Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  It was all too much to bear. “That part of the World of Science called Academicians, if not the Universal,” he told his brother-in-law, “are at this day, prone to Epicureanism to such a degree, that they instantly become the puffers and Trumpeters of every man of genius and Learning who despises the Church.”49

  Yet gradually Adams’s resentments softened. Not wanting his administration to be dismissed as some sort of monarchical ancien régime that had to be overthrown, he continued to play down Jefferson’s claim that his election represented a radical revolution. He admitted to his son John Quincy in 1804 that he had some regrets about what was happening under the Republicans, especially the assaults on the judiciary and the cashiering of so many public offices. But generally, he said, things at present were not “so very terrible.”50

  Adams appreciated that Jefferson was trying to avoid taking sides in the great struggle for supremacy taking place between Britain and France. The ferocity of that war, which had gone on more or less continually since 1793, had convinced Adams of “the absolute necessity of keeping aloof from all European Powers and Influences; and that a Navy was the only Arm by which it can be accomplished.” He was especially pleased to learn that Jefferson seemed to endorse this need for a strong navy in order to keep foreign powers off America’s shores. He was mistaken in this hope, as Jefferson had no such plans.51

  Adams concluded that Jefferson had borrowed, indeed, stolen, the basic principle that Adams himself had advocated and upheld ever since the model treaty of 1776—“to do Justice of all Nations, to have alliances with none without necessity.” Emotionally, Adams needed to see continuity, not change, in Jefferson’s administration. Forgetting how bellicose he had been at times during 1798–1799, Adams claimed that as president he had “established Peace with both France and England in such a manner that it was almost impossible for my Successor to break it.”52

  He still worried about Jefferson’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution—an enthusiasm that Bonaparte’s 1799 coup had not diminished. Initially, Jefferson had not seen Napoleon, as Adams had, as the inevitable outcome of a revolution that had gone terribly awry. Instead, Jefferson simply dismissed Bonaparte as a bigoted Italian usurper who offered “nothing which bespeaks a luminous view of the organisation of rational government.” Napoleon’s assumption of power was “not serious enough to disturb the course of [French] military operations.” Besides, Bonaparte had “but a few days to live,” for he was likely to be assassinated soon by fervent French revolutionaries. Jefferson had so much vested in the French Revolution that he just knew that if Bonaparte tried to stop it and declare for royalty either for himself or for Louis XVIII, “the enthusiasm of that nation would furnish a million of Brutus’s who would devote themselves to death to destroy him.”53

  But if Bonaparte was not killed, there was some consolation, said Jefferson. He might settle the question that had been undecided between the two transatlantic sister republics for nearly a decade—whether the single executive in the United States was better than the plural executive of the Directory in France.54 Jefferson hoped that Napoleon would use his head and realize “how much superior is the glory of establishing a republic to that of wearing a crown.” If he chose the crown, he feared “the influence of the example on our countrymen”—suggesting just how fragile America’s experiment in republicanism still seemed to Jefferson. All Americans could do, he said, was “wait with patience” until the French got it right. If it went wrong and the French republic blew up, the United States was at least far enough away to be safe.55

  By contrast, Adams had no illusions about Napoleon. To him the man was an extraordinary force of nature. Neither Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell, nor even Alexander the Great, he said, could “bear a Parallel with Bonaparte.” He was “Sui generis.” Of course, he admitted, no one could predict what would happen in France. The Revolution there resembled nothing before in history, “and Bonaparte differs from all the Conquerors we know of.” But at least Napoleon was bringing order and tranquillity to a society that was “weary of blood, disgusted with murder, and indignant at rapine.” He told Lafayette that he wished Napoleon “a greater Glory than ever yet fell to the Lott of any Conqueror before him, that of giving Peace to Europe and Liberty and Good Government to France.”56

  Perhaps because of his appreciation of what military force could achieve, Adams had come around to Jefferson’s handling of the continuing problems with North African pirates. Ever since independence, the Barbary states had been capturing and imprisoning American merchant sailors in the Mediterranean Sea and then asking for ransom to free them. Back in the 1780s, Adams had differed with Jefferson over how these Muslim states ought to be treated. Believing that Congress would never pay for the warships necessary to use force, he advocated following the example of Britain and France and simply paying tribute to the pirates. It would, he said, be cheaper than going to war with them.

  Jefferson, on the other hand, had taken a hard line. He believed that the North African states were so caught up in Islamic fatalism and Ottoman tyranny that their backward and indolent societies could only be dealt with by force. Although he was opposed to a standing army and preferred using commercial pressure to war in dealing with international problems with the great powers, the Barbary pirates were different. Paying tributes and ransoms, he said, was just “money thrown away.” The North African states kept upping their requests and breaking their promises. “I am an enemy to these douceurs, tributes and humiliations,” he explained to Madison, who was now his secretary of state, and “I know that nothing will stop the eternal increase of demand from these pirates but the presence of an armed force.”57

  Now thanks to the half-dozen frigates that his predecessor Adams had built to engage in the Quasi-War with France—a war and a naval buildup Jefferson had opposed—President Jefferson was at last able to use naval power against the Barbary pirates and teach them a lesson.

  As far as Jefferson’s domestic policies were concerned, Adams saw little that was really new or radical. Substituting messages for speeches and holding dinners every day for a dozen instead of levees twice a week for a large number were “mere Trifles.” Even Jefferson’s “twenty other little Sacrifices to a very vulgar popularity” didn’t bother him. He claimed disingenuously that he had never really favored the Alien and Sedition Acts, and therefore he did not regret their repeal. He did think the Republicans had made the naturalization process “too easy.” All “the irreligion, the Immorality and Venality which are creeping in and gaining ground” he blamed on “French intrigue,” and Jefferson couldn’t stop it anyhow. Adams predicted, correctly, that the Republicans’ catering to the press would in the future turn newspaper editors into “the principal Instruments” of party ambition and activity.

  In the end, the worst the Republicans had done was to shift the basis of American politics. “Public Virtue is no longer to rule: but Ambition is to govern the Country. . . . Call it Vanity or what you will,” but Adams believed that his and Washington’s administrations were the last expressions of selfless disinterested government. In the future, all the American people could hope for was that they might “be governed by honorable, not criminal ambition.” Since America’s Constitution seemed to lack “any Mediating Power capable of uniting or controlling Rival Factions, and maintaining a ballance between them, our Government must forever be a kind of War of about one half the People against the other.” This to Adams was what political parties portended.58

  The only solution he could imagine was to make the president more independent and more respectable, presumably by making him president for life. “Till this is done, the Government will be a ride and a tye, a game at leap frog, one Party once in eight or twelve years leaping over the head and shoulders of the other, kicking and spurring when it rides”—a rather perceptive prediction of what eventually did become normal American politics. He wanted the president to resemble a monarch and be the head of
the nation, not the head of a party. He saw himself standing above all the factional fighting.59

  Adams kept up a relentless patter of cynicism in his correspondence, describing, for example, “the Philosophers of the eighteenth Century and almost all the Men of Science and Letters” as cracked and fit only for Bedlam. Indeed, judging “by the Conduct and Writings of the Men of Science,” it seemed to him that the earth had become the place where “the Sun, Moon, and Stars send all their Lunaticks . . . for confinement.” He often made sly references in one way or another to the dreaminess of Jefferson. He mocked philosophers who believed in “a universal and perpetual Peace among all Nations and all Men.” He made fun of those who feared having “any thing more powerful at sea than Gun Boats.” He loved emphasizing the Virginians’ belief that in their state “Geese are all Swans.” He enjoyed pointing out that all men have the “universal Passion” of self-love in an equal degree, but, unlike knaves, “honest Men do not disguise it.” Someone like Jefferson who prided himself on his modesty, he said, was bound to be “as vain a fellow as lives.”60

  When told that he knew Jefferson better than anyone, he denied it outright. “In truth,” he said, “I know but little concerning him.” Even when they had been abroad together, “there was no very close intimacy between us.”61 Adams was still angry and hurt. His sarcasm was unmistakable when he called Jefferson’s government “our Monarchical, Antirepublican Administration” and compared it with his own, led by a real and “zealous Republican.” He was more serious and direct in his criticism of Jefferson’s handling of the 1807 trial of Aaron Burr for treason. (In 1806 the former vice president had organized a mysterious expedition to the West that seemed to threaten a breakup of the Union.) “Mr. Jefferson,” Adams told Benjamin Rush, “has been too hasty in his Message in which he has denounced him by Name and pronounced him guilty.” Even if Burr’s guilt was “as clear as the Noon day Sun,” he said, “the first Magistrate ought not have pronounced it so before a Jury had tryed him.” It is a point many historians and jurists have subsequently made as well.62

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  GRADUALLY, HOWEVER, Adams found himself agreeing more and more with Jefferson’s administration than with the views of his fellow Federalists. In fact, he became increasingly hostile to the so-called Essex Junto in Massachusetts, who he believed had turned against him in the election of 1800. While some northern Federalists plotted secession from the Union over the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Adams and his son John Quincy, newly elected by the Massachusetts legislature to the U.S. Senate, celebrated it. With Jefferson, he strongly opposed the British practice of impressing sailors on American ships. He and John Quincy even approved of Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807—a policy that devastated trading communities in New England and became anathema to the Federalists. Indeed, John Quincy’s support for the embargo cost him his seat in the Senate.

  When in 1807 a British warship fired on the U.S.S. Chesapeake, killing several seamen, and went on to impress four others, the United States was brought to the brink of war. But Jefferson hated war so much—it bred monarchism—that he hoped he might coerce Britain by withholding American trade as the colonists had done in the 1760s and ’70s. “War is not the best engine for us to resort to,” he said; “nature has given us one in our commerce, which, if properly managed, will be a far better instrument for obliging the interested nations of Europe to treat us with justice.”63 He and his Republican Congress thus instituted the embargo, which barred American ships and goods from all overseas trade.

  Although Adams termed the embargo “a cowardly measure,” he supported it as “a wise and prudent” but temporary action designed only to protect America’s seamen and property.64 Not liking armies, Adams understood the attractiveness of Jefferson’s grand experiment in peaceful coercion—what we today call economic sanctions. In the end, however, he realized that not only was the embargo “extremely difficult if not absolutely impossible to carry into Execution,” but he had “never believed that we could coerce or intimidate or bring to serious consideration the Government of Great Britain by embargo’s or non-importations or non-intercourses.”65 Such economic sanctions never worked for long; he realized that ultimately Americans might have to fight, but only if “we are compelled to it, and then only by Sea unless we are invaded.”66 When the war with Britain finally came, in 1812, Adams favored the military conflict, believing that war was needed to bring Americans together and preserve the Union.

  • • •

  BY THIS TIME ADAMS had become more of an outsider among the Federalist elite of Massachusetts than he had ever been. He had been in “Enemies Country” before—France, England—but now, he said, that country was “Boston, Massachusetts.” Some of these Massachusetts Federalists flirted with the British and even threatened secession. At a convention in Hartford in the winter of 1814–1815, several dozen of these angry and frightened Federalists from all the New England states brought to a head all their accumulated grievances against Virginia’s Republican dominance over the Union. Adams scoffed at the disloyal behavior of these Federalists, expressing astonishment that “so many of his Country-Men, still cherish a fond attachment to the people of England.” It seemed that some aspects of the Revolution had not been completed. In 1776 it had been “necessary to destroy the ignorant bigoted Attachment of the People to Great Britain. And this never has yet been half done.”67

  Although Adams’s position as an ex-president earned him the presidency of several boards in the state, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Agriculture, and the Visitors of the Professorship of Natural History at Harvard, he found himself at the meetings of these boards the odd man out. He told his friend Rush that there were twelve men on these boards, and they met once a month. “Every one, but myself, is a Staunch Anti-Jeffersonian and Anti-Madisonian. . . . They were all real Gentlemen; all but me, very rich, have their City Palaces and Country Seats, their fine Gardens and greenhouses and hot Houses &c &c &c.”68

  This was the aristocracy Adams had long worried about. In the opinion of these well-to-do Federalists, Adams’s separation from them was puzzling and his support for “Mr. Madison’s War” against Great Britain incomprehensible. He advised his controversial Republican friend Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse of the dangers of writing in the press against the Essex Junto. “They will not,” he warned Waterhouse, “hesitate to destroy, if they can, both you & your family.”69 The fact that John Quincy had joined the Republican Party only further convinced them that Adams had become a Jeffersonian. [JQA began as a Federalist but after the Embargo of 1807–8 he joined the Republican Party.] Before long, the High Federalists in Massachusetts were relishing the fact that Adams had “few friends” left, which Adams had to admit was all “too true.”70

  By the time the nation was at war with Great Britain, the New England states, much to Adams’s horror, were threatening secession. This moment in 1813, he told Jefferson, was the most serious that he had ever experienced. But the northern states were only copying what they had learned from the examples of Virginia and Kentucky in 1799. He didn’t know which party, the Federalists or the Republicans, had “the most unblushing Front, the most lying Tongue, or the most impudent and insolent not to say the most seditious and rebellious Pen.”71 All he knew was that the Union was in danger.

  • • •

  THE ISSUE THAT THREATENED the Union most was slavery. Adams had never commented on Jefferson’s involvement with slavery, but when the press brought it up, he could hardly avoid the subject. In the late summer and fall of 1802, James Callender, the former Republican scandalmonger who had recently turned against Jefferson, published in the Richmond Recorder several accounts of the relationship between Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. Callender claimed that he had earlier heard hints of Jefferson’s relationship with a slave but had dismissed them as Federalist calumny. But he now believed that “by this wench Sally our
president has had several children.” There was no one in the neighborhood of Charlottesville, he wrote, who did not believe the story.

  Callender claimed he was no prudish Scottish Presbyterian pastor. He understood boys and bachelors having relations with slaves, but Jefferson was the president, “the favorite! the first born of republicanism! the pinnacle of all that is good and great!” It was amazing that Jefferson should have a black concubine, given what he had previously written “so smartly concerning negroes.” When he had “endeavoured so much to belittle the African race” in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Callender had not expected that he would become “the ringleader” in showing this opinion to be erroneous or that he would choose “an African stock” on which he would “engraft his own descendants.” Because of this interracial relationship, the Republicans no longer had any right to criticize President Adams’s treaty with Haiti. Indeed, Jefferson was fortunate that the revelation came after he became president. If Americans had known about Sally in 1800, that “SINGLE FACT would have rendered his election impossible.”72

  These charges were picked up and spread everywhere in the press, becoming in the course of a year increasingly crude and more malicious in tone. The Republicans tried to deny them, while the delighted Federalists wrote endless poems and satires about “Dusky Sally.” Even John Quincy Adams, who generally tried to moderate some of the harshest Federalist criticism of Jefferson, joined in the fun with a loose imitation of Horace’s “Ode to Xanthia Phoceus.” He attributed the piece to Thomas Paine, “THE SOPHIST OF THETFORD,” and in a note he cited Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia on “the amatory propensities of the blacks.” The poem opened: