Passionate Sage (3 page)

T
HE EDUCATION
of John Adams was effectively complete by the time he reached the presidency, but his conduct during his four-year term served to exhibit the dominant features of the Adams personality in all their full-blown splendor. It was quite likely, in short, that he would succeed in the area of policy but fail politically. Which is to say that he could do what was right for his country, but arrange events so that his personal fate suffered as a consequence. This was the established Adams pattern: to sense where history was headed, make decisions that positioned America to be carried forward on those currents, but to do so in a way that assured his own alienation from success.
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Although there were, as we shall see, elements of deep-rooted perversity that dictated this pattern, events conspired to place Adams in a historical situation that virtually assured personal and political failure regardless of his affinity for psychological mischief. First and foremost was the elemental fact that he succeeded George Washington. Whatever frustrations Washington had experienced as president, his impeccable credentials and bottomless reputation assured a national consensus that any successor would be hard-pressed to sustain. Jefferson, who had been defeated by Adams in the election of 1796 by a mere three electoral votes, had an uncanny appreciation of his own good fortune in losing. As he explained to James Madison—while mixing his metaphors uncharacteristically—Washington was “fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag.” Washington's departure from office “will mark the moment when the difficulties begin to work,” Jefferson shrewdly predicted, and even though serious political and foreign policy problems were inherited from Washington, “they will be ascribed to the new administration….” Most historians of this period like to notice Jefferson's gracious deferral to Adams after the close election, when Jefferson acknowledged Adams's seniority and prior claim on the honor of the office. But when Jefferson said that he was “sincerely pleased at having escaped the late draught for the helm, and have not a wish which he [Adams] stands in the way of,” his motives were more calculating than charitable. He knew whoever followed Washington was in for trouble.
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Meanwhile, it was characteristic of Adams to recognize the danger presented by what might be called the problem of Washington's shadow, but to regard all thoughts of political self-interest as violations of virtue. Adams was one of the most astute political analysts of the era, whose understanding of the shifting configurations of power that shaped the national interest had few if any equals. But when it came to political thinking of the self-protective sort, he was worse than naive; he was congenitally committed to the active suppression of all such impulses. He wrote wryly to Abigail on the eve of his inauguration that, while aware of the problems he inherited from Washington, he preferred to ignore them and press on: “I think a man had better wear than rust.”
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If succeeding a national hero posed one set of difficulties, divisions within the Federalist camp presented even worse ones. At the top of the list was Alexander Hamilton, who, while not occupying any official position within the government, continued to exercise considerable influence over the members of the president's cabinet, most of whom regarded him as the real leader of the High Federalists, who in turn saw themselves as the very soul of the national government. During the election of 1796 Hamilton had concocted an elaborate scheme to deprive Adams of the presidency by manipulating the electoral votes in South Carolina so that Thomas Pinckney would emerge with a majority, thereby knocking Jefferson out altogether and relegating Adams to another term as vice president. James Madison wrote Jefferson that what he called Hamilton's “jockeyship” was rooted in an intense dislike for Adams, “and by an apprehension that he [Adams] is too head-strong to be a fit puppet for the intrigues behind the screen.” After Hamilton's plot failed and Adams was elected, Jefferson warned him to watch out for “the tricks of your arch-friend of New York…who most probably will be disappointed as to you.” And Jefferson was right, since Hamilton had begun a whispering campaign within the High Federalist network even before the inauguration, describing Adams as “a man of great vanity…and of far less real abilities than he believes he possesses.” The scandalous pamphlet of 1800 was merely the published version of innuendo against Adams that Hamilton had been spreading throughout Federalist circles before Adams had made a single decision or uttered one word as president.
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Finally, the Adams presidency was destined to be dominated by a single question of American policy to an extent seldom if ever encountered by any succeeding occupant of the office. Simply put, that question was whether the United States should declare war against France or find a way to resolve differences diplomatically. The country was already on the verge of what historians have called a “quasi-war” against French privateers in the Atlantic and Caribbean when Adams took office. Over the course of the next four years there were several startling twists and turns in diplomatic relations between the two countries, a bewildering cascade of reports, speeches, commissions, posturings, and gestures on both sides, as well as schemings within the different political factions inside each country. But amidst this massive body of ever-shifting detail and particularity, one simple and unattractive truth remained constant until the last months of Adams's presidency; namely, that the conditions necessary for a peaceful settlement were not present. Successful negotiations required a French government with the desire and the authority to end the hostilities, and an American government united on a peaceful course of action and backed by public opinion that could accept such terms. Since these conditions simply did not exist before 1800, and since there was very little that anyone could have done to bring them into being any earlier, the central policy problem of the Adams administration was inherently insoluble. And this would have remained true even if Adams had not inherited a weak and ultimately disloyal cabinet, if the shadow of Washington had somehow disappeared, if Hamilton had not behaved so treacherously, and if Adams himself had possessed the political finesse of a Talleyrand.
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If these were the realistic contours within which it is now clear that the Adams presidency took shape, they nevertheless allowed for some latitude of movement, for key decisions and choices that put the stamp of Adams's personality on an important moment in the early history of the American republic. In the weeks before his inauguration he let it be known that he was willing to have Jefferson play a major role in his administration, perhaps giving the vice president a prominent place in cabinet meetings and a role in the looming negotiations with France. “My letters inform me that Mr. Adams speaks of me with great friendship,” Jefferson reported to Madison; he noted that Adams had even hinted at “the prospect of administering the government in concurrence with me.” For his part Adams apprised friends that he felt “no apprehension from Mr. Jefferson,” and that “the cause of the irritation upon his Nerves, which broke out in some disagreeable Appearances a few years ago, is now removed as I believe.” Adams's original intention was to seek a peaceful resolution of the conflict with France, enlisting the support of Jefferson and his considerable political following to create a bipartisan administration and a foreign policy that remained true to what Adams called “my system,” which entailed a commitment to American neutrality at almost any cost and the creation of a naval force of sufficient size to fight a defensive war if either France or England left America no choice.
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Much could be said for this vision. In his autobiography, Benjamin Rush, Adams's dearest friend save for Abigail, claimed that it was the consensus of his contemporaries that Adams possessed “more learning probably, both ancient and modern, than any man who subscribed the Declaration of Independence.” And in the next century the prominent Unitarian minister Theodore Parker recalled that as a boy he had been taught that “with the exception of Dr. Franklin…no American politician of the eighteenth century was Adams' intellectual superior.” Adams possessed a mind that grasped intuitively and comprehensively the essential ingredients of a strategic decision. He was a veritable genius at recognizing what was central and what was peripheral, what the national interest required and what history would allow. In the spring of 1797 he recognized that the Hamiltonians who would tilt the country toward England and the Jeffersonians who would lean toward France were both wrong. He understood that neither misplaced patriotism nor party spirit at home, nor for that matter the imperialistic maneuverings of the English ministry nor the hopelessly erratic policies of the French Directory, should be allowed to seduce America into a foreign war that diverted national energies from the main task of the next century, which was to develop stable domestic institutions and to expand across the continent. He realized that the creation of an American navy, what he called “wooden walls,” was vastly preferable to an army, for a navy allowed the new nation to defend its coastline and protect its shipping without running the risks of a large land force, which conjured up all the historical dangers posed by a standing army and would serve as an irresistible temptation for would-be American Napoleons like Hamilton.
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Finally, he sensed that effective national leadership meant bridging the widening gap between the High Federalists and the Jeffersonians. Neither Adams nor Jefferson, nor any other member of the revolutionary generation for that matter, thought about political parties in anything like our modern sense of the term. So Adams did not consider his conciliatory behavior toward Jefferson as the gracious gesture of a Federalist president welcoming the leader of a Republican opposition into the councils of power. Instead, he saw it as an effort to carve out a centrist political position from which he might better implement policies that served the long-term national interest. His vision here was prescient, but it quickly ran afoul of the party spirit it was designed to transcend, as well as the quirks of his own personality.
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The party spirit struck from both sides. Before sending off his own accommodating response to Adams's conciliatory letter in January of 1797, Jefferson showed it to Madison, who immediately warned his mentor and fellow Virginian that working alongside Adams, inside the administration, would deprive him of the freedom to lead the opposition to Federalist policies. (Jefferson probably needed little persuading.) Over dinner two days after the inauguration Jefferson apprised Adams that he did not wish to be included in cabinet deliberations and that neither he nor Madison was willing to serve in the proposed peace delegation to France. “We parted as good friends, as we had always lived,” Adams recalled later, “but we consulted very little together, afterwards.”
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By the summer of 1797 even the long-standing mutual respect was at risk. As Adams saw it, Jefferson had chosen “the future of his party [over] the future of his friendship.” When word reached Adams that Jefferson had written a critical account of a presidential speech to Congress, Adams exploded: “It is evidence of a mind, soured, yet seeking for popularity, and eaten to a honeycomb with ambition,” he complained, “yet weak, confused, uninformed and ignorant.” Meanwhile, on the other side of the political equation, his cabinet had balked at the suggestion of welcoming Jefferson or involving the Republican opposition in the negotiations with France. Adams later recalled that, when he proposed the idea, the entire cabinet threatened to resign. Not only was the hope for a bipartisan coalition dead, but the centrist position Adams had chosen to occupy was now a no-man's-land, raked by a crossfire from what had now become two distinct political parties.
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There was a sense in which Adams, or at least an important part of him, preferred it that way. He certainly could not be blamed for the drift of the Jeffersonian Republicans toward becoming the first opposition party. Nor was he responsible for the tendency of the High Federalists to rally around Hamilton. But whether it was a function of unconscious design, pure accident, or sheer fate, the isolated position in which he found himself as president replicated a familiar Adams pattern in which personal independence usually transformed itself into alienation. Commitment to principle somehow necessitated unpopularity for John Adams, and the fullest expression of his best energies occurred in singular acts of passionate defiance. Whether they knew it or not, his opponents inside and outside the Federalist Party had created precisely the political conditions in which Adams could act out his preferred role as virtuous statesman, above all claims of party.

Over the course of the first two years as president, another familiar piece of the Adams personality gradually emerged. As he clung tenaciously to his policy of American neutrality and naval preparation—and this despite outrageous acts of duplicity by the French Directory in demanding payment of bribes from the American peace delegation—Adams began to focus his mounting frustrations on a single person who became, for him, the embodiment of evil. That person, of course, was Hamilton. Most members of the cabinet and many key Federalists in Congress were convinced that a war with France and a commercial alliance with England would best serve America's long-term interests, and Hamilton's advocacy of a large army was a central feature of that policy. Against Adams's wishes, the High Federalists introduced legislation for the creation of an army of ten thousand regular troops, with provisions for an even larger force once hostilities broke out.