Joseph J. Ellis (33 page)

Ultimately, of course, Adams himself must bear the responsibility for signing into law the blatantly partisan legislation that has subsequently haunted his historic reputation. But if, as he forever insisted, the Alien and Sedition Acts never enjoyed his enthusiastic support, Abigail’s unequivocal endorsement of the legislation almost surely tilted the decision toward the affirmative. To put it somewhat differently, if she had been opposed, it is difficult to imagine Adams taking the action he did. It is the one instance when the commingling of their convictions and the very intimacy of their partnership led him astray.

Ironically, the most significant—and in the long run most successful—decision of the Adams presidency occurred when Abigail was recovering from a bout with rheumatic fever back in Quincy, and the Federalists who opposed the policy attributed it to her absence. This was Adams’s apparently impulsive decision, announced on February 18, 1799, to send another peace delegation to France. Theodore
Sedgwick, a Federalist leader in the Congress, claimed to be “thunderstruck” and summed up the reaction of his Federalist colleagues: “Had the foulest heart and the ablest head in the world, been permitted to select the most ruinous measure, perhaps it would have been precisely the one which had been adopted.” Timothy Pickering, the disloyal secretary of state, whom Adams had come to despise, also described himself as “thunderstruck” and offered a perceptive reading of Adams’s motives: “it was done without any
consultation with any member of the government
and for a reason
truly remarkable—because he knew we should all be opposed to the measure.”
Abigail herself reported that all the bedrock Federalist enclaves of New England were taken by surprise: “the whole community were like a flock of frightened pigions; nobody had their story ready.”
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The stories circulating in the Philadelphia press suggested that Adams had acted impulsively because his politically savvy wife had not been available to talk him out of it. For the preceding two months he had in fact complained in public and private that he was no good as a “solitudionarian” and he “wanted my talkative wife.” Abigail had noted an editorial in
Porcupine’s Gazette
regretting her absence: “I suppose,” she wrote her husband, “they will want somebody to keep you warm.” The announcement of the new peace initiative then gave added credibility to the charge that, without Abigail, Adams had lost either his balance or his mind. Adams joked about these stories: “They ought to gratify your vanity,” he wrote Abigail, “enough to cure you and bring you here.” For her part, Abigail returned the joke, but with a clear signal of support: “This was pretty saucy, but the old woman can tell them they are mistaken, for she considers the measure a master stroke of policy.”
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This has pretty much been the verdict of history, for the delegation Adams appointed eventually negotiated a diplomatic end to the “quasiwar” with France; Adams’s decision became the first substantive implementation of Washington’s message in the Farewell Address, as well as a precedent for American isolation from European wars—one that would influence American foreign policy for over a century. In the immediate context of the party wars then raging, however, Adams’s unilateral action was politically suicidal: “He has sustained the whole force of an unpopular measure,” Abigail observed, “which he knew would … shower down upon his head a torrent of invective. As he
expected, he has been abused and calumniated by his enemies, that was to be looked for—but in the
house of his friends
, they have joined loudest in the clamor.” What Abigail meant was that Adams had chosen to alienate himself from the mainstream of the Federalist party, which regarded his policy as pro-French, indeed just the kind of decision one might have expected from Jefferson and the Republicans. The editorials in
Porcupine’s Gazette
turned against him. Federalist gossip suggested that their erstwhile leader was mentally unbalanced. (Adams, feeling his oats, wrote Abigail that he might now use the Sedition Act to shut down the Federalist press.) He was the archetypal illustration of the president without a party.
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Why did he do it? Three overlapping reasons appear to have converged in Adams’s mind and provided decisive direction to a foreign policy that, until then, had been vacillating between the incompatible agendas of the Federalists and the Republicans.

First, his lingering suspicions of Hamilton developed into unbridled distrust and then outright personal hatred. For two years, Hamilton had been issuing directives to Adams’s cabinet behind the scenes. Though Adams was vaguely aware of these machinations, he gave them little attention; after all, he never paid much heed to his cabinet anyway. In the summer of 1798, however, Hamilton persuaded his Federalist colleagues in the Congress to authorize the creation of a vastly expanded Provisional Army (subsequently called the New Army) of between ten thousand and thirty thousand soldiers in preparation for the looming outbreak of war with France. Adams had always supported military preparations more as a diplomatic maneuver to impress the French government of American resolve. And he had strongly preferred a naval force, what he called “Floating batteries and wooden walls.” Standing armies struck him as inherently dangerous and expensive items. “Regiments are costly articles everywhere,” he explained to his secretary of war, “and more so in this country than any other under the sun.” What possible rationale could exist for a large American land force, since the conflict with France was occurring on the high seas? “At present,” he observed, “there is no more prospect of seeing a French army here than there is in Heaven.”
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Then the whole horrid picture came into focus for Adams. Hamilton intended to make the New Army his personal instrument of power. It was a foregone conclusion that Washington would be called out of
retirement to head the force, but equally predictable that the aging general would delegate actual command to his former aide-de-camp. Adams suspected that Hamilton, whom he had formerly distrusted and now utterly loathed, saw himself as an American Napoleon, poised to declare martial law and present himself as the available savior. Abigail seconded the assessment, calling Hamilton “a second Buonaparty” whose imperialistic designs could only be guessed at. (If they had been able to read Hamilton’s private correspondence, they would have discovered that his plans were quite grandiose: He hoped to march his conquering army through Virginia, where recalcitrant Republicans would be treated like the Whiskey Rebels, then down through the Louisiana Territory and into Mexico and Peru, liberating all the inhabitants from French and Spanish domination and offering membership in the expanded American republic.) Although Adams had gone along with the Alien and Sedition Acts, the prospect of a Hamilton-led army marching heaven knows where conjured up the demise of republican government altogether in the classical last act—a military dictatorship. No one recognized this historical pattern more clearly than Adams. No one, not even Jefferson, hated Hamilton more than Adams. Abigail described the decision to resume negotiations with France as “a master stroke of policy” because it averted a French war and removed the rationale for Hamilton’s army at one fell swoop.
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Second, the reports Adams was receiving from John Quincy in Prussia, based on his network of contacts in Paris and Amsterdam, provided fresh evidence that Talleyrand was now eager for peace with the United States. In January of 1799 Adams’s second son, Thomas Boylston, returned from Europe with additional dispatches from John Quincy, indicating that Talleyrand would not only receive an American peace delegation but would also be open to a consideration of compensation for American shipping losses over the past three years. However impulsive Adams’s February decision might have appeared to outsiders, it was really the culmination of considerable deliberation, based on diplomatic advice from his most trusted and strategically located confidant, who also happened to be his son.

Third, and finally, Adams derived deep personal satisfaction from singular acts of principle that defied the agendas of both political parties. The fact that the decision to send the delegation rendered him unpopular, that it struck most observers as an act of political suicide,
only confirmed for him that it must be right. The office of the presidency, as he saw it, was designed to levitate above the party squabbles and transcend partisan versions of the national interest. Even more palpably, the fullest expression of his best energies always occurred when the long-term public interest, as he understood it, clashed with the political imperatives of the moment.

The trademark Adams style might be described as “enlightened perversity,” which actually sought out occasions to display, often in conspicuous fashion, his capacity for self-sacrifice. He had defended the British troops accused of the Boston Massacre, insisted upon American independence in the Continental Congress a full year before it was fashionable, argued for a more exalted conception of the presidency despite charges of monarchical tendencies. It was all part of the Adams pattern, an iconoclastic and contrarian temperament that relished alienation. (John Quincy and then great-grandson Henry Adams exhibited the same pattern over the next century, suggesting that the predilections resided in the bloodstream.) The political conditions confronting the presidency in 1798 were tailor-made to call forth his excessive version of virtue. Though Abigail was with him all the way, for Adams himself it was the supreme collaboration with his own private demons and doubts, his personal declaration of independence.

A
LL THE DOMESTIC
and international challenges facing the Adams presidency looked entirely different to Jefferson and Madison. Once they decided to reject Adams’s overture and set themselves up as the leaders of the Republican opposition, they closed ranks around their own heartfelt convictions and interpreted the several crises confronting him as opportunities to undermine the Federalist party, which they sincerely regarded as an organized conspiracy against the true meaning of the American Revolution. “As to do nothing, and to gain time, is everything with us,” Jefferson wrote to Madison, the very intractability of the French question and “the sharp divisions within the Federalist camp” between the Hamiltonians and what Jefferson called “the Adamites” worked to their political advantage. In order for the Republican agenda to win, the Federalist agenda needed to fail. Although Adams never fit comfortably into either party category, and eventually acted decisively to alienate himself from both sides, as the elected
leader of the Federalists he became the unavoidable target of the organized Republican opposition.
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Madison had never shared Jefferson’s personal affection for Adams, so it was easier for him to take the lead in stigmatizing Adams’s motives and character:

The latter point became an article of faith within the Jefferson-Madison collaboration—namely, that Adams actually wanted war with France. He was, declared Madison, “the only obstacle to accommodation, and the real cause of war, if war takes place.”
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Jefferson and Madison even managed to persuade themselves that Adams had concocted the entire XYZ Affair to mobilize popular support for a declaration of war. Talleyrand, they told each other, was neither so stupid nor so dishonorable to attempt bribery of the American peace delegation. Adams had orchestrated “a libel on the French government” as part of his “swindling experiment.” Instead of regarding Adams’s decision to delay release of the dispatches exposing the bribery demands as a prudent and statesmanlike effort to avoid a public outcry for war, Madison insisted it was timed to produce maximum damage. “The credit given to Mr. Adams for a spirit of conciliation towards France is wonderful,” Madison observed caustically, meaning that it was wholly undeserved. When Jefferson halfheartedly suggested that his old friend had once been a man of revolutionary principles, Madison retorted, “Every answer he gives to his addresses unmasks more and more his true principles.… The abolition of Royalty was it seems not
one of his Revolutionary principles. Whether he always made this profession is best known to those, who knew him in the year 1776.” Jefferson, in effect, needed to liberate himself from nostalgic memories. Adams was a traitor.
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Although he certainly knew better, Jefferson went along. He reported gossip in the corridors of Congress to the effect that Adams had been heard to declare “that such was his want of confidence in the faith of France, that were they ever to agree to a treaty ever so favorable, he should think it his duty to reject it.” (Adams was in fact, at that very moment, listening to Gerry’s pleadings for a renewal of the peace effort.) Another rumor circulating in the streets of Philadelphia caught Jefferson’s ear: Washington had leaked the news that he opposed Adams’s foreign policy. (The exact opposite was true. Washington was endorsing the Adams initiative as the effective implementation of his own long-standing commitment to American neutrality.) Yet another rumor had it that Adams was working behind the scenes to scuttle the plans for moving the capital to the Potomac (also untrue). And then, when the president announced his unexpected decision to send a new American peace delegation to France in February of 1799, Jefferson apprised Madison that this “event of events” had been forced upon Adams. Jefferson had reliable evidence that Talleyrand had threatened to leak news of his previous peace initiative, thereby requiring Adams to reciprocate. “Mark that I state this as conjecture,” Jefferson told Madison, “but founded on workings and indications which have been under our eyes” (all contrived).
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