A Magnificent Catastrophe

by Edward J. Larson

  During the early 1790s, a raging and widespread war between royalists and republicans in Europe greatly intensified these partisan tensions in America, which further strained the relationship between Adams and Jefferson. The European war had its roots in the violent fall of the monarchy and rise of republican rule in France, which sent tremors through the royal houses of Europe. France’s absolutist ancien régime began to totter in 1788 with the calling of a legislative assembly for the first time in over 150 years. Every French king since Louis XIV had claimed absolute power, but an unprecedented financial crisis, caused in part by helping to fund the American Revolution, forced Louis XVI to convene the old Estates General in order to obtain its consent to raise new taxes. This body consisted of three branches—one each for nobles, clerics, and commoners—with the consent of all three needed to institute any meaningful reforms. The commoners had distinct grievances against the government, however, with the largely disenfranchised masses suffering under heavy taxes and often living in abject poverty following a series of poor harvests.

  Soon after it convened, the commoners’ Third Estate declared itself the sole legislative authority in France and, absorbing the other two estates, renamed itself the National Assembly. At first, members of the other two estates resisted, but violent protests in support of the commoners and the threat of a nationwide popular insurrection forced the nobles, the clerics, and the King to comply. The army could not control the protesters, and in some places actually sided with the people. A revolution was clearly under way even if the extent of it remained in doubt. The King had lost his claim to absolute power and many sensed that the nobility and established church were vulnerable as well. Ineptly, Louis XVI began playing the various sides against the others in an effort to survive as a limited monarch.

  On hand as the American ambassador in Paris, Jefferson welcomed these developments despite the worsening violence. “The revolution of France has gone on with the most unexampled success hitherto,” he blithely wrote to Madison in May 1789, after hundreds had died in mass protests and military reactions in Paris and other cities. Countless thousands more were dying from starvation and disease as the economy collapsed under the stress of political disorder and repeated poor harvests. Some of the riots started out as nothing more than mass cries for food from government granaries, then ended in slaughter as troops attacked and protesters reacted. The Queen’s alleged response to the masses pleading for bread, “let them eat cake,” would seal her fate. She never uttered the famous phrase, but it fit her popular image and rumors that she said it circulated widely at the time.

  Jefferson remained in Paris long enough to witness the fall of the royal Bastille prison to the revolutionaries on July 14, 1789. “They took all the arms, discharged the prisoners, and…carried the [prison’s] governor and lieutenant governor to the Greve (the place of public execution), cut off their heads, and set them through the city in triumph,” Jefferson wrote excitedly in his official report. “The decapitation of [Governor] de Launai worked powerfully thro’ the night on the whole aristocratical party insomuch that in the morning those of the greatest influence…[accepted] the absolute necessity that the king should give up everything.”

  Impressed by this popular uprising, Jefferson contributed to the fund for the families of those slain storming the Bastille. He naïvely predicted that a constitutional monarchy respecting individual rights would quickly emerge from the ashes of absolutist rule. Jefferson believed that nobles and clerics would readily relinquish power to the people, and he personally urged his friends in the aristocracy to do so.

  Viewing events through the lens of the American Revolution, Jefferson saw only better times ahead for France. “We cannot suppose this paroxysm confined to Paris alone,” he noted. “The whole country must pass successively thro’ it, and happy if they get thro’ it as soon and as well as Paris has done.” To Madison, Jefferson added, “This scene is too interesting to be left at present.” His daughters had grown, however, and he wanted to take them home. Upon arriving with them in America late in 1789, and still planning to return to France without them, he learned that Washington had named him the first Secretary of State. Jefferson never again left the country.

  As Secretary of State, Jefferson continued steadfastly to side with the revolutionaries in France even as violence there spiraled out of control. Priests were massacred or driven from the realm for their loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church; nobles fled too, and their property was confiscated; protesters fell by the thousands in military reactions. In 1792, partisans pulled Jefferson’s friend, the reform-minded Duc de La Rochefoucauld, from his coach and killed him in full view of his mother and wife. Nevertheless, in 1793, Jefferson wrote of the revolution in France, “The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should fail, I would have seen half the earth desolated.” He saw the scene much like the English romantic poet William Wordsworth depicted it: “France standing on the top of golden hours / And human nature seeming born again.” It was a bloody birth.

  In contrast, the events in France horrified Federalists in the United States. Growing ever more radical and powerful, the French National Assembly (reconstituting itself first as the Legislative Assembly and then as the Convention under successive constitutions) took command of the armed forces, nationalized the Church, abolished noble titles and privileges, and made the King virtually its prisoner, holed up and under growing threat first at Versailles and then, by the Assembly’s command, at the Tuileries Palace in Paris. Of the Assembly and its impact on France, Hamilton wrote, “It has served as the engine to subvert all her ancient institutions, civil and religious, with all the checks that served to mitigate the rigor of authority.” Royalist regimes in Europe led by Prussia and Austria responded to these developments by invading France in 1791 to restore the old order. The invasion served only to radicalize the Assembly still further and precipitate a vicious counterattack. The French people rallied to defend their nation even if they did not otherwise support the revolution.

  After riding the whirlwind of revolution for four years, Louis XVI fell from his increasingly titular post as King after fleeing the besieged Tuileries Palace on August 10, 1792, paving the way for the Convention to impose republican rule on France six weeks later. Citizen Louis Capet, as the revolutionaries delighted in calling the former King, was imprisoned in the Temple fortress by the radical Paris Commune along with his widely despised wife, Marie Antoinette. “I’ll tell you what,” John Adams reportedly commented, “the French republic will not last three months.” Although proved wrong, Adams’s prediction surely expressed the hopes of many in his party, some of whom favored revising the Constitution to provide a constitutional monarchy for the United States.

  Inspired by republican visions of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French armies pushed back invading royalist forces and began spreading democracy to neighboring lands at gunpoint. “On this day began a new era in the history of the world,” German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously wrote after watching French republican forces rout Prussian imperial troops at Valmy, in France, on September 20, 1792. After he heard of the battle, Jefferson exulted, “Our news from France continues to be good, and promises a continuance; the [extent] of the revolution there is now little doubted of, even by its enemies.”

  Jefferson had hardly written these words before the Convention tried and guillotined the former King, closed Christian churches, and conscripted the entire population into the war effort. Although the revolutionary government had already nationalized the Catholic Church in France and deported or killed priests who would not swear their allegiance to the new order, radicals in the Convention still feared churches as rallying points for reactionaries. Soon the former Queen followed her husband to the scaffold. A new constitution proposed limiting private property an
d enshrining the right of revolution. By mid-1793, the Convention’s most radical faction, the Jacobins, assumed control. Pressed by opponents from within and without, Jacobins instituted a Reign of Terror to purge France of counterrevolutionaries. Thousands died in public executions, often on mere suspicion of disloyalty, including many of the leading revolutionaries themselves.

  The differing views of Federalists and Republicans in America regarding the bloody course of events in France made any attempt at nonpartisan governance by the Washington administration virtually futile. Bitter domestic disputes over national power, informed as they now were by analogies to the affairs in Europe, worsened the situation. By the end of Washington’s first term in 1793, the unity government that he had so carefully assembled lay in shambles. Jefferson and Hamilton fought privately for influence within the administration while their respective factions battled openly in Congress and the press. As Vice President, Adams played virtually no part in executive-branch deliberations and was silenced in the Senate, over which he presided, by a new rule limiting debate to senators. Adams grew increasingly distant from both Jefferson and Hamilton, whom he viewed as grasping rivals for power. He had also learned, to his dismay, that Hamilton had secretly discouraged some electors from voting for him in the first presidential election—a slight that Adams neither forgot nor forgave. Jefferson and Hamilton soon resigned from the cabinet but Hamilton, with a stronger stomach for direct confrontation, stayed long enough to fill the still forming executive branch with his followers.

  Though a more moderate revolutionary government in France relaxed the Terror in July 1794, as Washington’s second term progressed, international tensions continued to dominate partisan debate in the United States. In Europe, France’s armies pushed the offense, especially after the rise in the mid-1790s of a young Corsican general, Napoleon Bonaparte. Britain joined the European alliance against France and, with their far-flung empires drawn into the inferno, the whole world seemed at war. “None can deny that the cause of France has been stained by excesses,” Hamilton observed at the time. “Yet many find apologies and extenuations with which they satisfy themselves; they still see in the cause of France the cause of liberty…. Others on the contrary discern no adequate apology for the horrid and disgusting scenes which have been and continue to be acted.” Jefferson fit in the former camp; Hamilton placed himself in the latter one. For many Christians, Jefferson’s sympathy for Jacobin assaults on organized religion compounded the suspicions raised by his Deist beliefs. Hamilton and the Federalists repeatedly warned that Republican rule might lead to similar attacks on churches in America. The specter of militant Jacobin anticlericalism turned religion into a heated partisan issue in American politics.

  Although many Federalists favored Britain and the royalist alliance while most Republicans supported France and its allies, virtually all Americans hoped that their country could remain neutral in the European conflict and continue trading with both sides. That would prove a great challenge. Europe’s leading imperial powers, Britain and France, had fought off and on for over a century, but ideological differences and France’s military aggression now increased the bitterness of the battle. Both sides demanded support from other nations and retaliated against those that refused aid. Washington tried to maintain American neutrality but, following Jefferson’s resignation as Secretary of State in 1793, his administration increasingly came under the control of Hamilton’s pro-British High Federalists. Although suspicious of Britain’s designs on the United States, Adams abhorred the revolutionary regime in France and did little to right the balance.

  After stepping down as Secretary of State, Jefferson continued working privately with Madison and a growing interstate network of Republicans to oppose the High Federalists’ pro-Britain, pro-business policies. Although Jefferson claimed to want out of public life, Adams saw his retirement from the cabinet differently. “Jefferson thinks by this step to get a reputation as an humble, modest, meek man, wholly without ambition or vanity. He may even have deceived himself in this belief,” Adams noted at the time. “But if the prospect opens, the world will see and he will feel that he is as ambitious as Oliver Cromwell,” who usurped royal authority during the English Civil War. When Madison followed Jefferson into early retirement, Adams added, “It seems the mode of becoming great is to retire [from public scrutiny]…upon the same principle that no man is a hero to his wife or valet de chambre.” Jefferson and Madison so actively organized and led the Republican reaction to Hamilton’s programs that Federalists began calling them the Generalissimo and General of the opposition.

  Adding to the tension, British naval vessels began intercepting American ships bound to or from French ports and impressing American sailors for service in the Royal Navy. Washington dispatched Chief Justice John Jay to resolve differences between the United States and Britain. But bargaining from a weak position, Jay’s controversial British Treaty did little more than accept British limits on American trade with France in exchange for Britain finally evacuating the last of its pre-Revolutionary War forts on U.S. territory. It even failed to stop the British from intercepting American merchant ships and impressing American sailors. The agreement outraged both Republicans at home and the French government, which retaliated by authorizing the capture of American ships trading with Britain. The fledgling United States had no means to protect its merchant fleet, which was now regular prey to both the British and the French. For the first time, Washington’s popularity sagged. Jay reportedly said that he could travel from Boston to Philadelphia solely by the light of his burning effigies.

  In 1796, at age sixty-four, Washington announced that he would not accept a third term as President. The posturing for succession quickly evolved into a strange sort of behind-the-scenes competition for office. For the first two elections, no one opposed Washington for the presidency. Now the seat was open. The two emerging partisan factions had not yet evolved into institutionalized parties, and they did not yet have mechanisms for formally nominating presidential candidates. They did, however, have clear leading contenders for that office.

  Adams was in from the start. Although he once described the vice presidency as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived,” he nevertheless saw it as a stepping stone to the presidency. “I am heir apparent, you know, and a succession is soon to take place,” he wrote to his wife in January 1796. After eight tedious years as the “Prince of Wales,” as he termed the Vice President’s position, Adams never would have voluntarily relinquished his claimed right to inherit the throne. Hamilton may have coveted the presidency for himself or preferred a loyal High Federalist for the post over the more moderate Adams, but the Vice President’s status made it unlikely that any other Federalist could displace him without fatally dividing the party’s electoral vote. Jefferson was the obvious Republican contender. Nobody within his party seriously challenged him.

  No candidates openly campaigned for the presidency in 1796 or even publicly declared their interest in holding the job. Washington had acted that way in 1788 and 1792, and his would-be successors were careful to emulate him. Jefferson remained in Monticello; Adams went home to his farm near Boston. Others conspired on their behalf, typically without consulting them.

  As it turned out, Adams secured votes from 71 of the 139 electors—or one more vote than he needed for the requisite majority—in what was to be the last old-style presidential election. Jefferson was the runner-up with votes from 68 electors, and, as the Constitution then stipulated, he became the Vice President.

  Adams swept the northern states, gaining votes from every elector in New England, New York, and New Jersey. Delaware also went for Adams. Jefferson carried the South and West, except for votes for Adams from one elector in Virginia and another in North Carolina. The two nascent parties had secured regional bases of support, where they dominated state and local politics as well. The middle states of Pennsylvania and Maryland split their votes and emerged as key politic
al battlegrounds of the future. For the only time in American history, partisan opponents served together as President and Vice President.

  Immediately after his election in 1796, Adams reached out to the Republicans. He suggested that Madison lead a bipartisan mission to negotiate an end to the trade dispute with France and that, as Vice President, Jefferson serve in the cabinet. Although he accepted the vice presidency, Jefferson declined to work with Adams or support the Federalist agenda. The division between Adams and Jefferson, and their respective factions, had grown too wide to bridge by such means. Jefferson would preside over the Senate as the Constitution prescribed, and use that position to rally the Republican opposition. “My letters inform me that Mr. Adams speaks of me with great friendship, and with satisfaction in the prospect of administering the government in concurrence with me,” Jefferson wrote to Madison after the election results became known. “If by that he meant [my participating in] the executive cabinet, both duty and inclination will shut that door…. The Constitution will know me only as a member of a legislative body.”

  Adams ultimately filled his cabinet with holdovers from the Washington administration. Most of them were High Federalists and more devoted to Hamilton than to their new President. This would cause Adams a great deal of consternation in the coming years.

  Adams and Jefferson acted respectfully toward each other during their term together, but always at a distance. Partisan differences had become too fierce for their friendship to survive. As they were walking home together after a preinauguration dinner with Washington, Adams raised the issue of his peace mission to France. He informed Jefferson that Federalist legislators had insisted that only their partisans be sent on the mission. The two old friends soon reached an intersection “where our road separated,” Jefferson later recalled, “his being down Market Street, mine off along Fifth [Street], and we took leave; and he never after that said one word to me on the subject, or ever consulted me as to any measures of the government.” From that point forward, their paths, and those of their parties, diverged ever more sharply.