Founding Brothers (28 page)

Trust was
crucial. On almost all the disputes over domestic and foreign policy in the
1790s Adams and Jefferson had found themselves on different sides. And each man
had made brutally harsh assessments of the other, rooted in their quite
different convictions about the proper course the American Revolution should
take. Adams was distinctive, however, for his tendency to regard even serious
political and ideological differences as eminently negotiable once elemental
bonds of personal trust and affection were established. In the Adams scheme,
intimacy trumped ideology.

Several of Adams’s closest
friends—Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Benjamin Rush, Mercy Otis
Warren—were ardent Republicans but still retained his confidence. He was
especially predisposed to forgive or ignore political differences when the
other person had been one of the “band of brothers” in 1776. He
harbored, as Fisher Ames described it, “a strong revolutionary taint in
his mind, [and] admires the character, principles and means which that
revolutionary system … seems to legitimate, and … holds cheap any
reputation that was not then founded and top’d off.” By this
standard, Jefferson was a more reliable colleague than staunch Federalists who
had been reluctant or merely peripheral participants in the climactic phase of
the revolutionary drama. “His [Jefferson’s] talents I know very
well,” Adams wrote to Gerry in a letter he knew would find its way to
Monticello, “and have ever believed in his honour, Integrity, his Love of
Country, and his friends.”
³²

Because
nothing like the full-blooded machinery of a modern political party system
existed, Adams conveyed his tentative scheme for a bipartisan initiative
informally through letters and conversations sure to be picked up by the press.
That was how Jefferson learned that Adams was contemplating a truly bold
response to the most glaring problem facing his presidency—namely, to
send a delegation to France analogous to Jay’s mission to England, this
time to negotiate a treaty designed to avert war with the other great European
power. What’s more, Adams let it be known that he was considering either
Jefferson or Madison to head the delegation—in effect, including the
leadership of the Republican party in the shaping of foreign policy. When
Madison got wind of this rumor, he could not believe it: “It has got into
the Newspapers that an Envoy Extraordinary was to go to France,” he wrote
Jefferson, “and that I was to be that person. I have no reason to suppose
a shadow of truth in the former part of the story; and the latter is pure
fiction.”
³³

But the
rumor was true. Abigail endorsed the initiative. Again, the idea might have
originated with her, though the communication within the Adams marriage was so
seamless and overlapping that primacy is impossible to fix. When the trial
balloon floated past several dedicated Federalists, they could not believe it
either, since it seemed to them like willfully dragging the Trojan horse into
the Federalist fortress. Adams heard about the Federalist reaction and told
Abigail that if it persisted, he would threaten to “resign the office and
let Jefferson lead them to peace, wealth, and power if he will.” He was
sure, in any event, that a bipartisan effort maximized the prospects for a
truly neutral American foreign policy, which was what Washington had attempted
and the vast majority of Americans wanted: “We will have neither John
Bull nor Louis Baboon,” he joked to Abigail. His response to those
partisans of both parties who disagreed was one defiant word:
“Silence.”
³⁴

Jefferson
was the master of silence, especially when he disagreed. But the early letters
and leaks out of Monticello indicated that he was in fact disposed to agree and
consider a bipartisan political alliance grounded in the personal trust of the
once-great collaboration. He reiterated his claim, simultaneously sincere and
misleading, that he had been embarrassed to learn that he had become a
candidate for the presidency. “I never in my life exchanged a word with
any person on the subject,” he noted, “till I found my name brought
forward generally, in competition with that of Mr. Adams.” In fact, he
claimed to feel quite awkward being pitted against a man whom he regarded much
like an older brother and one with a superior claim to the office based on
seniority and experience: “Few will believe the true dispositions of my
mind,” he told his son-in-law. “It is not the less true, however,
that I do sincerely wish to be second on the vote rather than first.”
When a dispute over the electoral vote in Vermont threatened to produce a tie
in the final tally and throw the election into the House of Representatives,
Jefferson let out the word that he would defer to Adams so as “to prevent
the phaenomenon of a Pseudo-president at so early a day.” His posture
seemed the model of graciousness and elegant accommodation.
³⁵

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. Mixing his metaphors in uncharacteristic fashion,
he confided to Madison his deeper reasons for embracing the Adams victory:
“The President [Washington] is fortunate to get off just as the bubble is
bursting, leaving others to hold the bag. Yet, as his departure will mark the
moment when the difficulties begin to work, you will see, that they will be
ascribed to the new administration, and that he will have his usual good
fortune of repaying credit from the good acts of others, and leaving to them
that of others.” He was certain that “no man will bring out of that
office the reputation which carries him into it.” While strolling around
the grounds of Monticello with a French visitor, he expanded on his strategic
sense of the intractable political realities: “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.” Whereas Washington
had been able to levitate above the partisan factions, “the next
president of the United States will only be the president of a party.”
There was no safe middle ground, only a no-man’s-land destined to be
raked by the cross fire from both sides.
³⁶

From
Jefferson’s perspective, then, Adams was essentially proposing that the
two men join forces and stand back-to-back in the killing zone. To his credit,
Jefferson’s first instinct was to accept the invitation. After
congratulating Adams on his electoral triumph, assuring him that “I never
one single moment expected a different issue,” Jefferson warned him of
the partisan bickering that his administration would have to negotiate.
“Since the days on which you signed the treaty of Paris,” Jefferson
noted ominously, “our horizon was never so overcast.” He would be
pleased and honored, however, to play a constructive role in moving the nation
past this difficult moment and to recover the old patriot spirit of ’76,
“when we were working for our independence.” He closed with a vague
promise to renew the old partnership.
³⁷

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. Instead, Jefferson
decided to pass it to Madison in order to assure its propriety. Madison
produced six reasons why Jefferson’s gesture of support might create
unacceptable political risks. The last and most significant was the clincher:
“Considering the probability that Mr. A’s course of administration
may force an opposition to it from the Republican quarter, and the general
uncertainty of the posture our affairs may take, there may be real
embarrassments from giving written possession to him, of the degree of
compliment and confidence which your personal delicacy and friendship have
suggested.” In short, Jefferson must choose between his affection for
Adams, which was palpable and widely known, and his leadership of the
Republican party. If registering a nostalgic sentiment of affinity was
Jefferson’s main intention, Madison suggested that could be done by
leaking part of the message to mutual friends. (In fact, Madison had already
handled that piece of diplomacy by sending such words to Benjamin Rush, who
would presumably pass them along to Adams, and did.) But Jefferson must not
permit himself to be drawn into the policy-making process of the Adams
administration, lest it compromise his role as leader of the Republican
opposition.
³⁸

When Madison
offered tactical advice of this sort, Jefferson almost always listened.
Nevertheless, he wanted Madison to know that it came at a price: “Mr. A.
and myself were cordial friends from the beginning of the revolution,” he
explained. “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.” That said and duly recorded on one portion of
his soul, Jefferson concurred that a diplomatic leak of that message satisfied
his conscience. “As to my participating in the administration,”
Jefferson then observed, “if by that he meant the executive cabinet, both
duty and inclination will shut that door to me.” By “duty,”
Jefferson meant his obligation to orchestrate the opposition to Adams’s
presidency. By “inclination,” he meant his personal aversion to the
kind of controversy and policy debate inside the cabinet that Adams seemed to
be proposing. “I cannot have a wish,” Jefferson concluded,
“to descend daily into the arena like a gladiator to suffer martyrdom in
every conflict.” Instead of acknowledging that he was choosing loyalty to
party over loyalty to Adams—for Jefferson, ideology was trumping
intimacy—he preferred to cast his decision in personal terms. He simply
did not have the stomach or the stamina to argue the Republican agenda from
inside the tent. Though psychologically incapable of seeing himself as a party
leader, in truth that was what he had become.
³⁹

It was a
personally poignant and politically fateful decision. Adams did not know about
it for several weeks. The reports he was receiving from mutual friends
emphasized Jefferson’s generosity of spirit in defeat. This sounded
hopeful. Abigail remained confident that Jefferson could be trusted, that the
bipartisan direction was the proper course, and the inclusion of a prominent
Republican on the peace delegation to France, probably Madison, was a shrewd
move. On the other hand, the Federalists whom Adams chose for his
cabinet—he retained Washington’s advisers, his biggest
blunder—had threatened to resign en masse if Adams tried to implement his
bipartisan strategy. (In retrospect, this would have been the best thing that
could have happened to Adams.) How the incoming president would have resolved
this impasse if Jefferson had agreed to resume the collaboration is impossible
to know.

As it was, events played out in a rather dramatic face-to-face
encounter. On March 6, 1797, Adams and Jefferson dined with Washington at the
presidential mansion in Philadelphia. Adams learned that Jefferson was
unwilling to join the cabinet and that neither Jefferson nor Madison was
willing to be part of the peace delegation to France. Jefferson learned that
Adams had been battling his Federalist advisers, who opposed a vigorous
Jeffersonian presence in the administration. They left the dinner together and
walked down Market Street to Fifth, two blocks from the very spot where
Jefferson had drafted the words of the Declaration of Independence that Adams
had so forcefully defended before the Continental Congress almost twenty-one
years earlier. As Jefferson remembered it later, “we took leave, and he
never after that said one word to me on the subject or ever consulted me as to
any measure of the government.” But of course Jefferson himself had
already decided that he preferred the anomalous role of opposing the
administration in which he officially served.
⁴⁰

A few days
later at his swearing-in ceremony as vice president, Jefferson joked about his
rusty recall of parliamentary procedure, a clear sign that he intended to spend
his time in the harmless business of monitoring debates in the Senate. After
Adams was sworn in as president on March 13, he reported to Abigail that
Washington had murmured under his breath: “Ay! I am fairly out and you
fairly in! See which of us will be happiest.” Predictably, the sight of
Washington leaving office attracted the bulk of the commentary in the press.
Adams informed Abigail that it was like “the sun setting full-orbit, and
another rising (though less splendidly).” Observers with a keener
historic sense noticed that the first transfer of power at the executive level
had gone smoothly, almost routinely. Jefferson was on the road back to
Monticello immediately after the inaugural ceremony, setting up the Republican
government in exile, waiting for the inevitable catastrophes to befall the
presidency of his old friend. As for Adams himself, without Jefferson as a
colleague, with a Federalist cabinet filled with men loyal to Hamilton, he was
left alone with Abigail, the only collaborator he could truly trust. His call
to her mixed abiding love with a sense of desperation: “I never wanted
your advice and assistance more in my life,” he pleaded. “The times
are critical and dangerous and I must have you here to assist me.… You
must leave the farm to the mercy of the winds. I can do nothing without
you.”
⁴¹

L
OOKING BACK
over the full sweep of
American history, one would be hard-pressed to discover a presidency more
dominated by a single foreign policy problem and simultaneously more divided
domestically over how to solve it. 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. With all the advantages of
hindsight, Jefferson’s strategic assessment of 1796 appears more and more
prescient: Whoever followed Washington was probably doomed to failure.