Founding Brothers: Chapter Five

He used his spare time in London to toss off three volumes of political philosophy, entitled Defence of the Constitution of the United States, which emphasized the advantages of a strong executive, a bicameral legislature, and the principle of checks and balances.

Subsequent occupants of the vice presidential office have lengthened the list of semihumorous complaints about inhabiting a prestigious political prison (for example, “not worth a bucketful of spit”), but Adams originated the jokes because he was the first prominent American statesman to experience the paradox of being a proverbial heartbeat away from maximum power while languishing in the political version of a cul-de-sac.

It was difficult to think of the ever-combative, highly combustible champion of the American Revolution as extraneous and invisible, but that is what the vice presidency had made him.

But when he lectured the Senate on the need for elaborate trappings of authority and proposed that President Washington be addressed as “His Majesty” or “His Highness,” his remarks became the butt of several barbed jokes, including the suggestion that he had been seized by “nobilimania” during his long sojourn in England and might prefer to be addressed as “His Rotundity” or the “Duke of Braintree.”

Ever the political pugilist who felt obliged to answer every bell, Adams refused to back away from his belief that the new American government needed a strong executive presence.

In a series of thirty-one essays printed in the Gazette of the United States and subsequently published as Discourses on Davila, he argued that all stable governments required what he called a “monarchical principle,” meaning a singular figure empowered to embody the will of the nation and to protect the ordinary citizenry from the inevitable accumulation of power by the more wealthy and wellborn.

“I know not what your idea is of the best form of government. You and I never had a serious conversation together that I can recollect concerning the nature of government. The very transient hints that have passed between us have been jocular and superficial, without ever coming to any explanation.”

But his want of candor, his obstinate prejudices against all forms of government power, his real partiality in spite of all his pretensions...have so nearly reconciled me to it that I will not weep....

His letters to Madison also featured the Monticellan Jefferson, the statesman-turned-farmer sequestered in “my remote canton.”

On the other side, Federalist editors and polemicists, encountering this mounting campaign on Jefferson’s behalf, began to generate anti-Jefferson propaganda: He had suffered humiliation as governor of Virginia when he fled before British troops; he was an inveterate Francophile; he was an intellectual dreamer, “more fit to be a professor in a College, President of a Philosophical Society...but certainly not the first magistrate of a great nation.”

Abigail heard him out about the doomed course of the French Revolution but was somewhat more sanguine: “I ruminate upon France as I lie awake many hours before light,” she wrote. “My present thought is that their virtuous army will give them a government in time in spite of all their conventions but of what nature it will be, it is hard to say.”

When Adams offered a harsh appraisal of Washington’s lack of formal education and knowledge of the classics, Abigail chided him: Washington was the only man apart from her husband capable of detachment and ought not be carped at behind his back.

Like Jefferson—indeed, like any self-respecting statesman of the era, save perhaps Burr—Adams had no intention of campaigning for the office. (Burr did, and acted on it.) “I am determined to be a silent spectator of the silly and wicked game,” Adams explained to Abigail, “and to enjoy it as a comedy, a farce, or as a gymnastic exhibition at Sadler’s Wells.”

Yes, the presidency was a thankless job, “a most unpleasant seat, full of thorns, briars, thistles, murmuring, fault-finding, calumny, obloquy.”

This was not a mere facade, but it was only the top layer of Jefferson's thinking. A level below the surface, he, much like Adams, was preoccupied with the long shadow of George Washington.

In the present situation of the United States, divided as they are between two parties, which mutually accuse each other of perfidy and treason...this exalted station [the presidency] is surrounded with dangerous rocks, and the most eminent abilities will not be sufficient to steer clear of them all.

Adams would have been overjoyed to receive such a message—given the stilted language of their most recent and rather contrived correspondence, it seemed to meet him more than halfway—but the letter was never sent.

“The deviation from that line of politics on which we had been united has not made me less sensible of the rectitude of his heart: and I wished him to know this.”

The Adams presidency, in fact, might be the classic example of the historical truism that inherited circumstances define the parameters within which presidential leadership takes shape, that history shapes presidents, rather than vice versa.

On the one hand, the country was already waging an undeclared war against French privateers in the Atlantic and Caribbean.

Much like Jefferson, Adams regarded the impasse as a breakdown of mutual trust: “You can witness for me,” he wrote to John Quincy concerning Jefferson's opposition, “how loath I have been to give him up. It is with much reluctance that I am obliged to look upon him as a man whose mind is warped by prejudice...."

His vice president was in fact the leader of the opposition party; his cabinet was loyal to the memory of Washington, which several members regarded as embodied now in the person of Alexander Hamilton, who was officially retired from the government altogether; political parties were congealing into doctrinaire ideological camps...

It was a recipe for political chaos that even the indomitable Washington would have been hard-pressed to control.

Gerry was a kind of New England version of Benjamin Rush, a lovable gadfly with close personal ties to the Adams family but with ideological convictions that floated in unpredictable patterns over the entire political landscape.

Nevertheless, she followed the highly partisan exchanges in the Republican newspapers and provided her husband with regular reports on the machinations and accusations of the opposition.

These infamous statutes, unquestionably the biggest blunder of his presidency, were designed to deport or disenfranchise foreign-born residents, mostly Frenchmen, who were disposed to support the Republican party, and to make it a crime to publish “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States.”

Gallatin, she observed, “that specious, subtle, spare Cassius, that imported foreigner,” was guilty of treasonable behavior by delivering speeches or introducing amendments “that obstruct their cause and prevent their reaching their goals.”

Abigail herself reported that all the bedrock Federalist enclaves of New England were taken by surprise: “the whole community were like a flock of frightened pigions; nobody had their story ready.”

In the immediate context of the party wars then raging, however, Adams’s unilateral action was politically suicidal: “He has sustained the whole force of an unpopular measure,” Abigail observed, “which he knew would...shower down upon his head a torrent of invective. As he expected, he has been abused and calumniated by his enemies, that was to be looked for—but in the house of his friends, they have joined loudest in the clamor.”

Three overlapping reasons appear to have converged in Adams’s mind and provided decisive direction to a foreign policy that, until then, had been vacillating between the incompatible agendas of the Federalists and the Republicans.

Hamilton intended to make the New Army his personal instrument of power. It was a foregone conclusion that Washington would be called out of retirement to head the force, but equally predictable that the aging general would delegate actual command to his former aide-de-camp.

It was all part of the Adams pattern, an iconoclastic and contrarian temperament that relished alienation.

(John Quincy and then great-grandson Henry Adams exhibited the same pattern over the next century, suggesting that the predilections resided in the bloodstream.)

Once they decided to reject Adams’s overture and set themselves up as the leaders of the Republican opposition, they closed ranks around their own heartfelt convictions and interpreted the several crises confronting him as opportunities to undermine the Federalist party, which they sincerely regarded as an organized conspiracy against the true meaning of the American Revolution.

In The Prospect Before Us, Callender delivered the goods, describing Adams as “a hoary headed incendiary” who was equally determined on war with France and on declaring himself president for life, with John Quincy lurking in the background as his successor.

When confronted with the charge that, despite his position as vice president, he had paid Callender to write diatribes against the president, Jefferson claimed to know nothing about it.

There are only a few universal laws of political life, but one of them guided the Republicans during the last year of the Adams presidency—namely, never interfere when your enemies are busily engaged in flagrant acts of self-destruction.

In New Jersey, for example, when a drunken Republican editor was charged with making a ribald reference to the president’s posterior, the jury returned a not guilty verdict on the grounds that truth was a legitimate defense.

No leader could credibly claim to be above the fray.

If the very idea of virtue was no longer an ideal in American politics, then there was no place for him in public life. If the Adams brand of statesmanship was now an anachronism—and it was—then the Adams presidency would serve as a fitting monument to its passing.