First Family

by Joseph J. Ellis

  When Secretary of the Navy Stoddert, the only loyal member of the cabinet, urged him to end his seclusion, warning that “artful and designing men” were scheming to destroy his prospects for reelection, John replied that the advice was welcome, except the very mention of “a certain election may be wholly laid out of this question and all others.” In the political universe he chose to inhabit, the mere mention of partisan politics was inadmissible.47

  By midsummer Abigail’s health began to improve. She and John were able to take short walks around the farm, periodically joined by Nabby, who had come up from Eastchester with her three children to help care for her mother. Nabby’s presence provided a painful reminder of another subject that both Abigail and John preferred to avoid, namely, that the husband they had so heartily approved for her, William Stephens Smith, had continued to flounder, thereby putting the fate of their daughter and grandchildren at the mercy of his growing number of creditors. John had lost all hope in Smith’s capacity to salvage his life: “All the Actions of my Life and all the Conduct of my Children have not disgraced me so much as this Man,” he lamented. “His pay will not feed his Dogs. And his Dogs must be fed if his children starve.”48

  An abject failure at everything he tried, Smith had decided to return to his original profession as a soldier, somewhat ironically seeing the new Provisional Army as a golden opportunity. John could only cringe at the poor man’s flair for failure, since the golden opportunity was in the process of turning to dross—the Provisional Army was already being dismantled—as a result of the peace initiative toward France. (After Hamilton, Smith was apparently the last man to realize that the Provisional Army was an idea whose time had come and gone.) Desperate for a military career, Smith requested the president to appoint him commander of the American garrison at Detroit. John responded curtly, saying all such requests should be sent to the secretary of war, then concluding: “I will not interfere with the discipline and order of the army, because you are my son-in-law.”49

  Abigail tended to focus less on Smith’s pathetic character than on Nabby’s unhappy predicament. (She almost surely second-guessed herself about the abandonment of Royall Tyler, who was enjoying a flourishing legal career with a devoted family.) Though any discussion of John’s prospects for reelection was taboo, Nabby’s plight and the dismal future looming for her three children were prime candidates for extended family conversation. Besides worrying, the only thing Abigail and John could do was to remain ready for a rescue operation if and when Nabby’s marriage collapsed.

  But the most worrisome domestic crisis, more emotionally wrenching than Nabby’s abiding unhappiness or even John’s unresolved estrangement from his cabinet, was the sudden revelation that Charles had become an alcoholic. For several years he had managed to conceal his secret life of drink and promiscuity from both his parents and most of the world. His exposure, inevitable in the end, was triggered by the disclosure that he had lost all the money John Quincy had entrusted to him for investment—several thousand dollars—then bankrupted himself trying to recover the losses. Legal inquiries by his creditors revealed the sordid details of a double life: respectable lawyer and family man by day; barhopping drunk, drug addict, and adulterer by night. His wife, Sally, confirmed to Abigail that Charles had been spiraling downward for quite some time, but none of her pleas for his reform had any effect whatsoever.50

  Neither Abigail nor John had seen this coming, and they were both stunned. John’s initial reaction was to forbid mention of Charles’s name in the home ever again: “A Being [Charles] who has violated a Trust committed to him by you,” he wrote to John Quincy, “is a thorn in my flesh … Forlorn and undone, he has my unutterable indignation.” Under Abigail’s prodding, John backed off his hard-line position, and throughout the summer of 1799 both parents tried to understand how the designated charmer in the Adams family had collapsed into a heap of decrepitude, how they had remained oblivious to his descent for so long, and whether there was any way to bring the prodigal son back within the protective fold of the Quincy haven. Down in Philadelphia, as Federalists and Republicans were trying to guess what the absentee president was thinking about the evolving political landscape in France—Napoleon was rumored to be preparing for a military takeover of the government, as John Quincy had predicted more than a year earlier—both John and Abigail were primarily focused on their acute domestic dilemma.51

  By September it had become painfully clear that no amount of worrying, hoping, or cajoling would make any difference: “But all has been lost upon him,” Abigail lamented. “If only he would be penitent and reform, both parents would say my son was lost but now is found. But he remains unrepentant.” In a life filled with more than its fair share of pain and tragedy, she thought, this was the deepest wound she had ever suffered, and she did not expect that she would ever recover from it fully.52

  John decided to make one final effort. In October he ended his seven-month seclusion and began the long trip to Trenton, where the government had decamped until the yellow fever season ended in Philadelphia. On the way down, he stopped in New York to consult with Charles’s wife in order to determine what, if anything, could be done to recover his lost son. The stories she shared with him were more lurid and thick with depravities than John had ever imagined. He wrote back to Abigail with his harsh and final verdict: Charles was “a Madman possessed by the Devil … I renounce him … as a mere Rack, Buck, Blood and Beast.” He refused to visit him and never spoke to him again.53

  SPLENDID ISOLATION

  During John’s seven-month seclusion, the most disloyal members of his cabinet, Pickering and McHenry, had been working assiduously to undermine his diplomatic initiative by delaying the departure of the two additional envoys Congress had required to ensure a more representative delegation. Hamilton had devoted his matchless energy to sustaining the illusion of a robust Provisional Army, now being called the New Army to imply a more permanent presence, despite the disappearance of any plausible rationale for its existence and without any recognition that the new name conjured up Cromwell’s dangerous precedent. John arrived at Trenton in a foul mood, having just renounced his son and knowing he would have to endure the smiling of Pickering and McHenry once again.

  He did not realize that he would also have to encounter Hamilton, who rode over unannounced from his headquarters at Newark to make a face-to-face plea for a delay of the peace delegation and for presidential support for the New Army. There was never a remote possibility that John would agree to either request, but Hamilton’s presumptive posture—he continued to believe that John should defer to his judgment—made the encounter a dramatic occasion.

  John’s later recollection of the conversation is not to be trusted, given his swollen hatred for Hamilton by then, but it is all we have. He claimed that “the little man” went on for two hours, lecturing him on the French threat and likely British retaliation if America signed a treaty with France. “Never in my life,” John recalled, “did I hear a man talk so like a fool.” When Hamilton urged delay in sending the envoys based on reports that the Bourbon monarchy was about to be restored to the throne, John countered caustically: “I should as soon expect that the sun, moon and stars will fall from their orbs.” The peace mission would go forward, the navy would continue to grow, and the New Army would be allowed to expire. Though Hamilton, clearly in denial, continued to resist the message, the meeting killed all prospects for his imperialistic agenda and firmly established John’s control over American foreign policy. “I hope soon to hear that our Envoys have sailed,” he wrote to Abigail, “that there may be no longer room for impertinent Paragraphs by busy bodies who are forever meddling with Things they understand not.”54

  That should have been the end of it. From any detached perspective at the time, even more from the perspective provided by hindsight, John had put American foreign policy on the realistic course recommended by Washington, a course that would serve the nation well over the next century. He had also b
locked Hamilton’s dangerous flirtations with a militarized version of republican government, which in fact possessed the potential to undermine the core values of republicanism itself. The leadership of the Federalist Party should have rallied around the presidential standard, which was planted firmly in the same solid ground that Washington had also chosen, and the future of Federalism as a mainstream political force would have been ensured.

  The linkage with the Washington legacy proved impossible to ignore when word arrived from Mount Vernon that the great man, who had joked about making it into the next century, missed his mark by just over two weeks, the victim of a fatal throat infection. In his official message of mourning to the Senate, John struck a personal note: “I feel myself alone, bereaved by my lost brother.”

  Abigail had sufficiently recovered from her multiple ailments to be present in Philadelphia for the four-hour memorial service at the German Lutheran Church, where Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, Washington’s old cavalry commander, gave the eulogy that was destined to echo through the ages, extolling Washington as “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Abigail hosted a gathering for several hundred mourners after the ceremony, where she thought the men appropriately austere in their black suits, but the women inappropriately ornamental in their “epaulets of black silk … black plumes … black gloves and fans.”55

  As the new century began, tributes to Washington kept pouring in from across the land, demonstrating for the last time that he was truly, as the toasts in his honor put it, “the man who unites all hearts.” John’s speech to Congress, reporting that the American envoys had been courteously received in Paris, met with thunderous applause, which Abigail described as the most rousing response John had received during his presidency. A few weeks later word arrived from France that Napoleon had dissolved the Directory; named himself first consul, which made him de facto emperor; and declared the French Revolution ended. This was precisely the conclusion that John had always predicted, and a resounding refutation of Jefferson’s blissful belief that “liberty, equality, and fraternity” would prove to be the French version of the American Revolution, all of which seemed to deliver a fatal blow to the central premise on which Republican prescriptions for American foreign policy had been based for nearly a decade. At the policy level, John could hardly have asked for more: the peace initiative was moving forward; funding for the New Army was stopped, making its dismemberment imminent; and the Republican commitment to the inevitable triumph of the French Revolution was exposed as an illusion.

  At the personal level, history also seemed to be flowing in the Adams direction. Fears that Abigail might die or become permanently bedridden with her multiple ailments proved excessive. She was sufficiently recovered to take her place at John’s side at the weekly levees and recover her role as his most trusted confidante. Moreover, they were joined by Thomas, fresh from four years of serving as John Quincy’s secretary at The Hague and Berlin. Previously the most invisible of the Adams children, Thomas appeared quite suddenly as a conspicuously mature and supremely competent young man, an unexpected compensation delivered by the gods for the disgraced Charles. He afforded Abigail the opportunity to resume her old matchmaking skills, at one presidential ball guiding him toward a young beauty she described as “really fascinating,” even though she wished her dress “had left more to the imagination and less to the eye.”56

  Thomas also brought firsthand reports of John Quincy’s new wife, Louisa Catherine, a delicate orchid of a woman whom Abigail and John had never met, but who Thomas assured them brought a compelling new feminine presence into the Adams family. After a year of relentless worrying about Nabby’s domestic predicament and Charles’s alcoholism, it was consoling to know that two of their children were advancing nicely in wisdom, age, and grace.

  Then the political winds shifted dramatically as the campaign season began. Neither John nor Abigail commented on the upcoming presidential election—to do so would have violated their classic pose of indifference—but the leadership in both the Federalist and Republican camps could talk of little else. Jefferson was the obvious choice on the Republican side, and as the incumbent, without doing or saying anything at all, John was the presumptive candidate for the Federalists. Then, in February 1800, John Marshall, an emerging Federalist leader, reported a discernible movement in the Hamiltonian wing of the party, which was “much dissatisfied with the President on account of the late mission to France [and] strongly disposed to desert him and to push some other candidate,” presumably someone more amenable to Hamilton’s agenda. Hamilton put out the word that anyone, even Jefferson, was preferable to the current incumbent: “If we must have an enemy at the head of government,” he declared, “let it be one who we can oppose, and for whom we are not responsible.”57

  Hamilton’s decision to focus his political firepower on John’s defeat was nothing new. He had unsuccessfully attempted to manipulate the two preceding presidential elections in much the same way, believing as he did that his own political judgment was vastly superior to the shifting vagaries of the electorate, and loathing as he did a man who remained wholly immune to all forms of the dazzling Hamilton magic. But the political strategy Hamilton chose to pursue in the spring of 1800 was also a more far-reaching battle for the soul of the Federalist Party. For several years the editors of the Aurora had been accusing the Federalists of harboring monarchical ambitions, manipulating the popular hysteria about a prospective French invasion in order to justify censorship of the press and the creation of a massive military establishment. This, in fact, was precisely the direction that Hamilton still dreamed of taking the Federalist Party and the country.

  No one had done more to block Hamilton’s fantastic agenda than John Adams, which was the chief reason Hamilton was determined to remove him. For a time the Republicans were content to observe one of the few universal laws of political life; namely, never interfere when your enemies are engaged in flagrant acts of self-destruction. But eventually Jefferson decided that vanquishing the Federalists meant targeting the only man who stood between him and the prize. And so he commissioned a talented scandalmonger, James Callender, to do the requisite hatchet job.

  In The Prospect Before Us Callender claimed that John’s peace initiative toward France was wholly disingenuous, that the choice was “between Adams and war, or Jefferson and peace.” This was an outright lie, but then Callender was being paid to deliver the goods. As Jefferson succinctly put it: “Such papers cannot fail to produce the best effects.” Most of Callender’s effort was devoted to vilifying John in generic terms as “a repulsive pedant, … a gross hypocrite, … a wretch that has neither the science of a magistrate, the politeness of a courtier, nor the courage of a man.”58

  Federalist critics, prompted by Hamilton, completed the cross fire by spreading rumors that the president was slightly out of his mind, a judgment they found incontrovertible because any peaceful accommodation with France struck them as lunacy. Writing to John Quincy, Abigail lamented the two-sided attack on her husband: “The Jacobins are so gratified to see the federalist split to pieces that they enjoy in Silence the game,” she observed, “whilst in the Southern States they combine to bring Mr. Jefferson in as President.” She felt certain that the open breach in the Federalist camp made John’s reelection highly unlikely.59

  Results from state elections in New York in May confirmed this judgment. Skillful behind-the-scenes work by Aaron Burr, who was angling to become Jefferson’s running mate, and who was rumored to have spent $50,000 to seduce undecided voters, produced a new Republican majority in the New York legislature, which would choose twelve presidential electors the following fall. “It is generally supposed that New York would be the balance in the Scaile, Scale, Skaill, Scaill (is it right now? it does not look so),” Abigail asked her sister. While she was not sure how to spell scale, she knew a Republican sweep of New York’s electoral votes made Jefferson essentially unbeatable.60

  Ab
igail was the designated vote counter on the Adams team, while John felt obliged to cultivate at least the posture of studied indifference toward such mundane matters. But the realization that his electoral prospects were remote seemed to lift a burden from his shoulders. Right after the New York results were confirmed, he did what he should have done long ago, that is, demand the resignations of McHenry and Pickering. When Pickering refused to resign, claiming among other things that he needed the salary, John fired him outright and then appointed John Marshall as his new secretary of state. McHenry’s account of the occasion described it as the impulsive act of a raving lunatic, whereas John’s chief mistake had been to delay the decision much too long. Hamilton urged McHenry to comb the cabinet files on the way out for any documents that could be used to question John’s competence.61

  When Congress adjourned in late May, John headed down to survey the new capital on the Potomac, still very much a work in progress that was nonetheless scheduled to become the seat of government the following fall. There were as yet no clearly marked roads into the capital, prompting John to label it a “wilderness city” and then joke about losing his way: “Rolling, rolling, rolling,” he wrote Abigail, “till I am very near rolling into the bosom of Mother Earth.” His spirits were obviously up.62

  They were buoyed even higher upon receiving a letter from Abigail, who had stopped at Newark on the way back to Quincy in order to serve as John’s surrogate at the ceremony for disbanding the New Army. She stood alongside Hamilton amid the pomp and circumstance as they witnessed the final parade of troops that Hamilton had hoped to lead on a grand and glorious adventure. Hamilton behaved gallantly, despite his pain, Abigail reported, and “I acted as the Aurora says, as your proxy, praised and admired.” Then she added “and regretted,” referring to Hamilton’s obvious discomfort at her awkward presence as the death knell sounded on the chief instrument of his extravagant ambitions.63