John Adams - SA (72 page)

The “Reynolds Affair” was a complicated tangle of financial dealings, adultery, blackmail, and alleged corruption in the Department of the. Treasury, all dating back five years. In 1792, while his wife and children were away, Hamilton had become involved in an “improper connection” with a young woman named Maria Reynolds. Her husband, James Reynolds, a speculator with an unsavory reputation, commenced to blackmail Hamilton, until the point when he, Reynolds, went to prison for an earlier swindle. It was then, while in prison, that Reynolds, in an effort to ease his case, got word to three Republican members of Congress, including Senator James Monroe, that Hamilton was not only an adulterer, but, as Secretary of the Treasury, secretly profiteering with government funds. When the three confronted Hamilton with the charges, he denied any corrupt act as a public official, but acknowledged the affair with Mrs. Reynolds and the blackmail plot, with the understanding that they, as gentlemen, would keep silent, which they did to a degree. A few more were let in on the secret, including the Republican clerk of the House, John Beckley, and Thomas Jefferson.

But it was not until that summer of 1797 that the story broke in a series of unsigned pamphlets produced by James Callender, the unscrupulous writer for the Aurora, whose source apparently was Beckley.

Callender dismissed the adulterous affair as a cover story and accused Hamilton of being a partner with Reynolds in corrupt financial dealings. In response, Hamilton published his own pamphlet, Observations on Certain Documents... in which... the Charge of Speculation against Alexander Hamilton... is Fully Refuted. He denied any improper speculation with James Reynolds, but confessed to the adulterous affair. “My real crime,” Hamilton wrote, “is an amorous connection with his wife.”

Hamilton's disgrace was a windfall for the Republicans and all who had long thought him corrupt. Presumably the scandal would put a finish to his public career.

Jefferson appears to have made no comment on the Reynolds Affair. Nor did Adams, though it is certain he and Abigail heard plenty, such was the mood in Philadelphia when in November they arrived back at the President's House, after an absence of fully four months. “Alas, alas, how weak is human nature,” wrote Abigail to her son Thomas.

There was still no report from the three envoys to France. Speaking before Congress on November 23, Adams could acknowledge only that the “unpleasant state of things” continued. The wait would go on, and the lack of information, plus the suspicion that some people knew more than they were saying, only put nerves further on edge.

Feelings ran deep, dividing the parties, dividing old friends. “Men who have been intimate all their lives,” wrote Jefferson, “cross the streets to avoid meeting and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hats.”

*   *   *

IN EUROPE, French armies had been sweeping across Italy and Austria, in a campaign of French aggrandizement led by young General Napoleon Bonaparte, who appeared invincible. Now, with the start of a new year, 1798, Bonaparte had been given command of all forces on land and sea to carry the war across the Channel to Britain, and as John Quincy reported to his father, the expedition was “in great forwardness.” Bonaparte shortly was to change his mind and lead his forces to Egypt instead, as John Quincy would also report. The French had become formidable as never before.

January 1798 in Congress Hall in Philadelphia, by contrast, was marked by a battle royal on the floor of the House. Vicious animosity of a kind previously confined to newspaper attacks broke out in the first physical assault to occur in Congress. In the midst of debate, when Federalist Roger Griswold of Connecticut insulted Republican Matthew Lyon of Vermont, Lyon crossed the chamber and spat in Griswold's face. Soon after, Griswold retaliated with a cane. Lyon grabbed fire tongs from the fireplace, and the two went at each other until, kicking and rolling on the floor, they were pulled apart.

To some the scene provided comic relief. To others it was sad testimony to how very far the republican ideal had descended. It was also apt prelude to much that would follow.

Step by step, events were moving toward the precipice, as Adams said. The first hint of trouble with the mission to France had been in a letter to Adams from General Pinckney in November, but it was a hint only, nothing to go on. In January, again in a private letter, came word from John Marshall by way of The Hague warning that the mission might not be received by the French Directory. In February, to make the tension still worse, Adams had to inform Congress that a French privateer had actually attacked a British merchant ship inside Charleston Harbor.

“We are yet all in the dark respecting our envoys,” Abigail wrote on February 16; and again in another week: “Our envoys have been near six months in Paris but to this hour not a line has been received.”

In the meanwhile, as the President was unaware, his cabinet—Wolcott and McHenry in particular—were receiving continued advice and directions from Alexander Hamilton, who had supposedly retired from public life.

Hamilton was still opposed to war with France. “It is an undoubted fact that there is a very general and strong aversion to war in the minds of the people of the country,” he wrote to McHenry. “It is an undoubted fact that there is a very general indisposition toward the war in the minds of the people of the United States,” McHenry dutifully advised the President four days later. But should the present attempt to negotiate fail, then the President must address the Congress in a style “cautious, solemn, grave, and void of asperity,” declared McHenry—Hamilton also having told him this was what he was to say.

At last, late the evening of March 4, a year to the day since Adams became President, official dispatches arrived in Philadelphia and were delivered immediately to Timothy Pickering's desk at the Department of State at Fifth and Chestnut Streets. Four of the dispatches were in cipher and it would be several days before they were decoded. But the message of the fifth dispatch was clear. Seething with indignation, Pickering pulled on a coat and hurried three blocks to the President's House.

What Adams read was extremely unsettling. The government of France had refused to see the envoys. The mission had failed. Furthermore, the Directory had decreed all French ports closed to neutral shipping and declared that any ship carrying anything produced in England was subject to French capture.

Promptly the next morning, Monday, March 5, Adams sent the uncoded dispatch to Congress. But there was more to the story, as he soon learned with the decoding of the other dispatches.

After arriving in Paris in the first week of October, the three American envoys were kept waiting for several days and then were granted a meeting with Foreign Minister Talleyrand for all of fifteen minutes. More days of silence followed. Then began a series of visits from three secret agents representing Talleyrand—Jean Conrad Hottinguer, Pierre Bellamy, and Lucien Hauteval—who were referred to by the Americans in their dispatches as X, Y, and Z. The Foreign Minister was favorably disposed toward the United States, the American envoys were informed, but in order for negotiations to proceed, a douceur (a sweetener) would be necessary, a bribe of some $250,000 for Talleyrand personally. In addition, a loan of $10,000,000 for the Republic of France was required as compensation for President Adams's “insults” in his speech before Congress the previous May.

Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry refused to negotiate on such terms. M. Hottinguer, the X of X, Y, and Z, reminded them of the “power and violence of France,” as Marshall recorded, but the Americans held their ground. “Gentlemen,” said Hottinguer, “you do not speak to the point.

“It is money. It is expected that you will offer the money.... What is your answer?” to which General Pinckney emphatically replied, “No! No! Not a sixpence.”

The last of the dispatches was not entirely decoded until March 12, and for several days Adams struggled over what to do, listening to advice and scribbling his thoughts on paper as his mood swung one way then another. He wrote of the “continued violences” of the French at sea, of their “unexampled arrogance” in refusing to receive the envoys, and declared such “injury, outrage, and insult” more than a self-respecting nation should ever have to submit to. But he also noted that peace might still be attainable, and, in fact, peace with honor was still his determined objective.

Wild rumors swept the city. It was said France had already declared war on the United States, that the French were moving to take possession of Florida and Louisiana.

Adams's message to Congress on March 19 revealed only that the diplomatic mission had failed, and thus he must call again for the measures necessary to defend the nation in the event of attack. It was as mild a statement as he could have made under the circumstances. There was not a word about war, nor anything said of the contents of the dispatches, except that they had been examined and “maturely considered.”

The Republicans immediately decried the message as a declaration of war. In a letter to Madison, Jefferson called it “insane” and commenced lobbying for ways to delay action and allow time for Bonaparte to invade Britain. Jefferson proposed that members of Congress adjourn at once and go home to consult their constituents on the great crisis. “The present period ... of two or three weeks,” he told Madison in a burst of hyperbole, “is the most eventful ever known since that of 1775, and will decide whether the principles established by that contest are to prevail, or give way to those they subverted.”

Convinced that Adams was deliberately withholding information favorable to the French, Republicans in and out of Congress began insisting that the documents be made available at once. Any delay would be a sign of further duplicity. The Aurora taunted Adams for being “afraid to tell.”

“Beds of roses have never been his destiny,” Abigail wrote of her husband. Whether he would reveal more of the dispatches was something only he could determine, she told Mary; but “clamor who will,” great care must be taken that nothing endanger the lives of the envoys who were still in Paris. The Republicans, French agents, and the “lying wretch” Bache intended to abuse and misrepresent the President until they forced him to resign, “and then they will reign triumphant, headed by the man of the people, “Jefferson.

The respect she had expressed for Jefferson the year before had vanished. How different was the President's situation from that of Washington, whose Vice President had “never combined with a party against him... never intrigued with foreign ministers or foreign courts against his own government... never made Bache his companion and counsellor.” John Adams was no warmonger. In self-defense the country might become involved in a war, and for that the country should be prepared, which was the President's intent. Of what possible benefit could a war be to him? she asked. “He has no ambition for military glory. He cannot add by war to his peace, comfort, or happiness. It must accumulate upon him an additional load of care, toil, trouble, malice, hatred, and I dare say, revenge.”

On Monday, April 2, on the floor of the House, Representative Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania, who had replaced Madison in the leadership of the Republicans, stood to propose that the President be requested to turn over the text of the dispatches. Republicans who had been clamoring for disclosure were now joined by a number of High Federalists who had gotten wind of the damaging content of the dispatches and were happy to help the Republicans step into a trap of their own making. By a vote of 65 to 27 the House demanded that the full text be delivered at once.

Adams, who had apparently concluded that the envoys were by now safely out of France, released the documents the next day, and with the galleries cleared of visitors and the doors secured, the House went into executive session.

The revelation that the crisis was not less than the administration implied, but far worse, hit the Republicans like a hammer. They were “struck dumb, and opened not their mouths,” wrote Abigail. Many representatives privately voiced outrage over the effrontery of Talleyrand and his agents. Some offered lame new arguments. It was said that the whole XYZ story was a contrivance of the Federalist warmongers, that the breakdown of negotiations was the fault of the American envoys. Jefferson, while refusing to comment publicly, privately blamed Adams for past insults to the French, and insisted that Talleyrand and his agents were not, after all, the French government, which was “above suspicion.”

Once the Senate voted to have copies of the documents printed for use within Congress only, it was only a matter of days before they were public knowledge.

In the House, Gallatin had urged that the dispatches not be published, certain that they would dash any surviving hope of a settlement with France—which, it appears, was exactly the fear that troubled the President. And, indeed, High Federalists were claiming it was too late for preaching peace any longer. The Federalist press protested the “damnable outrages” of the French, and a wave of patriotic anti-French anger swept the city and the country with unexpected passion. As Abigail reported to Mary Cranch and John Quincy, public opinion in the capital changed overnight. The tricolor cockade of France that Republicans had been wearing in their hats all but disappeared from sight. No one was heard singing French patriotic songs in public as before, or espousing the cause of France.

The Aurora, in turn, lashed out at the President as a man “unhinged” by the “delirium of vanity.” Had Adams refrained from insulting the French, had he chosen more suitable envoys, the country would never have been brought to such a pass. But in a matter of days subscriptions and advertising fell off so drastically that it appeared the paper might fail. Anger at Bache and Callender was as intense nearly as at the French. John Fenno, editor of the rival Gazette of the United States, asked, “In the name of justice and honor, how long are we to tolerate this scum of party filth and beggerly corruption ... to go thus with impunity?” In the heat of the moment, it was a question many were asking, including the wife of the President. Bache and his kind had the “malice and falsehood of Satan,” wrote Abigail, whose dislike of the press, dating from the attacks on Adams by London newspapers a decade before, had nearly reached the breaking point.