A Magnificent Catastrophe

by Edward J. Larson

  Leaving nothing to chance, after Congress reconvened in November, Charles Pinckney decided to stay in South Carolina to urge party discipline on Republican state legislators rather than assume his U.S. Senate seat in Washington. “I have taken post with some valuable friends at Columbia where our legislature meets and are now in session, and here I mean to remain until the thing is settled,” he wrote to Madison in November. “I am the only member of Congress of either side present and the Federalists view me with a very jealous eye.”

  The five state legislative elections held during October had failed to resolve the contest for President. Federalists had won in New Jersey and Delaware, but most observers had assumed all along that the ten electoral votes of those two small states would go to the Federalists. In their larger neighbors to the west, Federalists retained control of the Pennsylvania Senate while Republicans took the Maryland House of Representatives, with Federalists in control of the Senate, leaving the twenty-five electoral votes of those two key states in doubt. South Carolina remained anyone’s guess until its legislature actually met.

  Going into November with less than five weeks until the Electoral College would meet, all four candidates could count on between forty and fifty votes, with seventy needed to win. During November, direct popular voting for electors in Rhode Island, Maryland, North Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky could clarify the presidential race somewhat, but it now looked as if Pennsylvania and South Carolina legislators would decide it by their choice of electors. Because of their popularity in South Carolina and the distinct possibility that Pennsylvania would not vote, Jefferson and Pinckney appeared to be the front-runners, but any of the four candidates could still win the presidency. In a tight finish, the options were legion.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THUNDERSTRUCK

  TO MANY observers—those not on the inside of political circles—it seemed to strike abruptly, like a bolt from the sky. Federalist insiders, however, knew that it built gradually, somewhat akin to a smoldering volcano that finally erupts. It represented one more convulsion and further calumny in a campaign that already had too many of the former and too much of the latter. After months of more-discreet scheming, in October, Hamilton broke openly with Adams and, in doing so, exposed the true depth of the division between High Federalists and moderates within the party.

  High Federalists never forgave Adams for reaching out to France in peace negotiations. “The rage of the Hamilton faction upon that occasion appeared to me then, and has appeared to me ever since, an absolute delirium,” Adams later wrote. He saw himself as simply seeking peace for America through a policy of balanced neutrality with the warring parties in Europe. Unlike some Republicans, Adams did not favor France in the European wars, but, unlike the High Federalists, he deeply distrusted Britain. In his own eyes, he pursued a nationalistic policy that served only American interests. High Federalists, in contrast, viewed Adams’s overture to France as weakness, and his subsequent decisions to disband the Additional Army, pardon Fries, and sack Pickering and McHenry only increased their fury.

  Hamilton had quietly courted Federalist electoral votes for Pinckney throughout the summer. Despairing for the country’s future under either Adams or Jefferson, Hamilton had reportedly commented in June that, “for his part, he did not expect his head to remain four years longer on his shoulders unless it was at the head of a victorious army.” Perhaps that explained his interest in the Additional Army. During that same month, Hamilton began soliciting material from his confidants within the administration to use in a public exposé of the President’s character and policies. The final impetus may have come when he read Secretary of War James McHenry’s account of being fired by Adams, which related a diatribe in which the President called Hamilton an immoral intriguer and foreign bastard. Proud and impulsive, Hamilton decided to publish some sort of “statement” that would explain his opposition to Adams.

  Back on July 1, Hamilton had asked Treasury Secretary Oliver Wolcott for help in composing the statement on Adams. “It is essential to inform the most discreet of this description of the facts which denote unfitness in Mr. Adams,” Hamilton wrote. “To be able to give it, I must derive aid from you…. But you must be exact and much in detail.” After initially agreeing to supply inside information on Adams, Wolcott cooled toward Hamilton’s idea and delayed sending the material.

  Hamilton repeated his request to Wolcott in August and spelled out his plan of distributing a letter denouncing Adams and defending himself. “I have serious thoughts of giving to the public my opinion respecting Mr. Adams, with my reasons in a letter to a friend with my signature,” he wrote. Printed copies of this letter would circulate among Federalists. To make the letter not appear overtly political, Hamilton proposed couching it as a defense of his personal honor. “I could predicate it on the fact that I am abused by the friends of Mr. Adams who ascribe my opposition to pique and disappointment [at losing my army command], and would give it the shape of a defense of myself,” Hamilton explained.

  Even as he prepared this missive, Hamilton sent two terse notes to the President—one in August, another in October—accusing Adams of “base, wicked, and cruel calumny” and demanding personal satisfaction, as if by a duel. Shocking as it seemed for a party leader to confront a sitting President in this way, Hamilton had a dueler’s temperament. Adams prudently ignored these demands, yet doing so may have provided just the pretext that Hamilton was seeking to publish his denunciation.

  By September, Hamilton began sharing his idea of a public exposé of the President’s character with a wider group of High Federalists and showing drafts of his proposed letter to some of them. They uniformly cautioned him that readers would dismiss the letter as a personal vendetta precipitated by Adams’s decision to disband Hamilton’s Additional Army. Unless published anonymously, George Cabot warned Hamilton, the letter “will be converted to a new proof that you are a dangerous man.” Fisher Ames advised, “You ought not with your name, or if practicable in any way that will be traced to you, to execute your purpose of exposing the reasons for a change of the executive.” In September, even Wolcott told Hamilton, “Whatever you may say or write will, by a class of people, be attributed to personal resentment.” There was no need to detail Adams’s erratic character in a public letter, Wolcott added, because “the people believe that their president is crazy. This is the honest truth and what more can be said on the subject?” McHenry, whom Adams had fired in May, was somewhat more supportive. Though he cautioned that the letter would “come too late” to impact the election, he nonetheless supplied a good deal of damning inside information about Adams to Hamilton for the project.

  Against the advice of his friends, Hamilton persisted as if possessed by private demons. Over the years, the brilliant former cabinet member had grown increasingly unable to judge or control his impulsive behavior. “You see I am in a very belligerent humor,” Hamilton wrote to Wolcott regarding this matter. “It is plain that unless we give our reasons [for opposing the President] in some form or other—Mr. Adams’s personal friends seconded by the Jacobins will completely run us down in the public opinion.” They will make us look “factious,” he later added. “If this can not be counteracted, our characters are the sacrifice. To do it, facts must be stated from some authentic stamp…. Anonymous publications can now affect nothing.” Adams’s efforts to rehabilitate himself as a moderate were working, Hamilton as much as admitted, and threatened to brand High Federalists as extremists.

  High Federalists must boldly make their case against the President, Hamilton reasoned, or they would lose and their cause would fail. By such arguments, he ultimately secured Wolcott’s assistance in crafting the letter. “Decorum may not permit going into the newspapers,” Hamilton conceded to Wolcott, “but the letter may be addressed to so many respectable men of influence as may give its contents general circulation.” If sincere, this concession simply revealed Hamilton’s political naïveté. To think that his signed attack on the
President could reach “general circulation” without creating a sensation in the press reflected either stunning innocence or studied ignorance.

  Like his two abusive notes to the President, this was an act of madness. Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow concluded, “In writing an intemperate indictment of John Adams, Hamilton committed a form of political suicide that blighted the rest of his career.” Much as when he published a pamphlet admitting to an extramarital affair with Maria Reynolds, Hamilton once more became his own worst enemy.

  Published on October 22, Hamilton’s “letter” ran fifty-four printed pages in pamphlet form and read like one long rant. “Not denying to Mr. Adams patriotism and integrity,” Hamilton began, “I should be deficient in candor were I to conceal the conviction that…there are great and intrinsic defects in his character which unfit him for the office of Chief Magistrate.” He then scrutinized Adams’s record of public service from the Revolutionary War to 1800 in the harshest light, purporting to find a pattern of bad judgment and an inability to persevere “in a systematic plan of conduct.” For example, he asserted that Adams’s wartime proposal to enlist troops annually during the Revolution (rather than for the duration of the conflict) would have “proved the ruin of our cause” and that John Jay (rather than Adams) deserved credit for negotiating a favorable peace with Britain. At the time, even Republicans viewed Adams as a hero of the Revolution and honored his service to the country. Criticizing that service, as Hamilton did, inevitably struck readers as petty.

  In his letter, Hamilton passed quickly over the eight-year tenure of Adams as Vice President except to disparage his “extreme egotism” and “vanity without boundaries” in office. “His public conduct in that station was satisfactory to the friends of the government, though they were now and then alarmed by appearances of some eccentric tendencies,” Hamilton observed. Claiming to have perceived these tendencies early on, Hamilton acknowledged having worked behind the scenes for the election of Thomas Pinckney over Adams in 1796, but disingenuously denied any personal reasons for doing so. “No,” Hamilton protested, “the considerations which had reconciled me to the success of Mr. Pinckney were of a nature exclusively public. They resulted from the disgusting egotism, the distempered jealousy, and the ungovernable indiscretion of Mr. Adams’s temper, joined to some doubts of the correctness of his maxims of administration.” Hamilton’s twin motives of defending himself and denouncing Adams, apparent in this passage, made his letter sound at once defensive and spiteful. His motives worked at cross purposes.

  In Hamilton’s analysis, Adams’s eccentric tendencies grew in magnitude to become fatal defects during his term as President. Characterizing this tenure as “a heterogeneous compound of right and wrong, of wisdom and error,” Hamilton launched into a one-sided harangue against all that he viewed as wrong with Adams’s presidency. In Hamilton’s eyes, of course, Adams’s greatest failing as President came in his decision to resume peace negotiations with France “after the mortifying humiliations we had endured” from that country. Adams made this allegedly impulsive decision over the objections of his cabinet and without consulting Federalists in Congress. “Very different from the practice of Adams was that of the modest and sage Washington. He consulted much, pondered much, resolved slowly, resolved surely,” Hamilton commented.

  Behind the various poor decisions made by Adams lay a petulant disposition that fouled his judgment and spoiled his leadership, Hamilton argued. “It is a fact that he is often liable to paroxysms of anger, which deprive him of self command and produce very outrageous behavior to those who approach him,” Hamilton wrote. “Most, if not all, his ministers and several distinguished members of the two houses of Congress have been humiliated by the effects of these gusts of passion.” One such irrational outburst led to McHenry’s dismissal, he asserted, and others unjustly sullied Hamilton himself. “He has denominated me a man destitute of every moral principle,” Hamilton complained, “he has stigmatized me as the leader of a British faction.” Hamilton self-righteously denied these charges, commenting about the pro-British one, “Of the purity of my public conduct in this, as in other particulars, I may defy the severest investigation.”

  After fifty-three pages vilifying the President and scarcely a word about Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Hamilton concluded his letter with the incongruous recommendation that Federalist electors should vote for Adams and Pinckney. “To refrain from a decided opposition to Mr. Adams’s reelection has been reluctantly sanctioned by my judgment, which has been not a little perplexed between the unqualified conviction of his unfitness for the station contemplated and a sense of the great importance of cultivating harmony among the supporters of the government,” he wrote. After reviewing a draft of the letter in early October, Wolcott urged Hamilton at least to change the end. Why attack Adams and then endorse him? It made little sense then and has puzzled historians ever since. “The final section of the pamphlet seemed particularly absurd,” Chernow noted. “For a man of Hamilton’s incomparable talent, the pamphlet was a crazily botched job, an extended tantrum in print.”

  Hamilton may have wanted the letter to circulate only among discreet Federalists, but Republicans obtained copies of it almost immediately and quickly began reprinting the most scandalous parts in their newspapers. Although both Aaron Burr and Republican organizer John Beckley received credit for filching the document and passing it on to the Aurora, these accounts contain discrepancies. Whoever the source was, on October 21—one day before Hamilton’s publisher would apply for a copyright on the letter and three days before he released it—the Aurora reported, “Alexander Hamilton has been some time occupied in writing another vindication of himself contra John Adams. It is already printed in New York, 200 copies only…. We expect to be able soon to exhibit the secret curiosity.” Excerpts began appearing the following day. Describing it as “better that [the letter] should appear in toto than by piece meal,” Hamilton’s publisher promptly began selling it to the general public for twenty-five cents a copy. The first printing sold out quickly and more followed. In all, five editions of Hamilton’s letter appeared by mid-November, including an unauthorized one published by the Aurora. Hamilton actually seemed to welcome all the attention given his letter and even discussed writing a revised, expanded version of it. His friends discouraged the effort, however. Most of them were shocked by the letter and unsure how to deal with it.

  “The subject which now occupies the public mind and excites much attention is the letter from General Hamilton,” New York High Federalist Robert Troup wrote in early November to the American ambassador in London, Rufus King. “The letter has been read by all parties with prodigious avidity, and the spread of it has been extensive.” Others made similar comments about the widespread interest in Hamilton’s letter. “Disapprobation of it [is] expressed everywhere,” Troup added, “and not a man in our whole circle of friends but condemns it.” Anticipating the letter’s publication, Troup earlier wrote to King, “I cannot describe to you how broken and scattered your Federal friends are!…Shadows, clouds, and darkness rest on our future prospects.” Two weeks after the letter’s publication, Hamilton boasted to McHenry about the response to it, “The press teems with answers.” McHenry replied from Maryland, “Those amongst the Federalists in this state…consider the publication of your letter rather calculated to distract than to do good.”

  As news of Hamilton’s letter and its contents spread across the country, it became a factor in the presidential campaign. The public now knew that the once unified Federalists were rent into factions with its best-known leaders locked in mortal combat. People seemed less interested in debating the merits of the letter’s charges than in speculating about who came off worse in the episode, Hamilton or Adams. While the contents of the letter gave new currency to old doubts about Adams’s leadership, its style, substance, and timing raised even graver misgivings about Hamilton’s judgment. There were no winners among Federalists. Republicans were ecstatic.

 
; Assuming a stance that served to refute depictions of his ungovernable temper, the President took the high road by not responding publicly to Hamilton. Of course, Adams vented in private and even composed a detailed, point-by-point refutation of Hamilton’s letter, but he did not release any of it for nearly a decade, when he published a defense of his presidency. For the time being, he appeared unruffled. “I regret [the letter] more on account of its author than on my own because I am confident it will do him more harm than me,” Adams wrote to one correspondent late in 1800. “The public indignation he has excited is punishment enough.” Adams also sent a note to New York Governor John Jay, who always backed the administration, volunteering that, “Among the very few truths in [Hamilton’s] pamphlet, there is one that I shall ever acknowledge with pleasure, viz. that the principal merit of the negotiations for peace was Mr. Jay’s.” In a gracious comment that betrayed his own embattled state, Adams added, “I often say that when my confidence in Mr. Jay shall cease, I must give up the cause of confidence and renounce it with all men.”

  Adams deeply resented the betrayal of private confidences by his advisers reflected in Hamilton’s letter. Soon after the letter appeared, but without giving it as a reason, Wolcott submitted his resignation to the President, who accepted it. Adams was finally free of the last Hamiltonian in his cabinet.

  Abigail Adams took a similar tack as her husband. “I shall not say anything to you upon political subjects,” she wrote to her sister in early November, “no not upon the little General’s letter, but reserve it for a future letter when…you have more health to laugh at the folly and pity the weakness, vanity, and ambitious view of [this] sparrow.” In a subsequent letter, she simply stated that a proper answer to Hamilton’s “gross lies” should come from someone who better knew the circumstances.