When the First Lady arrived in November to take up residence in the cavernous but still incomplete Executive Mansion, she lamented about the town, “If the twelve years in which this place has been considered as a future seat of government had been [well used], as they would have been if in New England, very many of the present inconveniences would have been removed.” Abigail Adams saw beyond the discomforts, though. “It is a beautiful spot and capable of every improvement,” she added. “The more I view it, the more I am delighted with it.” Clearly, she hoped to stay. Her husband’s political fortunes would decide that matter, however, and they were seriously in doubt.
During his twelve years as President or Vice President, John Adams returned to his Quincy, Massachusetts, farm whenever Congress stood in prolonged recess, which meant most of the time. He then conducted the nation’s business from home. Washington had established a similar routine during his two terms as President. In May 1800, however, after seeing his wife off to Quincy, purging his cabinet, and pardoning Fries, Adams followed his administration south to Washington for a few weeks before returning north to Massachusetts for the summer and early fall.
The trip was largely ceremonial—Adams did not perform any official duties at the new capital. Rather than go directly from Philadelphia to Washington, however, Adams first went west through Lancaster and York, Pennsylvania, then east through Frederick, Maryland, and south to Washington, before passing through Baltimore and Philadelphia on his way back to Massachusetts, where he remained until November. This took him through Federalist regions of two major states still in play for the election—Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Large crowds and official receptions greeted the President at every stop in both states. Although presidential candidates had never publicly campaigned for election before 1800, Adams desperately needed electoral votes from these states to win. Maryland remained one of the few states where voters chose electors by districts; Pennsylvania might still opt for a popular vote for presidential electors too, if the state’s Republican governor and Federalist senate could ever agree on the process. Due to the District of Columbia’s unresolved legal status, Washington and Georgetown voters could still participate in Maryland elections. In effect, Adams’s month-long journey to the nation’s capital became the first presidential campaign trip in American history. It visibly boosted the President’s sagging spirits.
“Is gone—what! Gone? Yes! Dead? Mortally, no; politically, aye? But he has left town. How? In his coach and four with the blinds up,” the Aurora reported on Adams’s departure from Philadelphia on May 27. “Are the blinds to be kept up or down on the way? Out of Philadelphia by all means an open carriage—that the swinish multitude may see who has been in the president’s chair four years.” The Republican newspaper thus sought to demean the President for reaching out to the people only now, when he needed their votes.
Adams traveled with his wife’s nephew, William Shaw, who served as his private secretary, two footmen, and a driver. They stayed in public houses along the way. “Remarkably cheap,” Shaw wrote to his aunt about the accommodations, “between two and three dollars at noon and seven and eight at night have been the amount of our bills.” Civic leaders and local militia turned out at every community to greet the presidential coach and escort it into and out of town with great fanfare. Bands played, church bells rang, and bonfires lit up villages at night as the President passed through. Adams loved it, and the people loved him. He became once again the Revolutionary War hero of ’76 rather than the harried politician of the past four years. Suddenly this often sour, sixty-five-year-old man saw nothing but fertile fields, burgeoning industry, and bright prospects for himself and his country.
“In re-visiting the great counties of Lancaster and York after the interval of three and twenty years,” Adams addressed the crowds in Pennsylvania, “I have not only received great pleasure from the civilities of the people,…but a much higher delight from the various evidences of their happiness and prosperity.” Adams’s previous visit came during the American Revolution, when the Continental Congress met in York during the British occupation of Philadelphia. His remarks reminded towns-people of his patriotic service during those dark days of British oppression, and how far they had come under his leadership during the intervening years. Adams spoke glowingly of “the multiplication of inhabitants; the increase of buildings for utility, convenience, and ornament; and the extensive improvements of the soil” since his earlier visit.
His brief address made the case for his reelection, and his listeners got the message. “Your presence strongly renews in our grateful remembrances your many, faithful, and important public services,” York’s mayor observed on behalf of the citizenry. “As your past life has been so successfully devoted to the service of the American people, it is our fondest hope that heaven may long continue it to add still more to the happiness and respectability of the republic.”
In Maryland too, the newspapers reported, Adams “was received with every demonstration of joy.” At a public reception in Georgetown, for example, the host formally toasted Adams as “the early, the uniform, the steady and unshaken friend of his country.” Other towns-people picked up various Federalist campaign themes, with one publicly toasting “the triumph of religion and order over infidelity and confusion”; another hailing “the Navy and the Army”; and a third raising his glass to Massachusetts, “the nurse of patriots.” For his part, Adams toasted the prosperity and enterprise of Georgetown and its inhabitants. “The utmost harmony and conviviality prevailed,” a local newspaper reported.
During this trip, Adams spoke from the heart about his impressions of bounty under Federalist rule. “Every inch of the land from Philadelphia to Frederick Town is a perfect garden, luxuriant as any in the world and only equaled, the President thinks, in Flanders and England,” Shaw wrote privately to the First Lady. “Our eyes have been delighted throughout the whole journey with cultivated fields and prospects of a fruitful harvest…. The people are prosperous and, of course, ought to be happy.” Adams viewed America through partisan eyes and believed that what he saw fully justified his continuance in office. Republicans, in contrast, saw high taxes, protective tariffs, and unresolved trade disputes with France and Britain holding back the economy. The reality lay in between. By 1800, the national recession that had marked the early years of Adams’s presidency was finally giving way to economic expansion. Regarding the public response to Adams’s visit, Shaw simply noted that “the President has been highly gratified.”
Raw and unfinished, Washington proved the ultimate test of the President’s rosy new view—but it passed. “I have seen many cities and fine places since you left me,” he wrote to his wife from the nation’s new capital. “I like the seat of government very well and shall sleep or lie awake next winter in the President’s house.” This future prospect cheered Adams even though, due to the Executive Mansion’s incomplete state, on this trip he stayed in a local hotel with his new Secretaries of State and War. “Oh! That I could have a home,” he exclaimed to his wife, thinking perhaps of living in the Executive Mansion for the next four years. Whatever happened in the election, Adams would reside in Washington from the time Congress reconvened in November 1800 until the end of his current term in March 1801. Knowing that the Executive Mansion would still remain under construction, several local citizens offered to rent their houses to Adams for that period, but he declined. He decided to move into the unfinished Mansion instead. Adams wanted to reside where his successors would live, even if only for a few months. He had a deep sense of history.
The President crossed the Potomac to make a courtesy call on Martha Washington at Mount Vernon—his first trip to a southern state—and received a surprisingly warm welcome in Republican Virginia. A crowd described by newspapers as the largest ever assembled in Alexandria turned out to greet him. “There was not a man in Alexandria who was not disposed, on the arrival of the President, to treat him with every remark of respect and attent
ion to which, as chief magistrate, he is entitled,” one Republican observer noted. Adams used the occasion to speak of both his Revolutionary War service defending Americans from British “injustice” and the “enviable tranquility and uncommon prosperity” that the country had enjoyed ever since. “We are grown a great people,” he concluded. “May no error or misfortune throw a veil over the bright prospect before us.”
In an address calculated to assert Adams’s political independence, this concluding phrase held special meaning. Speaking in the very state where the prosecution occurred, Adams had coopted the title of Callender’s scandalous book, The Prospect before Us, only eight days after its author had been convicted in a show trial staged by Adams’s own administration. The President sought to turn the tables on the Republican attacks against him. Regardless of what his critics might claim, Adams told Virginians, the prospect before us is bright.
Having perceived the enduring appeal of his role in the Revolution, Adams determined to fight for reelection by reminding Americans of his patriot credentials, centering himself between the Republicans and High Federalists, and distancing himself from the recent partisanship that he abhorred. At the same time, with his new Secretary of State from Virginia at his side, Adams distinguished himself from the pro-British Hamiltonian wing of his own party by speaking of past British “indignities” rather than recent French ones. After heading an administration seemingly bent on war with France and alliance with Britain, Adams now campaigned on a platform of peace through neutrality. His words, which were widely reported in newspapers across the country, exasperated High Federalists. One of their leaders accused Adams of “rousing the spirit of animosity against the English” to bolster his own position at the expense of the party’s so-called British faction, which followed Hamilton and favored Pinckney.
The scene repeated itself when Adams reached Baltimore. The mayor praised the President for his “eminent and long services…[that] have so largely contributed to establish us as an independent nation.” Adams accepted credit for his past services and hailed the city’s burgeoning prosperity. “I wish a continuation in future of rewards to your enterprise, industry, and faculties, in proportion to those which have attended you for the last three and twenty years,” he observed. As at earlier stops, Adams urged citizens to stay the course. The Gazette of the United States, which spoke for Adams’s wing of the Federalist Party, concluded, “The very affectionate reception and respectable addresses which have everywhere met our venerable and vigilant President on his tour to and from Washington has [sic] greatly increased the malignity and chagrin of the Jacobins.”
Accounts of the President’s speeches and the public responses to them appeared in Federalist newspapers across the country, allowing Adams to reach his supporters everywhere and solidify his popular base with his patriotic rhetoric. Of course, state legislators picked electors in ten states, but the people—or, more properly, free, adult, male landowners—voted directly for electors in some states, and popularly chosen electors in Rhode Island, Maryland, and North Carolina could supply the margin of victory in a close contest. Further, even in states where legislators selected electors, the President’s popularity could help to elect Federalist legislators who would choose pro-Adams electors. Several states—most notably New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and South Carolina—still had state legislative elections scheduled prior to the naming of electors.
The challenge, however, was formidable, and the split within his own party was a vexing problem undermining his efforts. Indeed, Adams’s actions during May and June—from his cabinet shake-up through the Revolutionary rhetoric in his stump speeches—excited extensive public speculation about the state of affairs within the Federalist Party. Despite the positive receptions that Adams received on his trip, observations and predictions concerning the apparent intraparty split dogged him along the way. “It appears now certain that the Federalists are determined to drop John Adams: they find him too much of a ‘dead lift’ to rise to the presidential chair,” a local Pennsylvania newspaper commented as the President passed through the state. Newspapers in both Alexandria and Baltimore reprinted an article from the Trenton Federalist claiming that Adams and Jefferson “have come to an agreement on certain equivalents to produce a common interest, which shall place them again in the seats of magistracy and produce a neutralization of the two great contending parties.” Each candidate would discard extremists from his camp and the two would rule together from the center, the article stated. Another Maryland newspaper countered “that Mr. Adams will not be the next president but General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney shall be the man.”
At about this time, various newspapers started running periodic projections of the probable electoral-vote count, with some listing Adams, Jefferson, and Pinckney separately, as if in a three-person race. Burr typically was not listed in these tabulations or was named along with Jefferson. During Adams’s visit to Baltimore, for example, the city’s conservative Federal Gazette published a state-by-state analysis projecting that Pinckney would edge out Jefferson in the electoral-vote count, 77 to 70, with Adams coming in a close third with 65 votes. The two Federalist candidates would sweep New England, New Jersey, and Delaware according to this tally. Jefferson would carry New York, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The parties would split the three middle-or upper-South states expected to use district voting: Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina. The Federal Gazette gave Pinckney the nod by predicting that independent electors in South Carolina and Georgia would vote for Pinckney along with Jefferson.
Tabulations appearing in Republican newspapers tended to predict a win for Jefferson by projecting that South Carolina electors would vote for the two Republican candidates and that Pennsylvania would either go Republican or not vote. Otherwise, the tallies of all papers were remarkably similar, with partisans on both sides projecting that virtually all electors from New England, New Jersey, and Delaware would vote for Adams and Pinckney, while the lion’s share of electors from southern and western states would vote for Jefferson and Burr. With few exceptions, most calculations suggested that the contest remained extremely tight. With New York already decided by a close but conclusive election, most prognosticators suggested that the outcome would likely turn on Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the Carolinas.
Betraying just how set against him so many leaders in his own party had become, when Adams passed through High Federalist strongholds in the Northeast on his journey home to Massachusetts, he received a chillier greeting than in the contested middle states. In Newark, New Jersey, for example, where local party leaders typically staged a formal welcome whenever the presidential party passed through, they did nothing to mark the occasion. “Their silence and quietude at this time,” the Aurora reported, “is an implied acknowledgment of their disapprobation of some of his late transgressions,” notably dismissing Pickering, disbanding the Army, and pardoning Fries. Adams nevertheless continued to defy the High Federalists by seeking center ground even on their home turf. Speaking at an official reception in New London, Connecticut, Adams pointed to his part “in our important and glorious revolution.” At a formal dinner at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, Adams toasted “the prescribed patriots, [John] Hancock and Samuel Adams”—two popular Anti-Federalist former Massachusetts governors. High Federalists reportedly boycotted the Boston dinner and became enraged upon learning that Adams had toasted their former political foes. “The man that would give that toast ought to be d——d, and kick’d out of the Hall,” a local partisan allegedly declared. “Has he turned Jacobin?”
In Massachusetts, certain prominent High Federalists with ties to Essex County—a wealthy center of commerce near Boston—were known derisively as the “Essex Junto.” John Hancock had coined the term in 1778 to label those he viewed as his most reactionary opponents—and it stuck. The core group included Ames, Pickering, Senators George Cabot and Benjamin Goodhue, and Theophilus Parsons. Adams now began using this old term to attack his new opp
onents within the party. In a letter dated July 19, Cabot complained of Adams having denounced “High Federalists as ‘a Junto of incorrigible Aristocrats’” and expressed his hope that the President’s Faneuil Hall toast would turn “judicious and discerning men” against him. Ames also criticized Adams’s toast: “The great man has been south as far as Alexandria making his addressers acquainted with his revolutionary merits…. He inveighs against the British faction and the Essex Junto like one possessed.” Cabot and Ames had regularly dined with Adams in the past, but snubbed him now. “It would be embarrassing to know what to say,” Ames noted. In July, Goodhue wrote of “Mr. Adams’ insufferable madness and vanity.”
As much as it infuriated High Federalists, the public display of his Revolutionary Era credentials served Adams well in his contest with Jefferson. Adams was an early advocate of American independence, a leader in the patriot cause, and an ardent nationalist. Although he admired its balanced system of government, Adams hated Britain and distrusted its leaders. Reminding voters of these aspects of his service and character acted as a perfect foil to Republican attacks on him as a pro-British monarchist. The approach had struck a responsive chord with citizens during his June trip through the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Maryland, and Adams continued using it into the summer and fall. In response to a midsummer testimonial from citizens in North Carolina, for example, Adams referred to his forty years in public service. “No man ever served his country with purer intentions or for more disinterested motives,” he boasted. Distinguishing himself from the faction within his own party that supported the Additional Army and opposed peace with France, he added, “I never shall love war or seek it for the pleasure, profit, or honor of it.”
A Magnificent Catastrophe Page 17