John Adams - SA (57 page)

The scheme succeeded. When the electors met in February 1789, Washington was chosen President unanimously with 69 votes, while Adams, though well ahead of ten others, had 34 votes, or less than half. Adams was humiliated by the news, his pride deeply hurt, but of Hamilton's part, he knew nothing.

Yet the fact remained that at age fifty-three, he, John Adams, the farmer's son from Braintree, had been chosen to serve as the first Vice President of the United States, the second-highest office in the land.

Abigail was to remain at home until he found a suitable place for them to live in New York. And thus the morning of his departure there was much that was reminiscent of other days as he bid goodbye, heading off again with a single servant, John Briesler. The difference this time was that Adams went accompanied by cavalry, a sight such as had never been seen in Braintree. It was April 13, 1789, one of the signal days of Adams's life and also, as it happened, Thomas Jefferson's forty-sixth birthday.

Boston provided a hero's send-off, with cannon salutes and exuberant crowds. The grand cavalcade that escorted Adams out of the city included more than forty carriages.

Merit must be conspicuously great when it can thus call forth the voluntary honors of a free and enlightened people
[wrote the Massachusetts Centinel]
. But the attentions shown on this occasion were not merely honorary—they were the tribute of gratitude due to a man who after retirement from trials and services which were of 18 years unremitted continuance, hath again stepped forth to endeavor to establish and perpetuate that independence... and which his exertions have so greatly contributed to produce.

All through Massachusetts and Connecticut people lined the road to cheer Adams as one of their own, a New England man. At Hartford he was presented a bolt of locally manufactured brown broadcloth considered worthy for an inaugural suit. New Haven gave him the “Freedom of the City.” That ideal weather accompanied the procession day after day was taken as auspicious.

At four o'clock the afternoon of April 20, after a week on the road, Adams arrived at the bridge at Spuyten Duyvil Creek, at the northern tip of Manhattan Island. A troop of New York cavalry and a “numerous concourse of citizens” led by John Jay and several members of Congress were waiting to escort him south to the city and Jay's palatial home on Broadway.

*   *   *

ONCE, IN THE MIDST of negotiations for the Paris Peace Treaty, John Adams had predicted that thirteen United States would one day “form the greatest empire in the world.” It was a faith he had first expressed at age nineteen, when a fledgling schoolmaster at Worcester, writing to his kinsman Nathan Webb; and it remained a faith no less in 1789, for all the skepticism and derision he had heard expressed abroad, and despite the many obstacles confronting the new nation.

Much about the state of things, much that Adams had seen or heard since his return, was heartening. On a visit to Harvard, he had crossed a magnificent new bridge over the Charles River, said to be the finest bridge in America. New England shipping and ocean trade were reviving after a slump that followed the war. A Salem vessel, Grand Turk, had been to China and back and was the talk of Massachusetts.

There was a rise in demand for American farm products. In Virginia, work had started on canals for both the James and Potomac Rivers. At Philadelphia an inventor named John Fitch had demonstrated a steamboat on the Delaware River. But as striking as any sign of the country's burgeoning energy and productivity was the “Grand Federal Procession” held in Philadelphia that July 4 of 1788, in which many hundreds of tradesmen marched, grouped by guilds: shipbuilders, rope-makers, instrument-makers, blacksmiths, tin-plate workers, cabinetmakers, printers, bookbinders, coppersmiths, gunsmiths, saddlers, and stonecutters, some fifty different groups carrying banners and the tools of their trade.

As a result of the Paris Peace Treaty, the size of the nation was double what it had been, greater in area than the British Isles, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined, and if the American population was small by the standards of Europe, it was expanding rapidly, which to Adams was the most promising sign of all. From 2 million or so in 1776, the population had grown to nearly 4 million by 1789, and this despite seven years of violent war, the departure of perhaps 100,000 Loyalists, and comparatively little immigration during the war years. Philadelphia, still the largest city, had increased to a population of 40,000. New York counted 18,000 and, like Philadelphia, surged with growth. Of the thirteen states, Virginia remained the richest and most populous, and thereby maintained the greatest political influence.

But wages were still low everywhere, and money was scarce. There was no standard American coinage or currency. British, Spanish, French, and German coins were all still in use, along with the coins of the different states, their value varying appreciably from one state to another. In New England, for example, six shillings made a dollar, while in New York eight shillings made a dollar. In the entire country there were only three banks.

Travel was slow and arduous everywhere, the roads appallingly bad and worst in the South. Largely because of bad roads, the new Congress, scheduled to convene in New York on the first Wednesday in March 1789, would not have a sufficient number present to make a quorum in either house until weeks afterward.

The nation had no army to speak of—about 700 officers and men. The Continental Navy had disappeared. The sea power that Adams had envisioned and worked so hard to attain was nonexistent.

The great majority of Americans lived and worked on farms, and fully two-thirds of the population was concentrated in a narrow band along the eastern seaboard from Maine to Spanish Florida. Nearly everything else was wilderness. The whole country, concluded one visitor, was “a vast wood.” In Massachusetts it was thought that less than a third of the land had been cleared, and it was the same in New York and Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh, at the end of the rough-hewn wagon road over the Allegheny Mountains, was the westernmost town of any consequence in the country and had fewer than 500 souls.

Approximately half the territory of the United States in 1789 was still occupied by American Indians, most of whom lived west of the Appalachians, and though no one knew how many there were, they probably numbered 100,000.

That a new America was steadily taking form beyond the Appalachians was one of the clearest signs of the times. Down the same road Adams traveled that spring to New York came small caravans from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut—families with children and household belongings piled onto heavy wagons, bound for Ohio, a journey of more than 700 miles. At the same time, settlers from Virginia and the Carolinas were crossing into Kentucky and Tennessee. George Washington himself, known to have great confidence in the future of the West, had landholdings in the Ohio River country of more than 20,000 acres.

But to many the immense size of the country and the shift of population westward were serious concerns. With people spread so far and communication so slow and unreliable, what was to hold the nation together? Such republics of the past as Adams had written about in his Defence of the Constitutions were small in scale—so what hope was there for one so inconceivably large? “What would Aristotle and Plato have said, if anyone had talked to them, of a federative republic of thirteen states, inhabiting a country of five hundred leagues in extent?” Adams pondered.

Besides, the country had no tradition of union. Indeed, Americans were long accustomed to putting the interests of region or state ahead of those of the nation, except during war, and not always then. Following the Revolution, General Nathanael Greene had written to Washington from South Carolina that “many people secretly wish that every state be completely independent and that as soon as our public debts are liquidated that Congress should be no more.”

North and South, the new Constitution had been vehemently opposed as a threat to the rights of the states and thus to individual liberty. Two sides had formed, the Federalists, who wanted a strong federal government, and the Anti-Federalists, who held to the sentiment of Thomas Paine, “That government is best which governs least.” And the outcome had been anything but certain. Not until June 1788, the week the Adamses were unpacking at Braintree, had the Constitution been finally secured, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify.

“The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us,” young schoolmaster Adams had written in his percipient letter to Nathan Webb, and to Adams now, as to others, dissolution remained the greatest single threat to the American experiment. “The fate of this government,” he would write from New York to his former law clerk, William Tudor, “depends absolutely upon raising it above the state governments. The first line of the Constitution made the point, “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Of the potentially divisive threats to “the more perfect union,” none surpassed slavery. The slave population, too, had burgeoned to nearly 700,000 men, women, and children who had no freedom whatever. There were slaves still in every state but one—only Massachusetts had eliminated slavery thus far—but with the overwhelming majority of slaves, fully 500,000 or more, centered in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, the difference between North and South was if anything greater than ever.

For Adams, who had seen far more of Europe than of his own country, the different Americas of the West and the South could only be imagined. But more disturbing to him than almost anything was the view heard in many circles that the old ideal of devotion to the public good had been supplanted by rampant avarice; the love of country, by a love of luxury. Mercy Warren had written to the Adamses while they were still in London that the current “avidity for pleasure” in America was certain to lead to trouble. Money, wrote James Warren bitterly, was all that mattered anymore. “Patriotism is ridiculed,” he had warned Adams. “Integrity and ability are of little consequence.”

The Warrens were among those who had adamantly opposed the Constitution, convinced it would only encourage speculation and vice. Certain that America was going the way of imperial Rome, James Warren had turned tiresomely sour and querulous. And though saddened by the change in his friend, Adams sensed he was right, that a moral shift had taken place. Nabby, appraising the politicians she encountered in New York, including Governor George Clinton, surmised there were few for whom personal aggrandizement was not the guiding motivation. She felt herself “in a land of strangers.” It was a feeling not unknown to her father.

“I find men and manners, principles and opinions, much altered in this country since I left it,” he confided to her. But this only made his dedication to union all the stronger.

*   *   *

AT THE START of every new venture of importance in his life, John Adams was invariably assailed by grave doubts. It was a life pattern as distinct as any. The boy of fifteen, riding away from home to be examined for admission to Harvard, suffered a foreboding as bleak as the rain clouds overhead. The delegate to the first Continental Congress, preparing to depart for Philadelphia, felt “unalterable anxiety”; the envoy sailing for France wrote of “great diffidence in myself.” That he always succeeded in conquering these doubts did not seem to matter. In advance of each large, new challenge, the painful waves rolled in upon him once again.

Part of this was stage fright, part the consequence of an honest reckoning of his own inadequacies. Mainly it was the burden of an inordinate ability to perceive things as they were: he was apprehensive because he saw clearly how much there was to be apprehensive about. And so it was as he approached the untried office of Vice President.

With issues of such immense national consequence to be addressed, policies to be considered and resolved, precedents to establish, laws to enact, an entire new structure for the governance of the nation to be brought into being, could he, given his nature, do justice to the essentially passive, ceremonial role he had been chosen to fill? Action had been his metier, advocacy his strength, and the vice presidency offered opportunity for neither. “The Vice President of the United States,” stipulated Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution, “shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.” So could he with his passion, his fund of opinion, his love of debate, possibly keep from speaking his mind? “I am but an ordinary man,” he had once written. “The times alone have destined me to fame.” But had “the times” now cast him in a role for which he was wholly unsuited?

Such worries weighed heavily through the journey to New York, for all the “parade and show” in his honor, and in advance of his first appearance in the Senate, he prepared a brief speech in which, with marked understatement and honesty, he identified the problem: “Not wholly without experience in public assemblies, I have been more accustomed to take a share in their debates than to preside in their deliberations.” Some months later, after one of the most unfortunate passages in a long public life, he would acknowledge succinctly to John Quincy that, in truth, the office he held was “not quite adapted to my character,” that it was too inactive, too “mechanical,” and that mistakenly he was inclined to think he must “throw a little light on the subject” when need be.

He had left home not knowing where he and Abigail might live, not knowing what salary Congress would provide, and worries over money troubled him exceedingly. Adams had strong views on the matter of recompense for officeholders. He was adamantly opposed to the notion espoused by some that in the ideal republican government public officials should serve without pay—an idea that had been supported by both Franklin and Washington, two of the wealthiest men in the nation. Were a law to be made “that no man should hold an office who had not a private income sufficient for the subsistence and prospects of himself and family,” Adams had written earlier while in London, then the consequence would be that “all offices would be monopolized by the rich; the poor and the middling ranks would be excluded and an aristocratic despotism would immediately follow.” He thought public officials should not only be paid, but that their salaries should be commensurate with their responsibilities and necessary expenses. And as one of the “middling ranks” himself, he viewed with great concern the expenses of living in New York.