First Family (29 page)

All this was a preposterous illusion, of course, but as the armies of the French Republic swept victoriously across Europe, even the most extreme forms of Gallic infatuation seemed credible. Writing to his father from The Hague, John Quincy caught the French mood of nearly delirious invincibility: the fate of the world was now, he wrote, “in the hands of a Corsican stripling [Napoleon], whose name two years ago might have been hidden under a dog’s ear on the rolls of fame, but which at the moment disdains comparison with less than Caesar or Alexander.”
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John’s instinctive response to the French threat, rooted in the same realistic convictions about America’s abiding interests that Washington had proposed in the Farewell Address, was that war must be avoided at almost any cost. And so in May 1797, soon after Abigail came down from Quincy—“I come to place my head upon your Bosom”—he decided to send a three-man delegation to Paris to negotiate a French version of the Jay Treaty. He coupled this diplomatic commitment with a buildup of the American navy, which would enable the United States to fight a defensive war on the high seas if negotiations broke down.
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It was extremely likely that they would. Within the larger context of the Anglo-French competition for primacy in Europe, the United States remained a piddling power of relative insignificance. And given the information they were receiving from the French consul in Philadelphia, fully briefed by Jefferson to dismiss any Federalist initiative as irrelevant, the Directory was poised to treat the American envoys with consummate indifference. At least at this early stage, the central problem facing the Adams presidency was inherently unsolvable.

John’s predicament was rendered even more difficult by two political
anomalies no president before or since has had to face. The first was the result of a flaw in the Constitution that made the runner-up in the presidential election the vice president. (This was corrected by the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, which eliminated the awkward burden of a vice president who happened to be head of the opposition party.) As we have seen, as soon as Jefferson rejected the bipartisan overture from John, he quickly moved behind the scenes to undermine the administration he was purportedly serving. In a sense it was a repeat of the equally duplicitous role Jefferson had played as secretary of state under Washington. It must have taxed even Jefferson’s psychological agility to appear at weekly levees alongside Abigail and John, then write coded letters to Madison orchestrating Republican strategy and pass juicy bits of anti-Adams information to Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the
Aurora
, but he somehow managed it with apparent serenity.

The second anomaly was the cabinet. One of John’s biggest blunders was to retain Washington’s chief advisors, a decision that he made without much thought and later attempted to explain as forced upon him by Federalists eager to convey the seamless transition from Washington to Adams. In effect, he somewhat lamely claimed that he lacked the authority to pick his own team.

What he did not realize, and it took him an inordinately long time to figure it out, was that three members of his cabinet—Timothy Pickering at State, Oliver Wolcott at Treasury, and James McHenry at War—were loyal disciples of Hamilton and regarded “the little lion of Federalism,” and not John Adams, as their political chief. Hamilton described the arrangement in terms that left no doubt: there was “the President’s administration,” with John an elected figurehead, and then there was “the actual administration,” with Hamilton exercising power as the acknowledged leader of the Federalist Party. Virtually every cabinet vote was run past Hamilton for his approval, and all major cabinet proposals originated with Hamilton. It is difficult to decide what was more bizarre, Hamilton’s stunning arrogance at presuming his supremacy over a duly elected president, or John’s blind indifference to what was going on around him.
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One final ingredient in the political chemistry, perhaps the most
elemental of all, was John’s distinctive personality. Despite his distinguished résumé, he had no executive experience, had never commanded troops like Washington or served as governor like Jefferson. He was not equipped, by either temperament or experience, to delegate authority to subordinates or to manage them through a difficult decision-making process. All his major public achievements—defending the British troops after the Boston Massacre, leading the Continental Congress toward independence, drafting the Massachusetts Constitution, insisting on a separate American peace treaty with Great Britain—were singular acts of leadership, usually performed in defiance of either conventional wisdom or popular opinion. He harbored a strong contrarian streak that, for example, made him uncomfortable with popularity, because it seemed to him a symptom of someone who would trim his sails rather than pursue the correct if unpopular course. He was an elitist who, unlike Jefferson, believed that majorities were wrong more often than right, and he periodically carried this conviction to the level of perversity, claiming that he was confident that a policy was correct because of its current unpopularity.

All these personal tendencies had hardened into permanent habits of mind and heart by the time John reached the presidency. (Abigail referred to him as an “old oak” who might be torn up by the roots but would never bend, whereas Jefferson was “the willow” who would shift with the wind.) At the policy level, he was completely clear about the direction in which American history needed to flow: neutrality abroad, unity at home, and peace at all costs. By sending an American delegation to Paris, he had planted his standard, which he was prepared to defend to the death, no matter how few American citizens rallied round it.
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The only advisors who had his ear were John Quincy, his designated one-man listening post in Europe, and Abigail, his one-woman cabinet. He urged John Quincy “to continue your Practice of writing freely to me, and cautiously to the Office of State,” thereby suggesting that he intended to keep foreign policy under his own control. As for Abigail, when the
Aurora
fired a salvo that described the president as “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams,” she joked that only she possessed the intimate information to verify the description,
and that its very virulence indicated that he must be on the correct political course. Living with John all those years had turned her into a contrarian, too.
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Abigail settled into her new duties—the term
First Lady
had not yet been coined—with all the ease one would expect of the veteran diplomat she had become. On a typical day she rose at five o’clock, tended to her correspondence until joining John for breakfast at eight, then received guests for two or three hours. She met John again for dinner at three, usually with a gathering of eight to ten guests, once a week hosting a much larger state banquet and twice a week hosting the more public levees. They spent two or three hours alone together most evenings, reading, talking, or writing letters at the same table.

They almost certainly discussed John’s decision to nominate John Quincy as American minister to the Prussian Court in Berlin. Though both parents were aware that the nomination would smack of nepotism, they also had Washington’s judgment to bolster their confidence. Washington had been extremely impressed with John Quincy’s performance at The Hague and had urged John not to have any reservations about appointing his son to another post. “For without intending to compliment the father or mother,” Washington wrote, “I give it as my decided opinion that Mr. Adams is the most valuable public character we have abroad, and there remains no doubt that he will prove himself to be the ablest of all our diplomatic corps.” When John Quincy learned of the nomination, however, he recoiled at the thought of being appointed by his father and declined the offer.
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John was insistent: “Your Delicacy about holding a Commission from your Father, Seems to me, too refined … It is the worst founded opinion I ever knew you to conceive.” John Quincy eventually relented, but he asked his mother to apprise the president “that no nomination of me to any public office whatsoever, may ever again proceed from the present first magistrate.” His reasons were honor-driven, to be sure, but his reasoning was more sound than his father’s. Granted, merit alone should always be the criterion, John Quincy
observed, “but the President is the constitutional judge of merit … and as it respects
me
, I
know
that he is a favorably partial judge.” What John Quincy did not know was that John had seriously considered appointing him to the highly controversial delegation to France, a decision that would have provoked a political firestorm.
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Predictably, Bache, at the
Aurora
, trained his guns on the appointment, charging that “our monarchical president” was positioning his son for “a succession to the throne” and claiming, in defiance of the evidence, that John Quincy’s salary was much higher than the norm. This was all mixed with sarcastic references to “our three vote president,” referring to John’s narrow margin in the election, and dusted-off references to “His Rotundity.”
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It was all too much for Abigail, who found it excruciating to sit still while her husband and son were being vilified. She began to refer to the Republican press, and eventually all critics of John’s policies, as “Jacobins,” a smear term that conjured up radical devotees of the guillotine during the French Revolution, declaring herself fed up with “the Billingsgate of all the Jacobin papers, the Lies, falsehoods, calamities and bitterness.” Her growing sense of revulsion spread to all of Philadelphia, which she described as “a City that seems devoted to calamity,” suggesting that the political atmosphere mirrored the contaminated air that produced yellow fever every summer.
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Throughout the fall and early winter of 1797, while the nation awaited word from the American envoys to France, Abigail became increasingly partisan in her characterizations of the Republican opposition. It was not just a collection of insufferable critics; it was a “frenchified faction that is spreading sedition.” Their purported principles, she charged, were merely a convenient cover “to calumniate the President, his family, his admistration until they oblige him to resign, and then they will Reign Triumphant,
headed by the Man of the People,”
presumably Jefferson. Though her information was not far off the mark, she was crossing a line by suggesting that critics of her husband’s policies were guilty of treason and should be treated accordingly. “In times like the present,” she warned, “all Neutral Ground should be abandoned, and those who are not for us, be considered against us.”
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It did not help that diplomatic prospects looked bleak. John Quincy wrote her to counsel low expectations from the current French government: “We shall find her to be at last, what she has been to us from the first moments of her existence, a domineering, captious, faithless and tyrannical sister.” John was equally pessimistic: “What are We to expect from the Negotiations? Europe seems to be one burning mountain, whose Bowells are full of Materials for Combustion.” Abigail was reaching the conclusion that war with France was unavoidable; indeed, France was already waging an undeclared war against American commerce. In such a situation, then, it was sheer folly to regard critics of government policy as anything but the modern-day equivalent of Tories. On this score, she had become more of an ultra-Federalist than John.
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John did not think of himself as a Federalist at all. His model as chief executive was the same as Washington’s, the “patriot king” celebrated in Henry St. John Bolingbroke’s writings on English history, the statesman who levitated above all partisan interests and attempted to act in the long-term public interest of the nation regardless of the popular enthusiasms of the moment. This was an elevated conception of the presidency that was becoming increasingly anachronistic in the ferocious and highly orchestrated party battles of the 1790s, in which anyone attempting to carve out a centrist position soon found himself in a political version of no-man’s-land, raked by the crossfire from both sides.

That was precisely the position that John found himself in after deciding to make a last-ditch effort to avoid war with France. His policy was both realistic and prudent—give diplomacy a chance to avoid a crippling and costly war that the infant American republic could ill afford to wage, and at the same time create a more formidable American navy in case war became unavoidable. But at the time, the policy alienated the ultra-Federalists, who regarded the diplomatic initiative as blatant appeasement, as well as the Republican opposition, who saw the naval buildup as provocative and the peace
initiative itself as a transparent sham designed to clear the ground for war with France. (In fact, this was Hamilton’s position.) In such a situation, the center could not hold because it did not exist.

The bad news arrived on March 4, 1798, the first anniversary of John’s inauguration. Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, had refused to receive the American delegation, and, even more devastating, his three anonymous operatives, designated X, Y, and Z, had demanded a bribe of $250,000 as the prerequisite for any further negotiations. President Adams was also required to make a public apology for critical remarks about the French government delivered to Congress the previous summer. Secretary of State Timothy Pickering insisted that the only possible response to such gratuitous insults was a declaration of war.

Though equally indignant about French demands, John rejected Pickering’s advice. He ordered the American envoys to return home, but refused to share the correspondence that exposed the indignities suffered by them with Congress, because he realized that those revelations would provoke popular outrage that would virtually force him into a declaration of war. Interestingly, Abigail described this decision as “a very painful thing [because] the President could not play his strongest card.” She misconstrued his decision because she herself, like Pickering, believed war with France was now unavoidable. John, however, was playing a different game, still clinging tenaciously to his core conviction that a premature war threatened to kill the infant American republic in the cradle. For one of the few times in their long partnership, Abigail and John were not on the same political page.
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