John Adams - SA (83 page)

By his presence at the ceremony Adams could have set an example of grace in defeat, while at the same time paying homage to a system whereby power, according to a written constitution, is transferred peacefully. After so vicious a contest for the highest office, with party hatreds so near to igniting in violence, a peaceful transfer of power seemed little short of a miracle. If ever a system was proven to work under extremely adverse circumstances, it was at this inauguration of 1801, and it is regrettable that Adams was not present.

It would also have been more politic to have expressed confidence in his successor, but, such expressions were not Adams's way if he did not mean them.

No President having ever been defeated for reelection until then, there was no tradition of a defeated president appearing at the installation of the winner. It is also quite possible that Adams was not invited to attend, or made to feel he would be welcome. When it was rumored, for example, that Adams might deliver a valedictory to Congress, the Aurora had questioned how possibly the “Duke of Braintree” could ever consider appearing before “a body in which his former friends are his enemies, and his former opponents the only persons who pity him.” Adams, said the Aurora, was a man who had been cast out by God like “polluted water out at the back door.” “May he return in safety to Braintree, that Mrs. Adams may wash his befuddled brains clear.”

Perhaps, given what Adams had been through at the hands of the Republicans and a number of Federalists still in Congress, those who had done all they could to overthrow him, he simply could not face being made a spectacle of their triumph.

Also, Adams's departure was no sudden, dark-of-the-night impulse. It had been planned more than a week in advance, as is clear from the correspondence of Billy Shaw, and there was no secret about it. To get to Baltimore in a day, one had to take the early stage, and the early stage departed at four in the morning.

Adams himself never explained why he did not stay for Jefferson's inauguration, but then it seems he was never asked.

“We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” Jefferson said famously in his inaugural address before a full Senate Chamber, his voice so soft many had difficulty hearing him. A passing tribute to Washington was made before he finished, but of Adams he said nothing.

To the victorious Republicans, and to generations of historians, the thought of the tall Jefferson, with his air of youth at fifty-seven, assuming the presidency in the new Capitol at the start of a new century, his eye on the future, would stand in vivid contrast to a downcast, bitter John Adams, old and “toothless” at sixty-five, on his “morning flight” to Baltimore.

Downcast, bitter, Adams may have been, but there is no evidence to support such a description. Adams loved the start of a new day, loved being on the move. Conceivably he felt immense relief to be homeward-bound, free finally of his burdens, his conscience “neat and easy,” as he would say. No one will ever know, but it is perfectly possible that as the sun rose higher that cloudless morning, Adams felt contentment of a kind he had not known for years—once he got over the fact that traveling with him on the same stage, as chance would have it, was Theodore Sedgwick. Like two warring boys who are made to sit in the same room until they get along, they would ride together all the way to Massachusetts.

*   *   *

WHATEVER ADAMS'S state of mind, he was leaving his successor a nation “with its coffers full,” as he wrote, and with “fair prospects of peace with all the world smiling in its face, its commerce flourishing, its navy glorious, its agriculture uncommonly productive and lucrative.”

In turbulent, dangerous times he had held to a remarkably steady course. He had shown that a strong defense and a desire for peace were not mutually exclusive, but compatible and greatly in the national interest. The new navy was an outstanding achievement. In less than two years, it had grown from almost nothing to 50 ships, including the frigates
United States
,
Constitution
, and
Constellation
, and over 5,000 officers and seamen, and this bore heavily on the outcome of the negotiations with France. Indeed, Adams's insistence on American naval strength proved decisive in achieving peace with France in 1800. Further, by undercutting Hamilton and making his army useless, he may have saved the country from militarism.

In his four years as President, there had been no scandal or corruption. If he was less than outstanding as an administrator, if he had too readily gone along with the Alien and Sedition Acts, and was slow to see deceit within his own cabinet, he had managed nonetheless to cope with a divided country and a divided party, and in the end achieved a rare level of statesmanship. To his everlasting credit, at the risk of his career, reputation, and his hold on the presidency, he chose not to go to war when that would have been highly popular and politically advantageous in the short run. As a result, the country was spared what would almost certainly have been a disastrous mistake.

In much the way he had rushed out in the night to help fight fires in Philadelphia and Washington, he had done his all to put out the fire of war—to the immeasurable benefit of the American people, and with no loss of honor or prestige to the nation. It was a brave, heroic performance.

Adams understood clearly the importance of what he had accomplished. To his dying day he would be proudest of all of having achieved peace. As he would write to a friend, “I desire no other inscription over my gravestone than: ‘Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of peace with France in the year 1800.’ ”

In the brief spell of goodwill that followed Adams's inaugural address in 1797, Benjamin Bache had reminded the country that the new President was a “man of incorruptible integrity,” “dignity,” exceptional “resources of mind,” and high purpose. “He declares himself the friend of France and of peace, the admirer of republicanism, the enemy of party.... How characteristic of a patriot.” The same could have been said at the conclusion of Adams's presidency no less than at the beginning.

Subjected to some of the most malicious attacks ever endured by a president, beset by personal disloyalty and political betrayal, suffering the loss of his mother, the near death of his wife, the death of a son, tormented by physical ailments, he had more than weathered the storm. His bedrock integrity, his spirit of independence, his devotion to country, his marriage, his humor, and a great underlying love of life were all still very much intact.

This phrase “rejoice ever more” shall never be out of my heart, memory, or mouth again as long as I live, if I can help it.

—John Adams

“THE ONLY QUESTION remaining with me is what shall I do with myself?” Adams had written earlier to Cotton Tufts. “Something I must do, or ennui will rain upon me in buckets.”

He could go each morning and evening to fodder his cattle, he supposed. Or take noontime walks to Penn's Hill. Or “potter” among his fruit trees and cucumbers. But what then? If he had money enough to spend on his farms, he might keep busier. But where was the money to come from? Talk of himself as Farmer John of Stoneyfield came easily. The reality would require adjustments.

He worried about the effect on mind and body of slowing to a standstill. His constitution, he was sure, would be put to a severe test after “a life of journeys and distant voyages.” Stillness “may shake my old frame,” he observed to another friend. “Rapid motion ought not be succeeded by sudden rest.”

He sensed he had little time left. “The day is far spent with us all,” he would tell Mercy Warren. “It cannot be long before we must exchange this theater for some other.” He only hoped it would be one with no politics. He and Abigail both had had enough of politics. “No more elective office for me,” she had written with absolute certainty. But neither would ever lose interest in politics.

For Abigail it was not just that the long journey of public life was ended, but that their capacity to “do good” was to be “so greatly curtailed,” as she had written before leaving Washington.

As it was, she and Adams had ten days of forced seclusion in which to ponder such concerns, starting almost the moment Adams arrived at Quincy on the evening of March 18, 1801. He was no sooner in the door than a wild northeaster struck, a storm of a kind such as they had not seen in years. Black skies, violent winds, and a flood of rain kept on day after day, no one budging from the house.

Somehow the mail got through, bringing a pointedly formal note of one sentence from the President dated March 8:

Th. Jefferson presents his respects to Mr. Adams and incloses him a letter which came to his hands last night; on reading what is written within the cover, he concluded it to be a private letter, and without opening a single paper within it, folded it up and now has the honor to inclose it to Mr. Adams, with the homage of his high consideration and respect.

Adams's reply, written on March 24, the fifth day of the storm, was one of the few times he ever acknowledged his suffering over the death of Charles, but suggests also that Jefferson may never have offered a word of sympathy to him.

Had you read the papers inclosed
[Adams wrote]
they might have given you a moment of melancholy or at least of sympathy with a mourning father. They relate wholly to the funeral of a son who was once the delight of my eyes and a darling of my heart, cut off in the flower of his days, amidst very flattering prospects by causes which have been the greatest grief of my heart and the deepest affliction of my life.

In closing, Adams said he saw “nothing to obscure your prospect of a quiet and prosperous administration, which I heartily wish you.”

Jefferson did not respond, however. Adams's letter was the last there would be between them for eleven years.

The violence and duration of the storm appears to have left Adams in better spirits once it passed. It was, he wrote to Benjamin Stoddert, “so old fashioned a storm that I begin to hope that nature is returning to her old good nature and good humor, and is substituting fermentations in the elements for revolutions in the moral, intellectual, and political world.”

Complaining was not the Adamses' mode. The adjustments were more difficult than they would concede. The humiliation that defeat and popular rejection had inflicted on them, the death of Charles, and now sudden, total seclusion took a heavy toll. In some circles, they knew, they were openly despised. In others they were now considered irrelevant. Worst perhaps was the sense that no one any longer cared about them one way or the other.

In the year prior to March 4, letters to President Adams numbered in the thousands; in the year that followed, citizen Adams received fewer than a hundred. Once, while president, he had written to Abigail, “We cannot go back. We must stand our ground as long as we can.” In the years following the presidency, it was resolve of a kind they had to summon more often than they admitted.

When members of the Massachusetts legislature came to Quincy to present Adams with a tribute to his devoted service to his country, he was moved to tears.

Feelings of dejection and bitterness would come and go for a long time. Nearly six months after the return to Quincy, in a letter to Billy Shaw, Adams would allow that if he had it to do over again he would have been a shoemaker. His own father, the man he admired above all, had been a shoemaker. Joseph Bass, the young neighbor who had ridden with Adams to Philadelphia the winter of 1776, was a shoemaker and a familiar figure still in Quincy, as well liked and respected as ever.

Long before, on his rounds of Boston as a young lawyer, Adams had often heard a man with a fine voice singing behind the door of an obscure house. One day, curious to know who “this cheerful mortal” might be, he had knocked at the door, to find a poor shoemaker with a large family living in a single room. Did he find it hard getting by, Adams had asked. “Sometimes,” the man said. Adams ordered a pair of shoes. “I had scarcely got out the door before he began to sing again like a nightingale,”

Adams remembered. “Which was the greatest philosopher? Epictetus or this shoemaker?” he would ask when telling the story.

Epictetus, the Greek Stoic philosopher, had said, among other things, “It is difficulties that show what men are.”

*   *   *

WITH THE REVIVAL of spring on the farm, with fruit trees in flower and warmer days steadily lengthening, familiar roles and routines resumed. Abigail, in a letter to Colonel Smith, asked that he tell Nabby, “I have commenced my operation of dairy woman, and she might see me at five o'clock in the morning skimming my milk.” To Catherine Johnson, John Quincy's mother-in-law, she described how the beauties of her garden, “from the window at which I write... the full bloom of the pear, the apple, the plum and peach,” helped her forget the past and rejoice. “Envy nips not their buds, calumny destroys not their fruits, nor does ingratitude tarnish their colors.”

“Your father,” she told Thomas, “appears to enjoy tranquility and a freedom of care which he has never before experienced. His books and farm occupy his attention.”

Adams professed to be perfectly content in his new “employment,” but how long this tranquility would continue, he could not honestly say. “Men are weak,” he added in a letter to William Cranch. “No man can answer for himself.”

He wrote but few letters, and these mostly to friends who had written to wish him well in retirement. But then, as he said, he did not have a great deal to write about, except for how his corn was growing or “how much wall I lay up every day.”

Only occasionally in what he wrote did he reflect on the national or world scene. There was no use trying to predict what Bonaparte might do, because Bonaparte was not like any conqueror of the past, he offered at one point in a letter to Thomas. “Everything I read only serves to confirm me in the opinion of the absolute necessity of our keeping aloof from all European powers and influences, and that a navy is the only arm by which it can be accomplished.” Jefferson, he noted, had lately said some “very strong things” about the navy and Adams felt “irresistibly inclined to agree with him.” But there was a problem with Jefferson, he told Thomas.