Joseph J. Ellis (35 page)

The same could be said for the Federalist party. The Jefferson-Madison collaboration was not just committed to capturing the federal government for the Republicans. As Jefferson put it so graphically, their larger goal was “to sink federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection of it.” When Madison declared that the Republican cause was now “completely triumphant,” he not only meant that they had won control of the presidency and the Congress but also that the Federalist party was in complete disarray. Though pockets of Federalist power remained alive in New England for over a decade, as a national movement with the capacity to dominate the debate about America’s proper course, it was a spent force. Jefferson had not yet invented the expression “the revolution of 1800” to describe the Republican ascendancy. Nor had historians translated that term to
mean the emergence of a more authentically democratic brand of politics, a translation that Jefferson would have understood dimly, if at all. (Jefferson actually thought that his victory represented a recovery rather than a discovery, a renewal of the principles of ’76 and a repudiation of the constitutional settlement of 1787 as the Federalists had attempted to define it.) But the more historically correct reality was that no one quite knew what the Republican triumph meant in positive terms for the national government. What was clear, however, was that a particular version of politics and political leadership embodied in the Washington and Adams administrations had been successfully opposed and decisively defeated. The Jefferson-Madison collaboration was the politics of the future. The Adams collaboration was the politics of the past.
⁷¹

What died was the presumption, so central to Adams’s sense of politics and of himself, that there was a long-term collective interest for the republic that could be divorced from partisanship, indeed rendered immune to politics altogether; and that the duty of an American statesman was to divine that public interest while studiously ignoring, indeed remaining blissfully oblivious to, the partisan pleadings of particular constituencies. After 1800, what Adams had called “the monarchical principle” was dead in American political culture, along with the kind of towering defiance that both Washington and Adams had harbored toward what might be called the “morality of partisanship.” That defiance had always depended upon revolutionary credentials—those present at the creation of the republic could be trusted to act responsibly—and as the memory of the Revolution faded, so did the trust it conferred. Of course Jefferson could, and decidedly did, claim membership in “the band of brothers,” but his election marked the end of an era. The “people” had replaced the “public” as the sovereign source of political wisdom. No leader could credibly claim to be above the fray. As Jefferson had understood from the moment Washington stepped down, the American president must forever after be the head of a political party.

Neither member of the Adams team could ever comprehend this historical transition as anything other than an ominous symptom of moral degeneration. “Jefferson had a party,” Adams observed caustically, “Hamilton had a party, but the commonwealth had none.” If the very idea of virtue was no longer an ideal in American politics, then
there was no place for him in public life. If the Adams brand of statesmanship was now an anachronism—and it was—then the Adams presidency would serve as a fitting monument to its passing. In February of 1800, Adams signed the Treaty of Mortefontaine, officially ending hostilities with France. He could leave office in the knowledge that his discredited policies and singular style had worked. As he put it, he had “steered the vessel … into a peaceable and safe port.”
⁷²

Rather ironically, the last major duty of the Adams collaboration was to supervise the transition of the federal government to its permanent location on the Potomac. Though the entire archive of the executive branch required only seven packing cases, Abigail resented the physical burdens imposed by this final chore, as well as the cold, cavernous, and still-unfinished rooms of the presidential mansion. For several weeks it was not at all clear whether Jefferson would become the next abiding occupant, because the final tally of the electoral vote had produced a tie between him and Burr. Rumors circulated that Adams intended to step down from office in order to permit Jefferson, still his vice president, to succeed him, in an effort to forestall a constitutional crisis. Adams let out the word that Jefferson was clearly the voters’ choice and the superior man, that Burr was “like a balloon, filled with inflammable air.” In the end, the crisis passed when, on the thirty-sixth ballot, the House voted Jefferson into office.
⁷³

Despite all the accumulated bitterness of the past eight years, and despite the political wounds Jefferson had inflicted over the past four years on the Adams presidency, Abigail insisted that her husband invite their “former friend” for cake and tea before she departed for Quincy a few weeks before the inauguration ceremony. No record of the conversation exists, though Jefferson had already apprised Madison that he knew the Adamses well enough to expect “dispositions liberal and accommodating.” On the actual day of the inauguration, however, Jefferson did not have Adams by his side as he rode down a stump-infested Pennsylvania Avenue to the yet-unfinished capitol. Rather than lend his presence to the occasion, Adams had taken the four o’clock stage out of town that morning in order to rejoin Abigail. He did not exchange another word with Jefferson for twelve years.
⁷⁴

A
DAMS CORRECTLY
regarded the five-hundred-mile trek back to Quincy as his final exit from the public stage. Upon arriving home he noted that his barnyard was full of seaweed, which then prompted a characteristically indiscreet observation: He had made “a good exchange … honors and virtues for manure.” When a violent storm struck on the day of his return, he took it as a providential sign that trouble was following him into retirement, as he put it, “substituting fermentations in the elements for revolutions in the moral, intellectual and political world.” As one who had helped to make those political revolutions happen, he claimed to be completely comfortable in stormy weather. But now, at the advanced age of sixty-six, was it not natural to expect some semblance of serenity? “Far removed from all the intrigues, and now out of reach of all the great and little passions that agitate the world,” he explained, “I hope to enjoy more tranquillity than has ever before been my lot.”
¹

The trouble with Adams was not that storms seemed to follow him, but rather that he carried them inside his soul wherever he went. Abigail spied him in the field that July of 1801, working alongside the hired hands, swinging his sickle and murmuring obscenities at his political opponents. From his letters we know that Hamilton topped his enemies list; he called him that “bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,” who was “as ambitious as Bonaparte, though less courageous, and, save for me,
would have involved us in a foreign war with France & a Civil war with ourselves.”
²

Not far behind Hamilton came his former friend and successor to the presidency. Though the hate for Jefferson was far less, the hurt was more. They had done so much together, struggled together against the odds in 1776, represented America in Europe during the 1780s, risen above their political differences during Washington’s administration. But during his own presidency Adams believed that Jefferson had betrayed him and their friendship. And it was all done so indirectly, so craftily, like a burglar who left no fingerprints. Jefferson was “a shadow man,” Adams now believed, a man whose character was “like the great rivers, whose bottoms we cannot see and make no noise.” When commenting on his other enemies, Adams displayed considerable flair. Tom Paine, for example, came off as “the Satyr of the Age … a mongrel between Pig and Puppy, begotten by a wild Boar on a Butch Wolf.” With Jefferson, however, the colorful epithets and irreverent images did not come so easily. It was difficult to be specific when the core of a man’s character was elusiveness.
³

The character of Adams’s own complicated feelings toward Jefferson eventually revealed itself through Abigail. The occasion was poignant. In 1804 Jefferson’s younger daughter, Maria Jefferson Eppes, died from complications during childbirth. Abigail decided to write a letter of consolation, explaining that “reasons of various kinds witheld my pen, until the powerful feelings of my heart, have burst through the restraint.” She recalled caring for Maria as a nine-year-old girl just arrived in London. “It has been some time that I conceived of any event in this Life, which would call forth, feelings of mutual sympathy,” Abigail confided to Jefferson, but the loss of a child overcame all her rational reservations. She wanted Jefferson to know that her heart was with him.
⁴

Jefferson normally had perfect pitch when interpreting the tone of a letter, but in this instance, he missed Abigail’s clear warning signals and read her words as an invitation to resume the friendship with the Adams family. He seized the opportunity to review the long political partnership he had enjoyed with her husband. Their mutual affection “accompanied us thro’ long and important scenes,” he wrote, and “the different conclusions we had drawn from our political reading and
reflections were not permitted to lessen mutual esteem.” Though they had twice run against each other for the presidency, he insisted that “we never stood in one another’s way.” The political rivalry had never eroded the personal respect between them.

There was only one occasion, Jefferson confided, when a decision by Adams struck him as “personally unkind.” That was his appointment of Federalists to several vacant judgeships during his last weeks as president. These appointments, somewhat misleadingly described as “the midnight judges,” had occurred after the presidential election, and therefore denied Jefferson the right to choose his own men. (The major offense was the appointment of John Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Court, arguably Adams’s most enduring anti-Jeffersonian legacy, in part because of Marshall’s magisterial career on the bench and in part because Jefferson and Marshall utterly despised each other.) But this one offense, as Jefferson put it, “left something for friendship to forgive,” so that “after brooding it over for some little time … I forgave it cordially, and returned to the same state of esteem and respect for him [Adams] which had so long subsisted.”
⁵

Jefferson’s letter sent Abigail into a controlled rage. “You have been pleased to enter upon some subjects which call for a reply,” she began ominously. The very notion that Jefferson should feel himself the injured party with the moral leverage to forgive her husband was a preposterous presumption. Now that Jefferson had raised the issue of political betrayal, he would have to “excuse the freedom of this discussion … which has taken off the Shackles I should otherwise found myself embarrassed with.” The pent-up anger poured out: “And now Sir, I freely disclose to you what has severed the bonds of former Friendship, and placed you in a light very different from what I had once viewed you in.”

After delivering a spirited defense of her husband’s right to make judicial appointments before he left office, Abigail launched a frontal attack on Jefferson’s character. Throughout Adams’s presidency, she claimed, Jefferson had used his position as vice president to undermine the policies of the very man he had been elected to support. This was bad enough. But the worst offenses occurred during the election of 1800. Jefferson was guilty of “the blackest calumny and foulest falsehoods” during that bitter campaign. While affecting disinterest and detachment, he was secretly hiring scandalmongers like James Callender
to libel Adams with outrageous charges: Adams was mentally deranged; Adams intended to have himself crowned as an American monarch; Adams planned to appoint John Quincy his successor to the presidency. “This, Sir, I considered as a personal injury,” Abigail observed, “the Sword that cut the Gordion knot.” It was richly ironic and wholly deserving that the infamous Callender had then turned on Jefferson and accused him of a sexual liaison with Sally Hemings, his household slave. “The serpent you cherished and warmed,” she noted with satisfaction, “bit the hand that nourished him.” And so, if there was any forgiving to be done, it would all happen on the Adams side. In the meantime, Jefferson was the one who needed to do some soul searching. She concluded with one last verbal slap: “Faithful are the wounds of a Friend.”
⁶

Throughout his extraordinarily vast correspondence, Jefferson never received another letter like this one. He had his detractors, to be sure, but Federalist critics tended to attack him in the public press, which he could and did dismiss as partisan propaganda. Abigail’s accusations, on the other hand, were private and personal, came from someone whom he respected as an intimate friend, and went beyond mere matters of political partisanship to questions of honor and trust. His first instinct was to claim that both sides, Republicans and Federalists alike, had engaged in lies and distortions during the election of 1800, and that he had suffered equivalent “calumnies and falsehoods” along with Adams. (This was completely true.) He then went on to disclaim that “any person who knew either of us could possibly believe that either meddled in that dirty work.” In effect, he had no role whatsoever in promoting Callender’s libels against Adams. (This was a lie.) “What those who wish to think amiss of me,” Jefferson pleaded, “I have learnt to be perfectly indifferent.” But with those like Abigail, “where I know a mind to be ingenious, and need only truth to set it to rights, I cannot be as passive.”
⁷