The fate of the condemned men, however, was left to Adams alone.
In southeastern Pennsylvania the previous year there had been an armed uprising by German (Pennsylvania Dutch) farmers angry over the federal tax on land and the high-handed ways of the federal tax collectors. The “rebellion” had died down by the time state and federal troops arrived, but its leader, John Fries, and two others were taken captive and tried in federal court. Found guilty of treason and sentenced to hang, they had appealed to the President for a pardon.
Adams had been initially incensed at the news of the rebellion—it was he who had ordered the federal troops to the scene—but had since insisted on making his own study of the case. “The issue of this investigation,” he wrote, “has opened a train of very serious contemplations to me, which will require the closest attention of my best understanding, and will prove a severe trial to my heart.” Again he asked for the opinions of his cabinet officers, all of whom recommended that, to set an example, the sentence should be carried out.
Capital punishment was part of life. Nor was Adams opposed to it. As President, he had signed death warrants for military deserters. Secretary of State Pickering, in giving his opinion, was, like the others, only expressing what he viewed as a duty of office. “Painful as is the idea of taking the life of a man,” Pickering wrote, “I feel a calm and solid satisfaction that an opportunity is now presented in executing the justice of the law, to crush that spirit, which, if not overthrown and destroyed, may proceed in its career and overturn the government.”
It was what Adams himself might have written earlier. But with his review completed, Adams saw that he had been mistaken. Fries, it was his judgment, had led a riot, not an insurrection, and was therefore not guilty of treason. Rejecting the verdict of the jury and the unanimous opinion of his cabinet, Adams pardoned Fries and the two others, never doubting he had done the right thing. And though the decision aggravated still further the already infuriated Hamiltonians, who saw it as still one more example of Adams's weakness and capriciousness, much of the electorate approved, and especially in Pennsylvania.
• • •
IF THE PRESIDENT and his wife had misgivings about vacating Philadelphia and the great brick mansion on Market Street, if they were at all saddened by the prospect, such feelings went unrecorded. In her last letters to Mary Cranch before leaving, Abigail wrote mainly of the lovely spring weather—“as luxuriant a season as I ever knew”—and the arrangements to be made for a final dinner party.
She started for Quincy on May 19. The President departed for Washington on May 27, heading southwest in his coach-and-four accompanied by Billy Shaw, and escorted by the ever-faithful John Briesler on horseback. For miles through Pennsylvania's Lancaster County, where well-tended farms were burgeoning with crops in the “luxuriant” season, Adams delighted in the scenery. At Lancaster and later at Frederick, Maryland, he spoke before public gatherings, and was warmly received, as he was at other towns along the way, enjoying what, in that day and age, passed for campaigning. Such were the tributes and entertainments in his honor en route, it was not until June 3 that he reached the boundary line of the ten-mile square of the District of Columbia.
• • •
GIVEN WHAT there was to see, Adams might have been terribly disappointed by the Federal City. He could rightfully have fumed over the heat, the mosquitoes, the squalid shacks of the work crews; or the projected cost of the project; or the questionable real estate ventures that had failed year after year, despite so many grand promises. Another nephew, William Cranch, had become involved in one such scheme and gone bankrupt. Being that it was his first foray into the South, Adams might have been disturbed by the sight of slaves at work.
For all the talk, there was no city as yet, only a rather shabby village and great stretches of tree stumps, stubble, and swamp. There were no schools, not a single church. Capitol Hill comprised a few stores, a few nondescript hotels and boardinghouses clustered near a half-finished sandstone Capitol. To accommodate the different departments of the government, only one structure had been completed, the Treasury, a plain two-story brick building a mile to the west of the Capitol, next door to the new President's House, which was still a long way from being ready.
Oliver Wolcott, in a letter to his wife, described the Capitol and the President's House as “magnificent,” yet was astounded at how much had still to be done.
I cannot but consider our Presidents as very unfortunate men if they must live in this dwelling. It must be cold and damp in winter... It was built to be looked at by visitors and strangers, and will render its occupants an object of ridicule with some and pity with others.
Dr. William Thornton, a commissioner of the District and architect of the Capitol, spoke confidently of a population in Washington of 160,000 people within a few years. To Wolcott, as to many, it seemed no one in Washington knew what he was talking about. In fact, it would be nearly eighty years before the city had such a population.
Adams, with his memories of Pans and London, with his fondness for Philadelphia and his belief that the capital of a great nation ought to be a great city, could have been appalled by the whole place and seen it as a colossal blunder. He could have dismissed it as Jefferson's city, Jefferson having devoted more time and thought to the project than anyone in government. Everything considered, there was almost no reason for Adams to have liked anything about it.
Yet by all signs he was quite pleased. “I like the seat of government very well,” he wrote Abigail. He stayed ten days, lodging at Tunnicliffe's City Hotel, near the Capitol. He was joined by his new appointments, Secretary of State Marshall and Secretary of War Dexter, who with the rest of the executive branch had made the move from Philadelphia, along with the complete files of the President and the departments shipped in eight packing cases.
Adams made a brief inspection of the new President's House. Once, when asked by Washington how he thought a President ought to live—in what manner and style—Adams had said it should be in a fairly grand way. And though he had said nothing specific about the sort of house a President should have, this under construction seems to have met his approval. He imagined himself asleep there, or lying awake, he told Abigail, but referred only to the coming winter, not the next four years.
He enjoyed most of all his visits to Mount Vernon to call on Martha Washington, and to Alexandria, where he was acclaimed by the townspeople and given a dinner in his honor at the home of Attorney General Lee, the net effect of which was to make him extremely homesick.
“Oh! That I could have a home!” He felt he had been forever on the move, on the road. “Rolling, rolling, rolling, till I am very nearly rolling into the bosom of Mother Earth.”
By first light, June 14, he was rolling north to Quincy, leaving John Marshall to manage in his absence.
• • •
IN THE SUMMER and fall of 1800 the question of who was to lead the nation rapidly became a contest of personal vilification surpassing any presidential election in American history. The spirit of party had taken hold with a vengeance, and whether Adams or Jefferson was the most abused would be hard to say. In Federalist pamphlets and newspapers, Jefferson was decried as a hopeless visionary, a weakling, an intriguer intoxicated with French philosophy, more a Frenchman than an American, and therefore a bad man. He was accused of favoring states' rights over the Union, charged with infidelity to the Constitution, called a spendthrift and libertine.
One New York paper assured its readers that a Jefferson victory would mean civil war. Hordes of Frenchmen and Irishmen, “the refuse of Europe,” would flood the country and threaten the life of “all who love order, peace, virtue, and religion.” It was said Jefferson had swindled clients as a young lawyer. The old smear of cowardice during his time as governor of Virginia was revived. But most amplified were charges of atheism. Not only was Jefferson a godless man, but one who mocked the Christian faith. In New England word went out that family Bibles would have to be
hidden away for safekeeping, were he elected. So widespread and pervasive was such propaganda that even Martha Washington, who may have been smarting still from the “Mazzei Letter,” remarked to a visiting clergyman that she thought Jefferson “one of the most detestable of mankind.”
Stories were spread of personal immorality. It was now that a whispering campaign began to the effect that all southern slave masters were known to cohabit with slave women and that the Sage of Monticello was no exception.
Adams was inevitably excoriated as a monarchist, more British than American, and therefore a bad man. He was ridiculed as old, addled, and toothless. Timothy Pickering spread the rumor that to secure his reelection Adams had struck a corrupt bargain with the Republicans. According to another story, this secret arrangement was with Jefferson himself—Adams was to throw the election Jefferson's way and serve as Jefferson's vice president.
If Jefferson carried on with slave women, Adams, according to one story in circulation, had ordered Charles Cotesworth Pinckney to London to procure four pretty mistresses to divide between them. When the story reached Adams, he was highly amused. “I do declare upon my honor,” he wrote William Tudor, “if this is true General Pinckney has kept them all for himself and cheated me out of my two.”
Most vicious were the charges that Adams was insane. Thus, if Jefferson was a Jacobin, a shameless southern libertine, and a “howling” atheist, Adams was a Tory, a vain Yankee scold, and, if truth be known, “quite mad.”
But the great difference in the attacks on Adams in this election was that they came from Republicans and High Federalists alike. While the Republicans assaulted him as a warmonger, he was berated by the High Federalists as fainthearted in the face of the French. While one side belittled him as a creature of the Hamiltonians, the other scorned him as a friend of Elbridge Gerry.
Jefferson in his four years as Vice President had so effectively separated himself from Adams and the administration that he could be held accountable for nothing that had disappointed, displeased, or infuriated anyone, whereas Adams was held forever accountable for the new taxes, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the standing army, and a host of other “menaces,” as said Philadelphia's Aurora.
There were, as well, striking ironies. Jefferson, the Virginia aristocrat and slave master who lived in a style fit for a prince, as removed from his fellow citizens and their lives as it was possible to be, was hailed as the apostle of liberty, the “Man of the People.” Adams, the farmer's son who despised slavery and practiced the kind of personal economy and plain living commonly upheld as the American way, was scorned as an aristocrat who, if he could, would enslave the common people. “My countrymen!” exclaimed William Duane in the Aurora in his crusade for Jefferson, “If you have not virtue enough to stem the current, determine to be slaves at once.”
For Adams, abuse from the Jefferson Republicans was an old story. It was to be expected. Far more hurtful were the personal attacks from the Hamilton Federalists.
When Oliver Wolcott wrote from his office in Washington to tell Fisher Ames of Massachusetts that he would work to defeat Adams and that between Adams and Jefferson there was scarcely a difference, that one would be as disastrous as the other, he was only expressing what many Hamilton Federalists had concluded, taking their cue from their leader. For again as in 1788 and 1796, Hamilton was throwing his weight into the contest to tip the balance against Adams, except this time there was no pretense of secrecy.
As early as May, Hamilton had launched a letter campaign to his High Federalist coterie declaring Adams unfit and incapable as President, a man whose defects of character were guaranteed to bring certain ruin to the party. “If we must have an enemy at the head of the government, let it be one whom we can oppose... who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures.”
On a tour of New England, ostensibly to bid farewell to his army before it disbanded, Hamilton spent as much time as possible among local Federalist leaders to whom he spread the same charge against Adams. Hamilton's scheme was to make Charles Cotesworth Pinckney President.
Reports of Hamilton's activities inevitably reached Quincy. “It was soon understood that... his visit was merely an electioneering business, to feel the pulse of the New England states, and impress those upon whom he could have any influence to vote for Pinckney,” Abigail wrote. But by such intrigues, she was sure, “the little cock sparrow general” would lose more votes for Pinckney than he would gain.
When such an old friend as Francis Dana turned his back on Adams, it was extremely painful for him. Yet he himself and his efforts for peace were widely approved in New England, as Hamilton discovered to his dismay. While “strong-minded men” stood ready to support Pinckney, Hamilton wrote in his analysis of the political climate, there was still “in the body of that people... a strong attachment” to Adams.
As Abigail observed in mid-August, not a public event or levee took place “without being attended by many persons who never before came and never were they so full, and so crowded as they have been this season.” Meanwhile, local Republicans were noticeably uncritical.
As handsome a tribute as any to Adams appeared in the Washington Federalist. In answer to “late attempts to undervalue” the President, readers were reminded that Adams stood “among the few surviving, steady, tried patriots” whose services to the country were of a kind almost beyond compare:
Bred in the old school of politics, his principles are founded on the experience of ages, and bid defiance to French flippancies and modern crudities.... Always great, and though sometimes alone, all weak and personal motives were forgotten in public energy and the security of the sacred liberties of his country.... Deeply versed in legal lore, profoundly skilled in political science; joined to the advantage of forty years' unceasing engagement in the turbulent and triumphant scenes, both at home and in Europe, which have marked our history; learned in the language and arts of diplomacy; more conversant with the views, jealousies, resources, and intrigues of Great Britain, France and Holland than any other American; alike aloof to flattery and vulgar ambition, as above all undue control [he has as] ... his sole object... the present freedom and independence of his country and its future glory. On this solid basis he has attempted to raise a monument of his honest fame.
With reports from the peace commission maddeningly thin and long delayed, the issue of peace and war remained foremost, almost to the end. What the Aurora would proclaim at the close of the campaign was no different from what James Callender had written in early spring. “With Jefferson we shall have peace... the friends of war will vote for Adams.”
The two candidates conveyed the customary air of indifference, neither saying anything publicly or appearing to lift a finger in his own behalf. Jefferson remained at Monticello, Adams at his farm, which he had lately taken to calling Stoneyfield, instead of Peacefield, perhaps feeling the new name was more in keeping with New England candor, or that it better defined the look of the political landscape at the moment.
He devoted himself almost entirely to official duties, maintaining steady correspondence with Secretary Marshall in particular. Nothing mattered more—over nothing did Adams fret more—than the state of negotiations in France. And still there was no word.
The great imponderable was Napoleon Bonaparte. “I cannot account for the long delay of our envoys,” wrote Marshall, who had begun to have doubts and reminded the President that there must be no sacrifice of American honor to please the First Consul. “We ought not be surprised if we see our envoys without a treaty,” he warned, and this could produce “a critical state of things.”
But Adams needed no reminding. In reply, he advised prudent preparations for war, in the event of another rebuff. “I am much of your opinion that we ought not to be surprised,” he told Marshall on September 4.
... the government ought to be prepared to take a decided part. Questions of consequence will arise, and among others, whether the President ought not at th
e opening session to recommend an immediate and general declaration of war against the French Republic.... We have had wonderful proofs that the public mind cannot be held in a state of suspense. The public opinion, it seems, must always be a decided one, whether in the right or not... I wish the heads of departments to turn their thoughts to the subject, and view it in all its lights.
For his part, Jefferson appeared to be devoting his time at Monticello to rural interests only.
• • •
BOTH ABIGAIL and John enjoyed comparatively good health, and Adams's love of home, his everyday delight in his farm, were as constant as ever—no less than what Washington had felt for Mount Vernon or Jefferson for Monticello.
But as Abigail confided in family correspondence, her own and the President's private days and frequent sleepless nights were deeply troubled by the sad fate of their alcoholic son. On her way home from Philadelphia in early November, Abigail had stopped again at East Chester, where this time she saw Charles himself. “The whole man [is] so changed that ruin and destruction have swallowed him up,” Abigail confided to John Quincy. “Poor, poor unhappy, wretched man,” she wrote, her heart breaking. Charles's wife had gone with her younger child to stay with her mother, while Abigail had brought the other child, four-year-old Susanna, home to Quincy. So with Nabby and her daughter Caroline again spending the summer, it was a full house.
Nothing she had been able to say to Charles had had any effect, Abigail wrote. She had tried “remonstrances.” She had reminded him of all that was dear in life—honor, reputation, family, friends. “But all is lost on him.”