John Adams - SA (75 page)

The French wanted peace, Gerry reported.

Three days later, on Thursday, October 4, Gerry presented himself at Quincy, and he and Adams settled in for a long private talk.

In his few days ashore Gerry had been thoroughly ostracized in Boston. “Not a hat was moved” as he walked up State Street, according to one account from the time. Angry crowds shouted insults outside his Cambridge home. But the welcome from Adams was warm, and the more Gerry talked, the more Adams must have realized that the current had turned his way at last. Talleyrand, Gerry assured him, was ready to treat seriously with the United States.

It was a critical moment in Adams's presidency. Among other things, Gerry had more than justified Adams's confidence in him. What he was telling Adams, to be sure, was what Adams desperately wanted to hear. The last thing in the world Adams wished to do was to lead the country into a needless war. But more to the point, he judged quite correctly that Gerry was telling the truth.

John Marshall had said much the same thing, and so had John Quincy in some of his correspondence with his father, but as Adams was to write, the assurances of Gerry—“my own ambassador”—were “more positive, more explicit, and decisive.”

Gerry's letter of October 1, Adams later said, “confirmed these
[earlier]
assurances beyond all doubt in my mind, and his conversations with me at my own house in Quincy, if anything further had been wanting, would have corroborated the whole.”

It was the week after Gerry's return when a letter arrived from Washington. Written on September 25, it did not reach Adams until October 8. Were he to be denied the deciding voice in the selection of his general staff, Washington informed the President, he would resign his commission.

Adams sent off an immediate reply, agreeing to Washington's wishes. As he had accepted Washington's cabinet in the interest of unanimity, so he now accepted Washington's choice of Hamilton. But he also had reason to believe now that Hamilton and the army might not be needed at all.

As a matter of form, he reminded Washington a bit lamely that by the Constitution it was the President who had the authority to determine the rank of officers. Washington promoted Hamilton to be inspector general.

In the contest of who was in charge, Adams, it seemed, had been put in his place, outflanked not so much by Washington as by his own cabinet, and ultimately Hamilton, which left Adams feeling bruised and resentful. But at the same time, it gave Hamilton, and those in Adams's cabinet whose first loyalty was to Hamilton, an inflated sense of their own importance and authority.

From continued discussion with Gerry at Quincy and from new dispatches from William Vans Murray at The Hague, Adams became convinced that Gerry's conduct in Paris had not only been proper, but courageous. On October 20, writing to Pickering to ask for suggestions on the content of his forthcoming message to Congress, Adams made it plain that he was thinking of sending a new minister to France “who may be ready to embark ... as soon as ... the President shall receive from the Directory satisfactory assurance that he shall be received and entitled to all the prerogatives and privileges of the general laws of nations.” Further, he offered a list of those he had in mind for the assignment that included Patrick Henry and William Vans Murray.

Then, in a letter to his Secretary of War expressing his full support for Washington's judgment, Adams added two pointed observations. Maintaining armies was costly business and could become quite unpopular in the absence of an enemy to fight, he reminded McHenry. Of what possible use could a large army be, Adams was saying, if a French invasion never took place? In closing, he observed, “At present there is no more prospect of seeing a French army here than there is in heaven.”

*   *   *

ABIGAIL'S ILLNESS dragged on. She never left her sickbed, her “dying bed,” as she said. Talk of sickness and death—of insomnia, melancholy, her persistent, baffling fevers—dominated the domestic scene, just as sickness and death filled the newspapers, week after week, as yellow fever spread in Boston, New York, Baltimore, and worst of all in Philadelphia.

By September nearly 40,000 people had evacuated Philadelphia. Yet the newspapers continued to report more than a hundred new cases a day. “The best skill of our physicians... have proved unequal to the contest of this devouring poison,” reported the Aurora. By the time the plague ran its course in Philadelphia, more than 3,000 lost their lives, including, as the Adamses were stunned to read, the mayor of the city and both Bache of the Aurora, who had died on September 10 at age twenty-nine, and his arch nemesis, Fenno of the Gazette of the United States, who died just days before. The list of victims also included four of the servants at the President's House, as Abigail was duly informed.

The melancholy that beset her was unrelenting, suggesting the fever she suffered may have been malaria, but she was also distressed over further troubles within the family.

Before leaving on his diplomatic assignment abroad, John Quincy had left his savings, some $2,000, in the trust of his brother Charles. In the time since, however, Charles had managed to lose nearly all of it through bad investments, and then kept silent about what had happened, refusing to answer John Quincy's queries, in the hope that, with a little more time, he might somehow recover at least part of the money. Only that summer had the truth become known within the family, and it was devastating to both parents, but especially to Abigail, who had so long and so diligently managed the family affairs.

“I have not enjoyed one moment's comfort for upwards of two years on this account,” Charles wrote to his mother in midsummer. “My sleep has been disturbed, and my waking hours embittered.”

“He is not at peace with himself,” she would write later to John Quincy, during her convalescence, “and his conduct does not meet my wishes.

He has an amiable wife... two lovely children. I hope my letters will in time have their effect. I have discharged my duty I hope faithfully, but my dying bed was embittered... with distress for the only child whose conduct ever gave me pain.

Abigail was bedridden at Quincy altogether for eleven weeks. It was early November before she was well enough to come downstairs, and it was early November before Philadelphia was declared once more free of yellow fever.

On November 12, leaving Abigail behind, Adams headed off in the presidential coach behind two spirited horses and accompanied by his young nephew William Shaw—Billy Shaw, as he was known—a recent graduate of Harvard who had been lame since birth and had lately become the President's secretary.

“I strive to divert the melancholy thoughts of our separation, and pray you do the same,” Adams wrote to Abigail at the end of his first day on the road.

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

—John Adams

ADAMS WAS ON THE MOVE AGAIN, gobbling up the miles. The weather was clear and cool, the road dry. “Our horses go like birds,” he wrote. Some days they made thirty miles. “We glided along unforeseen, unexpected, and have avoided all noise, show, pomp, and parade,” he reported to Abigail from Connecticut.

He wrote nearly a letter a day. His teeth and gums ached; one side of his face was badly swollen. Yet, he assured her, he was neither “fretful nor peevish.” Indeed, the speed at which he moved, his joy in horses that could fly like birds, suggest he was heading for the capital knowing there was a way out of the impasse he had faced since taking office—that out of the gloomiest of times at home had come a first real sense that he might succeed after all in his main objective.

A recurring rumor did much for his spirits. It was said a British fleet under Admiral Horatio Nelson had overwhelmed the French off the coast of Egypt. “Nelson's victory is mightily believed along the road,” Adams wrote. If true, the chance of a French invasion of America had all but vanished.

There was snow in New York and the horses required a day's rest. Adams stopped to see his son Charles, but of this he wrote nothing.

Crossing New Jersey, the horses flying again, they made forty-five miles in a day, to arrive on November 24 in Philadelphia, where it was known for certain that Nelson had destroyed the French fleet at the battle of the Nile, four months earlier on August 1.

The city was in a bustle. Throngs of people were returning to resume daily life, opening boarded-up shops, airing out houses, scrubbing everything with a will, now that the epidemic had passed. The weather was brisk. Congress was back, and to the delight of the city, George Washington had returned and could be seen coming and going from temporary headquarters at a boarding house on Eighth Street.

The general had entered Philadelphia on November 10 with full military flare, on horseback and in uniform, and accompanied by cavalry. “Almost the whole of the military corps were drawn up on the commons to receive him,” reported the Aurora, which had suspended publication following the death of Benjamin Bache, but was back in business under Bache's wife, Margaret. “This morning arrived in town the Chief who unites all hearts,” exclaimed another paper, the American Daily Advertiser.

While the war fever of summer had by no means vanished like the yellow fever, the spirit of opinion heard in the shops and taverns, and within the councils of government, was noticeably more moderate, and in large part because of the British victory at the Nile. Albert Gallatin wrote to his wife that he felt an honorable accommodation with France was now within the power of the administration, perhaps even “certain.”

Soon after his arrival, Adams met with a Philadelphia physician named George Logan, who had recently returned from France. As a Quaker and ardent Republican, Logan was not the sort of man Adams was known to favor. To Federalist war hawks he was contemptible, since he had presumed to conduct his own peace mission to France. Roundly castigated as a dangerous, possibly disloyal meddler, Logan found it impossible to get a fair hearing within the administration. When he called on the Secretary of State, to say he had been told by high officials in the French government that France was ready to make peace, Pickering gave him short shrift and showed him to the door. To see George Washington, Logan had accompanied a Philadelphia clergyman when he called at the house on Eighth Street. But Washington had refused to speak to Logan, directing what few comments he had to the clergyman only.

Adams, however, received Logan courteously, and tea was served. He had conversed directly with Talleyrand and a principal member of the Directory, Logan said, and they had expressed the wish to settle all disputes with America.

Adams showed displeasure only once, when Logan insisted that the Directory was ready to receive a new American minister. According to Logan, Adams leaped from his chair, saying that only if a Republican were sent would the French receive him. “But I'll do no such thing,” Adams said. “I'll send whom I please.”

“And whomever you do please to send will be received,” Logan assured him.

Whether he knew it at the time, Logan had made a strong impression. “I had no reason to believe him a corrupt character, or deficient in memory or veracity,” Adams later wrote.

Secretaries Pickering and McHenry remained certain that war was inevitable. Nonetheless, they joined the consensus among the President's advisers that, given the mood of the country and the Congress, a declaration of war at this point would be “inexpedient.” But it was also the unanimous conclusion of the cabinet that another mission to France would be an act of humiliation and was therefore unacceptable. If there were to be peace overtures, they must come from France. Let a French mission cross the ocean this time.

On December 7, 1798, Adams walked to Congress Hall, and in the presence of Generals Washington and Hamilton, Secretary of State Pickering, and both houses of Congress, he affirmed again America's need for defensive strength and America's desire for peace. The speech had been written by Pickering and Wolcott, and except for the addition of one phrase, Adams had made few changes. It must, he said, be “left with France ... to take the requisite step” of assuring that any American mission sent to Paris would be properly received. So while preparation for war would continue, Adams had signaled that the door to peace remained ajar. It was only a question of French intent and sincerity.

The speech infuriated the Republicans and the Vice President, and no less was the anger of the High Federalists in Congress, who had expected a declaration of war. If Adams lacked the fortitude to take the step, then Congress would, they declared. But their efforts failed. Congress was not inclined to declare war.

The martial ambitions of the inspector general were undampened, however. With his new command, Hamilton dreamed now of grand conquest with himself riding at the head of a new American army.

The idea was to “liberate” Spanish Florida and Louisiana, possibly all of Spanish America, in a bold campaign combining a British fleet and American troops. First proposed by an impassioned apostle of Spanish-American freedom, Francesco de Miranda of Venezuela, the scheme had been around for years. Adams had learned of it and dismissed it out of hand. “We are friends with Spain,” he had told Pickering. But the British had shown interest, and in secret Hamilton had lately become involved, seeing possibilities for national empire and personal glory beyond the vision of lesser men. In a letter to one of his generals in Georgia, Hamilton stressed the need for a buildup of military supplies. “This you perceive, looks to offensive operations,” he wrote. “If we are to engage in war, our game will be to attack where we can. France is not to be considered as separate from her ally
[Spain]
. Tempting objects will be within our grasp.”

Adams knew in general, if not in detail, what Hamilton, Pickering, and others were up to and would later speak of it as a colossal absurdity. “The man is stark mad or I am,” he would remember thinking of Hamilton. But at the time, he kept his own counsel, waiting to make his move. He wanted all “to be still and calm,” and told his department heads no more than they needed to know. For he understood now that their first loyalty was not to him.