Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams Read online

  One can easily conjure up the image of a defiant President Adams, hunched over his huge desk in the Oval Office, scratching his signature onto commissions as various aides and clerks put the papers before him, somber and cynical and perhaps a bit grumpy as he gestures for the next appointment letter, still bitter about his failure to win a second term, full of petulance and a craving for political revenge. We know that his bags were already packed and that he planned to take the four o’clock stage out of town the next morning, making him the first and only sitting president in American history to refuse attendance at the inauguration of his successor.

  This unflattering picture of Adams contains some accurate features, but like all legendary renderings, and more especially like all attempts to fit the boisterously unorthodox character of Adams into the conventional categories of democratic politics and popular psychology, it misses the essential truths.

  Even at the mundane level of factual accuracy, it distorts more than it describes. On the evening of Tuesday, March 3, 1801, the outgoing president actually appointed only two minor officials in Pennsylvania and three lower court judges in the District of Columbia. That was all the official business he did. Soon after the passage of the Judiciary Act in February of 1801, Adams had made the key appointments to the circuit courts and the Supreme Court, including John Marshall as Chief Justice. There was no last-minute, spasmodic act of political defiance. The important business had been completed weeks earlier.1

  Moreover, the atmosphere in the room that evening was neither as magisterial nor as melodramatic as the legend suggests. Because the national government had only recently moved from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., neither the city nor the presidential mansion was really ready for occupancy. The streets were unpaved, muddy cesspools, waiting for the summer heat to become mosquito-infested swamps. The presidential residence itself remained unfinished and unfurnished, still damp and cold in early March, requiring fires in thirteen fireplaces to offset the weather. There was, as yet, no Oval Office. Instead of mahogany desks, plush carpets, and obsequious aides, Adams spent his last night as president surrounded by barren walls, packing crates, moving trunks, and clotheslines which his wife, Abigail, had strung across the main conference room for drying the wash. These were the kind of domestic sacrifices one made for being the first president to occupy a capital city that, as Washington himself had predicted, would be ready for greatness “in about a century.”2

  It is, of course, much easier to know the physical context surrounding Adams that final evening in the White House than it is to recover what was in his mind and heart. We do know that, throughout his personal correspondence over the preceding weeks, Adams had claimed to feel more a sense of resignation than revenge, more relief than distress. “My little bark has been oversett in a squall of thunder & lightning & hail attended with a strong smell of sulphur,” he told his son Tommy, declaring that “I feel my shoulders relieved from a burden” and that “the short remainder of my days will be the happiest of my life.” This was the same message of stoic acceptance he went out of his way to convey to friends: “The remainder of my days will probably be spent in the labors of agriculture and the amusements of literature,” a typical letter put it, “on both of which I have always taken more delight, than in any public office of whatever rank.” Whether this was a brave pose, or perhaps a sincere expression of one facet of his many-faceted personality, is impossible to know for sure. Adams himself probably would have had a difficult time sorting out the different layers of conflicting emotions brewing inside him at the time.3

  We do know one aspect of his thinking that evening with reasonable certainty: he did not harbor any deep resentments toward Jefferson. Over the preceding months his fellow Federalists had expressed amazement at his tendency “to speak of him [Jefferson] with much regard…adding that he is a good patriot, citizen and father.” Fisher Ames, the arch Federalist from Adams’s own state of Massachusetts, noted that “the good Lady his wife has been often talkative in a similar strain, and she is as complete a politician as any Lady in the old French Court.” Ames observed with incredulity that Adams “acts as if he did not hate or dread Jefferson, and it is clear that his friends pursue a course in conversations and in the papers which can help nobody’s cause but Jefferson’s.” If there was any doubt that the friendship between Adams and Jefferson was still intact, it was removed when Adams made a point of inviting Jefferson for dinner at the presidential quarters a few days before the inauguration; Jefferson for his part made a point of visiting again to see Abigail off when she departed for Quincy. Whatever reservations Adams harbored toward Jefferson’s political convictions and his followers in the Republican Party—and there certainly were some—he still respected the man who was to succeed him.4

  In fact, if there was one person whom Adams spent his last hours as president cursing under his breath, it was not Jefferson but Alexander Hamilton, who was one of the leading lights in the same Federalist Party that Adams officially headed. Adams’s hatred for Hamilton—and hatred is not too strong a term—had many causes, but the most immediate and culminating cause was a public letter, eventually published in pamphlet form a few weeks before the presidential election of 1800, entitled Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq. President of the United States. “Not denying to Mr. ADAMS patriotism and integrity, and even talents of a certain kind,” the letter began, “…he does not possess the talents adapted to the Administration of Government….” Hamilton then went on to claim that, in lieu of talent, Adams possessed a deeply flawed character, which rendered him “unfit for the office of Chief Magistrate.” And Hamilton’s description of the Adams character minced no words: “he is a man of an imagination sublimated and eccentric; propitious neither to the regular display of sound judgment, nor to steady perseverence in a systematic plan of conduct…that to this defect are added the unfortunate foibles of a vanity without bounds, and a jealousy capable of discoloring every subject.”5

  Hamilton’s diatribe purported to review Adams’s entire public career, from his role in the making of the American Revolution in the 1770s, through his diplomatic efforts in France and England in the 1780s, then culminating in his actions as vice president and president in the 1790s. The underlying pattern Hamilton discerned, the key to explaining much if not all of his conduct, could be traced to what he called “the ungovernable temper of Mr. ADAMS.” Americans had already begun to think of the leaders of the founding generation—and no one could deny that Adams was one of those leaders—as paragons of virtue and models of magisterial self-control. Hamilton felt compelled to make public what, so he claimed, the entire political leadership of the new nation had known but been concealing for many years; namely, that Adams did not belong in their distinguished company, that he was a vain, volatile, and dangerous man: “It is a fact that he is often liable to paroxisms of anger, which deprive him of self command, and produce very outrageous behaviour to those who approach him.” Virtually all the Federalists who had served with him in government had witnessed his tantrums, so Hamilton claimed, and “been humiliated by the effects of these gusts of passion.” They could all testify to “the disgusting egotism, the distempered jealousy, and the ungovernable indiscretion of Mr. ADAMS’ temper….” They could all verify that Adams’s successful decisions “were not the effects of any regular plan, but the fortuitous emanations of momentary impulses.” In short, Adams was precisely the kind of unstable, imprudent, and capricious character that a new nation with a fragile republican government did not need; and might not be able to survive.6

  Hamilton was not only arguing against the election of Adams to a second term; he was also arguing that the long-standing weaknesses of Adams’s character should disqualify him from admission into the pantheon reserved for America’s founding heroes. “I was one of that numerous class who had conceived a high veneration for Mr. ADAMS,” Hamilton acknowledged, “on account of the part he acted in the first
stages of the revolution…as a man of patriotic, bold, profound and comprehensive mind.” But subsequent events had demonstrated that this reputation was undeserved, that “the gentleman [was] infected with some visionary notions, and that he was far less able in the practice, than in the theory, of politics.”7

  It seems plausible, indeed probable, that Adams spent at least a portion of those last few hours in office muttering epithets at Hamilton, brooding about the political motives that underlay the criticism of his character. But even though Adams was the most candid and self-revealed member of the revolutionary generation, there are some private moments that even he preferred to keep to himself. And this was one of them. We know for a fact that in his letters to friends, Adams claimed to pity Hamilton more than resent him. “This pamphlet I regret more on account of its author, than on my own,” he claimed, “because I am confident, it will do him more harm than me.” Hamilton had made himself into a pathetic creature, who ought not be answered or punished, Adams insisted, since “the public indignation he has excited is punishment enough.”8

  Adams’s political judgment proved correct. Even Hamilton’s staunchest Federalist friends and followers concurred that the publication of such a scandalous document on the eve of the presidential election seemed to cast Hamilton in just the role of wild-eyed eccentric that he had tried to impose on Adams. As it turned out, Hamilton’s vendetta against Adams proved to be an act of political suicide, fully as fatal to Hamilton’s career as his decision two years later to face Aaron Burr in a duel proved to his life.9

  But Adams’s claim that he felt more pity than anger does not ring true. Even though Adams’s analysis of public reaction proved correct, there is good reason to believe that his own personal reaction more resembled a volcanic eruption than a graceful bow to Hamilton’s self-destruction. We know that the suppressed rage against Hamilton exploded in the Adams autobiography and in a series of nearly endless diatribes in the Boston Patriot a few years later. It was characteristic of Adams to deny the existence of a seething anger that virtually vibrated inside his soul, not because he habitually lied to others or himself, but because the emotions he felt were too ferocious to allow for controlled expression or modulated articulation. The last thing he wanted to do was to confirm, by the very vehemence of his reaction, the essential truth of Hamilton’s charges against him.10

  In the end, then, it is impossible to know with any clinching certainty what the stout, balding, toothless, ever proud John Adams was thinking as he sat in the semi-darkness of the presidential mansion amidst the packing crates, clotheslines, and memories, waiting for the dawn stage to carry him out of public life and into retirement. We can be reasonably sure that the legend has it wrong—he was not thinking about ways to prolong Federalist policies against the will of Jefferson and his followers. We can speculate that Hamilton’s accusations occupied a portion of his conscious mind during those final hours as president. It seems safe to conclude that his unconscious mind, which is usually less accessible, was brimming over with angry recriminations and rebuttals.

  The advantages afforded by hindsight and relative detachment allow us to see that Hamilton’s indictment of the Adams character, much like the mythical account of the “midnight judges,” mixed together painful truths and outright falsifications. But despite Hamilton’s political prejudices and ulterior motives, he effectively framed the question that has haunted Adams’s reputation ever since: how was it that one of the leading lights in the founding generation seemed to exhibit such massive lapses in personal stability? how could the man who, next to George Washington, did most to assure and then secure the independence of the United States, strike so many of his contemporaries, friends and enemies alike, as a wild man, “liable to gusts of passion little short of frenzy, which drive him beyond the control of any rational reflection”? If Adams did try to provide answers to those questions that final night as president, it is virtually certain that his answers were inadequate. After almost two hundred years, during which time the deeper patterns of the Adams story have become available for our balanced consideration, we should be able to do better.11

  1

  The Education of John Adams

  I am not about to write lamentations or jeremiades over my fate nor panegyricks upon my life and conduct. You may think me disappointed [in losing the presidency]. I am not. All my life I expected it….

  —Adams to William Tudor, January 20, 1801

  If Virtue was to be rewarded with Wealth, it would not be Virtue. If Virtue was to be rewarded with Fame, it would not be Virtue of the sublimest Kind.

  —Adams to Abigail Adams, December 2, 1778

  THE 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.1

  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.2

  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.”3

  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 Ada
ms 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.4

  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.5