First Family (30 page)

What happened next was richly ironic. Thanks to their two-to-one majority in the House, the Republicans were able to pass a resolution demanding that the president share with Congress all the dispatches from the American envoys, convinced as they were that the correspondence would reveal that the negotiations had broken down because of skullduggery on the American side. (This conviction followed naturally from their operating assumption that the president’s peace initiative had, from the start, been designed to fail.) And, double irony, Jefferson himself, as president of the Senate, was required to read the dispatches that described in excruciating detail the insulting
behavior of the French government, bribes and all. Abigail, who was present in the gallery for this melodramatic scene, noted with enormous satisfaction that “the Jacobins in the Senate and House were struck dumb and opened not their mouths.”
²³

Popular opinion shifted almost overnight. Abigail reported with great glee the newspaper accounts of a riot in Philadelphia’s major theater when the orchestra attempted to play “French Songs and Airs.” The audience shouted down the musicians, demanded that they play “the President’s March,” and when they refused, drove them off the stage.
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Rumors began to circulate that French émigrés, who constituted a substantial minority population in Philadelphia, were plotting to set fire to the city and massacre the inhabitants. While Abigail found such wild rumors credible, John dismissed them as incendiary threats based on forged documents designed to stir up anti-French hysteria. He was almost surely correct, though even he lent his tacit support to the fearmongering when an anti-French mob estimated at ten thousand gathered outside the presidential residence, purportedly to protect it from firebombers. Rather ridiculously, John appeared before the crowd in military uniform, complete with sword, and obviously relished one of the few opportunities in his life to embrace the status of popular hero. The crowd chanted the new battle cry, “Millions for defense, not a cent for tribute.”
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If vanity made him vulnerable, and it clearly did, his deep distrust of mobs and wild swings in popular opinion virtually ensured that his dalliance with the cheers of the crowd would prove transitory. Moreover, he remained convinced that the shouts of the multitude were just as misguided now, when they were demanding war with France, as they had been not so long ago, when they were hypnotized by the ideological illusions of the French Revolution. He remained wedded to a centrist course of American neutrality, which was attuned, or so he believed, to the deeper rhythms of American history and ought not be influenced by the turbulent cacophonies of the moment.

Given the accusations of emotional instability that would be hurled at him in the ensuing months, it is instructive to recover his stubborn refusal to surrender his strategic vision to the impulsive cries
for war in the spring and summer of 1798. His behavior is a textbook example of diplomatic patience, delaying a decision while waiting for the political templates to move. A letter from John Quincy buoyed his hopes on this score, for it provided intelligence about shifting factions within the Directory, an emerging recognition that French military resources were already spread too thin in Europe to contemplate another front in North America, and a new willingness to open negotiations with one of the American envoys, Elbridge Gerry, who had decided to remain in Paris in order to make himself available if and when French policy changed. Gerry was being pilloried in the Federalist press for this apparent act of insubordination, but he was one of John’s closest friends, which was the only reason he was appointed to the American delegation in the first place, and now John Quincy was reporting that Gerry’s insubordination had proved prescient. The French were having second thoughts.
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Meanwhile, Abigail’s thoughts were moving in a different direction. Her comments on the French government became more strident and absolute (e.g., “the most dissolute and corrupt Nation now existing”). Unlike John, she held open no realistic hopes for a diplomatic resolution; indeed, she believed the nation was already engaged in an undeclared war with France, and therefore urged that Bache and his pro-French minions be identified as enemy agents: “As the French have boasted of having more influence on the United States than their own Government,” she wrote her sister, “the Men who now espouse their cause against their own Country … ought to be carefully marked.”
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More specifically, she favored federal legislation designed “to punish the stirrer up of sedition, the writer and printer of base and unfounded calumny.” Foreigners were also a problem, especially French émigrés and recent Irish immigrants, who harbored French or anti-British sympathies and appeared to constitute foot soldiers for Republican candidates in several states. She predicted that the Republican leaders “will take ultimately a station in the public’s estimation like that of the Tories in our Revolution.”
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In short, Abigail was an enthusiastic advocate for the four pieces of legislation pushed through Congress by the ultra-Federalists in late
June and early July 1798 and known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. These infamous statutes were designed to deport or disenfranchise foreign-born residents who were disposed to support the Republican, pro-French agenda, and make it a crime to publish “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States.” John played a passive role as the legislation made its way through Congress, and lived long enough to acknowledge that the Alien and Sedition Acts constituted a permanent stain on his presidency.
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While he never blamed Abigail for his blunder, it is difficult to imagine that her strong support did not influence his decision. (Or perhaps a better way to put it is that it’s difficult to imagine him signing the controversial legislation if she had opposed it.) Through their long partnership, her political judgment usually provided reinforcement for his excellent instincts, which were often unpopular at the time but proved correct as history unfolded. When she had offered a critical suggestion, it was almost always cautionary, designed to calm him down and rein in his more impulsive urges. In this instance, however, their customary roles were reversed. She had allowed herself to get caught up in the ultra-Federalist frenzy, to develop a highly melodramatic understanding of the political forces at play and lose any perspective on the hyperbolic assessments she was making. Instead of providing her usual gift of ballast, she helped to pull John over the edge and into a free fall from which his legacy never, in truth, completely recovered.

How could this happen? It helps to remember that the entire Adams presidency seems to have been enveloped within an electromagnetic cloud that caused otherwise sensible statesmen to temporarily lose their bearings. George Washington, for example, by almost all accounts the most sober and realistic political leader of the era, wholly endorsed the Alien and Sedition Acts. And on the other side of the ideological divide, Jefferson and Madison managed to convince themselves that the entire XYZ Affair had been orchestrated by President Adams or his behind-the-scenes henchman, Hamilton. Speaking of Hamilton, his arrogant assumption that he was the de facto president had a delusional dimension, and his imperial ambitions
as head of a putative standing army made Napoleon seem cautious by comparison. Abigail’s mental aberration, then, was part of a larger pattern of widespread political paranoia.

Moreover, some of Abigail’s fears were not wholly unfounded. Jefferson
was
providing confidential intelligence to French partisans and to Bache at the
Aurora
. The Directory
had
entertained a scheme—it was Talleyrand’s brainchild—to incite a civil war designed to make the southern states part of a new French empire in America. Indeed, in some respects more conspiracies were afoot than she realized, since she was as ignorant as her husband of Hamilton’s duplicities with the cabinet.

Context is also crucial. The national government was still too new to have developed clear criteria for what constituted treason, the press had yet to work out standards to distinguish responsible journalism from scandal sheets, and our modern conception of First Amendment guarantees of civil liberties and freedom of the press remained blurry hopes for the future. Abigail was doing her best to negotiate this hothouse environment and, like everybody else, making it up as she went along.

Finally, her judgment was a victim of her love for John. Ever the lioness protecting her lair, she was watching the pressures of the presidency and the incessant salvos from the Republican press age John beyond his years: “I never saw Mr. Adams look so pale,” she reported to her sister, “and he falls away [loses weight?] but I dare not tell him so,” adding in a motherly vein that “he smoaks more sigars then I wish he did.” He was the love of her life, father of her children, accomplice in negotiating midlife, political mentor, intimate confidant, and best friend. She also so wanted him to succeed that she was thrilled rather than shocked at a Fourth of July toast: “Mr. Adams. May he, like
Samson
, slay thousands of Frenchmen with the
jawbone
of Jefferson.”
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Her strong endorsement of the major misstep of John’s public career is, then, both poignant and paradoxical: poignant because it was motivated by the purest and strongest human affection possible; paradoxical because the very intensity of her love blinded her to the damage she was doing to his political legacy.

John’s signature on the Sedition Act—eventually the most regretted signature of his life—was barely dry when he drafted an urgent request to his retired predecessor at Mount Vernon. Congress had recently seen fit to order the creation of a ten-thousand-man Provisional Army. It was “provisional” because it was contingent upon the appearance of the French fleet off the American coast. The previous day John had ordered Secretary of War McHenry to visit Washington at Mount Vernon and ask him to head that army. The letter was designed to alert Washington to the looming request, which John was at pains to describe as a last resort: “If it had been in my power to nominate you to be President of the United States,” he somewhat strangely claimed, “I should have done it with less hesitation and more pleasure.”
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Even more curious than his purported willingness to step aside for Washington, John’s endorsement of the Provisional Army to oppose a putative French invasion seems strange, because his central assumption until then had been that any war with France would be fought on the high seas. He was an advocate of what he called “wooden walls,” an American fleet fully capable of contesting French naval power in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, where the undeclared war was already going on. He was also on record as opposing “standing armies,” which in English and European history had served as the vehicles for tyrannical takeovers of republican governments—witness Caesar, Cromwell, and now Napoleon—a pattern that John Quincy had noted in his forecast of Napoleon’s likely course. Moreover, even if all the diplomatic initiatives failed and war with France proved inevitable, the likelihood of a French invasion of the United States was remote in the extreme. As John put it to McHenry: “Where is it possible for her [France] to get ships to send thirty thousand men here? At present there is no more prospect of seeing a French army here than there is in Heaven.” Why, then, was the greatest hero of the age being asked to recruit and then lead an army that John regarded as both dangerous and unnecessary?
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The short answer is that the ultra-Federalists in Congress had
approved the creation of the Provisional Army in the same session that also produced the Alien and Sedition Acts. Both measures were justified as guarantees of American security in response to the looming war with France. John’s posture toward both initiatives was some combination of indifference, passivity, and dazed acquiescence. To say that he had lost control of the Federalist agenda would be misleading, since he had made no effort to exercise control of it in the first place. But it was one thing to embrace an elevated, float-above-partisanship conception of the presidency, quite another to watch helplessly from the heights as both the foreign and domestic policy of the government marched forward in a direction he neither supported nor opposed.

The most concise version of a longer answer required only two words: Alexander Hamilton. In the immediate aftermath of the XYZ revelations, when popular opinion was shifting decisively against France, Hamilton charged into print as the anonymous author of a seven-part series entitled
The Stand
, in which he effectively set the Federalist agenda for the following year. The humiliating treatment of the American envoys constituted a de facto declaration of war, he argued, and from now on “the frenchified faction” of the Republican Party, to include Bache and his followers, needed to realize that apologies for the despicable French behavior would not be tolerated. Moreover, reliable reports that a massive French fleet was gathering at Brest meant that the Directory was preparing to mount an invasion of either England or America. (As it turned out, Napoleon sailed the fleet into the Mediterranean, bound for Egypt.) Any prudent American response, Hamilton argued, must assume that the nation was the next target of French imperialism, so a substantial American army—Hamilton suggested fifty thousand troops—should be raised to meet the threat. In effect, the legislation promoted and passed by Congress in June and July 1798—the Alien and Sedition Acts and the creation of the Provisional Army—were efforts to implement Hamilton’s vision.
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Moreover, the decision to recruit Washington to command the army was also Hamilton’s, passed along as an order to Pickering and McHenry, who complied like the loyal soldiers they were. McHenry was instructed to insist that Washington be given complete autonomy
in selecting the officers to serve under his command and be discreetly informed that Hamilton was prepared to serve as inspector general, or second-in-command. It was safe to assume that Washington would remain a symbolic presence who never took the field, thereby placing the Provisional Army under Hamilton’s control.