It was carried by a courier to the second-floor Senate Chamber, where an astonished Vice President interrupted the business on the floor to read it aloud:
Always disposed and ready to embrace every plausible appearance of probability of preserving or restoring tranquility, I nominate William Vans Murray, our minister resident at The Hague, to be minister plenipotentiary of the United States to the French Republic.
If the Senate shall advise and consent to his appointment, effectual care shall be taken in his instructions that he shall not go to France without direct and unequivocal assurances from the French government, signified by their Minister of Foreign Relations, that he shall be received in character, shall enjoy the privileges attached to his character by the law of nations, and that a minister of equal rank, title, and powers shall be appointed to treat with him, to discuss and conclude all controversies between the two Republics by a new treaty.
The “war-monger” who the summer before had refused to declare war had declared, if not peace, then, at least, that the door to peace was now wide open.
Republicans were astounded. Federalists were momentarily speechless, then filled with “surprise, indignation, grief, and disgust.” Particularly galling to them was the fact that it was Jefferson who read the message.
The Secretary of State was enraged. The “honor of the country is prostrated in the dust—God grant that its safety may not be in jeopardy,” Timothy Pickering wrote to George Washington. In a letter to William Vans Murray, Pickering would declare “every real patriot... was thunderstruck.” Adams, he said, was “suffering the torments of the damned.” “I beg you to be assured that it is wholly his own act, “Pickering reported to Hamilton.
Senator Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, who had greatly admired Adams, worked for his election, and thought he had thus far played “a noble part” as President, felt personally betrayed. Barely able to contain his fury, he wrote of the “vain, jealous, and half frantic mind” of John Adams, a man ruled “by caprice alone.” “Had the foulest heart and the basest head in the world been permitted to select the most embarrassing and ruinous measure, perhaps it would have been precisely the one which has been adopted.”
Another riled Federalist, Robert G. Harper of South Carolina, Hamilton's chief spokesman in the House, privately expressed the hope that on Adams's way home to Quincy, his horses might run away with him and break his neck.
Hamilton himself allowed that if anything coming from John Adams could astonish, certainly this had.
To Thomas Jefferson it was the “event of events,” but strangely—regrettably—he was unable to accept what Adams had done at face value, or to give him any credit. Rather, Jefferson took pleasure in the “mortification” of the Federalists, which proved, he said, that war was always their intent. To Madison he wrote that Adams had only made the nomination “hoping that his friends in the Senate would take on their own shoulders the odium of rejecting it.”
In the Aurora, Margaret Bache and her new editor, William Duane, would concede only that Adams deserved “fair applause” for prudence.
But for all the indignant fuming of the High Federalists, no motions were made in the Senate for a resolution opposing a new mission to France. When a Senate committee led by Sedgwick came to see Adams a few days later, it was to object only to the choice of Murray, who was thought too young, not “strong enough,” for an assignment of such importance. They wished to have the nomination retracted, which Adams refused to do. Murray was a man of experience and ability through whom communications with Talleyrand were already established, Adams answered. Further, Murray had the advantage of being on the scene.
Accounts differ whether the meeting was amicable or acrimonious, but a compromise resulted in any event. Instead of Murray alone serving as minister plenipotentiary, Adams nominated Patrick Henry and Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth to join Murray as envoys to France, making a commission of three. The Senate immediately confirmed the appointments and a day later, March 4, Congress adjourned. Afterward, when Patrick Henry declined for reasons of health, Adams chose another southerner, the Federalist governor of North Carolina, William Davie.
In Massachusetts, infuriated Federalists were saying that had the President's “old woman” been with him in Philadelphia none of this would have happened—she being the more stouthearted of the two. “This was pretty saucy,” Abigail wrote to John of the gossip, “but the old woman can tell them they are mistaken.” She considered his decision a “master stroke.”
By the second week of March, as Adams was preparing to leave for Quincy, word reached Philadelphia that the American frigate Constellation, under Captain Thomas Truxtun, had captured the French frigate L'Insurgent, after a battle near the island of Nevis in the Leewards, the first major engagement of the undeclared war at sea. Where would it all end, people were asking in Philadelphia. But Adams was anything but alarmed or displeased. Of Captain Truxtun he wrote, “I wish all other officers had as much zeal.”
While his entire political standing, his reputation as President, were riding on his willingness to make peace, Adams was no less ardent for defense. In fact, he was convinced that peace was attainable only as a consequence of America's growing naval strength. To Secretary Stoddert he even proposed that some of the fast new ships might be used to cruise the coast of France.
Nor do I think we ought to wait a moment to know whether the French mean to give us any proofs of their desire to conciliate with us. I am for pursuing all the measure of defense which the laws authorize us to adopt, especially at sea.
• • •
CONVINCED he could run the government as well from Quincy as at Philadelphia, Adams stretched his stay at home from late March to September, fully seven months. From the views expressed by his vociferous critics, it was hard to say which annoyed them more, his presence at the capital or his absence. At worst, his absence seemed an arrogant abdication of responsibility. At best, it seemed a kind of eccentric scholarly detachment.
Some moderate Federalists and old friends warned Adams he could be doing himself and the country great harm by remaining too long in seclusion. “The public sentiment is very much against your being so much away from the seat of government. They did not elect your officers, nor do they... think them equal to govern without your presence and control,” wrote a correspondent who feared a plot against Adams could be hatching in his absence. “I speak the truth when I say that your real friends wish you to be with your officers, because the public impression is that the government will be better conducted.”
There had been criticism of his long absence the year before, irrespective of Abigail's illness, but the criticism now was greater, and with reason. Adams's presence at the center of things was what the country rightfully expected, and could indeed have made a difference.
But stay he did at Peacefield, and to his mind with more than sufficient justification. Washington, too, had spent long sessions at Mount Vernon (though never for seven months), and with Philadelphia hit by yellow fever every summer and fall, the government barely functioned there for several months. He could accomplish his work quite as readily at home as at the capital, so long as Congress was not in session. Were he ever unable to appear when Congress was sitting, Adams said, he would resign.
He worked dutifully. He read everything that was sent to him, read several newspapers assiduously, wrote some seventy letters to his department heads during the time he was absent, twenty-eight of which were to his Secretary of State. If there were delays in the system, they were nearly always at Philadelphia, not at his end.
Beyond all that, Adams recognized there was only so much he could do, that he could effect the roll of events only to a point. Writing to Washington earlier, he had expressed much of his philosophy as President in two sentences: “My administration will not certainly be easy to myself.
It will be happy, however, if it is honorable. The prosperity of it to the country will depend upon Heaven, and very little on anythin
g in my power.”
Frequently he would interject a similar refrain in thoughtful letters to his department heads when passing down decisions or judgments on matters of government business. For Adams the ultimate command rested always beyond the reach of mortal men, just as the very natures and actions of men themselves were often determined by their Maker. In an official letter to Secretary of the Navy Stoddert written the summer of 1799, Adams began, “It always gives me pain when I find myself obliged to differ in opinion from any of the heads of departments; but, as our understandings are not always in our own power, every man must judge for himself.” When Secretary of War McHenry stressed the importance to the nation of a substantial army and of “genius in the command of it,” Adams responded that “Genius in a general is oftener an instrument of divine vengeance than a guardian angel.”
In health and outlook he always benefited from time on his farm, and Abigail's health, too, was soon greatly improved. Given his nature and so much that burdened his mind, he undoubtedly had moments of despair and anger. Once when General Knox and Adams's old friend from the years in Holland, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, came to call, Adams sat the whole time reading a newspaper. Still, he attended the Harvard commencement, a Fourth of July celebration in Boston, and the launching of the frigate Boston.
On July 23, Adams watched from an upstairs window as the Constitution headed out to sea from Boston under full sail. “After a detention of nine days by contrary winds,” he wrote, “the Constitution took advantage of a brisk breeze, and went out of the harbor and out of sight this afternoon, making a beautiful and noble figure.”
According to Abigail, in a midsummer report to John Quincy, the President was in “very good humor.”
• • •
LATE IN THE DAY, August 5, Adams received a dispatch from Pickering containing a letter from Talleyrand dated May 12, assuring that the American envoys would be received with all appropriate respect.
It was the word Adams had been waiting for. At his desk at Peacefield the next morning, he wrote a letter to Pickering leaving no doubt of his intentions, his sense of urgency, or who was the senior diplomat between them, and that he expected immediate action taken. It was in all a strong summary of what had been his policy from the start. It also included a flash of Adams's temper—in what he said in response to Pickering's umbrage over the impatience Talleyrand had expressed about the time the Americans were taking to get things moving.
“It is far below the dignity of the President of the United States to take any notice of Talleyrand's impertinent regrets, and insinuations of superfluities,” Adams lectured. “You or Mr. Murray may answer them as you please.”
That said, Adams got to the essential point, lest Pickering have any misconceptions:
I will say to you, however, that I consider this letter as the most authentic intelligence yet received in America of the successes of the coalition. That the design is insidious and hostile at heart, I will not say. Time will tell the truth. Meantime, I dread no longer their diplomatic skill. I have seen it, and felt it, and been the victim of it these twenty-one years. But the charm is dissolved. Their magic is at an end in America. Still, they shall find, as long as I am in office, candor, integrity, and, as far as there can be any confidence and safety, a pacific and friendly disposition. If the spirit of exterminating vengeance ever arises, it shall be conjured up by them, not me. In this spirit I shall pursue the negotiation, and I expect the cooperation of the heads of departments.
American defenses by sea and land were not to be relaxed. As to the mission, he wished “to delay nothing.”
My opinions and determinations in these subjects are so well made up, at least to my satisfaction, that not many hours will be necessary for me to give you my ultimate sentiments concerning the matter or form of the instructions to be given to the envoys.
But just as it seemed Adams had set his course, news came from Paris of a breakup of the Directory—“chaos,” according to reports. To his cabinet it brought a surge of hope that peace could be postponed, a view strongly reinforced by Inspector General Hamilton.
Secretary of the Navy Stoddert, Adams's consistently loyal supporter, urged him to come at once to Trenton, New Jersey, where the government had set up emergency quarters until the yellow fever epidemic passed in Philadelphia. Although not inclined to go just yet, Adams told Stoddert that should “considerable difference” arise between the heads of departments, he would come at all events.
On September 13, Stoddert wrote again, filled with apprehension “that artful designing men might make such use of your absence” as to disrupt the peace initiative and “make your next election less honorable than it would otherwise be.” This and a letter from Pickering proposing suspension of the peace mission were all Adams needed to hear. Abigail would follow once she had things in order at home.
He would be in Trenton by October 15 at the latest, Adams wrote Stoddert. “I have only one favor to beg, and that is that a certain election may be wholly laid out of this question and all others.”
Adams left Peacefield on the last day of September, ready for what he had to face. But stopping at East Chester to see Nabby, he was struck a blow for which he was wholly unprepared. While the details are sparse, it could only have been one of the most dreadful moments of his life. To make matters worse, he had begun to feel ill en route and so arrived at East Chester already in a low state.
From his distraught daughter-in-law, Charles's wife, Sally, who with her two small daughters was staying with Nabby, Adams learned for the first time that Charles, who had disappeared, was bankrupt, faithless, and an alcoholic.
“I pitied her, I grieved, I mourned,” Adams wrote to Abigail in anguish, “but could do no more.” David's son Absalom at least had enterprise, he said. “Mine is a mere rake, buck, blood, and beast.” If he felt pity for Charles, he did not express it.
“I love him too much,” Adams had once written of his small second son when they were in Paris. “Charles wins the heart as usual, and is the most gentleman of them all,” he had said upon seeing him again, after the return from England. Now Charles had become “a madman possessed of the devil.” And, declared Adams, “I renounce him.”
As time passed, the Adamses would say comparatively little about Charles. It was as though the downfall of Abigail's brother William were repeating itself, and the family returned to the old ways of keeping “calamity” private. Only now and then would Abigail make mention of it, usually in letters to Mary Cranch, and almost never referring to Charles by name. “Any calamity inflicted by the hand of Providence, it would become me in silence to submit to,” she wrote some weeks later, “but when I behold misery and distress, disgrace and poverty brought upon a family by intemperance, my heart bleeds at every pore.” A “graceless child,” he was, but she did not renounce him.
To push on to Trenton, “loaded with sorrow,” was almost more than Adams was up to. He felt wretchedly ill with a cold so severe that he thought he might have yellow fever, which he did not.
Trenton, a village no larger than Quincy under normal conditions, was overflowing with refugees from Philadelphia, in addition to several hundred government officials and military officers. The best that could be arranged for the President were a small bedroom and sitting room in a boardinghouse kept by two maiden sisters named Barnes, one of whom provided the ailing Adams with a down comforter, while the other dosed him with a purgative of rhubarb and calomel.
Adams arrived expecting to meet directly with his cabinet to straighten out the impasse on the mission to France, and as miserable as he felt, he was ready to summon them without delay. What he had not expected was the presence in Trenton of General Hamilton, who had come to make a personal appeal to Adams to suspend the mission.
Hamilton had ridden over from Newark, where his troops were encamped and where by protocol he ought to have remained until called for, should the President wish to see him. That he had chosen to come to Trenton uninvited was taken b
y some as the kind of bold move Hamilton was known and admired for, but it also strongly suggested an element of desperation.
Hamilton called on Adams at the Barnes boardinghouse, where presumably they drew up chairs in Adams's tiny sitting room—two proud, pertinacious men who by now hated each other, one ambitious for war, the other peace, and each determined to have his way.
According to Adams, who provided several accounts of the confrontation, then and later, he received the general with appropriate civility, saying nothing of politics. But at first chance Hamilton commenced to “remonstrate” against the mission to France. “His eloquence and vehemence wrought the little man up to a degree of heat and effervescence.... He repeated over and over again... [his] unbounded confidence in the British empire... with such agitation and violent action that I really pitied him, instead of being displeased.” The British had the upper hand in the war, Hamilton insisted, and would soon help restore the Bourbons to power in France. America must join with the British and have no dealings whatever with the present French government.
Adams was astonished by Hamilton's “total ignorance” of the situation in Europe. He would as soon expect the sun, moon, and stars to fall from their orbits as to see the Bourbons restored, he told Hamilton. But even were that to happen, what injury could it mean for the United States to have envoys there?
The meeting lasted several hours, through which, by his account, Adams sat patiently listening as Hamilton with his famous powers of persuasion talked steadily on. “I heard him with perfect good humor, though never in my life did I hear a man talk more like a fool.”
On October 15, Adams summoned the cabinet to a session that lasted until eleven o'clock that night. Pickering, Wolcott, and McHenry, like Hamilton, adamantly opposed the mission. Secretary of the Navy Stoddert supported it, as did Attorney General Lee, the only member of the cabinet not present at Trenton, but who had expressed his views in a letter.