But what? Thank God for a devious mind—Colonel Burr had a strong capacity to look beyond the immediate. It was Federalist dogma that the administration would be subservient
to France with its noble-sounding revolution already collapsed into the arms of a tyrant. But Burr was a Democrat, or had been; he had no thought the idea was true.
But why a meeting with the French so carefully staged to appear accidental? Immediately the rumors current on the New York waterfront flashed to mind. The French were taking Louisiana back from the Spanish. Burr had dismissed it as too casual a rumor until now, but something was afoot with the French and what else could it be?
What a delicious prospect! Of course, Jefferson and Madison would have to resist, and of course, they would fail—imagine that pair of bumblers locked in combat with the mighty Napoleon. Oh, my, this might change everything, for they must surely lose Louisiana and then—
But then he had a sudden feeling he was being watched, and he spun about to see that inadvertently he had stopped outside the chairman’s office. And there was Mr. Randolph standing inside the tall window watching Burr watch the man who had stolen his power and all that mattered to him. He was suffused with shame, and ignoring the chairman’s cruel salute, his ironic smile, Burr stalked away. His hands were shaking, and he thrust them into his coat pockets.
Things were askew, the world off its axis, and it was time to set it all straight—go back to New York and reclaim his ground and refurbish his power.
Madison was sure that Pichon had started to duck back into the building, but the quick wave stopped him. He came slowly down the steps.
“How nice to see you, sir,” Madison said, bowing.
“And you, Mr. Secretary. An unexpected pleasure.”
“Glad I bumped into you,” Madison said. “There was a point I wanted to bring to your attention.” He leaned against the hitching rail and spread both arms. “My, isn’t this sun splendid? Fairly shows off a building that’s quite fine in its own way.” He gestured toward the gleaming stone. “Nothing like Versailles, of course, but a building of such magnitude
rising in a new city demonstrates strength that older nations should consider. Neither arm nor will is lacking.”
Pichon gave him an uneasy glance. “Certainly, sir. I’m sure that is so.” He was a slight figure in a plain black suit with white stock. Present problem aside, Madison liked him; there was a steady strength about him oddly combined with a wistful quality, as if he’d once dreamed dreams that were not to be.
“Yes, a handsome building. As much so inside as out. I suppose you’ve been in with my old friend, Gouverneur Morris.” Pichon shot him a startled glance; oh yes, hand in the cookie jar, all right. Of course diplomats spoke to the opposition, but they were expected to be discreet.
Madison smiled. “Gouverneur’s a charming man, very able. Unfortunately, he has a terrible blind spot on Democrats. Believes in his heart that we’re going to wither and fade into nothing.” He laughed. “No evidence I can show him will persuade him. That’s the way with blind spots, don’t you find?”
His tone had been light and genial. Now he turned to stare directly into Pichon’s eyes and hardened his voice. “No one should base his perceptions of America on Gouverneur’s opinions. He and his friends are uniformly wrong; they represent the past, the Democrats the future.”
“Of course, Mr. Secretary, I don’t—”
Madison waved this off with a careless flick of his hand and said, “Now, sir, I have on my desk a true copy of a treaty between France and Spain that details the retrocession of Louisiana to France. What is your explanation for this?”
Pichon went pale. “I—I would want to see that, sir.”
Madison took a step back. “Sir! Do you doubt my word?”
“No, no.” Pichon shook his head, rattled. “Forgive me, sir. An ejaculation of surprise, nothing more.”
“Very well, sir.” Madison cooled his voice further. “Did you know about this when the president asked you last night?”
“Certainly not!”
“Then this whole matter was held secret from you as it
was from us. We, who are most affected of all. I find an incredible hostility in that act, Mr. Pichon. Incredible.”
“Sir, I—”
“You understand that our vital interests go directly to the Mississippi. It waters the center of our continent, it gives half our nation outlet to the sea, it’s central to our commerce, travel avenue for our western people.”
Madison saw that as planned, the news flung suddenly in the Frenchman’s face in this most nondiplomatic of settings had quite disconcerted him. Plain potato, Wagner had said, and honest; Madison agreed with both.
But he thought Pichon would stiffen, which he did. Perhaps, the chargé said, his nation felt no obligation to inform nations not involved. Not involved? It was an unfortunate phrase and Madison used it to beat him about the head.
“But surely,” Pichon cried, “you can’t object to France recovering what was taken from it forty years ago?”
“The world has changed in forty years; the United States most of all.”
“But what’s the harm? It’s not yours now. What difference whether we hold it or Spain?”
“Collisions, sir,” Madison drew himself up. “Collisions between citizens of both nations are certain to follow, too far from the seat of either government to contain in time to prevent very serious consequences. It is incredibly dangerous.”
“But why? Rivers in Europe are jointly navigated by different countries all the time.”
“There, sir! You reveal the ignorance that lies behind this mad move—equating a raw frontier a thousand miles distant with the close confines of Europe. ’Pon my word, this suggests criminal ignorance of American terrain in your government.”
“Well, Spain holds it now, and you get on with Spain.”
“Spain is weak and pliant, sir. And if it weren’t, we’d seize Louisiana. Throw them into the sea. It’s easily in our power and threatened constantly by our western hot sparks. Does ‘pliant’ describe the imperial armies of Napoleon Bonaparte?”
Pichon shook his head, his face flushed.
“Now, sir, please mark my words well. The fact is that if France were to take Louisiana, it wouldn’t last long. The force of nature will make that country ours in due time.
We
have the settlers flooding westward, advancing mile by mile, a rising tide. In the end they’ll absorb and control by the force of numbers. It’s the
American
West, you see—a ripening apple poised for the autumn drop. No nation, France nor Spain, can resist the American tide.”
The next day Madison issued written protests to France and to Spain. It was plain that neither Pichon nor Yrujo had been informed, which was the most ominous point of all. Yrujo tried to bluster a bit, and Madison shut him off with a glance. Then the secretary went home exhausted. Both France and Spain had been put on notice that the United States intended to play a hand in this game. Now he must set about devising that hand.
BOSTON, EARLY 1802
A heavy, blustering fellow with red face and a ruff of white whiskers, wearing a coat that looked slept in and gave off a rich odor, lurched up the stairs to the cubbyhole office over the print shop.
“John Quincy Adams? Good! They tell me no one goes to law better’n you.”
The flattery chilled Adams. The fellow seized his hand and pumped it, crowding close as Adams backed almost into the corner.
“Name’s Silas Barnstover and I aim to sue my neighbor. Son of a bitch poisoned my cow.”
“Can you prove that?” Adams said.
“Why, hell yes. Everyone around saw the dead cow—”
“I mean that your neighbor poisoned—”
“Well, what else could it be, cow swole up and died overnight? Cows don’t just die, you know.”
“They get sick though.”
“Sick? Why, old Boss never had a sick day in her life. Gave milk every day for ten years.”
“Ten years? Maybe she died of old age.”
Barnstover’s face went several deeper shades of red. “You ain’t working for my neighbor; you’re working for me! And I say the son of a bitch poisoned her, and I want him to pay! So let’s get busy.”
“I’ll need a retainer of twenty dollars,” Adams said.
“Twenty dollars! I ain’t got that kind of money. We gotta get it out of the hide of that bastard next door.”
“I can’t start without a retainer.”
Barnstover stared with palpable contempt. “Got your palm out first crack outta the box, eh? What the hell kind of lawyer are you anyway?”
As the failed client went down the stairs cursing out loud, Adams sat at his desk and held his head in his hands. God, he did hate the practice of law. What kind of a lawyer are you anyway? A failing lawyer, that’s what kind. A lawyer who, in his day, had spoken to kings and dined with dukes and represented his nation all over Europe and now couldn’t handle a client with a cow that probably had blown her belly with the colic.
With a start he drew the turnip watch from his waistcoat pocket. Ten in the morning! Court would be opening, and he needed to be there in case a judge tossed a stray case his way. It was exquisite humiliation for the former ambassador, son of the former president, heir to one of the great names in America, to stand in the well of the court where all could see him waiting for a morsel tossed like a scrap to a hound; but he had no choice. He was slowly going broke, savings eroding,
cases rare, and winning cases even rarer. Well, it was his own fault too. He spent little or no time with fellow attorneys who were dolts and buffoons, he avoided the clubs and coffeehouses where judges lounged. They were dolts and buffoons too, and politicians were worse. He couldn’t even talk to such oafs, found nothing to say, and sounded stilted and unreal when he tried. He disliked his office full of ink odor and the squealing of the press screw from below and he had little to do there anyway, so he walked, miles and miles every day, around the Boston Common and up and down the hills and through pastures, walking and thinking … .
At least the house he’d purchased on Hanover Square was finished, and Louisa was beginning to return to life. The time with his parents in Braintree had been hard on her; his father had welcomed her warmly, but his mother had gazed on her new daughter-in-law with reserve if not disdain—seemed to say, let the girl prove herself over the next few years. A rough beginning …
Then those long sessions at Braintree, the whole family debating how the brilliant scion, whose star now seemed so dim, should support himself. The law, his mother said to general agreement, there was no other answer, and he supposed them right. Certainly not politics; politics had betrayed the Adamses. The rise of parties with their ugly partisanship had destroyed the purity of public service. Parties so tarnished all they touched that confused voters had turned on the leading man in the nation, a man who towered over others for probity, wisdom, intellect, decency, who had honed himself for leadership over a lifetime. Rejected for a slick talker, a Frenchified dreamer. Yes, once the Adamses and the Jeffersons had been the closest friends, but that was before the French Revolution had seduced the Virginian. And even back in those days, they now could see, there had been a lightness, a curious frivolity that allowed the man to embrace the strangest ideas! And strangest of all was this idea of universal democracy, the common man on a par with those who really count in any society, those on whom a nation’s solidity rests! Democracy,
the former president sagely observed, was like a rake full of fine promises who seduces a trusting maid … .
Yet walking briskly along the Common, circling the long way to Hanover Square, using his stick to thread his way through clusters of sheep who would move after a sharp rap on the nose, circling carefully around obviously truculent goats—goats were true Bostonians, not to be fooled with—Adams remembered his years in public life with nostalgia. A regular income, important work that mattered in international context, a gentleman’s existence that allowed ample time for the study that Adams knew was his real vocation—those had been glorious days! Of course, the family was right, for the only entry into public service today was through party, and it was clear there was no party an honest man could join without blushing. Adams was a Federalist but his own party was a disgrace, the other an abomination.
He was thus ruminating when Timothy Pickering came bearing down on him with a loud hail and raised arm. He bowed stiffly but Pickering seized him in warm embrace and half led, half dragged him to a nearby bench surrounded by biscuit crumbs where someone had been feeding pigeons. Seated, Pickering was scarcely taller than Adams, meaning his height was in his legs; for some reason Adams didn’t bother to analyze, this pleased him. Pickering sat hunched forward with his elbows on bony knees, eyes deeply set in his slender face glowing with fervor.
“My dear fellow,” he said with a warm smile, the rancor of their last meeting forgotten or dismissed, “it’s good to see you home where you belong. We need you, you know.”
“Oh?” Adams said, more grunt than comment. Pickering headed a radical group of Federalist congressmen called the Essex Junto that was determined to regain power—or separate.
“Yes, great things are afoot.” He lowered his voice and glanced around the deserted common as if he sensed spies everywhere. “You more than anyone understand the nation’s danger—the administration is a disaster, the coward wretch at the head of it all, he’s like a Parisian revolutionary monster
prattling about humanity, but truth is he would feel utter pleasure in destroying everything. Handmaiden to the French, sir. Can you believe the process of handing our country over lock, stock, and barrel to that dissolute nation has already started?”
Adams’s expression must have reflected his doubt, for Pickering said, as if anxious to persuade, “Captain Sinclair of the brig
Sweet Lily
, out of New Orleans five weeks ago, couldn’t wait to bring me the news. New Orleans is alive with a rumor—the French are taking over!”
“Rumors. A penny a bushel.”
“But this has the smack of truth. France taking control from the Spanish, reclaim what it lost fifty years ago, rebuild its empire, it makes perfect sense. And not a word from the administration, not a word! And you know why? Because it’s part of the plot, let the enemy in the back door, say nothing until it’s too late.”
Adams didn’t answer. He distrusted rumors, but could this be true? A disaster if it proved so. France dominating the Mississippi Valley sooner or later would shear off the West and cripple the country. The habit of thinking as a diplomat in international terms had never left him; at last he murmured, “Very dangerous if true.”
“Well,” Pickering said, “at least it bells the cat. Tells us what that benighted man really plans—make us a mere province of France.”
“Or force us into war.”
“Oh, he don’t want war. And we won’t fight over that river. Why should we? The West means nothing to us. No, no, Mr. Adams, the West’s importance is as proof of perfidy, nothing more. That’s the real core issue, you see—just how much turpitude must we accept before we act, how much?”
“Turpitude?”
“Of course. His cruel removal of faithful officers, the substitution of corruption and baseness for integrity and worth—.” Pickering appeared ready to go on at some length and Adams settled back on the bench. Of course, the man was a famous hater, but his vehemence was surprising. Adams had been
reviewing the administration’s early record, and he found it surprisingly good. The only removals of office holders for reasons other than cause had been among magistrates and marshals, and almost apologetically Jefferson had explained that some of their own in these ranks really was the only protection Democrats had against the more aggressive Federalist officers. Adams suggested as much to Pickering, reminding him that his own chief clerk, Mr. Wagner, had been kept on. Surely that was a favorable sign—
“That oaf,” Pickering snapped. “A traitor! How could he live in that administration and carry out its benighted policies. He’s disgustingly loyal to his new masters—won’t say a word of the awful scandals we know go on every day.”
The former secretary of state continued in this vein for some time, but the more Adams listened the more it seemed to him that all we had here was a different philosophy of government. Yes, Jefferson was economizing brutally, when it was the dictum of Alexander Hamilton that a big and expensive government with its consequent need for borrowing bound together government, business, and high finance, solidifying and empowering each. Jefferson was whittling down the massive public debt that had soared to eighty million dollars under Hamilton, promising to halve it by the next election, with consequent reduction of the power of the moneyed, while Hamilton saw that big anchoring debt putting good interest in the pockets of the wealthy as a fundament of his kind of government. The new men did seem obsessed with democracy—take this foolish “pell-mell” admission to presidential events, no protocol, no ranking by diplomatic standing, just a race for the gravy bowl. The old diplomat in Adams rebelled at such crudity. Naturally the diplomatic establishment was in an uproar. That was carrying things beyond reason. And the Democrats were even more obsessed with making sure that wealth alone gave an American citizen no greater political power than that possessed by the common man. Adams didn’t approve of all this and his father sharply disapproved, but both agreed it was a difference in approach rather than a manifestation of evil.
Jefferson was cutting army and navy; Adams disagreed on the question of the navy, the only real protection of our coasts and trade in a world torn by war, but he had to admit that Hamilton’s plans for a large army were pointless if not dangerous with no war to fight. Democrats said the real aim had been to control the citizenry; Adams could hardly credit that, but reducing the army’s size didn’t dismay him. What did dismay him was closing so many embassies, including Berlin and the Hague where he had served so faithfully. Did we care nothing for the people there?
Choosing his words, he said that while he disagreed with administration’s aims, he found it moderate in execution. Pickering reared back on the bench as if stung. Head thrown back, he glared at Adams and snapped, “My God! Don’t tell me you’re taken in by that! Of course he’s moderate now. He’s luring the people, trying to prove all their fears are groundless, before he unveils his revolutionary aims. Don’t you see? He’s waiting until he can turn us over to the French revolutionary party! That’s what you call moderation—it’s simple trickery!”
He leaned close. His stock was twisted on his neck, and Adams caught an odor of garlic. “Study it, my boy, you’ll see that it’s all flummery. Oh, I pray the people will recognize the dupery in time.” He paused, staring with glittering eyes, and then whispered with another conspiratorial glance around the empty common, “But if they don’t, we have plans to save ourselves and save all that’s dear to God-fearing New England folk. Here in New England, you know, is the locus for all that is pure and fine about our country, the last bastion of decency against the imperial pretensions of Virginia to rule or ruin. Don’t think the slave-holding South and West don’t intend to crush us to their ends, don’t think we won’t see niggers as president, niggers in control of Congress. That’s what’s coming!”
Again that conspiratorial glance all around. “But that part of the country is worthless anyway!
Here
is where all good is centered. And we can save it.”
Adams had a sudden feeling he should get up and walk
away right now, but there was a fascination to this ranting too, and he said, “What do you mean?”
He saw that Pickering had taken his response for more than it was worth. The former secretary of state rolled his shoulders in a little shiver of enthusiasm and inched closer on the bench. It was this expression of complicity that reminded Adams that here was the man who had betrayed his president while sitting in his cabinet. Pickering’s voice sank to a confidential whisper. He hoped administration excesses would bring people to their senses before the next election and they’d hurl Democrats into outer darkness. But suppose the great villain didn’t reveal himself in time and the people remained as duped as they were today. Then it would be time for men who loved their region to separate and go their way alone.