First Family (31 page)

Coded letters from Hamilton to Pickering and McHenry then revealed a truly Napoleonic plan of breathtaking grandeur. Hamilton intended to march his army through Virginia, declare martial law in the Republican homeland, then arrest and jail those Jefferson disciples who refused to renounce their French sympathies. He would proceed south to seize Florida and the Gulf Coast, justifiable acquisitions because Spain was a French ally, then head west to occupy New Orleans and claim the vast Louisiana tract. If the campaigns went as well as he hoped, Hamilton thought he might decide to head south again and invade Mexico. All this should be accomplished in less than a year.
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How Hamilton could have seriously contemplated such a preposterous scheme, and how he could so cavalierly manage its implementation in defiance of all legal and constitutional considerations, challenges rational explanation. His most recent biographer acknowledges that this moment constituted “one of the most flagrant instances of poor judgment in Hamilton’s career.” He had become an American version of Talleyrand and Napoleon rolled into one, who was putting the entire American experiment with republican government at risk.
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As long as he had functioned within the orbit of Washington’s authority, first as a trusted aide-de-camp and then as a cabinet officer, Hamilton’s matchless powers of mind and energy had followed a disciplined course. Once Washington retired from the scene, however, Hamilton’s unleashed and unchecked ambitions became wildly erratic, wholly imperious, and eventually self-destructive. He was setting a course that would soon carry the Federalist Party over the abyss and then place him before the fatal gaze of Aaron Burr on the plains of Weehawken.

John remained blissfully oblivious to Hamilton’s brazen machinations throughout the summer of 1798. Abigail had always been more
suspicious of Hamilton’s motives than her husband, apprising a friend (with more accuracy than she realized) that “the man would in any mind become a Second Buonaparty if he was possessed of equal power.” Over the ensuing months, however, as Hamilton focused his peerless energies on the creation of twelve new regiments—no detail escaped his attention, from the decorative stitching on the officers’ uniforms to the location of latrines in the training camps—John began to grasp the outline of Hamilton’s incredible scheme and the extent to which he had become a blind accomplice in its implementation.
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He spent two months back in Quincy that fall, digesting the growing realization that he had allowed Hamilton to wrest control of his presidency from him, but also tending to Abigail, who was bedridden with a serious attack of rheumatism and an equally debilitating “bilious disorder” that kept her awake most nights. For diversion, he began reading the collected works of Frederick the Great. At a deeper level he was processing his political options, fully aware, as Abigail apprised him, that Congress was expecting “a recommendation from the president of a declaration of war with France” upon his return to Philadelphia.
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His mind was moving in precisely the opposite direction. It would have been characteristic for him to share his thoughts with Abigail, but there is no evidence that he did, and in this instance her mind had been made up for months that war was unavoidable. Given her weak condition, he might have decided to keep his own counsel rather than risk an argument. At any rate, when the time came to leave for Philadelphia, he supported her decision to remain behind in Quincy. Writing from the road, he claimed to “miss my talkative wife” but agreed that she was in no condition to make the trip. He would have to make the defining decision of his presidency without her at his side.
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Even before he arrived in Philadelphia, the stunning news reached America that the French fleet, which was supposedly preparing for an invasion of the United States, had in fact sailed east rather than west and, more dramatic, had suffered a devastating defeat off the Egyptian coast at the hands of Horatio Nelson, the British naval hero who
had thereby destroyed the myth of Napoleon’s invincibility. It was now clear that the prospect of a French invasion was, and probably always had been, a mirage.

An interview with Elbridge Gerry, just back from France, also buttressed John’s diplomatic instincts. Gerry had come under criticism for lingering in Paris after being ordered home, but he reported that his recalcitrance had paid dividends, permitting several conversations with Talleyrand in which the French minister expressed profuse regret about the XYZ fiasco and a strong desire to resume negotiations.

John Quincy also reported from his listening post in Berlin that the diplomatic corridors of Europe were filled with rumors about a major shift in French policy: “They are spreading abroad the idea that they wish reconciliation with the United States, and are extremely desirous of a new negotiation.” The French were not to be trusted, John Quincy was quick to warn, and the words of both Talleyrand and Napoleon were inherently worthless. Nevertheless, it made realistic sense for Napoleon to end the undeclared war with America in order to consolidate his overextended military forces in Europe.
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With all these considerations in mind, John decided that a new American peace initiative had at least a decent chance of succeeding. On February 19, 1799, he apprised Congress that he intended to send William Vans Murray, currently American minister at The Hague, to reopen negotiations with the French government. Secretary of State Pickering, along with the Federalist leadership in Congress, claimed that they were “thunderstruck” by the decision, and began suggesting that John had lost his mind. Several commentators speculated that this apparent fit of temporary insanity was a function of Abigail’s absence, an explanation that John relished and immediately reported to her as evidence of her reputation as the only sound mind in the family.
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Abigail responded in kind. She, too, had seen the stories from critics who thought that “if the old woman had been there … they did not believe it would have taken place.” This was, as she put it, “pretty saucy, but the old woman can tell them they are mistaken, for she considers the measure a master stroke of policy, knowing as she did that the pulse had been feeling through that minister for a long time.” This meant that the decision, instead of an impulsive act, as so many commentators
claimed, was a highly deliberative judgment that John had been mulling over for several months.
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Abigail’s unconditional support also signaled her realignment with his preference for peace at any cost, after arguing for over a year that another peace initiative was futile. John never doubted that Abigail’s loyalty to their partnership would easily overwhelm her anti-French convictions. These were the kind of elemental presumptions on both their parts that required no conversation at this seasoned stage of their partnership. But John promised her a full recounting of his motives when they were next together. The mails could not be trusted, and “the Reasons which determined me are too long to be written.”
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Pickering guessed at the reasons for both the decision and the apparently sudden manner in which it was made: “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
.” This was an ironically shrewd assessment. John did not consult his cabinet because he had finally come to the realization that most of them were loyal to Hamilton. They would attempt to change his mind because they were co-conspirators in Hamilton’s scheme to manipulate popular fear of the French threat into a national security crisis. But John’s diplomatic initiative altered the political chemistry. It made the Provisional Army superfluous and Hamilton’s grandiose plans irrelevant. And that was precisely the reason that John made the decision. He was not only avoiding war, a major achievement in its own right, he was also avoiding a prospective military dictatorship.
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Having delivered the decisive blow, John then proceeded to leave town, ensconce himself in Quincy with an ailing Abigail, and remain sequestered there for the next seven months. This behavior struck observers then, and most historians since, as bizarre. While Washington had periodically retreated to Mount Vernon, he had never remained away for that long, and he had never absented himself in the midst of an ongoing political crisis. John’s decision had, in fact, provoked just such a crisis, because it caught Federalists and Republicans
alike by surprise. As Abigail described the scene, his decision was “so unexpected that the whole community was like a flock of frightened pigeons; nobody had their story ready.” A country that was eager to declare war was now being led in a different direction that raised a host of unresolved questions: What were the minimum terms the American peace delegation should demand from the French? Should planning for the Provisional Army, which was still only a skeleton force, go forward or stop? Was the buildup of an American navy, now at twenty-two frigates, still a priority? John had dropped a bombshell into the center of American politics and was walking away without even looking back at the debris.
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His explanation was Abigail. Her letters to family and friends had come to resemble medical reports: excruciating pain in her joints that kept her confined for eleven weeks and unable to sleep at night; chronic fevers, what she called “the ague,” sufficiently severe to resemble malaria; mounting fear that her health would never recover, that she was either dying (“I hourly expect my own dissolution”) or, worse, would become a permanent invalid. When informed that her youngest son, Thomas, was coming home after serving as John Quincy’s secretary at The Hague and Berlin, she asked John to alert him about her appearance: “He must prepare to see his mother ten years older than when he left her; time and sickness have greatly altered her.” At fifty-five, she felt seventy.
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John’s stated motives for moving his presidency to Quincy, then, were not fabrications. He had always regretted his absence more than thirty years earlier, when Abigail delivered their stillborn daughter while he remained preoccupied with his wartime duties in the Continental Congress. He did not want to make that mistake again now that her physical condition, perhaps her very survival, appeared at risk. She had so often sacrificed her own personal agenda to the imperatives of his public career. It was now her turn to become his priority.

Over the ensuing months, as critics in Philadelphia continued to question his absence, he claimed that his administrative duties could be responsibly handled by letter. And he was, in fact, assiduous about responding to all cabinet requests—Pickering on American policy
toward the slave insurrections in Santo Domingo; McHenry on rank squabbles in the army; requests for guidance from the newly appointed secretary of the navy, Benjamin Stoddert, on the deployment of recently commissioned frigates. All this routine business, he insisted, could be done from Abigail’s bedside.
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Although he was unwilling to acknowledge it, perhaps even to himself, there were other motives for his extended absence. Once he finally realized that his cabinet, most especially Pickering and McHenry, were loyal disciples of Hamilton, he should have fired them and appointed his own subordinates. And once he rejected a declaration of war in favor of a new diplomatic initiative, he should have ordered all planning for the Provisional Army to stop. He did neither, which allowed Pickering and McHenry to resume their behind-the-scenes maneuvering, this time to scuttle additional appointments to the peace delegation, and Hamilton to proceed with planning for the Provisional Army as if nothing had really changed. John’s hibernation in Quincy was part of a larger pattern of avoidance and procrastination whenever he was faced with the challenge of assuming direct control of the Federalist Party. On this score, instead of being impulsive—the major criticism directed at him—he was indecisive.

We are on treacherous ground here, since we are attempting to plumb the deeper recesses of John’s mind and soul, where the historical evidence is at best circumstantial and more often nonexistent. But the best guess is that his elevated conception of the presidency, as an office that transcended party (and therefore partisan) interests, produced an acute case of paralysis when the office required a party leader. There was no longer any room for his preferred version of nonpartisan executive leadership, so his response was to escape. Being a president-above-party was no longer possible, and in the new context he did not know what to do.

When Secretary of the Navy Stoddert, the only loyal member of the cabinet, urged him to end his seclusion, warning that “artful and designing men” were scheming to destroy his prospects for reelection, John replied that the advice was welcome, except the very mention of “a certain election may be wholly laid out of this question and all others.”
In the political universe he chose to inhabit, the mere mention of partisan politics was inadmissible.
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By midsummer Abigail’s health began to improve. She and John were able to take short walks around the farm, periodically joined by Nabby, who had come up from Eastchester with her three children to help care for her mother. Nabby’s presence provided a painful reminder of another subject that both Abigail and John preferred to avoid, namely, that the husband they had so heartily approved for her, William Stephens Smith, had continued to flounder, thereby putting the fate of their daughter and grandchildren at the mercy of his growing number of creditors. John had lost all hope in Smith’s capacity to salvage his life: “All the Actions of my Life and all the Conduct of my Children have not disgraced me so much as this Man,” he lamented. “His pay will not feed his Dogs. And his Dogs must be fed if his children starve.”
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An abject failure at everything he tried, Smith had decided to return to his original profession as a soldier, somewhat ironically seeing the new Provisional Army as a golden opportunity. John could only cringe at the poor man’s flair for failure, since the golden opportunity was in the process of turning to dross—the Provisional Army was already being dismantled—as a result of the peace initiative toward France. (After Hamilton, Smith was apparently the last man to realize that the Provisional Army was an idea whose time had come and gone.) Desperate for a military career, Smith requested the president to appoint him commander of the American garrison at Detroit. John responded curtly, saying all such requests should be sent to the secretary of war, then concluding: “I will not interfere with the discipline and order of the army, because you are my son-in-law.”
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