Adams's decision was given the next morning, Wednesday, October 16, 1799. “The President has resolved to send the commissioners to France,” wrote a thoroughly dispirited Hamilton to George Washington. “All my calculations lead me to regret the measure.” The commission sailed for France on November 15.
If Hamilton and his admirers in the cabinet had outmaneuvered Adams in the contest over command of the army, Adams had now cut the ground out from under Hamilton. Whatever dreams Hamilton entertained of military glory and empire, America was to have no need of either a standing army or a Bonaparte, which, it is fair to say, was as clear an objective in Adams's mind as was peace with France.
• • •
“I ENCLOSE THE SPEECH,” Abigail wrote to Mary Cranch. “It has been received here with more applause and approbation than any speech which the President has ever delivered.”
She was reinstated in the President's House and in the President's life, resuming her role where she had left off, despite all she had been through, and all, Mary knew, she suffered because of Charles. There would be grumbling over the speech, Abigail wrote. There would always be grumbling, she had come to understand.
Addressing a joint session of the new Congress, at the usual noon hour, December 3, 1799, Adams had delivered the most moderate, peaceable speech since his inaugural message, stressing a “pacific and humane” American stance before the world. Gone were calls for a new navy or a new army. Though the “measures adopted to secure our country against foreign attacks,” must not be renounced, the national defense must be “commensurate with our resources and the situation of our country.” War drums were out of season. Adams evoked instead “prospects of abundance,” “the return of health, industry, and trade, to those cities which have lately been afflicted with disease.”
Let the grumblers wake up to the “brightest, best and most peaceful days they now see,” declared Abigail. Her old delight in being at the center of things had returned in full flower. In unseasonably mild weather, she was out and about taking walks, making calls, receiving visitors, and enjoying the current spectacle of Philadelphia society. For in its last winter as the nation's capital, the city “intended to shine.” “I have heard of ‘Once a man and twice a child’ and the ladies' caps are an exact copy of baby's caps,” Abigail began her report to Mary on “gay attire,” showing no less delight in details—sleeves, buttons, petticoats, hairstyles—than once she had when writing from Paris.
Then, in an instant, the entire mood of the city changed. On December 14, 1799, as if to give period to the passing of the century and the Federal era, George Washington died at Mount Vernon. The cause of death was a heavy cold—a streptococcus infection. He had been sixty-seven, and until a few days before, in good health. The news reached Philadelphia the night of the seventeenth. In the morning the muffled bells of Christ Church commenced to toll and Congress adjourned.
The Adamses were stunned. The nation, said the President in a formal message to the Senate, had lost “her most esteemed, beloved, and admired citizen.... I feel myself alone, bereaved of my last brother.” “No man was more deservedly beloved and respected,” wrote Abigail. A “universal melancholy has pervaded all classes of people.”
The door of the presidential mansion, Congress Hall, Washington's pew at Christ Church, were draped in black. In Boston Harbor every ship displayed “the melancholy signal of mortality.” “Our pulpit is hung with black,” Mary Cranch reported from Quincy.
The day after Christmas, the official day of mourning in the capital, troops of light infantry and cavalry passed through the city to the slow military beat of muffled drums, in a grand solemn procession that began at Congress Hall and included a host of federal and state leaders, city magistrates, Masons, and a riderless white horse with reversed boots in the stirrups. Washington had been interred in the family vault at Mount Vernon, but this was the nation's funeral for its first President and greatest hero. The line of march was south on Fifth Street, east on Walnut, then north on Fourth, crossing Chestnut, Market, and Arch Streets to the German Lutheran Church at Fourth and Cherry, which had the largest seating capacity of any church in the city.
“The President of the United States and his Lady... and a vast concourse of other citizens,” were present for services led by Bishop William White of Christ Church, with an oration by Representative Henry Lee of Virginia—General “Light-Horse Harry” Lee—who extolled Washington as “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.”
When the service ended after four and a half hours, several hundred people crowded into the President's House. “The gentlemen all in black,” Abigail noted, while the ladies had not let their grief “deprive them in their taste for ornamenting.” They wore black military sashes, “epaulets of black silk... black plumes... black gloves and fans.”
But as the encomiums to Washington continued, in speeches, sermons, and editorials—tributes that seemed often as contrived for show as the black plumes and fans—Abigail grew extremely impatient. When a minister at Newburyport, in a rapturous eulogy spoke of Washington as the “savior” of the country, she turned indignant. At no time, she wrote, had the fate of the country rested on the breath of one man, not even Washington. “Wise and judicious observations about his character are those only which will outlive the badges of mourning,” she told Mary. “Simple truth is his best, his greatest eulogy.”
For the time being, the President said no more than he already had. But the Vice President was not known to have said anything about Washington. In some quarters it was being observed that because of his shame over the “Mazzei Letter,” Jefferson had deliberately delayed his departure from Monticello to avoid the ceremonies in Washington's memory. Jefferson, who could have been in Philadelphia in time, did not arrive until two days later, on December 28, after an absence of ten months.
• • •
“I CONGRATULATE YOU on the New Year and the New Century,” Adams wrote to his old friend Cotton Tufts on January 1, 1800, adding a line from Virgil, “Aspice venturo laetentur ut omnia! [Look how they are full of joy at the age to come!].”
If Adams had any thoughts or feelings about the passing of the epochal eighteenth century—any observations on the Age of Enlightenment, the century of Johnson, Voltaire, the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the age of Pitt and Washington, the advent of the United States of America—or if he had any premonitions or words to the wise about the future of his country or of humankind, he committed none to paper. His thoughts, to judge by what he said to Cotton Tufts, were on home and some marshland he wished to buy, overpriced though it might be.
Across the water, events had moved on dramatically. In February came the news from France of a coup on November 9–18 Brumaire, by the French revolutionary calendar. General Bonaparte had taken power as First Consul, which made him, at age thirty-three, sovereign ruler of France and much of Europe. The French Revolution was over, as declared Bonaparte himself.
Jefferson, who had pinned his highest hopes on the revolution, commented only that the situation was “painfully interesting.” Clearly, American enchantment with France and the revolution were also at an end. Washington's death had seemed to mark the close of one era; the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte ushered in another. Adams, who like Edmund Burke had predicted dictatorship as the inevitable outcome for the revolution, wisely kept silent.
• • •
“ELECTIONEERING” had already begun. A “stormy session” was forecast, and from the tone of their letters home—to Mary Cranch, Cotton Tufts, and others—both the Adamses seem to have concluded that there was to be no second term for them. That Jefferson would be the Republican choice to oppose him in the election was a foregone conclusion.
Congress was doing little. From the Vice President's chair upstairs at Congress Hall, Jefferson lamented the overbearing “dreariness” of the scene. As much as possible, he was associating with the “class of science,”
as he said, his friends and fellow members of the Philosophical Society, of which he had become president. He took time to have his portrait painted by young Rembrandt Peale, the gifted son of Charles Willson Peale, and of all the portraits done of him, it was perhaps the strongest—Jefferson in his prime at age fifty-seven, grey-haired, handsome, and confident.
Acutely conscious of the mistakes Adams had made as Vice President, Jefferson, when presiding in the Senate, never talked out of turn, or tried to impose his own opinion from the chair, conduct all in keeping with his nature. Moreover, he saw no necessity to be constantly present, as Adams had. There were better ways to spend his time, Jefferson felt. Seeing the need for a manual of parliamentary rules for the Senate, he wrote one, distinguished by its clarity, emphasis on decorum, and the degree to which he had drawn on the British model. Had it been Adams paying such tribute to English foundations and traditions, the uproar would have been immediate; he would have been denounced still again as “tainted” by his years in London and love for all things British. But among Jefferson's many contributions to the new republic, his Senate Manual would stand as one of the most useful and enduring.
In writing one rule, No. 17.9, under “Order in Debate,” it was almost as though he had his predecessor as Vice President specifically in mind.
No one is to speak impertinently or beside the question, superfluously or tediously.
If Adams found any relief or pleasure in his duties, it was approving, on April 24, legislation that appropriated $5,900 to “purchase such books as may be necessary” for a new Library of Congress. It was one of the few measures upon which he and the Vice President could have heartily agreed.
• • •
THAT THE CONTEST for the presidency in 1800 was to be unlike any of the three preceding presidential elections was clear at once. For the first (and last) time in history, the President was running against the Vice President. The two political parties had also come into their own with a vitality and vengeance exceeding anything in the country's experience.
Further, under the Sedition Act anyone openly criticizing the President ran the risk of being fined or sent to prison. Since the first sensational case against Congressman Matthew (“Spitting”) Lyon of Vermont, eleven others had been charged and convicted under the law. In one instance, a New Jersey tavern loafer who had done no more than cast aspersions on the President's posterior was arrested, prosecuted, and fined $150.
That spring of 1800, the notorious James Callender reemerged, determined to defeat “the wretch” Adams, elect his patron Jefferson, and make himself a martyr. Matthew Lyon, after being sentenced to four months in a foul Vermont jail, had become a national hero and was overwhelmingly reelected to Congress.
Callender, who had quit Philadelphia, was now working as a Republican propagandist in Richmond, Virginia, with the encouragement and financial support of Jefferson, who, at the same time, was actively distributing a variety of campaign propaganda throughout the country, always careful to conceal his involvement. “Do not let my name be connected with the business,” he advised James Monroe. That Adams was never known to be involved in such activity struck some as a sign of how naive and behind the times he was.
In the Richmond Examiner, where he praised Jefferson as “an ornament to human nature,” Callender assaulted Adams in a series of essays that would soon appear as a book titled The Prospect Before Us. It was the first salvo of the election and a clear sign of the sort of contest it would become.
Not satisfied that the old charges of monarchist and warmonger were sufficient, Callender called Adams a “repulsive pedant,” a “gross hypocrite,” and “in his private life, one of the most egregious fools upon the continent.” Adams was “that strange compound of ignorance and ferocity, of deceit and weakness,” a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”
“The reign of Mr. Adams,” said Callender, “has hitherto been one continued tempest of malignant passions.” Once, according to Callender, Adams had become so enraged, he tore his wig off, threw it to the floor, and stomped on it. By what “species of madness” had America submitted to accept such a man as president?
The historian will search for those occult causes that induced her to exalt an individual who has neither that innocence of sensibility which incites it to love, nor that omnipotence of intellect which commands us to admire. He will ask why the United States degrades themselves to the choice of a wretch whose soul came blasted from the hand of nature, of a wretch that has neither the science of a magistrate, the politeness of a courtier, nor the courage of a man?
Adams's sole objective was to make war on France, Callender asserted. The choice was clear—Adams and war, or Jefferson and peace.
To all this Jefferson gave his approval. Having seen the proof sheets of the new volume, he assured Callender, “Such papers cannot fail to produce the best effects.”
To no one's surprise Callender was promptly arrested for inciting the American people against their President. In May he went on trial in a federal court in Richmond where the jury returned a verdict of guilty and he was sentenced to nine months in jail. But as he and Jefferson expected, it was another victory for the Republicans, just as Matthew Lyon's conviction had been.
Adams's far greater concern, meanwhile, was his cabinet. Particularly in his dealings with Pickering and McHenry, tension had been building for months, Adams feeling ever more isolated and certain that their first loyalty was to Hamilton, not him. Reports of ill will within the executive departments appeared in the papers. Adams and Pickering were said to “hate each other with the utmost cordiality.”
The long-overdue showdown came after the Republicans defeated the Federalists in the election of the New York legislature, a crucial election in that it would determine New York's electoral vote for President. It was as if all Adams's troubles, all the pent-up anger and frustration he had had in his dealings with the cabinet, let go in a furious outburst at James McHenry, an incompetent but affable man whom Adams rather liked.
On the evening of May 5, Adams summoned McHenry to the presidential mansion to discuss the appointment of a minor federal official. The discussion was quickly concluded and McHenry was about to leave when something he said, or the way he said it, started Adams on the subject of Hamilton and the loss of the New York election. Adams charged McHenry with working secretly with Hamilton to undercut the administration. When McHenry protested, Adams cut him off, saying, “I know it, sir, to be so.” Hamilton, said Adams, seething with anger, was an “intrigant... a man devoid of every moral principle, a bastard ... a foreigner.” Then Adams let fly with what to any faithful Hamiltonian was the ultimate insult. Jefferson, Adams declared, was a better man, “a wiser one,” than Hamilton, and, furthermore, Jefferson would make a better president.
How could McHenry and Pickering presume to know what to do in matters of foreign affairs, Adams went on. How dare they try to suspend the mission to France! And why had he been given no warning that Hamilton would turn up at Trenton? Adams charged McHenry with inept management, of failing to clothe the troops adequately. “You cannot, sir, remain longer in office,” Adams declared at last.
But then, when McHenry agreed to resign, Adams, his fury spent, said almost in apology he had always considered McHenry a man of understanding and integrity.
McHenry immediately wrote his own account of the scene, copies of which he sent to both Adams and Hamilton. Writing to explain his dismissal to a nephew, McHenry portrayed Adams as “actually insane.”
While Adams's outbursts of temper could be explosive, they never happened in public, always in private confrontations. It was then that “he would give to his language the full impress of his vehement will.” But never until now was he known to have berated a subordinate, and his regret over the outburst was considerable.
Still, nothing he had said was untrue, nor was his anger without justification. In firing McH
enry he had done what he should have done well before this. After a pause of a few days—possibly to cool down—he fired Pickering.
This time there was no unpleasant confrontation. On May 10, in customary fashion, Adams asked for Pickering's resignation by letter. Almost inconceivably, Pickering refused to comply. In a written response of May 12, he said he did not feel it his duty to resign, and implied that he needed the government salary to subsist. Adams discharged him at once and the same day named as his new Secretary of War, Senator Samuel Dexter of Massachusetts, and as Secretary of State, John Marshall, who was now a member of the House of Representatives.
Why Adams failed to discharge Oliver Wolcott while cleaning house was never adequately explained. Though Wolcott had been quite as duplicitous and disloyal to Adams as either McHenry or Pickering, he somehow succeeded in winning Adams's trust and would continue as Secretary of the Treasury.
Hearing of the dismissals, Alexander Hamilton quickly asked Pickering to search the files at the Department of State for “copies of extracts of all such documents as will enable you to explain both Jefferson and Adams.” The time had come, Hamilton said, when “men of real integrity” must unite against all charlatans.
• • •
THE REMOVAL of the government from Philadelphia to the new Federal City by the Potomac was scheduled to take place in June. The President was to go there himself for a first look as soon as he could get away. But two critical issues required decisions in the weeks that remained—what to do about the temporary army and what to do about three Pennsylvania German farmers who had been sentenced to hang for treason.
The fate of the now useless and unpopular army was settled with remarkably little fuss, showing how greatly times had changed. Adams declared that were it left to him the army “should not exist a fortnight.” Both Federalists and Republicans in Congress, seeing no reason why Adams should get the credit, voted to disband the army by summer. Had Hamilton been given free reign with the army, Adams would remark, it would have required a second army to disband the first one.
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