“All your observations on the subject are received by me with gratitude, as I knew them to proceed from serious concern and purest parental affection,” answered the young diplomat. The lady in question had “goodness of heart and gentleness of disposition, as well as spirit and discretion,” and would “prove such a daughter as you would wish for your son.”
“My fear arose from the youth and inexperience of the lady,” Abigail wrote in reply, and asked John Quincy to please tell Louisa that “I consider her already my daughter.”
Her greater concern was still over Nabby, whose husband, Colonel Smith, Abigail had sadly concluded, was “a man wholly devoid of judgment.” He had deceived himself with his visionary schemes and “led his family into a state of living which I fear his means will not bear him out.”
In April, as Abigail was preparing to leave for Philadelphia, the weather turned unseasonably hot. Then as suddenly the temperature plunged and John's aged mother went into a sharp decline. “The good old lady is sure she shall die now [that] her physician and nurse are about to leave her, but she judges with me that all ought to be forsaken for the husband,” Abigail informed John.
Refusing to leave, she was with his mother until the end came on April 21, and it was she who made arrangements for the funeral in her front parlor.
“I prepare to set out on the morrow,” she wrote to John on April 26. “Our aged parent has gone to rest.... She fell asleep, and is happy... I am ready and willing to follow my husband wherever he chooses.”
The obituary that appeared in the Boston papers noted that Susanna Boylston Adams Hall, mother of the President of the United States, who died in the eighty-ninth year of her life, had “afforded the present generation a living example of that simplicity of manners and godly sincerity for which the venerable settlers of this country were so justly esteemed.”
From Philadelphia, Adams wrote to Abigail to express his grief and the wish that he had been at Quincy to give her help and comfort.
Our ancestors are now all gone, and we are to follow them very soon to a country where there will be no war or rumor of war, no envy, no jealousy, rivalry or party.
You and I are entering on a new scene, which will be the most difficult and least agreeable of any in our lives. I hope the burden will be lighter to both of us when we come together.
Her journey south was extremely difficult, because of heavy rains and washed-out roads. She felt like Noah's dove, Abigail wrote, her thoughts always returning to the ark she had left. The part she must play now, as wife of the President, though “enviable no doubt in the eyes of some,” was one she had never envied or wanted. “That I may discharge my part with honor and give satisfaction is my most earnest wish.”
Stopping to see Nabby at East Chester, she was stunned to find that Colonel Smith was off again on another of his uncertain ventures, and Nabby too upset even to talk about it, except to say she had no idea where he was. “My reflections upon prospects there took from me all appetite for food,” Abigail confided to her sister Mary, “and depressed my spirits, before too low.”
Expecting her to arrive at Philadelphia on May 10, Adams set off that morning by carriage and met her about twenty-five miles outside the city.
I quitted my own carriage, and took my seat by his side [she wrote]. We rode on to Bristol, where I had previously engaged a dinner, and there upon the banks of the Delaware, we spent the day, getting into the city at sunset.
It took several days for her to recover from the trip. But in little time she, too, was caught up in the tumult of events.
• • •
ONE DAY LATER, on May 11, Thomas Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia from Monticello to find the city astir over a private letter he had written more than a year before that had just appeared in print in the New York Minerva, a strongly Federalist paper, edited by Noah Webster. Writing to an Italian friend, Philip Mazzei, during the debate over the Jay Treaty, Jefferson had described America as a country taken over by “timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty,” and by leaders who were assimilating “the rotten as well as the sound parts of the British model.” Then, in the line that caused the stir, Jefferson wrote:
It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to those heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.
Successive translations of the letter from English to Italian to French, then back to English again had changed and intensified some of the wording by the time it appeared in the Minerva—“harlot” had become “whore,” for example—but the meaning was essentially unchanged and the letter was taken by many as an unconscionable attack on Washington.
Jefferson said nothing in his defense, and Washington, too, remained silent. But great damage had been done to Jefferson by the “Mazzei Letter,” notwithstanding the many prominent Republicans who claimed he had only been telling the unvarnished truth.
• • •
THE PRESIDENT entered Congress Hall at midday, May 16, 1797, absolutely clear in his mind about his intentions and walked to the dais knowing he had the support of his cabinet in what he was about to say. Indeed, some of the language in the speech he carried was their own, arrived at after he had asked for their answers to a list of specific questions, a technique employed by his predecessor. Long a man of decided temperament, Adams was as determined as he had ever been to maintain the policy of neutrality established by Washington, while refusing to submit to any indignities or to sacrifice American honor—he was determined, in essence, to fulfill his own inaugural promises.
But as an old realist, and one who had read more of history and experienced more of it than any of those in his audience, he also knew how extremely difficult, if not impossible, neutrality would be to achieve and maintain in a world at war. He knew how much could happen in France or Britain or on the high seas, or within his own country, over which he had no control. Regional and party differences had made a tinderbox of American politics. It was not only that Republicans were divided from Federalists, but Federalists were sharply at odds with themselves, and the roll of the strident, often vicious press was changing the whole political atmosphere.
Nor was Adams like George Washington immensely popular, elected unanimously, and all but impervious to criticism. He had no loyal following as Washington had, no coterie of friends in Congress. Further, there was the looming reality that America at the moment had no military strength on land or sea. With authorization from the Republic of France, French privateers continued to prey on the American merchant fleet at will and there was no way to stop them.
In a calm, steady voice, Adams said the French had “inflicted a wound in the American breast,” but that it was his sincere desire to see it healed, and to preserve peace and friendship with all nations. He was therefore calling for both “a fresh attempt” at negotiation with France, and a buildup of American military strength.
While we are endeavoring to adjust all our differences with France by amicable negotiation, with the progress of the war in Europe, the depredations on our commerce, the personal injuries to our citizens, and the general complexion of our affairs, render it my duty to recommend your consideration of effectual measures of defense.
This was not an act of belligerence, but a measure to give added weight and respect to the mission he planned to send to Paris.
As was remarked at the time, the speech bore a strong resemblance to the American eagle, an olive branch in one talon, and in the other the “emblems of defense.” Federalist papers hailed Adams's patriotic fire. He had “shone forth” as in times of old, exciting “the liveliest approbation of all real Americans.”
It may be justly called a true American speech [said the Gazette of the United States]. It breathes in every line true American patriotism. It came from the heart of a tried patriot, and was addressed to the hearts of patriots alone. There was nothing wavering in it;
no little trick to catch a transitory approbation from the discontented, or to soothe the fractious. It was the explicit language of the first magistrate of the nation, disclosing to his fellow citizens the honest sentiments of his heart, expressing with proper feeling and sensibility the wrongs done to his injured country, and his determination to attempt to obtain redress; while at the same time it manifested humane anxiety to avert the calamities of war by temperance and negotiations.
Federalist approval was emphatic and widespread. From Mount Vernon, Washington wrote that the President had “placed matters upon their true ground.”
Republicans were enraged. Adams had not only failed to express sufficient sympathy for the French but had sounded a “war-whoop.” How, if he wanted to avoid war, could he press Congress to build up the navy?
Benjamin Bache turned with a fury on the President he had so recently lauded as a prudent, high-minded man of integrity. In almost daily attacks in the Aurora, Adams was belittled as “The President by Three Votes,” mocked again as “His Rotundity,” excoriated as a base hypocrite, a tool of the British, “a man divested of his senses.” He was charged again and again as a creature of Hamilton and the Federalist war hawks.
In fact, most Federalists at this point, including Hamilton, recognized the need for a renewed effort to treat with France, and as Adams did not know, it was largely because of Hamilton's influence that the cabinet had given their full support to the peace mission.
Within days Adams appointed two special envoys who, with General Pinckney, would comprise a new commission to proceed to Paris. He chose John Marshall of Virginia, whom he did not know, and his own former aide in Paris, Francis Dana. But when Dana declined because of poor health, Adams named Elbridge Gerry.
Marshall, a forty-two-year-old lawyer, was an ardent champion of George Washington under whom he had served gallantly in the war. A cousin of Jefferson's, but not an admirer of the Vice President, he was known to be able, skilled in the law, and, as mattered greatly, he was one of Virginia's few Federalists. Secretary of State Pickering and others in the cabinet strongly approved the choice.
Elbridge Gerry, however, was unacceptable to Pickering and the cabinet, who thought him too independent and unreliable. “It is ten to one against his agreeing with his colleagues,” Secretary of War McHenry warned the President. Even Abigail questioned the choice. But Adams insisted. He needed someone on the commission whose friendship and loyalty were beyond doubt. He knew Gerry—“I knew Gerry infinitely better than any of them,” he later said. The old bond of 1776 was still a tie that held Adams to Rush and even to Jefferson, for all the strains of politics. From the time of their ride to Philadelphia by horseback in the crisis winter of 1776, Adams had felt Gerry was someone to count on, and he was prepared to do just that in the present crisis. With the exception of his own son, John Quincy, there was perhaps no man in whom Adams placed more trust. Also, importantly, of the three envoys Gerry was the most sympathetic to France and, with his open admiration of Jefferson, came the closest to making it a bipartisan commission.
Later, when Marshall arrived in Philadelphia, Adams felt still better about the makeup of the commission. He and Marshall liked each other at once, even used virtually the same words to describe one another. Marshall judged Adams a “sensible, plain, candid, good tempered man,” while Adams wrote of Marshall, “he is a plain man, very sensible, cautious, and learned in the law of nations.”
In Paris the three American envoys would be dealing with the extremely wily and charming new French Foreign Minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord. A former bishop in the Catholic Church, Talleyrand had only recently returned to France after more than two years in exile in Philadelphia, where he had been well treated. Adams had known him but only slightly, not enough to have a sense of what to expect.
• • •
THE UNDECLARED WAR at sea continued. That spring Adams was informed that already the French had taken more than 300 trading vessels. American seamen had been wounded. In March the French captors of a ship out of Baltimore, the Cincinnatus, had tortured the American captain with thumbscrews in an unsuccessful attempt to make him say he was carrying British cargo.
“The task of the President is very arduous, very perplexing, and very hazardous. I do not wonder Washington wished to retire from it, or rejoiced in seeing an old oak in his place,” observed Abigail, who in her letters to her sister Mary was to provide an inside look at the Adams presidency like no other, much as she had in portraying their life in France and London years before, writing always to the moment and with untrammeled candor.
Adams was in his office in the President's House most of every day and from “such close application” looked exhausted. She took charge of the large house, supervised the staff, and sent off orders to Mary for shipments of the President's favorite New England cheese, bacon, white potatoes, and cider. In keeping with “old habit,” she told Mary, their day began at five in the morning. Breakfast was at eight, and they saw each other again at dinner, customarily served at three. “I begin to feel a little more at home, and less anxiety about the ceremonious part of my duty,” Abigail allowed. “I am obliged every day to devote two hours for the purpose of seeing company.”
The day is past, and a fatiguing one it has been [she closed another letter at eight o'clock in the evening]. The ladies of Foreign Ministers and the Ministers, with our own secretaries and ladies have visited me today, and add to them, the whole levee today of Senate and House. Strangers, etc. making near one hundred asked permission to visit me, so that from past 12 till near 4:00, I was rising up and sitting down.
She was both involved and vitally interested in her husband's world. She read all the newspapers, and in time came to know the names and faces of everyone in Congress, their background and political views. Little transpired in the capital that she did not know about. Yet her interest in matters at home never flagged. She kept contact with nieces and nephews, inquired regularly about the welfare of her pensioners: Parson Wibird, who had grown old and infirm, and her aged former servant Phoebe, to whom she sent money and made sure she had sufficient firewood and whatever other necessities were wanting.
The President's worries and burdens were never out of mind. “Mrs. Tufts once styled my situation ‘splendid misery,’ ” Abigail reminded Mary. Interestingly, it was a phrase Vice President Jefferson also used to describe the presidency.
When Adams named John Quincy to be minister to Prussia, more Republican protest erupted. Washington had never appointed relatives to office, it was said, not even distant relatives. The President must resign, charged the Aurora, “before it is too late to retrieve our deranged affairs.” When Congress chose to leave some matters to the “discretion” of the President, the Aurora attacked Adams for his excessive vanity.
“We may truly say we know not what a day will bring forth,” Abigail observed in her running account. “From every side we are in danger. We are in perils by land, and we are in perils by sea, and in perils by false brethren.” Whom she meant by false brethren, she did not say. But the Vice President all the while did nothing whatever to help his former friend the President. Further, he made no secret of his belief that Adams was leading the nation straight to war.
After years of seclusion at Monticello, Jefferson had, with amazing agility, stepped back into the kind of party politics he professed to abhor, and in no time emerged as leader of the opposition. With Madison in retirement, and the vice presidency providing ample free time, Jefferson kept extremely busy as a “closet politician,” in one man's expression, writing letters and lending support—ideas, information, and money—to the Republican press, including such “gladiators of the quill” as a dissolute Scottish pamphleteer and scandalmonger named James T. Callender, who wrote for the Aurora and specialized in attacks on John Adams.
The Francis Hotel, where Jefferson continued to lodge, became headquarters for the Republican inner circle. Any pretense of harmony between the President and Vi
ce President was dispensed with. Like other Republicans, Jefferson failed to understand how Adams could reconcile negotiation for peace with measures of defense, and in private correspondence accused Adams of willfully endangering the peace. When some of this got back to Adams, he angrily declared it bespoke a mind “eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.”
Yet given all that Jefferson was doing, and the combustible atmosphere of the moment, Adams's rancorous comments were remarkably few and mild. Many in the Federalist party suspected Jefferson of outright treachery against his own country.
Convinced that the best hope for the world was the defeat of Britain by France, and that such an outcome was imminent, Jefferson privately advised the French charge d'affaires in Philadelphia, Philippe-Henry-Joseph de Letombe, that the Directory should show the three American envoys all proper courtesy but “then drag out the negotiations at length.”
Letombe wrote of the meeting with “the wise Jefferson,” in a report to his Foreign Minister, dated June 7, 1797. America, Jefferson had impressed upon Letombe, was “penetrated with gratitude to France” and would “never forget that it owes its liberation to France.” The new President of the United States was another matter, however. Jefferson was unsparing: “Mr. Adams is vain, irritable, stubborn, endowed with excessive self-love, and still suffering pique at the preference accorded Franklin over him in Paris.” But Adams's term of office was only four years, Jefferson reminded Letombe. Besides, Adams did not have popular support. “He only became President by three votes, and the system of the United States will change along with him.”