Such stalwart, respected Federalists as Senators Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts and James Lloyd of Maryland were strongly in support of the Sedition Act. Noah Webster, editor, author, lexicographer, and staunch Federalist, declared it time to stop newspaper editors from libeling those with whom they disagreed, and to his friend Timothy Pickering wrote to urge that the new law be strictly enforced.
Even George Washington privately expressed the view that some publications were long overdue punishment for their lies and unprovoked attacks on the leaders of the union.
Vice President Jefferson, having no wish to be present for the inevitable passage of the Sedition Act, or anything more that might take place in such an atmosphere, quietly packed and went home to Monticello.
There were some Federalists who had mixed feelings about the Sedition Act, and John Marshall was openly opposed. Were he in Congress, Marshall said, he would have voted against it.
Though Adams appears to have said nothing on the subject at the time, it is hard to imagine him not taking a measure of satisfaction from the prospect of the tables turned on those who had tormented him for so long. And if Adams was reluctant to express his views, Abigail was not. Bache and his kind would inevitably provoke measures to silence them, she had predicted to Mary Cranch. They were “so criminal” that they ought to be brought to court. “Yet daringly do the vile incendiaries keep up in Bache's paper the most wicked and base, violent and culminating abuse,” she wrote another day, sure that “nothing will have effect until Congress passes a Sedition Bill.”
It was not uncommon in Philadelphia—or in Massachusetts—to hear talk of the unrivaled influence Abigail Adams had on her husband and of her political sense overall. Fisher Ames once observed that she was “as complete a politician as any lady in the old French Court.” That Adams valued and trusted her judgment ahead of that of any of his department heads there is no question, and she could well have been decisive in persuading Adams to support the Sedition Act. “Bearing neither malice or ill will towards anyone, not even the most deluded ... I wish the laws of our country were competent to punish the stirrer up of sedition, the writer and printer of base and unfounded calumny,” she wrote, and the key word to her was “unfounded.” She wanted proven lies to be judged unacceptable. This, she was sure, would “contribute as much to the peace and harmony of our country as any measure, and in times like the present, a more careful and attentive watch ought to be kept over foreigners.”
But it was also possible that Adams needed no persuading, and that in what she wrote to Mary Cranch, Abigail was speaking for both of them. Nor, importantly, was her influence always decisive, as shown by his choice of Elbridge Gerry as an envoy to France and, most importantly, his continued reluctance to declare war.
• • •
ON JULY 2, to meet the cost of the military buildup, the House voted a first direct tax on the people, a tax on land. Also, on July 2, to the surprise of many, Adams nominated George Washington as commander-in-chief of the new provisional army. “It was one of those strokes which the prospect and exigency of the times required,” wrote Abigail, “and which the President determined upon without consultation.” In addition, Adams submitted a list of proposed general officers that included Alexander Hamilton, but also several Republicans, most notably Aaron Burr, as well as his own son-in-law, Colonel Smith.
In a matter of days, Congress abrogated the French-American treaties of 1778, created a permanent Marine Corps, passed the Sedition Act, and approved the nomination of Washington as supreme commander. War fever was at a pitch.
On July 9, Secretary McHenry left for Mount Vernon by the express mail stage carrying Washington's commission and a letter from Adams saying that were it in his power to appoint Washington President, he would gladly do so.
On July 16, Congress adjourned and departed the city with a rush. By July 25, when the Adamses set off, people were already dying in what would become the worst yellow fever epidemic since 1793.
• • •
THE YEAR 1798, the most difficult and consequential year of John Adams's presidency, was to provide him no respite. His stay at Quincy would be longer even than the year before, but the stress of the undeclared war—the Quasi-War, as it came to be known, or Half-War, as he called it—combined with the threatening ambitions of Alexander Hamilton and growing dissension within Adams's own cabinet, filled his days with frustration and worry. There was precious little peace to be found at Peacefield in the summer of 1798, and especially as Abigail fell so ill that she very nearly died.
The first days at home were supposed to have been an even greater delight than usual, for unbeknown to Adams, a huge improvement to the house had taken place in their absence. An entire wing with a spacious parlor and a library above, had been added to the east end, and the whole house “new painted” inside and out. Abigail had secretly arranged it all that spring through Cotton Tufts, as a surprise for Adams. It was a “wren's house” no more. She had doubled its size, much as Jefferson had done at Monticello, except on a considerably smaller scale and with the difference that she did it entirely to her own wishes, paying for it out of money she saved from household expenses at Philadelphia, and never asking for Adams's permission or opinion. “I meant to have it all done snug... before I come,” she had told Mary Cranch in April. “I know the President will be glad when it is done, but he can never bear to trouble himself about any thing of the kind, and he has not the taste for it.”
The parlor was for Abigail, the second-floor library, or “Book room,” for Adams, and like the parlor, it was to have a handsome fireplace and windows on three sides. It must accommodate all his books “in regular order and be a pleasant room for the President to do business in,” Abigail had directed.
But in late June, just as the project was nearly finished, a Quincy neighbor on his way through Philadelphia stopped to pay his respects and revealed the whole secret to Adams, who, Abigail was happy to report, responded with a hearty laugh.
Whatever pleasure they might have found in their expanded quarters was foreclosed before they ever reached home. Abigail was taken ill on the journey and confined to her bed from the day they arrived, August 8.
She was “very weak,” Adams wrote to Oliver Wolcott. Some days later he reported to Timothy Pickering, “Mrs. Adams is extremely low and in great danger.” In fact, she was as sick as she had ever been and it was with difficulty that Adams was able to concentrate on anything else.
Nabby, who with her daughter Caroline had come for an extended visit, hoping to be of help, wrote to John Quincy that it had become a different house. “The illness of our dear mother has cast a gloom over the face of everything here, and it scarce seems like home without her enlivening cheerfulness.”
To Secretary of War McHenry, Adams would describe it as “the most gloomy summer” he had known, but he could as easily have called it one of the most gloomy passages of his life, second only to his own siege of illness and despair in Amsterdam. Writing to George Washington later, after two months at home, Adams would say that Abigail's fate was still very precarious “and mine in consequence of it,”
Yet to judge from the volume of correspondence, the number and variety of issues he dealt with, he worked no less diligently than usual, spending long hours at his desk in the new library across the hall from Abigail's sickroom. Official reports from Philadelphia, dispatches from department heads, documents requiring his signature, requests for pardons, applications for jobs, reports of all kinds, arrived in assorted bundles, daily by post rider. Decisions were called for on matters large and small. Benjamin Rush asked that his brother be considered for the Supreme Court. There was a request for the President's approval to build a lighthouse at Cape Hatteras, a request from Secretary Wolcott for authority to borrow up to $5,000,000 on behalf of the United States, reports from Wolcott on the yellow fever epidemic. Secretary McHenry sent an extended review, numbing in detail, of expenditures required for the Department of War. (“I have
supposed that the items in the table of the Quarter Master's supplies and contingent expenses for the eight additional companies and privates to the old establishment and for the six additional companies of dragoons may be covered by the appropriations for the original army and that the 600 thousand dollars stated by the Quarter Master's department for the 12 regiments will procure all the camp equipage not provided for by the table. “) Nor was there any letup in the stream of patriotic addresses.
Adams struggled to read it all and respond. “Wooden walls have been my favorite system of warfare and defense for three and twenty years,” he wrote in reply to an address from the Boston Marine Society. “Americans in general, cultivators as well as merchants and marines, begin to look to that source of security and protection.” After reading Wolcott's report on the ravages of yellow fever at the capital, Adams sent an anonymous contribution of $500.
Most pressing was an unfortunate dispute that developed between Adams and Washington. At the heart of the issue was whether Alexander Hamilton should be made the second-highest-ranking officer in the new army, as Washington preferred and as Hamilton desperately desired.
When McHenry had gone off by express stage to Mount Vernon in early July, he had carried, in addition to Washington's commission from the President, a letter from Hamilton about which Adams was told nothing. “The arrangement of the army may demand your particular attention,” Hamilton wrote, referring to Washington's choice of a general staff. In this regard Washington was advised that the judgment of the President ought not to be a consideration. “The President,” Hamilton wrote, “has no relative ideas, and his prepossessions on military subjects in reference to such a point are of the wrong sort,” meaning, presumably, that Adams cared more for the navy than the army.
The view that Adams was unsuited to prepare the nation for war and that Hamilton, by contrast, was the ideal choice for second-in-command was shared by McHenry and Secretary Pickering alike. Indeed, Pickering had already said as much in a letter to Washington.
Thus, both the Secretary of War and the Secretary of State were secretly campaigning for Hamilton, supplying him with inside information, and undermining the intentions of their President, whom they saw riding for a fall. Sending Hamilton copies of secret government documents that summer, McHenry attached a note saying, “Do not, I pray you, in writing or otherwise betray the confidence which has induced me to deal thus with you or make extracts or copies.... Return the papers immediately.”
Washington had accepted his commission in an entirely cordial letter to Adams, but with the understanding that as head of the new army he could choose his own principal officers. Then he made known his intention to name Hamilton as second-in-command, with the rank of major general. Since no one expected Washington to take the field at his age, or to command except in name, the proposed arrangement meant, in effect, that Hamilton was to be in command—it was to be Hamilton's army.
In a letter that went off from Quincy to McHenry on August 29, Adams wrote that Washington had conducted himself with “perfect honor and consistency.” But the “power and authority are in the President,” Adams reminded his Secretary of War. “There has been too much intrigue in this business,” he added, suggesting he knew more, or suspected more, than he appeared to. In a letter to Oliver Wolcott that he most likely never sent, Adams said angrily that were he to consent to the appointment of Hamilton to second rank under Washington, he would consider it the most reprehensible action of his life. “His talents I respect. His character—I leave...”
But Washington had left Adams no way out. To raise the new army Washington's prestige was essential, as Hamilton, McHenry, Pickering, and Wolcott all understood. On September 30, Adams relinquished the final say to Washington.
September 30 was a Sunday, which makes it unlikely that the letter went off until the following day, October 1, the same day Elbridge Gerry arrived home from France, bringing news that gave a very different cast to the whole picture. Gerry's ship appeared off Boston that morning. Losing no time, he dispatched a letter to Adams before the ship docked. But whether Gerry's letter reached Adams before Adams's letter went off to McHenry with the morning post is not known.
The French wanted peace, Gerry reported.
Three days later, on Thursday, October 4, Gerry presented himself at Quincy, and he and Adams settled in for a long private talk.
In his few days ashore Gerry had been thoroughly ostracized in Boston. “Not a hat was moved” as he walked up State Street, according to one account from the time. Angry crowds shouted insults outside his Cambridge home. But the welcome from Adams was warm, and the more Gerry talked, the more Adams must have realized that the current had turned his way at last. Talleyrand, Gerry assured him, was ready to treat seriously with the United States.
It was a critical moment in Adams's presidency. Among other things, Gerry had more than justified Adams's confidence in him. What he was telling Adams, to be sure, was what Adams desperately wanted to hear. The last thing in the world Adams wished to do was to lead the country into a needless war. But more to the point, he judged quite correctly that Gerry was telling the truth.
John Marshall had said much the same thing, and so had John Quincy in some of his correspondence with his father, but as Adams was to write, the assurances of Gerry—“my own ambassador”—were “more positive, more explicit, and decisive.”
Gerry's letter of October 1, Adams later said, “confirmed these [earlier] assurances beyond all doubt in my mind, and his conversations with me at my own house in Quincy, if anything further had been wanting, would have corroborated the whole.”
It was the week after Gerry's return when a letter arrived from Washington. Written on September 25, it did not reach Adams until October 8. Were he to be denied the deciding voice in the selection of his general staff, Washington informed the President, he would resign his commission.
Adams sent off an immediate reply, agreeing to Washington's wishes. As he had accepted Washington's cabinet in the interest of unanimity, so he now accepted Washington's choice of Hamilton. But he also had reason to believe now that Hamilton and the army might not be needed at all.
As a matter of form, he reminded Washington a bit lamely that by the Constitution it was the President who had the authority to determine the rank of officers. Washington promoted Hamilton to be inspector general.
In the contest of who was in charge, Adams, it seemed, had been put in his place, outflanked not so much by Washington as by his own cabinet, and ultimately Hamilton, which left Adams feeling bruised and resentful. But at the same time, it gave Hamilton, and those in Adams's cabinet whose first loyalty was to Hamilton, an inflated sense of their own importance and authority.
From continued discussion with Gerry at Quincy and from new dispatches from William Vans Murray at The Hague, Adams became convinced that Gerry's conduct in Paris had not only been proper, but courageous. On October 20, writing to Pickering to ask for suggestions on the content of his forthcoming message to Congress, Adams made it plain that he was thinking of sending a new minister to France “who may be ready to embark ... as soon as ... the President shall receive from the Directory satisfactory assurance that he shall be received and entitled to all the prerogatives and privileges of the general laws of nations.” Further, he offered a list of those he had in mind for the assignment that included Patrick Henry and William Vans Murray.
Then, in a letter to his Secretary of War expressing his full support for Washington's judgment, Adams added two pointed observations. Maintaining armies was costly business and could become quite unpopular in the absence of an enemy to fight, he reminded McHenry. Of what possible use could a large army be, Adams was saying, if a French invasion never took place? In closing, he observed, “At present there is no more prospect of seeing a French army here than there is in heaven.”
• • •
ABIGAIL'S ILLNESS dragged on. She never left her sickbed, her “dying bed,” as she said. Talk of sickness
and death—of insomnia, melancholy, her persistent, baffling fevers—dominated the domestic scene, just as sickness and death filled the newspapers, week after week, as yellow fever spread in Boston, New York, Baltimore, and worst of all in Philadelphia.
By September nearly 40,000 people had evacuated Philadelphia. Yet the newspapers continued to report more than a hundred new cases a day. “The best skill of our physicians... have proved unequal to the contest of this devouring poison,” reported the Aurora. By the time the plague ran its course in Philadelphia, more than 3,000 lost their lives, including, as the Adamses were stunned to read, the mayor of the city and both Bache of the Aurora, who had died on September 10 at age twenty-nine, and his arch nemesis, Fenno of the Gazette of the United States, who died just days before. The list of victims also included four of the servants at the President's House, as Abigail was duly informed.
The melancholy that beset her was unrelenting, suggesting the fever she suffered may have been malaria, but she was also distressed over further troubles within the family.
Before leaving on his diplomatic assignment abroad, John Quincy had left his savings, some $2,000, in the trust of his brother Charles. In the time since, however, Charles had managed to lose nearly all of it through bad investments, and then kept silent about what had happened, refusing to answer John Quincy's queries, in the hope that, with a little more time, he might somehow recover at least part of the money. Only that summer had the truth become known within the family, and it was devastating to both parents, but especially to Abigail, who had so long and so diligently managed the family affairs.
“I have not enjoyed one moment's comfort for upwards of two years on this account,” Charles wrote to his mother in midsummer. “My sleep has been disturbed, and my waking hours embittered.”
“He is not at peace with himself,” she would write later to John Quincy, during her convalescence, “and his conduct does not meet my wishes.