First Family (28 page)

John could not claim that he was unaware of his own candidacy, in part because he lacked Jefferson’s powers of self-deception, in part because he was receiving letters from Abigail and John Quincy about his prospects. Abigail made a survey of newspaper editorials on the eve of the election and reported that his endorsement of American neutrality and support for the Jay Treaty would cost him most of the electoral votes in the South. She predicted a clear sectional split in the
final tally and a very close contest. If he did not win but came in second, she requested and received a solemn promise that he would refuse the vice presidency and join her in retirement in Quincy.
⁷³

For his part, John took refuge behind the classic code of silence. Anyone who uttered any statements on his own behalf, or even commented on the ongoing campaign being conducted by surrogates, thereby exposed his own vanity and was deemed unqualified to serve. On good days he boasted to Abigail that he would be fine regardless of the outcome: “I feel myself in a very happy temper of mind. Perfectly willing to be released from the Port of Danger, but determined, if call’d to it, to brave it.” On bad days he confided his emotional confusion: “I laugh at myself twenty times a Day, for my feelings and meditations … It really seems to be as if I wished to be left out. Let me see. Do I know my own heart? I am not sure.” Could he, with proper decorum, announce Jefferson’s victory in the Senate, where the electoral votes were counted? Or would he be too mortified to do his duty? He did not know.
⁷⁴

After the election, but before the results were known, Abigail reported to John that she had had an interesting dream. She was riding in a coach when a barrage of twenty-four cannonballs came flying at her. She was terrified and fully expected to be blown to bits. But the cannonballs all exploded in midair before they reached her. She interpreted the dream as a kind of supernatural signal not to worry. Either way, they would be fine. And the dream probably meant that, despite all the anguish, John was going to win.
⁷⁵

He did. As Abigail had predicted, the vote was extremely close (71–68). As she also predicted, the split was mostly sectional, with John’s margin of victory dependent on two electoral votes in western Virginia and North Carolina. The results were reasonably clear over a month before the votes were officially counted in the Senate in February 1797. “According to present Appearances,” John apprised Abigail in late December, “Jefferson will be Daddy Vice,” a fate that would require him to adjust his indulgent living habits to the meager salary of the office.
⁷⁶

Abigail wrote back to report that congratulatory compliments were pouring in from all their friends and relatives. The only sour note
concerned the revelation, based on several reliable sources, that Alexander Hamilton, in a brazen act of skullduggery, had attempted to manipulate the electoral votes on behalf of Thomas Pinckney, a South Carolina Federalist, in the apparent hope of sneaking Pinckney in ahead of John. The plot failed, but it probably cut into John’s margin of victory.

This was clinching evidence that Hamilton could not be trusted. “He is a Man ambitious as Julius Caesar,” Abigail warned. “His thirst for Fame is insatiable. I have ever kept my eye on him.” The clear implication was that John had rather nonchalantly taken Hamilton’s support for granted and vastly underestimated his ambition to control the Federalist agenda after Washington’s departure. Hamilton must now be regarded as a rival.
⁷⁷

Although she had made her own preferences for retirement clear, now that the voters had spoken, Abigail was prepared to embrace the verdict and join John again as a partner in this final triumph of his public career. It was so cold in Quincy that it was freezing her ink and chilling the blood in her veins, she observed, but his election had quickened her heartbeat in defiance of the cold. They were in all eyes, including hers, a team, so in some sense she, too, had been called to serve. She promised to be at his side, “in the turbulent scenes in which he is about to engage.”
⁷⁸

CHAPTER SIX

1796–1801

A
LTHOUGH BOTH
John and Abigail were well aware of the supercharged political atmosphere they were entering, the shrewdest assessment of the scatological climate came from no less than Thomas Jefferson: “The President [Washington] is fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag … No man will bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.” Editorials in the
Aurora
, the chief Republican newspaper, seemed designed to illustrate Jefferson’s point, firing several salvos at the departing hero that verged on criminal slander. The Farewell Address was described as “the loathings of a sick mind,” and Washington was urged to ask himself “whether you are an apostate or an imposter, whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.” Given Washington’s singular status, one could only imagine the gauntlet being prepared for his successor. Abigail conjured up the picture of “being fastned up Hand and foot and Tongue to be shot at as our Quincy lads do at the poor Geese and Turkies.”
¹

She soon suggested a political path designed to flank this fate, which John immediately adopted as his own preferred course. It entailed opening up a discreet line of communication with Jefferson; offering him cabinet status and a major say in foreign policy; designating him or Madison as the new American envoy to France, where the most ominous threats were brewing; and in effect creating a bipartisan presidency. Despite the recent breach in their relationship, Abigail observed, “I do not think him [Jefferson] an insincere or corruptible man,” adding that her own “Friendship for him has ever been
unshaken,” and that “all the discords may be atuned to harmony by the Hand of a skillfull Artist.” Besides, a political alliance with Jefferson was vastly preferable to depending on the loyalty of the ultra-Federalists, who were infatuated with Hamilton, whose misguided attempt to manipulate the recent election had exposed his anti-Adams agenda. “Beware of that spare Cassius,” Abigail warned. “I have read his Heart and his wicked Eyes many a time. The very devil is in them.”
²

John leaked word of his bipartisan intentions to Jefferson through Elbridge Gerry, a mutual friend. The initial response from Monticello, a letter to Madison, dutifully confided to mutual friends in Philadelphia, seemed encouraging: “I can particularly have no feelings which would revolt at a secondary position to Mr. Adams,” Jefferson observed, also noting that “I am his junior in life, was his junior in Congress, his junior in the diplomatic line, his junior lately in government.”
³

A second letter was equally gracious, recalling his long friendship with the entire Adams family and saluting John’s generosity “at the prospect of administering the government in concurrence with me.” Jefferson eventually wrote directly to John, agreeing that the partisan political atmosphere had become truly poisonous and hoping to recover the old spirit of ’76, “when we were working together for our independence.” Rumors were rampant on the streets of Philadelphia that the venerable Adams-Jefferson partnership was back. Abigail reported attending a dinner at Harvard, where the students proposed a toast: “Adams and Jefferson, or Checks and balances.”
⁴

The course of the Adams presidency, perhaps even the early path of American history, would have gone in a different direction if John’s bipartisan proposal had worked. But it quickly became the victim of the party spirit it was intended to replace. When John floated the idea past several dedicated Federalists, they expressed disbelief, claiming that it amounted to dragging the Trojan horse into the Federalist fortress. Meanwhile, down at Monticello, Jefferson was having second thoughts, prompted by Madison’s insistence that the Republican cause must take precedence over nostalgic bonds of brotherhood, no matter how heartfelt; a political alliance with Adams was rooted in a
merely sentimental attachment, Madison observed, and not in the abiding interests of the Republican opposition that Jefferson must now prepare himself to lead.
⁵

The prospects for an Adams-Jefferson partnership died in a poignant fact-to-face encounter that both men saw fit to record in their memoirs, a clear sign they recognized its political and personal significance. After dining with Washington on March 6, 1797, they walked together down Market Street to Fifth, two blocks from the very spot where Jefferson had drafted the Declaration of Independence that John had so forcefully defended in the Continental Congress almost twenty-one years earlier. John reiterated his offer to bring Jefferson into cabinet deliberations—he had apprised members of his cabinet that anyone who felt strongly opposed to Jefferson’s presence should feel free to resign—and repeated his willingness to dispatch either Jefferson or Madison to Paris as American envoy. But Jefferson dismissed both proposals as impossible. They parted at Market and Fifth as former friends who were now poised to become bitter political enemies.
⁶

Abigail received a somewhat cryptic letter from John a week later, saying that “Mr. Jefferson has been here … He is as he was.” She immediately recognized the significance of the message: “There is one observation in your Letter which struck me as meaning more than is exprest. Jefferson is as he was! Can he still be a devotee to a cause and a people run mad? Can it be.” John delivered his own answer to the question in a letter to John Quincy: “You can witness for me how loath I have been to give him [Jefferson] up. It is with much reluctance that I am obliged to look upon him as a man whose mind is warped by prejudice … as to be unfit for the office he holds.” He did not know that, at that very moment, Jefferson was engaged in clandestine conversations with the French consul in Philadelphia, urging him to ignore any peace initiative from Adams, who did not speak for the true interests of the American people, despite his recent election. By most measures, such behavior verged on treason.
⁷

Jefferson’s rejection increased John’s awareness of the bitterly partisan political world emerging in the wake of Washington’s departure: “From the Situation, where I am now,” he lamented to Abigail, “I see
a Scene of Ambition beyond all my former suspicions or Imaginations … Jealousies and Rivalries have been my Theme … but they never Stared me in the face in such horrid forms as at present.”
⁸

The inaugural ceremony was awkward for John, in part because Abigail, who was tending to his dying mother at Quincy, was not present to calm his nerves, in part because everyone in the audience was sobbing at the sight of Washington’s final appearance on the public stage. At the end of the ceremony, so he reported to Abigail, Washington whispered to him, “Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be happiest.” In the ensuing weeks, with Washington gone back to Mount Vernon and Jefferson gone over to the opposition, he suddenly felt lonely and isolated, and sent a cri de coeur to Quincy: “I never wanted you more in my life. The times are critical and dangerous and I must have you here to assist me … You must leave our farm to the mercy of the winds … I can do nothing without you.”
⁹

John’s sudden sense of desperation was based not on an overripe imagination, but on an accurate assessment of the foreign and domestic dilemmas facing him at the start of his presidency. The most pressing problem was France, which had reacted to the Jay Treaty by deploying its privateers in the Atlantic and Caribbean to prey on all American vessels carrying contraband cargo bound for British ports. By May 1797 they had seized more than three hundred American ships, thereby placing the Franco-American relationship on the cusp of war.

Nor was that all. The ever-shifting French government, misleadingly called the Directory, had moved into an anti-American phase, expelling the new American minister, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, effectively breaking off diplomatic relations with the United States. Rather incredibly, this was pretty much what the previous American minister, James Monroe, who was a devoted Jefferson protégé, had recommended. (Monroe had described the Federalist administration as a hopeless gaggle of pro-British sympathizers wholly out of touch
with the pro-French sympathies of the American people, which was the same line that Jefferson was taking with the French consul in Philadelphia.) As a result, the Directory had developed grandiose plans for declaring war against the American government, based on the belief that the vast majority of American citizens would rally to the French cause. The French foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, envisioned a resurgent French empire in North America based in the Republican stronghold in the southern states.
¹⁰