John Adams - SA (67 page)

Adams expressed concern over the toll the presidency could take on his health. He felt perfectly strong, he assured her, but twice mentioned the tremble in his hands, and remarked that he could see the President rapidly aging before his eyes.

Early in February 1796, on the same day Benjamin Franklin Bache declared in the Aurora that “good patriot” Jefferson was the inevitable and ideal choice to replace Washington, Adams professed to be tired of politics.” I am weary of the game,” he told Abigail, then added with characteristic honesty what she had long understood, “Yet I don't know how I would live out of it.”

No successor to Washington could expect such support as Washington had, she warned. “You know what is before you—the whips, the scorpions, the thorns without roses, the dangers, anxieties, the weight of empire.” Still, the presidency would be a “glorious reward” for all his service to the country, should Providence allot him the task.

“I have looked into myself,” he wrote in another letter, “and see no dishonesty there. I see weakness enough. But no timidity. I have no concern on your account but for your health.”

I hate speeches
[he continued]
, messages, addresses, proclamations and such affected, constrained things. I hate levees and drawing rooms. I hate to speak to 1,000 people to whom I have nothing to say. Yet all this I can do.

When she reminded him that he was sixty years old, he replied, “If I were near I would soon convince you that I am not above forty.”

IN MARCH, when the House of Representatives took up the Jay Treaty, it appeared a constitutional crisis was in the offing. The Republicans had pounced on the treaty with all their “teeth and... nails,” as Adams reported. “The business of the country... stands still... all is absorbed by the debates.... Many persons are very anxious and forebode a majority unfavorable, and the most pernicious and destructive results.” It was hard to imagine the Republicans being that “desperate and unreasonable,” but should they be, he told Abigail, “this Constitution cannot stand... I see nothing but a dissolution of government and immediate war.”

He was again invited to dine alone with the President, who in the course of the evening mentioned three times that he would likely retire. “He detained me there 'til nine o'clock,” Adams wrote, “and was never more frank and open about politics. I find his opinions and sentiments are more like mine than I ever knew before, respecting England and France and our American parties.”

To Adams, time was moving all too fast. (“Long! Nothing is long! The time will soon be gone and we shall be surprised to know what has become of it.”) Then, the first week in May, he could happily send Abigail word that the Jay Treaty bills had passed both Houses, “and good humor seems to be returning.” The constitutional crisis had passed, the threat of war was greatly diminished.

Requesting a leave of absence, he was on his way home by May 6. His time as Vice President was virtually over. He had served longer than in any other post in his career, and in all he had served extremely well—dutifully as president of the Senate and with unfailing loyalty to Washington. He had cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate of historic importance—in protecting the President's sole authority over the removal of appointees, for example, and in the several stages leading to the location of the national capital. In all, Adams cast thirty-one deciding votes, always in support of the administration and more than by any vice president in history.

*   *   *

AT QUINCY he threw himself into his other life as farmer Adams with greater zest than ever, as though determined to make the most of what might be his last extended stay for a long while.

It had been a particularly fine spring along the coast of Massachusetts, with warm days and ample rain. The farm “shines very bright,” he wrote. For the first time in years he revived his diary, keeping note of all daily activity and progress. He decided to build a substantial new barn, the first such project he had ever undertaken. “This day my new barn was raised near the spot where... my father... raised his new barn in 1737,” he recorded on July 13. He thought it looked “very stately and strong.”

He kept three to ten men at work through the summer, including John Briesler, another of the numerous Bass family, Seth Bass, and a hard-drinking neighbor named Billings, who was an especially hard worker.

After the sedentary life of the Senate, Adams relished the days out of doors. He loved the work, the tangible results, the feeling that he had not only returned home, but returned, if only for a while, to the ways of his father and generations of Adamses.

July 15, Friday

... Went with three hands...
[to]
cut between 40 and 50 red cedars, and with a team of five cattle brought home 22 of them at a load. We have opened the prospect so that the meadows and western mountain may be distinctly seen....

July 16

... We got in two loads of English hay....

July 20

... Walked in the afternoon over the hills and across the fields and meadows, up to the old plain. The corn is as good there as any I've seen....

August 2

... finished the great wall on Penn's Hill.

August 5

... Sullivan and Mr. Sam Hayward threshing—Billings and Bass carting earth and seaweed and liming the compost.

He was up each morning with the birds, drank his usual gill of hard cider, and with Abigail passed quiet evenings reading, writing letters, or keeping up with his diary, where along with the chronicle of daily enterprises, he wrote of clear summer skies and described a morning shower as “a soft, fine rain in a clock calm... falling as sweetly as I ever saw in April...” Ever the realist, he wrote, too, of rattlesnakes and corn worms, Hessian flies and “mosquitoes numerous.”

Though Abigail's health remained a worry, she apparently felt well enough to entertain Parson Wibird at dinner and to ride to Weymouth to dine with Cotton Tufts, whose salted beef, shell beans, and whortleberry pudding Adams proclaimed “luxurious.”

“Of all the summers of my life,” he recorded, “this has been the freest from care, anxiety, and vexation to me. The sickness of Mrs. A. excepted.”

“Billings and Prince laying wall,” he wrote September 8. “Briesler and James picking apples and making cider. Stetson widening the brook.

I think to christen my place Peacefield, in commemoration of the peace which I assisted in making in 1783, of the thirteen years peace and neutrality which I have contributed to preserve, and of the constant peace and tranquility which I have enjoyed in this residence.

*   *   *

THOUGH POLITICS through the summer of 1796 had been in “a perfect calm,” as Abigail noted, neither she nor John had any illusions about what was to come. Mischief was surely brewing in “the Jacobin caldron,” she wrote, as “venomous as Macbeth's hell broth.” When the Boston papers carried news of Washington's retirement and the text of his “Farewell Address” of September 17, it was, as said, as if a hat had been dropped to start the race.

Adams and Jefferson were the leading candidates in what was the first presidential election with two parties in opposition, an entirely new experience for the country. Jefferson remained at Monticello, Adams at Peacefield, neither taking any part in what quickly became a vicious, all-out battle.

Adams was pilloried in the Republican press as a gross and shameless monarchist—“His Rotundity,” whose majestic appearance was so much “sesquipedality of belly,” as said Bache's Aurora. Adams, declared the widely read paper, was unfit to lead the country, and beneath a headline declaring AN ALARM, Bache warned that unless by their votes the people were to call forth Thomas Jefferson, “the friend of the people,” Adams, the “champion of kings, ranks, and titles,” would be their President. Were Adams to be elected, warned the Boston Chronicle, the principle of hereditary succession would be imposed on America, to make way for John Quincy. With Jefferson, said the paper, no one need worry since Jefferson had only daughters.

To add further fuel to the fire, Thomas Paine, in a fury over the Jay Treaty, unleashed an unprecedented attack on George Washington in the pages of the Aurora. Writing from Paris, Paine called Washington a creature of “grossest adulation,” a man incapable of friendship, “a hypocrite in public life,” apostate and impostor.

For their part, the Federalists were hardly less abusive. Jefferson was decried as a Jacobin, an atheist, and charged with cowardice for having fled Monticello from the British cavalry in 1781. “Poor Jefferson is tortured as much as your better acquaintance,” Adams wrote to John Quincy.

The candidates for Vice President were Aaron Burr of New York for the Republicans, and for the Federalists, Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, thus providing regional balance on both sides. Adams was expected to carry New England, Jefferson, the South, while the Middle States could go either way.

To add to Adams's troubles, Alexander Hamilton was up to his old tricks behind the scenes, urging the strongest possible support for Thomas Pinckney, ostensibly as a way to keep Jefferson from becoming Vice President, but also, it was suspected, to defeat Adams as well and make Pinckney president—Pinckney being someone Hamilton could more readily control.

The rumors of this that reached Adams at Quincy would be confirmed before the year was out by his old friend Elbridge Gerry, who was a presidential elector for Massachusetts and, like Adams, an ardent antiparty man. For both John and Abigail, Gerry's report marked the end of whatever remaining trust or respect they had for Hamilton. Abigail henceforth referred to him privately as Cassius. John called him “as great a hypocrite as any in the U.S. His intrigues in the election I despise.”

For all the clamor over politics, the country was still at peace and more prosperous than ever. If there was a prevailing sentiment overall concerning national politics, it was one of regret, even sadness, that Washington would soon be stepping down. Abigail expressed what most Americans felt when, quoting Shakespeare, she wrote of Washington, “Take his character all together, and we shall not look upon his like again.”

On November 23, Adams bid her goodbye and started for Philadelphia, and again by public conveyance, John Briesler his sole companion. “Fear takes no hold of me,” he assured Abigail, as if to boost both their spirits. He reached Philadelphia on December 4, and the night of December 7, struggling with the prospect of defeat, he wrote again:

I laugh at myself twenty times a day, for my feelings, and
[the]
meditations and speculations in which I find myself engaged: Vanity suffers. Cold feelings of unpopularity. Humble reflections. Mortifications. Humiliation. Plans of future life. Economy. Retrenching expenses: Farming. Returning to the bar, drawing writs, arguing causes, taking clerks.

I can pronounce Thomas Jefferson to be chosen P
[resident]
of
[the]
U
[nited]
S
[tates]
with firmness and a good grace that I don't fear. But here alone abed, by my fireside, nobody to speak to, pouring upon my disgrace and future prospects—this is ugly.

But in a week or so, in an entirely different mood, he was writing to tell her it appeared he would be elected President. Though the final count would not be known until February, when the electors met, it was being said openly in and out of Congress that he had won, and that Jefferson was to be Vice President.

Overnight, Adams was being treated as though suddenly he had become a different man, and this he found most remarkable. Even Bache's Aurora seemed to experience a miraculous change of heart. John Adams, the paper now declared, was clearly preferable to Washington.

There can be no doubt that Adams would not be a puppet—that having an opinion and judgment of his own, he would act from his own impulses rather than the impulses of others—that possessing great integrity he would not sacrifice his country's interests at the shrine of party... In addition ... it is well known that Adams is an aristocrat only in theory, but that Washington is one in practice—that Adams has the simplicity of a republican but that Washington has the ostentation of an eastern bashaw—that Adams holds none of his fellow men in slavery, but Washington does.... The difference is immense.

To Adams's particular delight, one of the most partisan of all the young Republicans, Representative William Branch Giles of Virginia, had been heard to say of him, “The old man will make a good President, too.”

*   *   *

AT MONTICELLO, Jefferson received word from Madison that he should be prepared for the likelihood of finishing second, and that for the good of the country and the “valuable effect” of his influence on Adams, he must accept the vice presidency. In reply, Jefferson expressed no reluctance to serve under Adams, since “he had always been my senior, from the commencement of my public life.” Then, three days after Christmas, Jefferson took up his pen to write an extraordinary letter to Adams.

From his latest information, Jefferson said, it appeared Adams's election to the “first magistracy” was an established tact. But to Jefferson this had never been in doubt. “I have never one single moment expected a different issue.” And though he knew he would not be believed, it was true nonetheless that he never wished it otherwise. He warned that Hamilton had been up to some of his usual schemes, but doubted it would change the outcome.

I leave to others the sublime delights of riding in the storm, better pleased with sound sleep and a warm berth below, with the society of neighbors, friends and fellow laborers of the earth, than of spies and sycophants. No one then will congratulate you with purer disinterestedness than myself... I have no ambition to govern men. It is a painful and thankless office... I devoutly wish you may be able to shun for us this war by which our agriculture, commerce, and credit will be destroyed. If you are, the glory will be all your own; and that your administration may be filled with glory and happiness to yourself and advantage to us is the sincere wish of one who though, in the course of our voyage through life, various little incidents have happened or been contrived to separate us, retains still for you the solid esteem of the moments when we were working for our independence, and sentiments of respect and affectionate attachment.