A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (33 page)

The Father of Our Country would not live to see the new century, but his legacy to American posterity was never exceeded, and rarely matched. Historian John Carroll listed no fewer than ten achievements of Washington’s two administrations, including developing a policy for the disposition of public lands, establishing credit at home and abroad, removing the British troops from the Northwest, and several others.
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Another historian concluded, “By agreeing to serve not one, but two terms of office, Washington gave the new nation what above all else it needed: time.”
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It might also be said that Washington loaned the young republic some of his own character, modeling virtuous behavior of a president for all who followed.

Quasi War

Despite the succession of a member of Washington’s own party and administration, the election of 1796 elevated to power a man much different in temperament and personality than the great general he replaced. John Adams was both ably suited for, and considerably handicapped in, the fulfillment of his presidential duties. The sixty-two-year-old president-elect still possessed a keen intellect, pious devotion, and selfless patriotism, but age had made him more irascible than ever. His enemies pounced on his weaknesses. The
Aurora
referred to him as “old, Guerelous [sic], bald, blind, and crippled,” to which Abigail quipped that only she was capable of making such an assessment about her husband!
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Adams, however, excelled in foreign policy matters, which was fortunate at a time when the nation had been thrust into the imbroglio of Anglo-French rivalry. With no help from Republican opponents or Federalist extremists within his own party, Adams rose above factionalism and averted war. In the process he paid a huge political price for his professionalism.

For at least a decade the British had bullied Americans on the high seas and at the treaty table; in 1797 the French decided it was their turn. Angered by Federalist Anglophilia and the subservience evidenced in Jay’s Treaty, France, too, began to seize and confiscate American shipping to the tune of three hundred vessels. French aggression shocked and silenced Republicans. Among the Federalists, the response was surprisingly divided. Predictably, Hamiltonians and other arch-Federalists, who had bent over backward to avoid war with Britain, now pounded the drums of war against France. A popular toast of the day to Adams was, “May he, like Samson, slay thousands of Frenchmen with the jawbone of a Jefferson.”
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Adams himself and the moderates, however, followed the president’s lead and tried to negotiate a peace. They were stymied initially by unscrupulous Frenchmen.

To negotiate with the French foreign minister Charles Talleyrand—a master of personal survival skills who had avoided the guillotine under the Jacobins, later survived the irrationalities of
l’empereur
Napoléon, and later still had returned to represent the restored Bourbon monarchy—Adams sent Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (Thomas’s brother), John Marshall, and Elbridge Gerry to Paris. Upon arrival, however, the Americans were not officially allowed to present their credentials to the foreign minister—an immense snub. At an unofficial meeting with three French agents—referred to anonymously by the American press as Agents X, Y, and Z—the Americans learned that the French agents expected a bribe before they would be granted an audience with French officials. Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry refused such a profane act, and immediately returned home. Newspapers later reported that Pinckney had proclaimed to Agents X, Y, and Z that Americans would gladly spend “millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.” It’s more probable he uttered the less quotable, “It is no, not a sixpence,” but regardless, the French got the message. The negotiations abruptly ended, and the arch-Federalists had their issue.
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Before long, the infamous X, Y, Z Affair produced a war fever and temporarily solidified the Federalists’ power base. After recovering somewhat from their initial shock, Republicans asked why Americans should declare war on France for aggression identical to that which Great Britain had perpetrated with impunity for nearly a decade. Adams stood between the two groups of extremists, urging more negotiations while simultaneously mustering thousands of soldiers and sailors in case shooting started. He had benefited from the authorization by Congress, two years earlier, of six frigates, three of which were rated at forty-four guns, although only the
United States
and the
Constellation
actually carried that number.
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These vessels, which Adams referred to as “floating batteries and wooden walls,” entered service just as tensions on the oceans peaked. In February 1799, open fighting between American and French ships erupted on the high seas, precipitating an undeclared war, dubbed by historians thereafter as the Quasi War.

Adams already had his hands full with peacemaking initiatives without the interference of George Logan, a Pennsylvania Quaker who traveled to Paris on his own funds to secure the release of some American seamen. Logan may have been well intentioned, but by inserting himself into international negotiations, he endangered all Americans, not the least of which were some of those he sought to help.
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His actions spawned the Logan Act of 1799, which remains in effect to the present, forbidding private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments in the name of the United States.

Meanwhile, buoyed by a 1798 electoral sweep, the so-called arch-Federalists in Congress continued to call for war against France. Pointing to alleged treason at home, they passed a set of extreme laws—the Alien and Sedition Acts—that would prove their political undoing. A Naturalization Act, aimed at French and Irish immigrants, increased from four to fourteen the number of years required for American citizenship. The fact that these immigrants were nearly all Catholics and Republicans no doubt weighed heavily in deciding their fate. A new Alien Act gave the president the power to deport some of these “dangerous Aliens,” while the Sedition Act allowed the Federalists to escalate their offensive against American Francophiles by abridging First Amendment speech rights. The Sedition Acts forbade conduct or language leading to rebellion, and although the wording remained rather vague, Federalist judges evidently understood it. Under the act, they arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed or fined twenty-five people, mostly Republican newspaper editors, including Matthew Lyon, a jailed Republican congressman who won his reelection while still behind bars.

Application of modern-day values, not to mention civil liberties laws, would make the Alien and Sedition Acts seem outrageous infringements on personal liberties. In context, the sedition clauses originated in the libel and slander laws of the day. Personal honor was a value most Americans held quite dear, and malicious slurs often resulted in duels. The president of the United States, subjected to vile criticism, had no means of redress to defamatory comments. It would be almost a half century before courts routinely held that a much higher bar governed the protection of public figures’ reputations or character from attacks that, to an ordinary citizen, might be considered libelous or slanderous.

Newspapers rushed to Adams’s defense, with the
Guardian
of New Brunswick declaring “Sedition by all the laws of God and man, is, and ever has been criminal.” Common law tradition in England long had a history of restricting criticism of the government, but with the French Revolution threatening to spread the Reign of Terror across all of Europe, public criticism took on the aura of fomenting rebellion—or, at least, that was what most of the Federalists thought, provoking their ham-handed response. Adams, above all, should have known better.

Suffering from one of his few moral lapses, Adams later denied responsibility for these arguably unconstitutional laws, yet in 1798 he neither vetoed nor protested them. Republicans countered with threats to disobey federal laws, known as the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Authored in 1798 and 1799 by Madison and Jefferson, respectively, the resolutions revived the Anti-Federalist spirit with a call for state sovereignty, and comprised a philosophical bridge between the Articles of Confederation (and Tenth Amendment) and John C. Calhoun’s 1832 Doctrine of Nullification. Madison and Jefferson argued from a “compact” theory of government. States, they claimed, remained sovereign to the national government by virtue of the fact that it was the states, not the people, who formed the Union. Under this interpretation the states had the duty to “judge the constitutionality of federal acts and protect their citizens from unconstitutional and coercive federal laws.”
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Such a Lockean argument once thrilled true Revolutionaries, but now the Declaration (through inference) and the Constitution (through express statement) repudiated these doctrines. If one follows the Jeffersonians’ logic of deriving all government from “first things,” however, one must go not to the Constitution, per se, but to its roots, the Declaration, wherein it was the people of the colonies who declared independence; and the preamble to the Constitution—which, admittedly is not law itself but the intention for establishing the law—still begins, “We the People of the United States of America…” In either case, the states never were the activating or motivating body, rather simply the administering body. No other state supported Madison or Jefferson’s resolutions, which, if they had stood, would have led to an endless string of secessions—first, states from the Union, then, counties from states, then townsips from cities.

Adams’s Mettle and the Election of 1800

In one of his greatest triumphs, John Adams finally rose above this partisan rancor. Over the violent objections of Hamilton and his supporters, he dispatched William Vans Murray to negotiate with Talleyrand. The ensuing French capitulation brought an agreement to leave American shipping alone. With long-term consequences unsure, the short-term results left the Quasi War in abeyance and peace with France ensued. Adams showed his mettle and resolved the crisis. As his reward, one month later, he was voted out of office.

Much of the anger stemmed from higher tax burdens, some of which the Federalists had enacted for the large frigates. A new tax, though, the Direct Tax of 1798, penalized property ownership, triggering yet another tax revolt, Fries’s Rebellion, wherein soldiers sent into Philadelphia to enforce the tax encountered not bullets but irate housewives who doused the troops with pails of hot water. Fries was arrested, convicted of treason, and sentenced to be executed, but he found the Federalists to be far more merciful than their portrayal in the Jeffersonian papers. Adams pardoned Fries, and although the tax protest shriveled, so did Federalist support in Pennsylvania.
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It bears noting, however, that in the twenty-nine years since the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, Americans had already risen in revolt
three
times, and on each occasion over taxation.

By 1800, the president had spent much of his time in the new “city” of Washington. Hardly a city at all, the District of Columbia was but a clump of dirty buildings, arranged around “unpaved, muddy cesspools in winter, waiting for summer to transform them into mosquito-infested swamps.”
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Adams disliked Washington—he had not liked Philadelphia much better—and managed to get back to Quincy, Massachusetts, to his beloved Abigail whenever possible. Never possessed of a sunny disposition, Adams drifted into deep pessimism about the new nation. Although he ran against Jefferson again in 1800, this time the Virginian (a “shadow man,” Adams called him, for his ability to strike without leaving his fingerprints on any weapon) bested him. Anger and bitterness characterized the two men’s relationship by that point. Of Jefferson, Adams wrote, “He has talents I know, and integrity, I believe; but his mind is now poisoned with passion, prejudice, and faction.”
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Political warfare had soured Adams even more since he had become president. Hamilton, whom Adams called the “bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,” vexed him from behind and Jefferson, from in front. Besieged from both ends of the political spectrum—the Jeffersonian Republicans blamed him for the Alien and Sedition Acts, while Hamilton’s arch-Federalists withdrew their support because of his peace with France—Adams was left with few friends. When the electoral college met, Jefferson and his vice presidential candidate Aaron Burr tied with 73 electoral votes each; Adams trailed in third place with 65.

Then, as in 1796, wily politicians tried to alter the choice of the people and the rule of law. Jefferson and Burr had tied in the electoral college because the Constitution did not anticipate parties or tickets and gave each elector two votes, one each for president and vice president. A tie threw the election to the lame-duck Federalist House of Representatives, which now had the Constitutional prerogative to choose between the two Republicans. To make matters worse, the Federalists expected from Burr, but never received, a polite statement declining the presidency if it were to be offered to him. Burr had other ideas, hoping some deadlock would result in his election, in spite of failing to win the electoral college and all of his prior agreements with the Republican leadership.

House Federalists, with Hamilton as their de facto leader, licked their chops at the prospect of denying Jefferson the presidency. Yet the unscrupulous and unpredictable Burr was just not tolerable. Hamilton was forced to see the truth: his archenemy Jefferson was the lesser of two evils. By siding with the Virginian, Hamilton furthered American democracy while simultaneously (and literally) signing his own death warrant: Colonel Burr would soon take vengeance against Hamilton over letters the secretary had written supposedly impugning Burr’s honor.

Meanwhile, the lame-duck president frantically spent his last hours ensuring that the Jeffersonians did not destroy what he and Washington had spent twelve years constructing. The Republicans had decisively won both the legislative and executive branches of government in November, leaving Adams only one hope for slowing down their agenda: judicial appointments. His unreasonable fear and hatred of the Jeffersonians led him to take a step that, although constitutional, nevertheless directly defied the will of the voters. In February 1801, Adams sent a new Judiciary Act to the lame-duck Congress, and it passed, creating approximately five dozen new federal judgeships at all levels, from federal circuit and district courts to justices of the peace. Adams then proceeded to commission ardent Federalists to each of these lifetime posts—a process so time consuming that the president was busy signing commissions into the midnight hours of his last day in office. These “midnight judges,” as the Republicans soon dubbed them, were not Adams’s only judiciary legacy to Jefferson. In the final weeks of his tenure, Adams also nominated, and the lame-duck Senate approved, John Marshall as chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.
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