John Adams - SA (76 page)

For someone supposedly suspicious by nature, Adams had been inordinately slow to suspect the worst of his closest advisers, and to face the obvious truth that keeping Washington's cabinet had been a mistake. Still, somehow, he must avoid a war and keep Hamilton from gaining the upper hand with his “mad” schemes. As Abigail had warned the summer before, “That man would... become a second Bonaparte.”

*   *   *

AT THE NAVY DEPARTMENT and the President's House that December, with a foot of snow in the streets outside and sleigh bells sounding, Adams, Gerry, McHenry, Secretary of the Navy Stoddert, and others gathered about large maps of the West Indies. Four squadrons, twenty-one ships in total, virtually the whole of the American naval force, were now assigned to the Caribbean. The largest squadron, which included the heavy frigates
United States
and
Constitution
, was under Commodore John Barry, who was admonished in his orders that “a spirit of enterprise and adventure cannot be too much encouraged in the officers under your command.... We have nothing to dread but unactivity.”

The fleet was to cruise the Lesser Antilles, from St. Christopher (St. Kitts) to Tobago. San Domingo (Haiti) was to have increasing importance. Toussaint L'Ouverture, leader of the slave rebellion on San Domingo, had written to Adams to suggest they become allies. Desperate for food for his starving troops, Toussaint wanted the American embargo lifted from the former French colony. In effect, he wanted recognition of the black republic, and Adams was interested. Thus, in December, a representative from Toussaint, Joseph Bunel, dined with Adams, marking the first time a man of African descent was the dinner guest of an American President.

American ships would be welcome and protected in all San Domingo ports, Adams was told. John Quincy had earlier written his father to say he hoped something could be done for Toussaint, that he wished to see San Domingo “free and independent.” And with Secretary Pickering strongly of the same mind, Adams responded promptly. Commodore Barry was instructed to show himself “with the greatest part of the fleet at Cape Francois, to Genl. Toussaint, who has a great desire to see some ships of war belonging to America.” And the issue of de facto recognition, “Toussaint's clause,” would go before Congress.

General Washington was rarely seen. He was working seven days a week with Hamilton drawing up plans for the army, reviewing applications, and choosing qualified officers for twelve new regiments that were all still largely on paper. Satisfied with what had been accomplished, Washington departed the city for the last time on December 14.

*   *   *

MUCH HAD BEEN SAID of Washington's cheerful demeanor. Even the Aurora commented on his “good health and spirits,” while Adams, by contrast, looked drawn and weary and was seldom cheerful. The old streak of irritability, his single flaw, according to Abigail, had been made worse by the presidency, as he himself acknowledged. He was weary from work, “weary of conjectures,” as he said. “If you come on, you must expect to find me cross,” he had written to her in fair warning. It was not just that the work was unending, but that it was so tiresome. “A peck of troubles in a large bundle of papers often in a handwriting almost illegible comes every day... thousands of sea letters... commissions and patents to sign. No company. No society. Idle, unmeaning ceremony.”

Adams's earlier proposal of Colonel Smith for the general staff had been turned down by the Senate (as had his proposed commission for Aaron Burr). Smith was unacceptable, Adams was told, because he was a bankrupt. This Adams had not denied, but praised his son-in-law as a brave and able soldier who had more than proven himself in the Revolution. Against his better judgment, Adams agreed to try again, this time nominating Smith for a colonel's commission, which in spite of “warm opposition,” the Senate approved.

In a letter to Smith, telling him the news, Adams made clear what an embarrassment the whole business had been for him, and warned Smith bluntly that, if unchecked, his pride and extravagances would bring ruin.

His own children would be his undoing, Adams complained to Abigail. “My daughter and son
[Charles]
bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave, if I don't arouse my philosophy. The daughter, too, without a fault. Unfortunate daughter! Unhappy child!”

Snow fell again for several days. Christmas morning dawned clear and bright, and Adams succeeded in rousing his philosophy to a considerable degree. There was no mistaking his age or the burdens of the presidency, he wrote to Abigail. “I am old, old, very old and never shall be very well—certainly while in this office, for the drudgery of it is too much for my years and strength.” But he took joy in the day. “It is Christmas and a fine day,” he wrote. He had a cold, but was over it now. “I sleep well, appetite is good, work hard, conscience is neat and easy. Content to live and willing to die.... Hoping to do a little good.”

*   *   *

THE VICE PRESIDENT, having departed Monticello on December 18 and traveled “dreadful” winter roads north by public coach, arrived at Philadelphia that same Christmas morning in time for breakfast at the Francis Hotel. Jefferson had been absent for six months, during which he had raised no voice as head of the Republican party, but had kept extremely busy, writing letters and secretly drafting a set of resolutions to be introduced in the legislature of Kentucky. Written in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions declared that each state had a “natural right” to nullify federal actions it deemed unconstitutional. The states were thus to be the arbiters of federal authority. At the same time, James Madison undertook a version of his own resolutions for Virginia.

The Kentucky Resolutions, which had passed in November, were an open challenge to the authority of the central government and a measure both of Jefferson's revulsion over the Alien and Sedition Acts and the seriousness with which he regarded states' rights. Possibly he failed to see the dire threat to the union embodied in what he had written, but a letter he wrote to Madison strongly suggests otherwise. He was confident, Jefferson said, that the American people with their “good sense” would “rally with us round the true principles of the federal compact,” but, he wrote in chilling conclusion, he was “determined, were we to be disappointed in this, to sever ourselves from the union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self-government.”

Tormented by the thought of his old enemy Hamilton riding high as inspector general and federal power in the grip of a “military enclave,” Jefferson saw the country on the verge of civil war. He feared a federal army under Hamilton might march on the South at any time. His advice to Madison and other close associates was to stay calm and quiet. “Firmness on our part, but passive firmness, is the true course,” Jefferson cautioned after returning to Philadelphia.

He was distressed also about the bill before Congress to lift the embargo on San Domingo and commence trade with the “rebellious Negroes under Toussaint.” When “Toussaint's clause” was passed, Jefferson noted bleakly, “We may expect therefore black crews and... missionaries” pouring “into the Southern states... If this combustion can be introduced among us under any veil whatever, we have to fear it.”

It had been more than a year since the President and Vice President had spoken to each other. Except for passing pleasantries at a few ceremonial occasions, conversation and correspondence between them had ceased. Had they been able to compare notes, they would have discovered how much more they shared in common than met the eye or than either had any idea.

Both complained privately of poor health. They were each extremely lonely and longed for home. Much of what Jefferson wrote to his daughters from Philadelphia in the opening weeks of the New Year, 1799, might have been taken from Adams's letters to Abigail. Jefferson battled a head cold and suffered from inflammation of the eyes. “The circle of our nearest connections is the only one in which a faithful and lasting affection can be found,” he wrote to Polly. And in a letter to Martha he could hardly have sounded more like Adams in his own days as Vice President: “Environed here in scenes of constant torment, malice, and obliquy, worn down in a station where no effort to render service can avail anything, I feel not that existence is a blessing, but when something recalls my mind to my family or farm.”

Had Jefferson known Adams's mind at this juncture, he would have been quite surprised. Most striking was their common dislike and fear of Hamilton. The worries Jefferson had about Hamilton's threat to the nation were more than matched by Adams's, as Adams revealed in private conversation with Elbridge Gerry at the President's House. “
[Adams]
thought Hamilton and a party were endeavoring to get an army on foot to give Hamilton the command of it, and thus to proclaim a regal government and place Hamilton as the head of it, and prepare the way for a province of Great Britain,” wrote Gerry. Plainly, Adams feared a military coup by the second “Bonaparte,” which goes far to explain what was soon to take place.

Closing his Christmas letter to Abigail, Adams said, “I write to you nothing about public affairs because it would be useless to copy the newspapers which you read. And I can say nothing more.”

How much was implied by this, she could only try to imagine.

Three weeks later, in mid-January, to Adams's utmost joy, his son Thomas, now twenty-seven, arrived in Philadelphia after four years abroad. “Thomas is my delight,” he wrote. It was also of no small consequence that Thomas carried word from John Quincy assuring his father that the French were ready to negotiate.

*   *   *

ON MONDAY, February 18, 1799, Adams made his move. Having consulted no one, and without advice from Abigail, he took the most decisive action of his presidency. Indeed, of all the brave acts of his career—his defense of the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trials, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, his crossing the Atlantic on the
Boston
in the winter of 1778, the high risks of his mission to Holland—one brief message sent to the United States Senate was perhaps the bravest.

It was carried by a courier to the second-floor Senate Chamber, where an astonished Vice President interrupted the business on the floor to read it aloud:

Always disposed and ready to embrace every plausible appearance of probability of preserving or restoring tranquility, I nominate William Vans Murray, our minister resident at The Hague, to be minister plenipotentiary of the United States to the French Republic.

If the Senate shall advise and consent to his appointment, effectual care shall be taken in his instructions that he shall not go to France without direct and unequivocal assurances from the French government, signified by their Minister of Foreign Relations, that he shall be received in character, shall enjoy the privileges attached to his character by the law of nations, and that a minister of equal rank, title, and powers shall be appointed to treat with him, to discuss and conclude all controversies between the two Republics by a new treaty.

The “war-monger” who the summer before had refused to declare war had declared, if not peace, then, at least, that the door to peace was now wide open.

Republicans were astounded. Federalists were momentarily speechless, then filled with “surprise, indignation, grief, and disgust.” Particularly galling to them was the fact that it was Jefferson who read the message.

The Secretary of State was enraged. The “honor of the country is prostrated in the dust—God grant that its safety may not be in jeopardy,” Timothy Pickering wrote to George Washington. In a letter to William Vans Murray, Pickering would declare “every real patriot... was thunderstruck.” Adams, he said, was “suffering the torments of the damned.” “I beg you to be assured that it is wholly his own act, “Pickering reported to Hamilton.

Senator Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, who had greatly admired Adams, worked for his election, and thought he had thus far played “a noble part” as President, felt personally betrayed. Barely able to contain his fury, he wrote of the “vain, jealous, and half frantic mind” of John Adams, a man ruled “by caprice alone.” “Had the foulest heart and the basest head in the world been permitted to select the most embarrassing and ruinous measure, perhaps it would have been precisely the one which has been adopted.”

Another riled Federalist, Robert G. Harper of South Carolina, Hamilton's chief spokesman in the House, privately expressed the hope that on Adams's way home to Quincy, his horses might run away with him and break his neck.

Hamilton himself allowed that if anything coming from John Adams could astonish, certainly this had.

To Thomas Jefferson it was the “event of events,” but strangely—regrettably—he was unable to accept what Adams had done at face value, or to give him any credit. Rather, Jefferson took pleasure in the “mortification” of the Federalists, which proved, he said, that war was always their intent. To Madison he wrote that Adams had only made the nomination “hoping that his friends in the Senate would take on their own shoulders the odium of rejecting it.”

In the Aurora, Margaret Bache and her new editor, William Duane, would concede only that Adams deserved “fair applause” for prudence.

But for all the indignant fuming of the High Federalists, no motions were made in the Senate for a resolution opposing a new mission to France. When a Senate committee led by Sedgwick came to see Adams a few days later, it was to object only to the choice of Murray, who was thought too young, not “strong enough,” for an assignment of such importance. They wished to have the nomination retracted, which Adams refused to do. Murray was a man of experience and ability through whom communications with Talleyrand were already established, Adams answered. Further, Murray had the advantage of being on the scene.

Accounts differ whether the meeting was amicable or acrimonious, but a compromise resulted in any event. Instead of Murray alone serving as minister plenipotentiary, Adams nominated Patrick Henry and Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth to join Murray as envoys to France, making a commission of three. The Senate immediately confirmed the appointments and a day later, March 4, Congress adjourned. Afterward, when Patrick Henry declined for reasons of health, Adams chose another southerner, the Federalist governor of North Carolina, William Davie.