A Magnificent Catastrophe

by Edward J. Larson

  Following the caucus, U.S. Senator Samuel Dexter of Massachusetts, a moderate, complained about the party’s treatment of its President. Passing Dexter’s objections on to Hamilton, Sedgwick wrote, “He says that however those who have had the opportunity of personal observation may esteem the character of Mr. Adams, as he is viewed by the great majority of Federalists, he is the most popular man in the U.S.” The public would blame Hamilton and the High Federalists if the agreement led to Pinckney becoming President over Adams, Dexter reportedly warned, and “this will crumble the Federal Party to atoms.”

  Revealing the full depth of his hatred for Adams, Hamilton responded angrily to the comments by Dexter. “He is, I am persuaded, much mistaken as to the opinion entertained of Mr. Adams by the Federal Party,” Hamilton replied to Sedgwick. “For my individual part, my mind is made up. I will never more be responsible for [Adams] by my direct support—even though the consequence should be the election of Jefferson. If we must have an enemy at the head of the government, let it be one whom we can oppose and for whom we are not responsible.”

  Hamilton promised to honor the caucus agreement as long as it appeared to hold “in the East,” but if it faltered there, he would support only Pinckney. In short, if it seemed that New England electors were breaking ranks to drop votes from Pinckney, as they had done to his brother in 1796, then Hamilton would urge other electors to drop votes from Adams. “’Tis a notable expedient for keeping the Federal Party together to have at the head of it a man who hates and is despised by those men of it who in time past have been its most efficient supporters,” Hamilton noted bitterly. A flurry of letters ensued from Massachusetts Federalists committing their state legislature to appoint electors who, in the words of one, “would vote unanimously for Adams and Pinckney.”

  Republicans could scarcely contain their glee over the still private but no longer secret split within Federalist ranks. The caucus decision to support Adams and Pinckney equally was public knowledge, and the split that underlay it was obvious enough to astute observers. Republicans speculated openly about the ulterior motives behind the caucus decision and used it to undermine support for the Federalist ticket among those loyal to the President. The Republicans, Fisher Ames warned fellow Federalists, “would join in the cry to make any [Federalist] opposed to the President unpopular” simply as a means to divide the opposition and discredit High Federalists. Of course, the Republicans did not like Adams, but they could join with moderate Federalists in denouncing High Federalists for opposing him as a means to further split the opposition. Feeding the division within the Federalists, the Aurora’s editor circulated and later published an old letter by Adams questioning the patriotism of the Pinckney brothers and suggesting “much British influence” in Thomas Pinckney’s 1792 appointment by Washington as the American ambassador in London. Every move served to deepen the wedge between Adams and the High Federalists and expose their differences. Soon their private dispute erupted in public.

  John Adams had a temper that could explode into uncontrollable outbursts of verbal abuse. With time and reflection, he typically brought his emotions under control and responded rationally to situations, but for the moment he could appear, as Benjamin Franklin had famously observed, “absolutely out of his senses.” In May, Hamilton’s private campaign to topple Adams touched off an outburst that opened the rift within the Federalist Party for all to see and reverberated throughout the presidential campaign.

  In all likelihood, Adams’s outburst was prompted by the one-two punch of news about the New York elections and the ensuing Federalist caucus. With the former, Adams learned that Jefferson had gained the advantage in the contest for the presidency; with the latter, he realized that his own party had virtually abandoned him for Pinckney.

  Adams blamed Hamilton for his plight. Not only did Adams suspect that Hamilton had conspired to undermine his presidency from the outset (due at least in part to jealousy), but he also believed that Hamilton had lost the New York election by picking weak candidates loyal to himself and then masterminding the caucus vote for Pinckney. “Hamilton had opposed my election as Vice President in 1788 and my election at every subsequent period as Vice President and President,” Adams later wrote, and “divided the Federalists of New York…[by] selecting a list of representatives for the city in their state legislature who [would] concur with his plan in the choice of electors of president” to “bring in General Pinckney.” Claiming that informers had told him about Hamilton’s plots in advance, Adams attributed the Republican victory in New York to the reluctance of his friends to support Hamilton’s candidates. Adams may have exaggerated Hamilton’s direct role in his worsening prospects, but he reacted as if he believed it.

  Immediately after the New York elections and Federalist caucus, Adams moved against the Hamiltonians within his administration. He had retained three of them in his cabinet from the Washington administration: James McHenry, Timothy Pickering, and Oliver Wolcott. In Adams’s eyes, only Wolcott performed his job well. All three men actively conspired with Hamilton while serving in Adams’s cabinet and shamelessly sought to undermine Adams’s peace initiative with France. McHenry was inept as well as disloyal. Republicans especially despised Pickering for his vigorous enforcement of the Sedition Act against their partisan newspapers. “Mr. Pickering would have made a good collector of the customs but he was not so well qualified for a Secretary of State,” Adams noted about his stern, proud foreign minister. “He is a man in a mask, sometimes of silk, sometimes of iron, and sometimes of brass. And he can change them very suddenly and with some dexterity.” Adams later joked, “Pickering could never be happy in heaven because he must there find and acknowledge a superior.” Four months earlier, Wolcott confided to a friend that Adams “considers Col. Pickering, Mr. McHenry, and myself as enemies; his resentments against General Hamilton are excessive; he declares his belief at the existence of a British faction in the United States.”

  Ostensibly to discuss a minor administrative matter, Adams invited McHenry for a private meeting on May 5 that turned into a verbal assault. All the President’s pent-up fury fell on this meek man, who wrote poetry and spoke with an Irish lilt. The President “became indecorous, and at times, outrageous,” McHenry wrote to his nephew about the encounter. “I had done nothing right.” Adams listed McHenry’s supposed transgressions, major and minor, from aiding Hamilton’s power grab in the Army and subverting Adams’s peace mission to buying shoddy clothes for the troops and refusing a military commission for the lone North Carolina elector who voted for Adams in 1796. McHenry denied none of the major charges against him. Indeed, in the letter to his nephew, who served as an American diplomat in Europe, McHenry defended his efforts to subvert the peace mission on classic High Federalist grounds: “The kind of war we waged with France gave us little to fear from her, effectively shut out French principles, [and] was calculated to…preserve the friendship of England.”

  Following his meeting with the President, McHenry set down his recollection of the exchange and sent it to both Adams and Hamilton. Adams reportedly declared, “Hamilton is an intriguer—the greatest intriguer in the world—a man devoid of every moral principle—a bastard and as much a foreigner as Gallatin. Mr. Jefferson is an infinitely better man; a wiser one, I am sure, and, if President, will act wisely.” The President then turned on McHenry: “You are subservient to Hamilton, who ruled Washington…. Washington saddled me with three Secretaries who would control me, but I shall take care of that.” Wolcott could stay, the President suggested, but the other two must go. McHenry submitted his resignation the next day.

  In the letter to his nephew, McHenry described Adams’s degree of agitation on this and other occasions vividly. “At times he would speak in such a manner of certain men and things as to persuade one that he was actually insane,” McHenry wrote. When Hamilton learned what happened, he exclaimed in a letter to McHenry, “Oh mad! Mad! Mad!”

  Next came Pickering. On May 10, in a terse lette
r that gave no substantive reasons, Adams asked for the Secretary of State’s resignation. Pickering replied in his customary peevish fashion that, due to the importance of his work and the financial needs of his family, “I do not feel it to be my duty to resign.” In what Adams later called “one of the most deliberate, virtuous, and disinterested actions of my life,” he instantly fired Pickering.

  As soon as he heard about the sackings, Hamilton sent the outgoing Secretary of State an urgent letter asking him to purloin from department files “all such documents as will enable you to explain both Jefferson and Adams. You are aware of a very curious journal of the latter when he was in Europe, a tissue of weakness and vanity.” Rumors suggested that Adams had bared his soul a bit too candidly in his official reports from Europe during his diplomatic missions there. Hamilton wanted material to use against Adams in the worst way—even if it meant stealing it—and justified the request by adding that “real integrity” required exposing charlatans. Pickering received Hamilton’s letter too late to act upon it. “I intended to have done precisely what you suggest respecting Mr. Adams[’s] journal,” he wrote back to Hamilton, but he never had a chance. The President discharged Pickering without notice, and the Secretary left office on the same day. Hamilton would have to look elsewhere for damaging material on Adams.

  Adams’s dismissal of McHenry and Pickering represented more than simply retribution against personal foes; it fit into a larger shift by the President toward the political center. Having secured his Federalist base the best that he could by obtaining at least a co-nomination for the presidency at the party’s congressional caucus, Adams apparently felt free to moderate his policies in advance of the election. The party was committed to support him at least equally with Pinckney, and so the High Federalists could not now dump him. He was free to reach out in directions that might appeal to voters in Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, and other places where popularity might still translate into electoral votes. Firing McHenry and Pickering was only the beginning.

  Before the end of May, Adams took a series of further steps that appealed to moderates. First, he named Massachusetts Senator Samuel Dexter to replace McHenry as Secretary of War and Virginia Representative John Marshall to replace Pickering as Secretary of State. During the preceding legislative session, Dexter and Marshall had shown a measure of independence from High Federalists in Congress. Then, on May 14, Adams signed into law a bill authorizing him to discharge the Additional Army. “This bill amounted to a disbanding of the army,” the angry High Federalist printer William Cobbett complained, “because it was well known that Adams, who was now laying in a provision of popularity against the ensuing election for President, would issue orders for disbanding the moment the Congress adjourned.” Adams did so the next day by directing McHenry, who remained in office until the end of May, to transmit an order disbanding the Army “to Major Generals Hamilton and Pinckney.” Finally, on May 21, Adams issued a bold pardon of a man who had led a popular uprising against federal war taxes; a man whom High Federalists wanted to hang as a grim lesson to all.

  John Fries was a former Revolutionary War officer. In 1799, he had led up to four hundred east-central Pennsylvania farmers and towns-people in armed but largely nonviolent resistance to the collection of federal property taxes imposed in 1798 to pay for military preparedness against France. These taxes represented the least popular part of the Federalist war effort. Even though no one was physically injured by the tax resisters, High Federalists cast them as Jacobin revolutionaries who imperiled public order and national security. Proclaiming that the actions of the tax resisters “amount to treason,” Adams had ordered a force ultimately composed of nearly 3,000 federal and state troops to subdue them.

  Fries’s so-called rebellion died down long before the troops arrived. Federal marshals riding with that army nevertheless arrested over ninety persons involved in it. Following a series of highly politicized trials, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase—already hated by Republicans for his treatment of Sedition Act violators—sentenced Fries and two of his closest confederates to hang for treason. Thirty-two others received jail sentences. All of them acknowledged their guilt, promised to obey the law, and petitioned for executive clemency.

  Upon receipt of the prisoners’ petitions in mid-May, Adams asked his cabinet for advice. In a joint response, the cabinet declared the sentences both “just” and calculated to inspire “the well disposed with confidence in the government and the malevolent and fractious with terror.” Every cabinet member affirmed that at least Fries should hang; Wolcott added that all three convicted traitors should die. He stressed, “The cause of humanity will be most effectually promoted by impressing an opinion that those who are brought to trial, and convicted of treason, will not be pardoned.” While still Secretary of State, Pickering had written to the President about Fries’s conviction, “I feel a calm and solid satisfaction that an opportunity is now presented in executing the justice of the law to crush that spirit which, if not overthrown and destroyed, may proceed in its career and overturn the government.”

  Now, on May 21, having come to view the underlying criminal activity as a “riot” rather than an insurrection, Adams rejected his cabinet’s advice and issued a blanket pardon. Fries and his followers went home. The presidential pardon incensed High Federalists but proved popular in Pennsylvania, where Adams still hoped to win electoral votes. Everywhere, it reinforced the generally favorable view of Adams as a political independent. He would take a middle course in the campaign between Jefferson and the High Federalists.

  So public was the break between Adams and the High Federalists that the Aurora ran an article asserting that there were now three parties represented in the U.S. Senate—Republicans, Adamites, and Pickeronians—with each having about equal numbers in that body. “The latter party consists of those who have leagued with Hamilton and are easily designated by their English connections,” the newspaper noted. They were the High Federalists: the elite of the “aristocratic” party, according to the Aurora. They had no true national candidates. Indeed, Adams and Jefferson were the only two American politicians with national followings.

  Many High Federalists now recognized the virtues of manipulating the Electoral College so as to slip Pinckney in ahead of Adams without giving a majority to Jefferson. For some High Federalists, however, the overarching aim became to purge their party of Adams, even if it meant losing the presidency. “The miserable policy of regarding men not measures will defeat the hopes of the most enlightened and truly patriotic citizens,” Pickering complained regarding Adams’s continued popularity among middle-of-the-road Americans and many rank-and-file Federalists.

  Once Congress adjourned in mid-May and its members returned home, letters became virtually the only means of private communication among party leaders. Trying to coordinate the electoral vote and debating whether to honor the caucus agreement or reject Adams for Pinckney became the object of countless letters among High Federalists. Many read like Shakespearean soliloquies: Whether ’tis nobler to support Adams and retain the presidency or defy him openly and risk Republican rule became the overriding question for High Federalists.

  By the end of May, Pickering and Wolcott joined Hamilton in privately urging Federalist electors to break with Adams regardless of the consequences. “The cause of Federalism (which we consider to be the cause of our country) will be as little or as less in jeopardy under Mr. Jefferson than under Mr. Adams,” Pickering observed. From within Adams’s own cabinet, Wolcott wrote, “It is with grief and humiliation, but at the same time with perfect confidence, that I declare that no administration of the government by President Adams can be successful.” He added, “I am no advocate for rash measures, and know that public opinion cannot be suddenly changed, but it is clear to my mind that we can never find ourselves in the straight road of Federalism while Mr. Adams is President.” For these men who had worked under Adams, principle prevailed over the presidency. Wolcott now charact
erized Adams’s reelection, not Jefferson’s election, as “the greatest possible curse: A presidential administration which no party can trust.”

  Most High Federalists, however, still disagreed with the extreme measure of publicly repudiating the President. “An open attack, if made soon on [Adams], would, I fear, divide our force and perhaps give some [electoral] votes to Jefferson,” Fisher Ames wrote in June. “Instead of analyzing the measures of the man who has thus brought the cause into jeopardy,” he admonished Wolcott about his attacks on Adams, “you must sound the tocsin against Jefferson.” Believing that a “Jacobin President” represented a greater threat to ordered liberty than another term for Adams, Ames warned, “A thousand ways of attacking property are plausible, popular, and fatal.”