Founding Brothers (30 page)

All this was
true enough, but sign them he did, despite his own reservations and against the
advice of moderate Federalists like John Marshall. (Even Hamilton, who
eventually went along, too, was at best lukewarm and fearful of the precedent
set by the Sedition Act.) Abigail, on the other hand, felt no compunctions:
“Nothing will have an effect until Congress passes a sedition
bill,” she wrote her sister in the spring of 1798, which would then
permit “the wrath of the public to fall upon their [the Republican
editors’] devoted heads.… In any other country Bache and all his
papers would have been seized long ago.” Her love for her husband, and
her protective sense as chief guardian of his presidency, pushed her beyond any
doubts. She even urged that the Alien Act be used to remove Albert Gallatin,
the Swiss-born leader of the Republican party in the House of Representatives.
Gallatin, she observed, “that specious, subtle, spare Cassius, that
imported foreigner,” was guilty of treasonable behavior by delivering
speeches or introducing amendments “that obstruct their cause and prevent
their reaching their goals.” Gallatin, along with all the henchmen in the
Jefferson camp, should be regarded “as traitors to their
country.”
⁵¹

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.”
⁵²

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.”
⁵³

This has
pretty much been the verdict of history, for the delegation Adams appointed
eventually negotiated a diplomatic end to the “quasi-war” 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.
⁵⁴

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.”
⁵⁵

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.
⁵⁶

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.
⁵⁷

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:

There never was perhaps a greater contrast between two
characters than between those of the present President and of his
predecessor.… The one cold considerate and cautious, the other headlong
and kindled into flame by every spark that lights on his passions. The one ever
scrutinizing into the public opinion, and ready to follow where he could not
lead it; the other insulting it by the most adverse sentiments and pursuits. W.
a hero in the field, yet overweighing every danger in the Cabinet. A. without a
single pretension to the character of a soldier, a perfect Quixote as a
statesman. The former chief magistrate pursuing peace every where with
sincerity, tho’ mistaking the means; the latter taking as much pains to
get into war, as the former took to keep out of it.

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.”
⁵⁸

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.
⁵⁹