A Magnificent Catastrophe
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Their work together in Philadelphia for a declaration of independence had scarcely ended when Adams and Jefferson parted company. In September 1776, Jefferson left Congress to be with his ailing wife and young children in Virginia. There, he threw himself into efforts to liberalize the state’s aristocratic legal code and to end state support for the Anglican Church. He declined the first summons from Congress to serve with Franklin in France, writing to the senior statesman in 1777, “I wish my domestic situation had rendered it possible for me to have joined you in the very honorable charge confided to you.” Jefferson fully appreciated the importance of that charge: Securing French support for America’s revolution would likely decide the war’s outcome. After refusing that call, Adams begged Jefferson to return to Congress. “We want your industry and abilities here extremely,” he wrote in May 1777. “Your country is not yet quite secure enough to excuse your retreat to the delights of domestic life.” Still, Jefferson remained at home.
Adams ultimately served in France in Jefferson’s stead, arriving after Franklin had secured the needed military alliance. Jefferson joined them there in 1784. After Franklin returned home in 1785, for the next three years, Adams served in London and Jefferson in Paris as America’s two ranking foreign diplomats. It was a particularly difficult time to serve the country abroad. America had secured its political independence with the signing in 1783 of a peace treaty with Britain. Under the Articles of Confederation, the country remained a loose confederation of states, however, until ratification of the Constitution in 1788. Without an effective national government to represent, Adams and Jefferson could accomplish little. Although they secured a critically needed loan from Dutch bankers, Britain refused to honor its treaty obligation with the United States to evacuate its forts in the Great Lakes region, and France descended toward revolutionary turmoil. After generations of oppression and with the government on the verge of bankruptcy, the people of France arose against their leaders with unexpected violence. Tensions continued between the United States and its former colonial master; America’s recent ally, France, could no longer offer any effective assistance. America stood alone in a hostile world and neither Adams nor Jefferson could do much about it as ambassadors.
From their posts in Europe, they watched during 1787–88 as delegates to the Constitutional Convention framed and the states ratified the new national charter. Success remained in doubt until the end. Concerns over representation in Congress divided the small and large states; the issue of slavery already split North from South. The Convention repeatedly bogged down in factional strife and the ratification process became highly contentious in some states.
Concerns about the document reached Americans in Europe and were avidly debated there. Jefferson feared that the Constitution gave too much power to the President, who was chosen by electors; Adams worried that it gave too much power to the Senate, whose members were appointed by the state legislatures. Both thought that it should include a bill of rights. “You are afraid of the one—I, the few,” Adams wrote to Jefferson in 1787. “We agree perfectly that the many should have full, fair, and perfect representation. You are apprehensive of monarchy; I, of aristocracy.”
Despite their reservations about the compromise document that emerged from the divided Convention, Adams urged that Massachusetts ratify it while Jefferson expressed his qualified support for ratification in Virginia. Having seen what he perceived as the benefits of strong monarchies in Europe, Adams thought that only an effective central government led by a powerful president could forge a stable, secure nation from a multitude of weak, wrangling states. He supported the new Constitution as a means toward that end and thereby gained prominence among those proponents of ratification and a strong national government who called themselves Federalists. Jefferson, in contrast, saw representative democracy and states’ rights as the bulwarks of liberty, as against the potential corruption and tyranny of a powerful executive, and he stressed those aspects of the new constitutional union. Although Jefferson did not oppose ratification, he became a leading voice within the faction that included both Anti-Federalists, who had opposed ratification, and more moderate critics of a strong national government. Collectively, its members became known as Republicans or, later, Democrats. These differences in emphasis and constitutional interpretation between Adams and Jefferson sharpened as the government took shape following ratification.
As patriot leaders representing differing factions within the broad constitutional consensus, both men returned to America and took leadership positions in the new government. Serving under President Washington, Adams was elected Vice President and Jefferson was named Secretary of State. Together with others, they endeavored to form a unity government embracing a broad spectrum of federalist-republican opinion. They were convinced that well-meaning leaders could draw together in establishing the union just as they had once united to fight for independence.
Based on their wartime experience of suppressing political differences for the common good, the new government’s leaders uniformly condemned factionalism and opposed the formation of political parties. Individuals in Congress and the executive branch should address each issue on its merits, they thought, rather than take partisan positions. For this reason, despite their growing differences, Adams and Jefferson tried to get along. Upon hearing of Adams’s election as Vice President, Jefferson warmly congratulated him, “No man on earth pays more cordial homage to your worth nor wishes more fervently your happiness.” Adams, in turn, hailed Jefferson’s appointment as the first Secretary of State.
The differences dividing Adams and Jefferson reflected a deepening ideological rift that divided mainstream Americans into factions. As the nascent government took shape under the Constitution, the people and their chosen representatives vigorously debated various issues regarding the authority of the national government and the balance of power among its branches and between it and the states. Whether the national government could charter a bank and thus create a national banking system became especially heated, for example. Many doubted if the new national government would long survive. Adams and those calling themselves Federalists saw a strong central government led by a powerful president as vital for a prosperous, secure nation. Extremists in this camp, like Alexander Hamilton, who favored transferring virtually all power to the national government and consolidating it in a strong executive and aristocratic Senate, became known as the ultra or High Federalists. At the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton had unabashedly depicted the monarchical British government as “the best in the world” and famously proposed life tenure for the United States President and senators.
Jefferson and his emerging Republican faction viewed such thinking as inimical to freedom. A devotee of enlightenment science, which emphasized reason and natural law over revelation and authoritarian regimes, Jefferson trusted popular rule and distrusted elite institutions. Indeed, like French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, Jefferson instinctively revered man in nature. “Those who labor in the earth,” such as farmers and frontiersmen, possess “substantial and genuine virtue,” he wrote in his 1787 book, Notes on the State of Virginia. “The will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of men,” Jefferson affirmed three years later. He instinctively favored the people over any institution.
In contrast, Adams and the Federalists tended to distrust the common people and instead to place their faith in the empowerment of what they saw as a natural aristocracy, though one that should be restrained by civil institutions such as those provided by a written constitution with checks and balances. “The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God, and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true,” Hamilton reportedly told the Constitutional Convention regarding a popularly elected legislature. “The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first [or upper house] a distinct, permanent share in the governmen
t. They will check the unsteadiness of the second [or lower house].”
Although more moderate in his Federalism than Hamilton, but still unlike the Republican Jefferson, Adams thought that every nation needed a single, strong leader who could rise above and control self-interested factions of all classes and types. Neither an aristocratic Senate nor a democratic House of Representatives would safeguard individual rights, he believed. Indeed, Adams once complained to Jefferson about “the avarice, the unbounded ambition, [and] the unfeeling cruelty of a majority of those (in all nations) who are allowed an aristocratic influence; and…the stupidity with which the more numerous multitude not only become their dupes but even love to be taken in by their tricks.” Only a disinterested chief executive—the fabled philosopher-king of old—would protect liberty and justice for all. Adams thus combined a Calvinist view of humanity’s innate sinfulness with an Old Testament faith that a Moses-like leader could guide even such a fallen people through the wilderness into the promised land of freedom.
Due to these beliefs, Adams supported a strong American presidency. Although Adams always preferred an elected supreme leader to a hereditary one, his thinking leaned too much toward monarchism for Jefferson to stomach, especially when others in positions of power around Adams, most notably Alexander Hamilton, openly praised the “balanced” British constitution with its hereditary House of Lords, representative House of Commons, and still-powerful king. As Washington’s Treasury Secretary, Hamilton pushed a centralizing, pro-business program of internal taxes, protective tariffs, a national bank, and close trading ties with Britain. He viewed them as essential for national power, prestige, and prosperity.
Jefferson opposed all these policies as destructive of individual liberty and equality of opportunity. Even more, he feared that they would undermine popular rule by creating an aristocracy of wealth in America, a homegrown elite. He did not want the United States simply to become a better Britain, with its concentrated wealth and power. He dreamed of something new under the sun in America—a land of free, prosperous farmers and workers. His support for their rights was staunch and heartfelt.
The differences between Adams and Jefferson became clear in their responses to Shays’s Rebellion, a widely publicized antigovernment protest in Adams’s home state of Massachusetts. In 1786, hundreds of western Massachusetts farmers led by Revolutionary War officer Daniel Shays briefly took arms against high taxes and strict foreclosure laws during the economic recession that followed the American Revolution. Massive deflation threatened these protesters with the loss of their property and jobs, while the state government only made matters worse for them by raising taxes to repay bondholders for Revolutionary Era debts.
When news of the uprising reached him in Paris, Jefferson used a metaphor from science to convey his reaction in a letter to Abigail Adams, who was then in London with her husband. “I like a little revolution now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere,” Jefferson wrote. She was horrified. Speaking for herself and probably her husband, she told Jefferson her views on Shays’s Rebellion in no uncertain terms: “Ignorant, restless desperados, without conscience or principles, have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard under pretense of grievances which have no existence but in their imaginations.”
Jefferson came to see the episode as significant. From his post in London, John Adams did not sufficiently appreciate the protesters’ dire plight, Jefferson later wrote. He feared that Adams took the uprising to mean that even “the absence of want and oppression was not a sufficient guarantee of order” against popular revolts stirred by a demagogue. This disagreement over Shays’s Rebellion, however mild it seemed at the time, began to fray the relationship between Jefferson and the Adamses; it was a foretaste of the bitter divisions to come.
The divisions between Adams and Jefferson were exasperated by the more extreme views expressed by some of their partisans, particularly the High Federalists led by Hamilton on what was becoming known as the political right, and the so-called democratic wing of the Republican Party on the left, associated with New York Governor George Clinton and Pennsylvania legislator Albert Gallatin, among others. Proud of his humble origins, Adams always had reservations about Hamilton’s elitist agenda. He particularly questioned the wisdom of a national bank and never warmed to Britain. Those reservations were lost on Jefferson, however, who reacted against the whole and all of its parts. Adams supported the basic outlines of the Federalist program, and Jefferson resented it. By 1792, Madison, who always acted on Jefferson’s behalf in such matters, was calling for a “Republican” party to oppose Hamilton and the Federalists. For his part, Adams never thought Jefferson did enough to restrain the extreme democrats among his supporters. On both sides, the outlines of party organizations emerged in the rise of partisan newspapers, the coordination of voting by members of Congress, and party endorsements for political candidates.
Washington and Adams were not the primary targets of the Republicans, but they came under fire to the extent that they supported Hamilton’s projects. The Republicans embraced policies that favored popular sovereignty, individual freedoms, low taxes, farms over factories, and a limited national government. During the next three decades, the party’s name would evolve from Republican into Democratic, leaving the former label for a later, indirect descendant of the Federalist faction.
Adams’s actions as Vice President unwittingly further fed Jefferson’s fears that the Federalists would subvert democracy. In 1789, Adams urged Congress to confer a “regal” title on the President, such as “His Most Benign Highness” or (better yet) simply “Majesty,” which Jefferson dismissed as “the most superlatively ridiculous thing I ever heard of.” Expressing his republican sentiments, Jefferson added, “I hope the terms of Excellency, Honor, Worship, [and] Esquire forever disappear from among us.”
Then, in 1790–91, Adams published Discourses on Davila, a series of historical essays warning against the dangers of human passion and unchecked democracy. They raised Adams’s standing with High Federalists but lowered it among Republicans. In the final essay, he attributed the persistence of monarchism in “almost all the nations on the earth” to the failings of popular rule. “They had tried all possible experiments of elections of governors and senates,” Adams wrote, but found “so many rivalries among the principal men, such divisions, confusions, and miseries, that they had almost unanimously been convinced that hereditary succession was attended with fewer evils than frequent elections.” Adams’s words seemed to support a British-type system in which only the legislative lower house was elected. Certainly Jefferson read them that way. “Mr. Adams had originally been a republican,” Jefferson later wrote. “The glare of royalty and nobility, during his mission to England, had made him believe their fascination a necessary ingredient in government.”
Jefferson engaged Adams privately about the essays, freely calling him a “heretic” to his face for the antirepublican sentiments expressed in them. A strong presidency, independent of checks imposed by the elected House of Representatives, inevitably threatened democracy, Jefferson argued, especially if the President took on regal airs. A hereditary monarch was much worse. Adams maintained that the essays simply chronicled the European experience; they did not endorse an American king.
The dispute went public when Thomas Paine’s blistering defense of radical democracy in revolutionary France, The Rights of Man, appeared in the United States in April 1791. It bore an endorsement from Jefferson expressing his pleasure “that something is at length to be publicly said against the political heresies which have sprung up among us.” Politicians read Jefferson’s words as a direct assault on Adams’s Davila, which they were.
A published attack by the Secretary of State on the Vice President threatened to split the administration and clearly irritated Washington. Jefferson apologized for the public affront by saying that he never intended or expected his endorsement to appear in print. Of course “I had in my view Discourses on Davila�
�� and Adams’s “apostasy to hereditary monarchy and nobility,” Jefferson explained in a letter to the President, “but I am sincerely mortified to be thus brought forward on the public stage.” To Adams, Jefferson wrote, “That you and I differ in our ideas of the best form of government is well known to both of us; but we have differed as friends should do, respecting the purity of each other’s motives and confining our differences of opinion to private conversation.”
In his response, Adams formally accepted Jefferson’s apology but protested that the damage to his reputation had already been done. “The friendship which has subsisted for fifteen years between us without the slightest interruption, and until this occasion without the slightest suspicion, ever has been and still is very dear to my heart,” Adams wrote. In fact, it was all but over. The longtime friends had become political rivals.