A Magnificent Catastrophe

by Edward J. Larson

  Writing on behalf of High Federalists in the Northeast, New Jersey Senator Richard Stockton also cautioned Wolcott that, although they shared his utter alienation from Adams, “nothing further was practicable than the plan proposed in Philadelphia of running two candidates.” He added, “None of us think that affairs are so desperate as to believe that Mr. Adams, with all his weaknesses…can be a worse man than Jefferson.” In a like manner, South Carolina Congressman Robert G. Harper wrote to Hamilton that, while Southern Federalists favored Pinckney over Adams, “they are however convinced that no direct attack can safely be made to drop or supercede Mr. Adams. It would create uncertainty, division, and defeat.”

  Pinckney also urged his Southern supporters not to break publicly with the President. “If any alteration should take place in the agreement entered into in Philadelphia,” he wrote in mid-June, “it should originate in the Eastern states; otherwise we shall be inevitably divided, and the Anti-Federalists obtain the success which I am sure they will not if the Federalists are united, active, and energetic.” The call to repudiate Adams should come first from Federalists in New England, Pinckney reasoned, because if it came from Federalists in any other region, New Englanders would likely rally around their native son. Although highly critical of the President in private, Pinckney still viewed the caucus agreement as the best means for the Federalists to retain the presidency.

  In his doleful letters lamenting Adams’s conduct and his own mistreatment, McHenry captured the High Federalists’ angst. “Have our party shown that they possess the necessary skill and courage to deserve to be continued to govern?” he wrote to Wolcott about the continuing party support for Adams. “They did not (with few exceptions), knowing the disease, the man, and his nature, meet it, when it first appeared, like wise and resolute politicians…. Nay,…they write private letters. To whom? To each other. But they do nothing to give a proper direction to the public mind.” Someone should speak out against Adams, McHenry believed, but he left the task to others.

  Plotting against the President themselves, High Federalists now could see only the worst in his every move. In 1800, for example, Jefferson had remained in the nation’s capital later than his customary return to Monticello in April. This unexplained act coupled with Adams’s firing of McHenry and Pickering in early May touched off rumors within Federalist circles that Adams and Jefferson had entered into a secret pact to run on a united ticket. “I have good reason for believing that Pinckney and McHenry have been sacrificed as peace offerings,” House Speaker Theodore Sedgwick wrote to Hamilton in mid-May, suggesting that the dismissals of these two partisan cabinet officers sealed a deal between the President and the Vice President. Jefferson had remained in the nation’s capital until Adams consummated the bargain by his actions, the speculation ran. One version of the rumor had the men agreeing to exchange their current positions, with Adams becoming Jefferson’s Vice President. Another version had Adams serving a second term as President and then supporting Jefferson for the post. Adams hotly denied the rumors, and his wife found them disgusting. The fact that some High Federalists believed them showed the level of distrust that divided the party. Even Pinckney conceded in June that, if true, a deal by Adams “to form a party with Jefferson” would justify Federalists in abandoning the caucus agreement to support Adams.

  The cumulative effect of the New York election and all the ensuing intraparty intrigue fundamentally destabilized the Federalist Party. “All our friends here are in sad anarchy,” Gouverneur Morris observed from New York in early June.

  Even as the Federalists went to battle among themselves, the Republicans took every opportunity to assail them, and they had substantial material to use against them. High or low, Federalists had held power for twelve years and could not escape blame for unpopular taxes, excessive spending, and perceived abuses of power tending toward authoritarianism or, as their critics like to call it, monarchism. The Republicans continuously hammered them on these issues, but never more abusively than in the campaign tract The Prospect before Us, by scandalmonger James Thomson Callender. In late May, with Adams’s full support, the government tried to silence Callender by invoking the Sedition Act one last time. To many, however, the high-handed use of a wartime measure to suppress political criticism during the campaign served only to reenforce the Republican case against continued Federalist rule.

  After moving to the United States in 1793 to escape an indictment for sedition in Britain, Callender made a career of exposing the public and private misdeeds of Federalists. His sensational History of the United States for 1796 accused Hamilton of speculating in government securities, while he was Treasury Secretary, to pay off the husband of his mistress, Maria Reynolds. In a stunningly selfish and self-destructive defense of his public honor, Hamilton, a married man with eight children and a wealthy, socially respected wife who adored him, issued a written statement admitting the extramarital affair but denying any corrupt dealings in securities. This admission haunted Hamilton for the rest of his life by providing fodder for his critics, especially in light of his own out-of-wedlock birth.

  Following a stint working for the Aurora in Philadelphia during 1798 and a brief hiatus fleeing from prosecution for sedition there, Callender surfaced in Virginia as a writer for the Richmond Examiner. His vitriolic assaults on Adams boosted the Examiner’s circulation and were reprinted in other Republican newspapers. Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe took an interest in Callender’s work and supported it. With funds secretly provided by Jefferson, Callender revised and expanded his articles on Adams into The Prospect before Us, which appeared early in 1800. When Jefferson saw an advance copy, he congratulated Callender, “Such papers cannot fail to have the best effect.”

  Although it exposed no private scandals, the 183-page pamphlet restated the standard Republican charges against Adams’s intemperate behavior and imprudent policies in the most caustic terms to date. “The reign of Mr. Adams has, hitherto, been one continued tempest of malignant passions,” Callender wrote, resulting in a costly war with France solely “for the sake of yoking us into an alliance with the British tyrant.” Onerous direct taxes, a soaring national debt, and “profligate expenditure of public money” have resulted, he claimed. “Take your choice,” Callender advised readers, “between Adams, war, and beggary, and Jefferson, peace, and competency!” Abigail Adams soon denounced “all the host of Callender’s lies.”

  On May 21, Samuel Chase descended on Richmond in pursuit of Callender. “Judge Chase,” the Aurora taunted, “the pious and religious Judge Chase, is going to Virginia where, he says, if a virtuous jury can only be collected, he’ll punish CALLENDER with a vengeance.” At the time, federal courts did collect jurors rather than choose them at random, with the local federal marshal able to handpick individuals for the jury pool. The marshals themselves were political appointees of the President and invariably party loyalists. Republicans charged with sedition never had a chance with a jury composed of local Federalists, especially with Chase on the bench. Washington had appointed Chase to the Supreme Court in 1796, but he was loyal to John Adams and partisan in the extreme. Even after being named to the High Court, Chase continued to campaign for Federalist candidates in his home state of Maryland and publicly endorsed Adams over Jefferson in 1800.

  Chase acted virtually as judge, jury, and prosecutor in Callender’s highly publicized trial. The indictment accused Callender of maliciously defaming the President. As Chase interpreted the Sedition Act, Callender could escape conviction only by proving the truth of his malicious, defamatory assertions about Adams, many of which were simply matters of opinion. “Can any man of you say that the President is a detestable and criminal man…[and] excuse yourself by saying it is but mere opinion?” Chase rhetorically asked defense counsel, which featured three of Virginia’s leading Republican lawyers—including the state’s attorney general and assembly clerk—all serving without pay. Yet, when Republican Senator John Taylor tried to testify that Adams avowed ari
stocratic principles much like Callender claimed, Chase barred Taylor’s testimony because it did not precisely track Callender’s assertions. The appearance of Taylor and Virginia’s top Republican lawyers at the trial underscored its partisan nature.

  In a public and probably planned protest, Callender’s lawyers withdrew from the case after Chase refused to allow them to challenge the constitutionality of the Sedition Act before the jury. Chase called their argument “irregular and inadmissible” in so far as it was directed to a jury rather than the judge. The defense maneuver left Callender visibly at the mercy of Chase, who was predisposed to show no mercy. After the jurors duly convicted Callender pursuant to the judge’s instructions, Chase congratulated them on showing “that the laws of the United States could be enforced in Virginia, the principal object of this prosecution.” He sentenced Callender to nine months in the Richmond jail, which would keep him behind bars until after the election.

  The conviction backfired. The national government had no prisons at the time, and Virginia jails did not harshly confine Sedition Act violators. Portraying himself as a victim of Federalist tyranny, Callender published various attack articles and a second volume of The Prospect before Us from jail. Defiantly titling one chapter of the new book “More Sedition,” Callender depicted the President as “insolent, inconsistent, and quarrelsome to an extreme…. Every inch which is not fool is rogue.” In addition, the Republicans turned Chase’s bullying tactics at Callender’s trial into an effective campaign issue. “The judge spoke of Mr. Callender in the most contemptuous manner,” one partisan newspaper reported, “and made many remarks which proved that he was much better qualified to act as prosecutor than to act as an impartial judge.” Government officials never brought another indictment under the Sedition Act: Apparently they learned not to make writers into martyrs.

  Ironically, Jefferson later felt Callender’s sting, when, two years after the election, the acerbic writer broke the story that Jefferson kept his slave, Sally Hemings, as a mistress. “Human nature in a hideous form,” Jefferson wrote to Monroe in 1802 about Callender, whose body was found floating in Virginia’s James River a year later. An inquest ruled that Callender had drowned accidentally while bathing drunk. Unlike Hamilton in the Reynolds affair, Jefferson never publicly admitted to the relationship with Hemings, which remained simply a persistent rumor until the advent of DNA testing two hundred years later.

  By the end of May, roughly the midpoint between the effective beginning of the presidential campaign and the December date fixed for voting by electors, the Federalists were unnerved. Virtually nothing had gone their way. Their most respected leader, Washington, had died. Republicans had won critical state elections in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New York. Without yet producing any diplomatic results, Adams’s peace mission to France had dissipated the war fever that once had drawn voters to the Federalist banner. The Additional Army was disbanding. The Sedition Act was discredited. Americans everywhere complained about high taxes and the rising national debt. Worst of all for the Federalists, their party unity was shattered by the caucus decision urging electors to vote equally for Adams and Pinckney, and by Adams’s subsequent dismissal of High Federalists from the cabinet. Meanwhile, the Republicans appeared united behind Jefferson for President and Burr for Vice President. As if to symbolize the shift in party fortunes, after Congress adjourned in May 1800, the nation’s capital moved from Federalist-friendly Philadelphia to the new town named for Washington just across the Potomac River from staunchly Republican Virginia.

  “The Fed[eralist]s have split,” the President’s youngest son, Thomas Boylston Adams, wrote to a friend on the last day of May 1800. “Some are resolved to abandon the present leader while some abide by him…. General Pinckney will run as V.P. in several eastern states and as President in the Southern [ones], which according to some calculations will put him into the [presidential] chair. All the opinion I can give at present is that the Federal[ist] candidate will not prevail.”

  His father had not given up, though. Sixty-five years old and toothless but with the energy and emotions of a much younger man, Adams resolved to rally his old supporters one last time. Jefferson had trusted allies in Madison and Monroe; except for his beloved wife, Adams felt alone and embattled. But he soon made a bold move to reinvigorate his prospects. For the first time in American history, a presidential candidate took his campaign on the road.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A NEW KIND OF CAMPAIGN

  THE FUTURE District of Columbia was virtually a wilderness in 1790, when Jefferson bargained with Hamilton to make it the nation’s permanent capital. As the sitting Treasury Secretary, Hamilton wanted the national government to assume the states’ unpaid Revolutionary War debts. By this, he hoped to give wealthy creditors further reason to support the new Constitution and to facilitate banking and commerce generally. Hamilton’s critics savaged the plan as a costly boon to speculators who had bought unpaid war bonds at a discount and done little for the patriot cause. As the Secretary of State with a following among the emerging Southern Republican faction in Congress, Jefferson (working with Madison in the House of Representatives) could supply the votes needed to pass Hamilton’s debt-assumption bill. In return, however, he wanted the capital in or near Virginia. They struck a deal: Southern Republicans would vote for debt assumption if Northern Federalists voted for a capital on the banks of the Potomac River, within an easy ride of Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation. Congress named the new city for the nation’s beloved leader, who took a fatherly interest in its planning throughout the remainder of his life.

  For a decade, the government sat first in New York and then in Philadelphia while architects and builders struggled to transform the District’s wooded hills and swampy thickets into a capital city of broad avenues and impressive edifices. Local officials renamed diminutive Goose Creek after Rome’s Tiber River in a widely ridiculed effort to lend some classical dignity to the place. Congress counted on the sale of private building lots to supplement meager national appropriations and state funds from Maryland and Virginia to finance the city’s construction—but enough never came from any source to meet the needs. The town of Alexandria, Virginia, lay across the Potomac from the main development site, and tiny Georgetown, Maryland, stood upstream, on the far side of Rock Creek, but otherwise the area presented a nearly virgin landscape for a people accustomed to staking their future on the frontier.

  “No stranger can be here a day and converse with the proprietors without conceiving himself in the company of crazy people,” Treasury Secretary Oliver Wolcott observed upon his arrival in 1800. “Their delusions with respect to their own prospects are without parallel.” Speculators all, local boosters talked of the Potomac becoming a major avenue of trade to the west and touted Washington as a future center of commerce. The river’s Great Falls above Georgetown and its twisted course frustrated such developments, however. Unlike most other world capitals, Washington remained a one-industry town: the seat of government only.

  The architectural plans remained more vision than reality in 1800, when Congress determined nevertheless to transfer the seat of government to Washington. One correspondent wrote in 1800 of it “resembling more the encampment of hunters than a city,” and commented on its “few scattering houses, without doors, yards, gardens, streets, or enclosures (there being not one foot of fence to be seen from the Capitol).” Another observer rapped poetic in ridicule:

  Where tribunes rule, where dusky Davi bow,

  And what was Goose Creek once is Tiber now:

  This embryo capital, where fancy sees

  Squares in morasses, obelisks in trees.

  This critic reported finding only woods to see “Where streets should run and sages ought to be.” Only a few public buildings were ready for use by 1800, and only one wing of the Capitol.

  The administration moved first, soon after Congress adjourned in May. “Notice. The Office of the Department of State will remove this day from
Philadelphia,” a paid announcement in the Aurora stated on May 28, 1800. “All letters and applications are therefore to be addressed to that Department at the City of Washington from this date.” The ad could not supply an exact address because the State Department’s building simply did not exist. For now, the department’s small staff would borrow space in other structures. The graceful sandstone north wing of the Capitol, along with framework for its south wing, rose on a low hill near the planned city’s center surrounded by a small cluster of privately owned structures. On high ground a mile and a half west of the Capitol stood the completed two-story Treasury building, the exterior walls of the War Department offices, and the imposing outer shell of the unfinished Executive Mansion—the future White House. “I cannot but consider our presidents as very unfortunate men if they must live in this dwelling,” Wolcott noted. “It was built to be looked at by visitors and strangers,” not to be lived in comfortably. The older shops and houses of Georgetown lay two miles farther to the west, across the Rock Creek ravine, on a steep bank above the Potomac.

  In May 1800, tree stumps lined the dirt path running from Capitol Hill to the Executive Mansion, with much of the route becoming a muddy swamp in wet weather. Washington did not yet have its own newspaper, though preexisting publications in both Alexandria and Georgetown claimed to serve the new capital too. The town’s first bookstore and theater opened later in the year. In the meantime, taverns provided the only public entertainment.

  Seven packing crates sufficed to cart the entire archives of the executive branch from Philadelphia to Washington during May and early June. Congress followed when it reconvened in November, while the Supreme Court did not sit in the new capital until 1801. Both houses of Congress and the Court initially squeezed into the Capitol’s completed north wing. Lodging was so scarce that members of Congress had to share rooms in local boardinghouses. Wolcott predicted that they would “live like scholars in a college, or monks in a monastery, crowded ten or twelve in one house.”