John Adams - SA (63 page)

Jefferson would have been better off had he let the matter drop. Instead, he wrote again, speciously insisting that blame for the controversy rested with “Publicola.” Then, in what must have been an effort to spare Adams's feelings, he went further. In direct contradiction to what he told Washington, Jefferson denied to Adams that he ever had him in mind when he wrote to the printer: “Indeed, it was impossible that my note should occasion your name to be brought into question; for as far from naming you, I had not even in view any writing which I might suppose to be yours.... Thus I hope, my dear sir, that you will see me to have been innocent in effect as I was in intention.”

In sum, Jefferson refused to take any responsibility for what had happened. To Washington he cited the “indiscretion of a printer”; to Adams he said John Quincy was the cause of the trouble, and that he himself was innocent of ever even thinking of Adams in the first place.

But it was not Jefferson who had suffered abuse and ridicule in the press. It was Adams, and the damage done was extreme, given the overwhelming popularity of both Thomas Paine and the French Revolution.

From this point on, Adams and Jefferson were seldom to be perceived as anything other than archrivals. The public stage that Jefferson said he wished to avoid, the growing enmity between public men that Adams abhorred, had made them in the public mind symbols of the emerging divisions in national politics. Further, in what he had written to Madison, and in what he had said in his note to the printer, Jefferson had tagged Adams with being both mentally unsound and a monarchist, the two charges most commonly and unjustly made against him for the rest of his life.

Adams let the matter drop. He made no reply to Jefferson's last letter, and there would be no further correspondence between them for several years. The “explanation with each other” that Adams hoped for would have to wait for more than two decades.

*   *   *

IN THE AUTUMN of 1791, alarmed to find they were living beyond their means, Abigail and John moved from Bush Hill to a modest dwelling in town at Fourth and Arch Streets. Servants were let go, except for Briesler and a cook, “a clever, sober, honest,” free black woman, as Abigail reported to Mary Cranch. “We live sociably and friendly together,” she wrote, and in many ways felt they were all better off living in town.

But with winter came the inevitable siege of illnesses, and for Abigail, beset mainly by rheumatism “attended with a violent fever,” it was as miserable a time as she had known. Her eyes became so inflamed she could not bear any light in her room, “not even the fire to blaze.” After six weeks in bed she was still too feeble to go downstairs without being carried. “I have scarcely any flesh left in comparison to what I was.” Dr. Rush came several times to draw blood, and, in the mistaken belief that the human body contained more blood than it actually does, it was his practice to bleed patients far more than customary. At times he was known to remove as much as eighty ounces, which could well explain Abigail's feeble state.

The news that Colonel Smith, newly returned from London, was to sail again on the next packet, and would be taking Nabby and the children with him, left her feeling still more dreadful. The “everlasting fever” hung on, she wrote weeks later, confiding also that the “critical period” of midlife compounded her troubles. She brooded over the brevity of life. “How soon may our fairest prospects be leveled with the dust and show us that man in his best estate is but vanity and dust?” she wrote on March 21, 1792, after a particularly bad night of “nerves.” It was already another election year, the end of the President's and the Vice President's terms of office. Who knew what was to come? Southern members of the House seemed determined not just to oppose the Secretary of the Treasury but to destroy him, while much of the press joined in the assault. Not even the President escaped their venom any longer. Oddly it was only the Vice President now who was allowed to “sleep in peace,” though this hardly compensated for Abigail's worry for the country.

“I firmly believe,” she darkly forecast to Mary, “if I live ten years longer, I shall see a division of the Southern and Northern states, unless more candor and less intrigue, of which I have no hopes, should prevail.”

Adams was more sanguine. If frequently exhausted by his labors and distressed over her ailments, he appears to have come to terms with his marginal role in the order of things. It had been a painful process, but he had at last learned the part he was supposed to play and to a large degree accepted its limitations. Rarely did he speak in the Senate anymore. Rarely if ever did he intrude on Senate business. If the role of Vice President made him a political cipher—as it would anyone—he could at least serve faithfully.

He was in the chair every day, all day, without fail, which was a point of pride with him, but also of some worry, since he knew such sedentary confinement to be good neither for the body nor the spirit of “a man habituated for a long course of years to long voyages and immense journeys.”

Though loyal to Washington and the administration, Adams was but nominally a Federalist, refusing steadfastly to be, or to be perceived as, a party man. That he had allowed “no party virulence or personal reflections” to escape him was also a matter of pride and consolation. If called upon to maintain order in the Senate now, he apparently had only to tap gently with his silver pencil case on the small mahogany table before him.

In mid-April, her health sufficiently restored for her to travel, Abigail returned to Massachusetts. Adams followed in May, once Congress adjourned, and the long summer at home, far removed from the hornets' nest of election-year politics at the capital, did much to restore them both.

The one big change at home was that their part of town, the old, first-settled North Precinct, had been broken off from the rest of Braintree and renamed Quincy. Otherwise, town life and days on the farm went on refreshingly the same as always.

*   *   *

AMONG CLOSE ASSOCIATES the President had been expressing a strong desire to return to private life. He was weary of the demands of office, weary and disheartened, Washington said, by party rancor and a severely partisan press that had taken to calling him the American Caesar.

Many of the harshest attacks on Hamilton's economic policies—and some of the more biting comments on Washington himself—came from the National Gazette, a newspaper newly established in Philadelphia as an antidote to the partisan Federalist views of the Gazette of the United States, to which Alexander Hamilton was a regular contributor of essays and money. But when it became known that the editor of the new National Gazette, Philip Freneau, had been encouraged to establish the paper by Madison and Jefferson, and that he was also employed by Jefferson as a translator in the Department of State, it appeared Jefferson himself had a hand in the attacks on the President and the administration. The most vicious assaults, however, were aimed at Hamilton, whom Freneau delighted in vilifying, and to add to the insults, such diatribes were nearly always accompanied by lavish praise for Jefferson.

Washington claimed to disregard newspaper abuse but privately asked Jefferson to intercede with Freneau and remove him from the State Department. Jefferson insisted that Freneau and his paper were saving the country from monarchy and persuaded Washington that it would be a grave misstep to impede on freedom of the press.

Even more aggravating for the President was the unrelenting feud between Jefferson and Hamilton, the two highest officers in his cabinet, and the most gifted. Animosity between them had reached the point where they could hardly bear to be in the same room. Each was certain the other was a dangerous man intent on dominating the government; and each privately complained of the other to the President.

The one, Hamilton, disliked and distrusted the French, while, for the good of the American economy, strongly favoring better relations with Britain. The other, Jefferson, disliked and distrusted the British, while seeing in France and the French Revolution the embodiment of the highest ideals of the American Revolution. To Jefferson, Hamilton was “not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.” To Hamilton, Jefferson belonged among those “pretenders to profound knowledge” who were “ignorant of the most useful of all sciences—the science of human nature.” The day would come, Hamilton warned, when Jefferson would be revealed as a voluptuary and an “intriguing incendiary.”

Washington urged “mutual forebearances, and temporizing yieldings on all sides.” To Hamilton, he expressed a deep melancholy that” a fabric so goodly, erected under so many providential circumstances,” should be “wracked by controversy and brought to the edge of collapse.”

On one issue only were Hamilton and Jefferson in agreement—that for the sake of the country, Washington must serve a second term, as he alone could hold the union together. “North and South will hang together if they have you to hang on,” Jefferson told Washington. There were very few such uniquely eminent individuals upon whom society had peculiar claims, Jefferson insisted. Among that indispensable few, however, Jefferson did not count himself. His own intention was to retire.

In the National Gazette, Freneau warned that “plain American republicans” stood to “be overwhelmed by those monarchical writers on Davila, etc.,” who were spreading “their poisoned doctrines throughout this blessed continent.” To commemorate July 4, the paper declared, “Another revolution must and will be brought about in favor of the people.”

Seeing themselves as representing the true spirit of republican ideals, Jefferson, Madison, Freneau, and others allied with them had begun calling themselves Republicans, thus implying that the Federalists were not, but rather monarchists, or monocrats, as Jefferson preferred to say. And while there was as yet some question whether it was Jefferson or Madison who led the Republicans, there was no doubt about who led the Federalists. It was Hamilton, who was more than a match for anyone.

Hamilton, for his part, had no intention of diverting votes from Adams this time around. Aaron Burr, a New York Republican and Hamilton's nemesis, was in the running for Vice President and so Hamilton was happy now to laud Adams as “a real friend to genuine liberty, order and stable government.”

Early in September, Hamilton sent an urgent letter to Quincy telling Adams he must return to Philadelphia with all possible speed. Adams's absence from the scene, Hamilton warned, was benefiting the candidacy of yet another, more serious rival for the vice presidency, the popular governor of New York, George Clinton, a long-time Anti-Federalist now in the Republican camp. “I am persuaded you are very indifferent personally to the event of a certain election, yet I hope you are not so as to the cause of good government,” Hamilton wrote.

But with Congress not due to reconvene for another two months and the President still declining to say whether he would serve again, Adams saw no need for hurry and remained where he was. What annoyed him exceedingly, he confided to Abigail, was the idea that George Clinton could ever be regarded as a serious rival, given the immense difference in their sacrifices for the country, differences in experience and knowledge. To Adams this was not a question of vanity but of plain fact.

*   *   *

THE NEWSPAPERS, meanwhile, were filled with increasingly lurid news from Paris. With the whole country beset by chaos and violence, France by now was also at war with much of Europe. The King was being held a virtual prisoner in the Palace of the Tuileries, while the extreme radicals of the revolution, the Jacobins—Marat, Danton, Robespierre—were riding high.

The Massachusetts Centinel carried a report from London dated August 14, describing how, on August 10, a riotous mob of thousands had marched on the Tuileries to proclaim the King a traitor and call for his head. The paper reported that 130 of the King's Swiss guards were cut down, countless others murdered, and “numerous heads, stuck on poles, were carried about the streets.” Actually more than 500 Swiss guards had been slaughtered, and at least 400 of the besiegers.

An October edition of the Boston paper carried a report of massacres in September in which 6,000 to 7,000 people had been slain, which was an exaggeration. Yet the truth of the September Massacres was hardly less appalling. Some 1,400 political prisoners—including more than 200 priests—were butchered in the name of the revolution. “Let the blood of traitors flow. That is the only way to save the country,” cried Marat, who had once been a physician pledged to save lives.

From London, Nabby wrote to her mother of reports from Paris “too dreadful to relate.” “Ship loads of poor, distressed, penniless priests and others are daily landing upon this island.” The Marquis de Lafayette had fled France and was being “kept a close prisoner by the Austrians.” Madame de Lafayette had escaped to Holland. That the French King and Queen would soon “fall sacrifice to the fury of the mobites,” Nabby had no doubt. “I wonder what Mr. Jefferson says to all these things?”

As it happened, William Short was writing to Jefferson from The Hague at the same time, and his descriptions of events greatly distressed Jefferson. In a stinging confidential reply of January 1793, Jefferson called them “blasphemies.” “The tone of your letters had for some time given me pain,” he informed Short, “on account of the extreme warmth with which they censured the proceedings of the Jacobins of France.” Jefferson would hear no more of it. “I consider that sect as the some with the Republican patriots (of America)....” He deplored the loss of life, Jefferson said, but only as he would deplore the loss of life in battle. Then Jefferson, whose personal philosophy was to get through life with the least pain possible, who shunned even verbal conflict, made as extreme a claim as any of the time.

The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest... rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every continent, and left free, it would be better than it now is.