John Adams - SA (61 page)

With the death of Franklin on April 17, Philadelphia staged the greatest public homage that had ever been given a deceased American. In New York, the House of Representatives voted to put on mourning, but the Senate declined. When Jefferson proposed to Washington that the executive department follow the example of the House, Washington, too, declined, saying he would not know where to draw the line if he once began such a ceremony.

Adams's only known response to the news of Franklin's demise was in a letter to Rush in which he lamented the lies history would tell of “our revolution.” “The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical rod smote the earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiation, legislation, and war.”

The reunion of the Adamses and Jefferson in New York was appropriately amicable. They saw each other socially at dinners and presidential levees, and on more than one occasion, Jefferson rode out to Richmond Hill. “Jefferson is here and adds much to the social circle,” Abigail noted, but that was all. Jefferson in his letters home to Patsy (whom he addressed as Martha, now that she was a married woman) made no mention of the Adamses.

The Gazette of the United States had by now carried the text of a formal reply by Jefferson to the welcome he had received from his Virginia neighbors. It was a declaration of his faith in reason and democracy that he had taken great pains over.

It rests now with ourselves to enjoy in peace and concord the blessings of self-government so long denied to mankind: to show by example the sufficiency of human reason for the care of human affairs and that the will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps even this may sometimes err, but its errors are honest, solitary and shortlived. Let us then, my dear friends, forever bow down to the general reason of society.

But to Adams the “sufficiency” of reason alone for the care of human affairs was by no means clear, and it was exactly the will of the majority, particularly as being exercised in France, that so gravely concerned him. He was certain France had “severe trials” to endure, as he wrote to a friend. The will of the majority, if out of hand, could lead to “horrible ravages,” he was sure. “My fundamental maxim of government is never to trust the lamb to the wolf,” and in France, he feared, the wolf was now the majority.

Adams's series of articles also commenced in the Gazette of the United States that spring of 1790, on April 27, and would continue for a year, endlessly, it seemed to many. Though they were unsigned, the identity of the author was common knowledge. Titled
Discourses on Davila
, and ultimately published as a book, they were largely a translation of a history of the French civil wars of the sixteenth century, a once-popular work,
Historia delleguerre civili di Francia
, by the Italian Enrico Caterino Davila, published first in 1630. More than he had in his Defence of the Constitutions, Adams stressed the perils of unbridled, unbalanced democracy, and in what he called “useful reflections” he dealt with human nature, drawing heavily on the works of Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, and on Pope's Essay on Man.

In the initial installments, he wrote again, as he had as far back as his teaching days at Worcester, of the natural “passion for distinction “in all men and women—“whether they be old or young, rich or poor, high or low, wise or foolish, ignorant or learned, every individual is seen to be strongly actuated by a desire to be seen, heard, talked of, approved and respected.”

“To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable,” wrote the man who, as Vice President, felt himself so consistently overlooked.

He ruminated on avarice, poverty, fame, and honor. No one, he wrote, better understood the human heart than the Romans, who “considered that as reason is the guide of life, the senses, the imagination and affections are the springs of activity.” Unlike Jefferson, Adams was not only fascinated by “the passions,” but certain they ruled more often than others were willing to concede. “Reason holds the helm, but passions are the gales.”

The world was growing more enlightened, Adams conceded. “Knowledge is more diffused.... Man, as man, becomes an object of respect.” But, he insisted, there was “great reason to pause and preserve our sobriety.

Amidst all their exultations, Americans and Frenchmen should remember that the perfectibility of man is only human and terrestrial perfectibility. Cold will still freeze, and fire will never cease to burn; disease and vice will continue to disorder, and death to terrify mankind.

Between Jefferson and Adams there was no discussion of their diverging views. To Jefferson, Adams had become an embarrassment, and while always pleasant in social encounters, Jefferson had as little as possible to do with him. On matters of foreign relations, where Adams's judgment could have been of value, Jefferson would never seek his counsel or include him in deliberations. Washington seldom asked Adams for views, but Jefferson, who in Europe had deferred repeatedly to Adams, asked for them not at all.

Like Washington and many others, Adams had become increasingly distraught over the rise of political divisiveness, the forming of parties or factions. That political parties were an evil that could bring the ruination of republican government was doctrine he, with others, had long accepted and espoused. “There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader and converting measures in opposition to each other,” Adams had observed to a correspondent while at Amsterdam, before the Revolution ended. Yet this was exactly what had happened. The “turbulent maneuvers” of factions, he now wrote privately, could “tie the hands and destroy the influence” of every honest man with a desire to serve the public good. There was “division of sentiments over everything,” he told his son-in-law William Smith. “How few aim at the good of the whole, without aiming too much at the prosperity of parts!”

Then, in May, with the weather unseasonably wet and cold and influenza rampant in the city, Washington was suddenly taken so ill it appeared the one unifying force respected by all was in mortal jeopardy.

In the first six months of his presidency, Washington had lived in a comparatively modest house on Cherry Street, but had since moved to grander quarters, a mansion on Broadway, where now the street was cordoned off to give him some quiet. One doctor after another came and went at the front door. For several days, until the fever broke, it appeared the President was dying. Senator Maclay, on a call at the house, found “every eye full of tears.” When the President's presiding physician allowed that death was all but certain, alarm swept through the city. Calamity faced the country.

For the Adamses, they were days of extreme anxiety. When the crisis passed, Abigail tried to convey to Mary Cranch the degree to which the union and permanency of the government depended on Washington's life. “At this early day when neither our finances are arranged, nor our government sufficiently cemented to promise duration, his death would, I fear, have had most disastrous consequences.” The prospect of anyone succeeding to Washington's place was unthinkable, but the realization that there was indeed “only one breath,” as John had put it, between him and the presidency, and that it would be he who would have to face the “disastrous consequences,” had struck her full force as it had not before. “I feared a thousand things which I pray I never may be called to experience,” she continued. “Most assuredly I do not wish for the highest spot. I never before realized what I might be called to do, and the apprehension of it only for a few days greatly distressed me.”

Meantime, the entire household at Richmond Hill was stricken with influenza, with the exception of the Vice President. James Madison had been laid up. One congressman died. Jefferson was out of circulation for a month, confined to his house in the grip of excruciating headaches.

That one had to keep “a good heart,” come what may, was Abigail's lifelong creed. “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine,” she loved to say, quoting Proverbs. “I hate to complain,” she now wrote. “No one is without difficulties, whether in high or low life, and every person knows best where their own shoe pinches.”

That June of 1790, with the President recovered, the French diplomat, Louis-Guillaume Otto, summing up the situation in New York for his government, reported that the influence and importance of the Vice President were “nil.” If Washington had an heir apparent, by all rights it was Jefferson.

It appears certain at present that he
[Adams]
will never be President and that he will have a very formidable competitor in Mr. Jefferson, who, with more talents and knowledge than he, has infinitely more the principles and manners of a republican.

*   *   *

THAT SUMMER Congress worked itself to a fever pitch over two issues certain to be of long-lasting consequence. The question of where to locate the national capital had been a topic of rancorous discussion since the summer before, and was again at the forefront, along with a proposal for the federal government to assume some $25 million in debts incurred by the states during the Revolution. The “assumption” plan was the work of the youthful Hamilton, who, since his appointment, had swiftly made the Treasury the most creative department in the government, and was commonly recognized as having extraordinary ability.

An immigrant of illegitimate birth, Hamilton had arrived in New York from the West Indies at age fifteen. In less than ten years he had distinguished himself as a scholar at King's (later Columbia) College, served as Washington's aide in the war, led an assault at Yorktown, and married into the wealthy, influential Schuyler family of New York, which did him no harm when, after the war, he turned his energies to the law and politics. Brilliant to the point of genius, he exuded vitality and could turn on great charm when needed. His capacity for hard work was almost superhuman. Though somewhat shorter than Adams—about five feet seven—he was attractively slender, handsome, with clear blue eyes and sandy red hair, and dressed so as never to be lost in a crowd, in perfectly tailored coats, waistcoats, and breeches in a rainbow of colors. Even his ambition seemed to become him—Adams wrote of Hamilton's “high-minded ambition”—and his incurable love of intrigue had thus far alienated no one.

As one of the principal authors, along with Madison, of the Federalist Papers, Hamilton ranked as a leading proponent of a strong central government, and his name was commonly linked with that of Madison, with whom he remained on friendly terms. Further, both were highly esteemed by the President, which was of considerable importance.

Madison, a tiny, sickly-looking man who weighed little more than a hundred pounds and dressed always in black, had emerged as the most formidable figure in the House, largely on the strength of a penetrating intelligence and a shrewd political sense. Adams thought him overrated, but in time Adams would change his mind.

Hamilton's assumption plan had first been laid before Congress the previous January, 1790, as part of a large report in which he argued that a sound public credit was essential to economic growth and national unity. He had called for the central government to pay off all federal debt and to assume the debt of the states as well, on the grounds that they had been incurred in the common cause of independence. Boldly, Hamilton argued that such an increase in the national debt would be a blessing, for the greater the responsibility of the central government, the greater its authority.

He was vehemently opposed, however, by those who saw it as an overreaching and very unrepublican move to concentrate power in the central government to the detriment of the states. To southerners in the Congress the scheme would not only reduce the importance of the states, but would lead to a dangerous, ultimately corrupting concentration of wealth and power in the North. And it was Madison now, breaking with Hamilton, who led the opposition in the House, where assumption was put to the vote on April 12 and narrowly defeated.

Still, the battle continued, and at the same time that the location of the capital—the “residence” issue—had become a subject of equal rancor. New Yorkers, eager to keep the capital where it was, had begun building an executive mansion for Washington by the Battery, with a grand panorama of the harbor. New Englanders also favored New York, it being much the easiest location for them to reach, though Philadelphia, adamantly espoused by the Pennsylvanians, was considered an acceptable alternative.

The Virginians wanted no part of either of the northern cities and were strongly committed to bringing the capital south to a site on the Potomac River not far from Washington's home at Mount Vernon. Those “most adjacent to the seat of legislation will always possess advantages over others,” said Madison, who feared that the South and its agrarian way of life would suffer were the capital to remain in the North.

In the Senate, charges and countercharges were voiced with increasing vehemence. Adams struggled to keep order and apparently with little effect. “John Adams has neither judgment, firmness of mind, nor respectability of deportment to fill the chair of such an assembly,” scoffed the ever-splenetic William Maclay.

Then, on a morning in June, the historic “compromise of 1790” began to take form, when Hamilton and Jefferson met outside the President's house and Hamilton, taking Jefferson by the arm, walked him up and down for half an hour, urging him, for the sake of the union, to join in “common cause” and resolve acceptance of the assumption bill. Professing that reasonable men ought to be able to reach a compromise, Jefferson invited Hamilton and Madison to dine at his house the next day. And there, over a bottle of Jefferson's best wine, the bargain was struck. In return for southern support for the assumption bill, Hamilton agreed to do all he could to persuade the Pennsylvanians to vote for a permanent capital by the Potomac, if it were agreed to move the capital temporarily to Philadelphia. Madison said he would not vote for assumption, but then neither would he be “strenuous” in opposition.