John Adams - SA (71 page)

Elbridge Gerry, however, was unacceptable to Pickering and the cabinet, who thought him too independent and unreliable. “It is ten to one against his agreeing with his colleagues,” Secretary of War McHenry warned the President. Even Abigail questioned the choice. But Adams insisted. He needed someone on the commission whose friendship and loyalty were beyond doubt. He knew Gerry—“I knew Gerry infinitely better than any of them,” he later said. The old bond of 1776 was still a tie that held Adams to Rush and even to Jefferson, for all the strains of politics. From the time of their ride to Philadelphia by horseback in the crisis winter of 1776, Adams had felt Gerry was someone to count on, and he was prepared to do just that in the present crisis. With the exception of his own son, John Quincy, there was perhaps no man in whom Adams placed more trust. Also, importantly, of the three envoys Gerry was the most sympathetic to France and, with his open admiration of Jefferson, came the closest to making it a bipartisan commission.

Later, when Marshall arrived in Philadelphia, Adams felt still better about the makeup of the commission. He and Marshall liked each other at once, even used virtually the same words to describe one another. Marshall judged Adams a “sensible, plain, candid, good tempered man,” while Adams wrote of Marshall, “he is a plain man, very sensible, cautious, and learned in the law of nations.”

In Paris the three American envoys would be dealing with the extremely wily and charming new French Foreign Minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord. A former bishop in the Catholic Church, Talleyrand had only recently returned to France after more than two years in exile in Philadelphia, where he had been well treated. Adams had known him but only slightly, not enough to have a sense of what to expect.

*   *   *

THE UNDECLARED WAR at sea continued. That spring Adams was informed that already the French had taken more than 300 trading vessels. American seamen had been wounded. In March the French captors of a ship out of Baltimore, the
Cincinnatus
, had tortured the American captain with thumbscrews in an unsuccessful attempt to make him say he was carrying British cargo.

“The task of the President is very arduous, very perplexing, and very hazardous. I do not wonder Washington wished to retire from it, or rejoiced in seeing an old oak in his place,” observed Abigail, who in her letters to her sister Mary was to provide an inside look at the Adams presidency like no other, much as she had in portraying their life in France and London years before, writing always to the moment and with untrammeled candor.

Adams was in his office in the President's House most of every day and from “such close application” looked exhausted. She took charge of the large house, supervised the staff, and sent off orders to Mary for shipments of the President's favorite New England cheese, bacon, white potatoes, and cider. In keeping with “old habit,” she told Mary, their day began at five in the morning. Breakfast was at eight, and they saw each other again at dinner, customarily served at three. “I begin to feel a little more at home, and less anxiety about the ceremonious part of my duty,” Abigail allowed. “I am obliged every day to devote two hours for the purpose of seeing company.”

The day is past, and a fatiguing one it has been
[she closed another letter at eight o'clock in the evening]
. The ladies of Foreign Ministers and the Ministers, with our own secretaries and ladies have visited me today, and add to them, the whole levee today of Senate and House. Strangers, etc. making near one hundred asked permission to visit me, so that from past 12 till near 4:00, I was rising up and sitting down.

She was both involved and vitally interested in her husband's world. She read all the newspapers, and in time came to know the names and faces of everyone in Congress, their background and political views. Little transpired in the capital that she did not know about. Yet her interest in matters at home never flagged. She kept contact with nieces and nephews, inquired regularly about the welfare of her pensioners: Parson Wibird, who had grown old and infirm, and her aged former servant Phoebe, to whom she sent money and made sure she had sufficient firewood and whatever other necessities were wanting.

The President's worries and burdens were never out of mind. “Mrs. Tufts once styled my situation ‘splendid misery,’ ” Abigail reminded Mary. Interestingly, it was a phrase Vice President Jefferson also used to describe the presidency.

When Adams named John Quincy to be minister to Prussia, more Republican protest erupted. Washington had never appointed relatives to office, it was said, not even distant relatives. The President must resign, charged the Aurora, “before it is too late to retrieve our deranged affairs.” When Congress chose to leave some matters to the “discretion” of the President, the Aurora attacked Adams for his excessive vanity.

“We may truly say we know not what a day will bring forth,” Abigail observed in her running account. “From every side we are in danger. We are in perils by land, and we are in perils by sea, and in perils by false brethren.” Whom she meant by false brethren, she did not say. But the Vice President all the while did nothing whatever to help his former friend the President. Further, he made no secret of his belief that Adams was leading the nation straight to war.

After years of seclusion at Monticello, Jefferson had, with amazing agility, stepped back into the kind of party politics he professed to abhor, and in no time emerged as leader of the opposition. With Madison in retirement, and the vice presidency providing ample free time, Jefferson kept extremely busy as a “closet politician,” in one man's expression, writing letters and lending support—ideas, information, and money—to the Republican press, including such “gladiators of the quill” as a dissolute Scottish pamphleteer and scandalmonger named James T. Callender, who wrote for the Aurora and specialized in attacks on John Adams.

The Francis Hotel, where Jefferson continued to lodge, became headquarters for the Republican inner circle. Any pretense of harmony between the President and Vice President was dispensed with. Like other Republicans, Jefferson failed to understand how Adams could reconcile negotiation for peace with measures of defense, and in private correspondence accused Adams of willfully endangering the peace. When some of this got back to Adams, he angrily declared it bespoke a mind “eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.”

Yet given all that Jefferson was doing, and the combustible atmosphere of the moment, Adams's rancorous comments were remarkably few and mild. Many in the Federalist party suspected Jefferson of outright treachery against his own country.

Convinced that the best hope for the world was the defeat of Britain by France, and that such an outcome was imminent, Jefferson privately advised the French charge d'affaires in Philadelphia, Philippe-Henry-Joseph de Letombe, that the Directory should show the three American envoys all proper courtesy but “then drag out the negotiations at length.”

Letombe wrote of the meeting with “the wise Jefferson,” in a report to his Foreign Minister, dated June 7, 1797. America, Jefferson had impressed upon Letombe, was “penetrated with gratitude to France” and would “never forget that it owes its liberation to France.” The new President of the United States was another matter, however. Jefferson was unsparing: “Mr. Adams is vain, irritable, stubborn, endowed with excessive self-love, and still suffering pique at the preference accorded Franklin over him in Paris.” But Adams's term of office was only four years, Jefferson reminded Letombe. Besides, Adams did not have popular support. “He only became President by three votes, and the system of the United States will change along with him.”

Possibly these were not Jefferson's exact words; possibly his assessment of Adams was not as harsh and patently disloyal as Letombe's account would make it appear. But if what Letombe recorded was all that Jefferson had to say for Adams, this would seem to have proved the end of a long friendship. And whatever Jefferson's exact words may have been, clearly the charge d'affaires was led to conclude that the difficulties of the moment were not a question of American regard for France, but of the difficult, unpopular, aberrant old man who temporarily held office as President.

The truth, it happens, was that Adams and Jefferson both wanted peace with France and each was working to attain that objective, though in their decidedly different ways.

SUMMER MARKED the departure of the envoys, Gerry sailing from Boston, Marshall from Philadelphia, where Congress sweltered and fumed trying to wind up business, before “the sick season” came on.

She could not wait to start for home, Abigail wrote. She longed for a sea breeze and her rose bush. “The President really suffers for want of a journey, or rather for want of some relaxation,” she told Mary Cranch.

Today will be the fifth great dinner I have had, about 36 gentlemen today, as many more next week, and I shall have to get through the whole of Congress, with their appendages. Then comes the 4th of July, which is a still more tedious day, as we must then have not only all Congress, but all the gentlemen of the city, the Governor and officers and companies... I hope the day will not be hot.

The Fourth turned out to be a “fine, cool day,” and her reception a great success.

... my fatigue arose chiefly from being dressed at an early hour, and receiving the very numerous sets of company who were so polite as to pay their compliments to me in succession in my drawing room after visiting the President below, and partaking of cake, wine, and punch with him. To my company were added the ladies of foreign ministers and Home Secretaries with a few others. The parade lasted from 12 until four o'clock.

To at least one of those present, she and the President seemed the picture of calm good cheer. Henrietta Liston, the British ambassador's wife, described Adams as “steady and resolute,” while “Mrs. Adams... has spirit enough to laugh at Bache's abuse of her husband, which poor Mrs. Washington could not do.”

In days the city had become a bake house again, as Abigail wrote. “The hot weather of July has weakened us all. Complaints of the bowels are very frequent and troublesome.” Strangely, cats were dying all over the city. The streets were filled with dead cats. No one had an explanation, and no one in Congress wished to delay departure an hour longer than necessary.

On July 10, exhausted, irritable members of both houses started for home convinced the special session had only aggravated party divisions.

Adams had hoped it would help unite the country, and in this plainly he had failed.

There was some consolation, however. After a good deal of fuss and bickering, Congress had at last approved an Act Providing a Naval Armament. It was hardly what Adams had called for, but it was a start, providing funds to equip and man three frigates, the
Constitution
, the
United States
, and the
Constellation
, which had been built during the Washington administration but remained unequipped for service.

With a cooling rain falling, the Adamses started for home on July 19. Why, asked the Aurora, had the President of the United States “absconded” from the seat of government at a time when the public mind was “exceedingly agitated”?

*   *   *

IT WAS A SUMMER without incident. There was no news from France, no worsening or lessening of the crisis. For Adams the pleasures of August and September at Peacefield had all the desired effect. By the time they were heading back to Philadelphia, he and Abigail were both rested and revived. Abigail wrote of feeling better than she had in years.

Also, one news item appears to have added considerably to their outlook. John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Johnson had been married, as the Adamses learned just before leaving home. The small announcement in a Boston paper, like the first word from John Quincy himself, appeared two months after the fact. The young couple were married on July 26 in the ancient Anglican church known as All Hallows Barking by the Tower of London.

“I have now the happiness of presenting to you another daughter,” read John Quincy's letter to his “Dear and Honored Parents,” each of whom responded with an appropriately warm letter of congratulations. “And may the blessing of God Almighty be bestowed on this marriage and all its connections and effects,” wrote Adams in benediction.

The departure from Quincy took place in the first week of October, but the Adamses were not to reach the capital for more than a month. Yellow fever again raged in Philadelphia, as they learned en route, and so it was necessary to stop and wait at East Chester with Nabby. Adams was kept apprised by daily reports. Two-thirds of the population of Philadelphia had fled the city. The government had scattered to various outlying towns. He imagined members of Congress stranded along the way all up and down the country, all waiting as he was, “in a very disagreeable, awkward, and uncertain situation.” Told there had been an attempt to break into the President's House and asked if a guard should be posted, Adams said no, lest a sentinel at the door lead people to think the situation worse than they knew.

The wait “at East Chester was not easy, as much as he and Abigail adored Nabby and the four grandchildren. The house was small, and the continued absence of Colonel Smith cast a shadow. Abigail found East Chester itself unbearably dull. She worried about Nabby living there, and urged her to come with the children to Philadelphia. “I cannot leave her here this winter with not a single creature within 20 miles of her to speak a word to, or shorten the long solitary winter evening,” she told Mary. But Nabby refused. “I cannot say as much as is in my mind,” wrote Abigail, “the subject being a very delicate one.”

Adams went to New York for a dinner in his honor. Otherwise, to fill the time there was little but the newspapers and talk of a sensational scandal involving Alexander Hamilton. Possibly for Abigail, who claimed to have seen “the very devil” in Hamilton's eyes, the story came as no surprise.