First Family (27 page)

This was also the moment when the cracks that had already begun to appear in the friendship between Jefferson and the Adams family became a chasm. It was an open secret that Jefferson, while serving as secretary of state in the Washington administration, was orchestrating the Republican opposition to the very government he officially served. John apprised Abigail that she would not recognize the man they had welcomed into their family in Paris: “I am really astonished at the blind spirit of Party which has seized on the whole soul of this Jefferson,” he reported. “There is not a Jacobin in France more devoted to Faction.”
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Though he claimed to be acting on principle—opposing the excessive exercise of federal authority and embracing the glorious cause of the French Revolution—in John’s opinion Jefferson’s true motives were blatantly self-serving. Like so many of the Virginia planters, he was heavily in debt to British creditors, and therefore predisposed toward an anti-British foreign policy that would delay repayment into the indefinite future: “I wish someone would pay his Debt of seven thousand pounds to Britain,” John confided to Abigail, “and then I believe his Passions would subside, his Reason return, and the whole Man and his whole State [Virginia] become good Friends of the Union and its Govt.”
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As one of the most seasoned students of the Jefferson psyche, John reached the conclusion that his former friend was extremely adept at playing hide-and-seek within himself: “Ambition is the subtlest Beast of the Intellectual and Moral Field. It is wonderfully adroit in concealing itself from its owner.” In Jefferson’s case, John believed that he could not candidly confront his own ambition to succeed Washington as the next president.

When Jefferson announced that he was stepping down as secretary
of state, leaving public life for the bucolic serenity of Monticello, John predicted that his retirement would prove temporary: “Jefferson thinks he shall by this step get a Reputation as a humble, modest, meek Man, wholly without ambition or vanity. He may even have deceived himself into this Belief. But if a Prospect opens, the World will see and he will feel, that he is as ambitious as Oliver Cromwell.” A year later, Jefferson claimed to be completely consumed by his new crop rotation scheme at Monticello and wholly oblivious to the mounting efforts of Republican operatives in several states to launch his candidacy for the presidency.
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It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that John’s insights into the ambitions simmering away in Jefferson’s soul proved so prescient because they mirrored the presidential ambitions he himself was harboring. If so—and it would seem highly unlikely that the thought never crossed his mind—he suppressed any mention of it in his correspondence. Quite the contrary: his letters to Abigail conveyed the impression of an aging patriarch, eager to complete this last assignment of his public life and then join Abigail in retirement at Quincy. Moreover, the scene he was then witnessing from his perch in the Senate was so full of partisan bickering and nasty political infighting that no sane observer, he suggested, would have been able to think of the presidency as anything but a thankless task fit only for masochists and martyrs.

The chief occasion for this circuslike spectacle was the debate over the Jay Treaty, the controversial centerpiece of Washington’s second term, much as Hamilton’s financial program had been in the first. In both instances, the debate was so fierce because of the embedded resistance to any explicit projection of executive power, which immediately conjured up the dreaded “consolidation” by some faraway federal government and the equally threatening emergence of a “monarchical presence” within the republican temple. John regarded these fears as groundless, and the Republican effort to exacerbate and exploit them as a diabolical plot to topple the Federalist government by partisans of the Virginia-writ-large persuasion.

Here is the essential background. By 1794 the prospects of war with Great Britain were approaching a crisis. It was one thing to proclaim
American neutrality in the war between France and Great Britain, quite another to maintain a neutral posture when British troops remained stationed on the northwestern frontier, inciting and supplying Indian raids on American settlers in the Ohio Valley, and British frigates were scooping up American merchant ships in the Caribbean with impunity in order to block all grain shipments to France.

Washington dispatched Chief Justice John Jay to London, where he was charged to negotiate a realistic bargain that would remove the British troops and redefine commercial relations with Great Britain in terms that avoided war. Adams had no say in this decision, though he concurred completely that avoiding war was America’s highest diplomatic priority. Jay returned with a treaty that, on the positive side, required the removal of British troops on the frontier and also committed the British to arbitrate American claims of compensation for cargoes confiscated by the British navy. On the negative side, however, the treaty recognized British naval supremacy in deferential terms that gave American neutrality a decidedly British tilt, a tacit admission that trade with Great Britain was the lifeblood of the American economy. And it required American debtors, chiefly Virginian planters, to pay off their prewar debts to British creditors.
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In retrospect, the Jay Treaty was a shrewd bargain, for it not only avoided a potentially ruinous war but also aligned the United States with the dominant global power over the next century. At the time, however, it was overwhelmingly unpopular. Jay later claimed that he could have walked the entire eastern seaboard at night with his way lit by fires from his burning effigies. Adams thought that Jay had performed the ultimate act of political virtue, the trademark Adams act, by defying popular opinion to further the long-term public interest: “He will live to see the Federal City,” Adams predicted, “and inhabit the proudest House,” meaning that Jay’s contributions would eventually lead to his election as president. Meanwhile, popular opinion raged against the treaty: “No event since the Commencement of the Government,” Abigail observed, “has excited so much undue heat, so much bitter acrimony, so much base invective.”
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In June 1795, with John watching in stony silence, the Senate
approved the treaty on a straight party-line vote (20–10), thereby behaving in accord with John’s description of the Senate as the custodian of America’s enduring interests, regardless of popular disapproval. “It is well the Senate only have the discussion of it [the Jay Treaty],” Abigail noted, “for if it was to go to the House for Ratification, and was a Treaty from the Kingdom of Heaven, proclaiming Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men, there would not be wanting characters to defame and abuse it.”
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Although Senate approval should have ended the matter, the Republican opposition under Madison’s adroit leadership devised a strategy to sabotage the treaty by denying the funds for its implementation in the House, which had authority over all money bills. John believed he was watching the triumph of party politics in its most partisan form. “There is an Inveteracy and Obstinacy on this occasion as I scarcely ever saw,” he lamented to Abigail. The Republican opposition was highly orchestrated, “all moving as one Man, not a dissenting Voice among them, appearing as if drawn by one Cord.” And if he could have read the correspondence between Madison and Jefferson, John would have seen that the cord stretched back to Monticello, where Jefferson had roused himself from retirement to assume command of Republican strategy to kill the treaty.

The Republicans had a clear majority in the House, but as petitions poured in from merchants, Quakers, and frontier settlers, all of whom had come to the realization that failure to pass the treaty meant war with Great Britain, the majority began to melt away. “Mr. Madison looks worried to death,” John reported to Abigail. “Pale, withered, haggard … They have brought themselves into great embarrassment.” Funding for the Jay Treaty passed by a slim majority (51–48) on April 30, 1796.
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What John had witnessed in the debate over the Jay Treaty was the emergence of a highly partisan brand of party politics for which he was both intellectually and temperamentally unprepared. And because this episode would prove to be a preview of coming attractions, indeed the first appearance of what would become a two-party system that made the very idea of the disinterested statesman into an anachronism, he was also witnessing the arrival of a political culture
almost designed to torment him until his dying days. His political irrelevance as vice president had allowed him to avoid the full force of the partisan game: “I have escaped in a whole skin,” he wrote to John Quincy, “as Mr. Jay and the President have attracted almost the whole Attention, Genius, Inventions and Industry of the Libellers.” But this was all about to change.
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In January 1796 Washington leaked the news that he intended to step down after his second term as president. Although he had been hinting at his intentions for nearly four years, Washington’s stature as the only self-evident truth in American politics made it difficult to imagine an American government without him as the centerpiece. There had been, therefore, an unspoken assumption that he would continue to serve until his soul was carried to its heavenly reward, dying in office like an American king. Now the indispensable man let it be known that he was leaving.

John’s initial response to this news was extremely revealing: “You know the Consequences of this, to me and to yourself,” he wrote to Abigail. “Either we must enter upon Arduors more trying than any yet experienced, or retire to Quincy, farmers for Life.” He obviously recognized that he was a viable candidate to succeed Washington, but he had not allowed himself to think about that prospect until the moment arrived. And now that it had, Abigail needed to be an equal partner in the decision. His initial instinct, or at least his first conscious reaction, was to lean toward retirement: “But I think upon the whole the Probability is strong that I shall beat the hasty Retreat,” he wrote her, “and spend the rest of my days in a very humble Style with you.” On the other hand, he wanted Abigail to know that the decision was not entirely theirs to make: “I am Heir Apparent, you know, and a Succession is soon to take place,” he half joked. “I have a pious and philosophical Resignation to the Voice of the People in the Case, which is the Voice of God.” In other words, he was waiting to gauge the prospects of his candidacy before making a final decision.
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Abigail’s reaction was less ambivalent: “My Ambition leads me not to be first in Rome,” she responded. “If personal considerations alone were to weigh, I would immediately say retire.” Then she added a crucial caveat: “But in a Matter of such momentous Concern I dare not influence you. I must pray that you have Superior Direction.” It was a repeat of the pattern established when John was in Europe and she urged him to come home. Her own preferences were clear, but she would support whatever decision he made. She did feel free to remind him that the partisan politics surrounding the Jay Treaty debates boded badly for the next president, who would also face the nearly impossible task of succeeding the greatest hero of the age: “I am sure it will be a most unpleasant Seat,” she warned, “full of Thorns, Briers, thistles, murmuring, fault finding, calumny … and what not.”
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John acknowledged that the political atmosphere had become quite toxic, and he could testify that it had taken its toll on Washington, who had aged a decade over the past two years. He also harbored doubts about his own health, at one point concluding that it made more sense to retire “before my Constitution failed, before my Memory failed, before my Judgment failed.” And, yes, he had to admit that he was “weary of the Game.” But then he added: “Yet I don’t know how I could live out of it.”
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Abigail surely realized that, when all the internal twitchings and vacillations were done, when all the arguments for and against were exhausted, her husband would find the summons to serve irresistible. But as he rocked back and forth among all his demons and doubts, she felt an obligation to let him know what he would be up against: “You know what is before you. The Whips and Scorpions, the Thorns without Roses, the dangers, anxieties and weight of Empire.” Moreover, she had some doubts about herself: “I am anxious for the proper discharge of that share which will devolve upon me.” Over the past four years she had grown accustomed to the serenities of her Quincy home, where she could speak her mind: “I should say that I have been so used to a freedom of sentiment,” she observed, “that I know not how to place so many guards about me.” John concurred that the social obligations of the office would be a burden for them both: “I
hate Levees and Drawing Rooms. I hate to speak to 1000 People to whom I have nothing to say.” But then came the caveat: “Yet all this I can do.”
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Although the ultimate decision had probably been made by March, John’s wrestling match with his own ambitions continued throughout the spring. Once again, as in the two previous presidential elections, the absence of a formal nomination process meant that he did not need to declare his candidacy. But in newspaper editorials, even toasts at dinner parties, his name topped most lists throughout New England as the obvious choice. He had, after all, received more votes in the two previous elections than anyone except Washington. And if the chief criterion was revolutionary credentials, one would be hard-pressed to find anybody else who could match his. Abigail assured him on this point: “There remains not a Man in America whose Publick Service [more] entitled him to the office.”
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Prospective voters south of the Potomac did not quite see it that way, insisting that there was a certain Virginian currently in retirement at Monticello who possessed impeccable revolutionary credentials of his own, and whose views on the proper limitations that should be placed on federal power were more akin to their own. By the summer of 1796 it was clear to all concerned, except apparently to Jefferson himself, that the contest for the presidency would match the two former friends. Jefferson later claimed that he was wholly oblivious that he was a candidate, and that he was too busy harvesting his vetch crop to notice that the Republican opposition had rallied around his candidacy. Madison endorsed this rather incredible version of Jefferson’s indifference, claiming that he made a point of not visiting his friend at Monticello that summer for fear that any mention of the presidential election might cause Jefferson to withdraw his name.