Joseph J. Ellis (30 page)

Madison managed the particulars silently and surreptitiously. He understood—indeed, it was a crucial aspect of the collaboration—that Jefferson’s eventual reentry into the political arena depended upon sustaining the fiction in his mentor’s own mind that it would never happen. Jefferson required what we would call “deniability,” not just for public purposes but also for his own private serenity. In the Jefferson-Madison collaboration, Madison was not just responsible for handling the messy particulars; he was also accountable for shielding his chief from the political ambitions throbbing away in his own soul.

As late as the summer of 1796, when Washington’s retirement was a
foregone conclusion and Jefferson’s candidacy for the presidency was common knowledge throughout the country, Jefferson claimed to be completely oblivious to the campaign on his behalf. Madison spent four months at Montpelier, only a few miles from Monticello, but never visited Jefferson, for fear of being forced into a conversation that might upset Jefferson’s denial mechanisms. “I have not seen Jefferson,” he wrote Monroe in code, “and have
thought it best to present him no opportunity of protesting
to his
friend against
being
embarked on this contest.”
Jefferson thus became perhaps the last person in America to recognize that he was running for the presidency against his old friend from Massachusetts.
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Meanwhile up in Quincy, that very friend was also dancing a minuet with his own political ambitions. Adams’s partner in the dance was Abigail, whose political instincts rivaled Madison’s legendary skills and whose knowledge of her husband’s emotional makeup surpassed all competitors. She had always been his ultimate confidante, the person he could trust with his self-doubts, vanities, and overflowing opinions. Now, however, with Jefferson gone over to the other side and their former friendship reduced to polite and nervously evasive exchanges, Abigail became his chief and, in most respects, his sole collaborator. One reason Adams fled from Philadelphia for nine months each year, apart from the oppressive summer heat, the annual yellow fever epidemics, and the fact he despised his job, was that he needed to be with her.

Ironically, we can only know what they were saying to each other while together from the letters they wrote when apart. During the months Congress was in session they wrote each other two or three times every week. Much of the correspondence was playfully personal: “No man even if he is sixty years of age ought to have more than three months at a time from his family,” Abigail complained soon after he departed for Philadelphia. “Oh that I had a bosom to lean my head upon,” Adams replied. “But how dare you hint or lisp a word about ‘sixty years of age.’ If I were near I would soon convince you that I am not above forty.”
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Just as often, however, Adams also used the correspondence to unburden himself of opinions that his muzzled status in the Senate prevented him from sharing publicly. The quality of oratory in the Senate, he complained, was far below the standards at the Continental Congress, though he was intrigued by the fluid, nonchalant style of
Aaron Burr, whom he described “as fat as a duck and as ruddy as a roost cock.” He was lonely for his wife’s company and political advice: “I want to sit and converse with you about our debates every evening. I sit here alone and brood over political probabilities and conjectures.” Abigail heard him out about the doomed course of the French Revolution but was somewhat more sanguine: “I ruminate upon France as I lie awake many hours before light,” she wrote. “My present thought is that their virtuous army will give them a government in time in spite of all their conventions but of what nature it will be, it is hard to say.”
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Abigail responded harshly to Republican critics of Jay’s Treaty, calling them “mindless Jacobins and party creatures.” Adams concurred, though he also thought the affection for England that the “ultras,” or High Federalists, seemed to harbor was just as misguided as the Republican love affair with France: “I wish that misfortune and adversity could soften the temper and humiliate the insolence of John Bull, but he is not yet sufficiently humble. If I mistake not, it is the destiny of America one day to beat down his pride. But the irksome task will not soon, I hope, be forced upon us.” Like Washington, he saw Jay’s Treaty as a shrewd if bittersweet bargain designed to postpone war with England for perhaps a generation. In the meantime, he hoped that England and France would bleed each other to death. As for George III, “the mad idiot will never recover,” but as in the old revolutionary days, “his idiocy is our salvation.”
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When Adams offered a harsh appraisal of Washington’s lack of formal education and knowledge of the classics, Abigail chided him: Washington was the only man apart from her husband capable of detachment and ought not be carped at behind his back. If anyone else had corrected him so directly, Adams would have gone into his Vesuvial mode. Coming from Abigail, however, the political advice was welcomed. “Send more,” Adams pleaded. “There is more good thoughts, fine strokes, and mother wit in them than I hear [in the Senate] in the whole week.” Abigail dismissed such praise as pure flattery. “What a jumble are my letters—politics, domestic occurrences, farming anecdotes—pray light your segars
[sic]
with them.” Instead, he savored and saved them all.
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Then there was the touchy question of the presidency. At some unspoken level, Adams knew, which meant that Abigail also knew, that he considered the office his revolutionary right. No one else, save perhaps
Jefferson, could match his record of service to the cause of independence. Why else had he been willing to languish in the shadow of the vice presidency for those godforsaken years if not to use it as a stepping-stone to the prize itself? Like Jefferson—indeed, like any self-respecting statesman of the era, save perhaps Burr—Adams had no intention of campaigning for the office. (Burr did, and acted on it.) “I am determined to be a silent spectator of the silly and wicked game,” Adams explained to Abigail, “and to enjoy it as a comedy, a farce, or as a gymnastic exhibition at Sadler’s Wells.” Then he added a candid afterthought: “Yet I don’t know how I should live without it.”
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That was the Adams pattern: first to deny his political ambitions, much like Jefferson; then to confront them, feel guilty about them, fidget over them; then grudgingly admit they were part of who he was. Washington’s successor would inherit “a devilish load … and be very apt to stagger and stumble.” Who in his right mind would want the job? Moreover, he was not cut out for all the ceremonial obligations: “I hate speeches, messages, addresses and answers, proclamations, and such affected, studied, contraband things,” he wrote sulkily to Abigail. “I hate levees and drawing rooms. I hate to speak to a thousand people to whom I have nothing to say.” Then again the revealing afterthought: “Yet all this I can do.”
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Abigail aligned her responses to fit alongside her husband’s own internal odyssey toward the inevitable. Yes, the presidency was a thankless job, “a most unpleasant seat, full of thorns, briars, thistles, murmuring, fault-finding, calumny, obloquy.” But—her version of the Adams internal ricochet—“the Hand of Providence ought to be attended to, and what is designed, cheerfully submitted to.” Did this mean she could live with his candidacy and would consent to live with him if he won the election? Abigail refused to answer that question until the late winter of 1796. “My Ambition leads me not to be first in Rome,” she observed somewhat coyly. Her only political ambition was to “reign in the heart of my husband. That is my throne and there I aspire to be absolute.” On the other hand, if he was elected to the presidency, it would be “a flattering and Glorious Reward” for his lifetime of public service, and he would obviously need “a wife to hover about you, to bind up your temples, to mix your bark and pour out your coffee.” Adams was ecstatic: “Hi! Ho! Oh Dear. I am most tenderly
your forever friend.” With her at his side, he had no real need for a cabinet.
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Now that his personal demons were out in the open and Abigail was on board, the collaboration moved into high gear. In March and April of 1796, the Adams team began to assess electoral projections on a state-by-state basis. He worried that New England might not rally to his candidacy. She was confident it would go solidly for him. (She was right.) Reports from New York and Pennsylvania suggested a strong surge for Jefferson, who was clearly the main threat. Adams foresaw a very close electoral vote, perhaps even a tie with Jefferson, which would then throw the election into the House of Representatives. Or suppose Jefferson finished a close second and therefore became vice president? (Until passage of the Twelfth Amendment, electors voted for two candidates, not one ticket of two.) Might this not create “a dangerous crisis in public affairs” by placing the president and vice president “in opposite boxes”? Abigail thought such speculations were too hypothetical to worry about. (Here events proved her wrong.) Moreover, she still had a soft spot in her heart for Jefferson and believed him fully capable of joining the Adams team: “Though wrong in politics, though formerly an advocate of Tom Paine’s
Rights of Man
, and though frequently mistaken in men and measures, I do not think him an insincere or corruptible man.” And all this fretful conjuring about prospective mishaps and crises, she scolded, was unbecoming a man who would be first magistrate of the nation. In a recent dream, Abigail reported, she was riding in a coach when, suddenly, several large cannonballs were flying toward her. All burst in the air before reaching her coach, the pieces of metal falling harmlessly in the middle distance. This was a clear sign: Stop worrying. The voters and the gods were on their side.
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E
VENTS PROVED
Abigail half-right. The electoral vote split along sectional lines, Adams carrying New England and Jefferson the South. As the results trickled in from different states in December, Adams threw several tantrums that required Abigail to nurse him back to composure. The Federalist ticket featured Adams and Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina as a tandem. Behind-the-scenes maneuverings by Hamilton threatened to propel Pinckney past Adams, though Hamilton claimed
that his chief goal was to knock Jefferson out altogether. For a while, when it appeared that Pinckney might actually win and Adams come in second, the Sage of Quincy exploded: Pinckney was a “nobody”; the humiliation of serving under him was more than he could bear; he would resign the vice presidency if he finished in second place. On December 30, however, when results from Virginia and South Carolina revealed that Adams had captured one electoral vote in each of these southern states, Adams ceased erupting and started celebrating. “John Adams never felt more serene in his life,” he wrote Abigail. It was a razor-thin victory, but he had prevailed over Jefferson 71 to 68, with Pinckney a close third and Burr, Jefferson’s running mate, far back in the pack.
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Jefferson’s posture throughout the drawn-out counting of the electoral votes remained a combination of studied indifference and calculated obliviousness. Quite obviously, he realized he was a candidate. Madison was relaying state-by-state assessments to Monticello, which were also being reported in the local press. Although Jefferson claimed to be too busy with his renovations at Monticello and his crop-rotation scheme to notice such things, some hidden portion of his mind was surely paying close attention, since he predicted that Adams would win by three electoral votes—the precise result—two months before it became official.

On December 28 he wrote a congratulatory letter to Adams, regretting “the various little incidents [that] have happened or been contrived to separate us” and disavowing any desire to have been thrust into the presidential election in the first place: “I have no ambition to govern men,” he explained. “It is a painful and thankless task.” He also went out of his way to squelch rumors that he might resent serving under his old friend and more recent opponent: “I can particularly have no feelings which would revolt at a secondary position to Mr. Adams. I am his junior in life, was his junior in Congress, his junior in the diplomatic line, his junior lately in our civil government.” Up in Quincy, Abigail reiterated her abiding sense that Jefferson could be trusted to recover his earlier intimacy with her husband. “You know,” she confided to Adams, “my friendship for that gentleman has lived through his faults and errors—to which I have not been blind. I believe he remains our friend.”
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Over the course of the next few weeks Adams and Jefferson developed
two equally cogent but wholly incompatible political strategies in response to their somewhat awkward reunion as a political pair. Both strategies began with the realistic recognition that whoever succeeded Washington as president was likely to face massive problems, in part because of the deep political divisions over foreign policy that had haunted his second term, mostly because Washington was destiny’s choice as the greatest American of the age and therefore inherently irreplaceable. From that common starting point, they then devised diametrically different courses of action.

The core feature of the Adams strategy was to bring Jefferson into his confidence and his councils—in effect, to create a bipartisan administration in which Jefferson enjoyed the kind of access and influence that Adams himself had been denied as vice president in the Washington administration. Adams began to leak his thoughts along these lines in private conversations that he knew would find their way back to Jefferson. And they did: “My friends inform me that Mr. A. speaks of me with great friendship,” Jefferson observed, “and with satisfaction in the prospect of administering the government in concurrence with me.” Adams was suggesting that the old collaboration of 1776 be recovered and revived. If no single leader could hope to fill the huge vacuum created by Washington’s departure, perhaps the reconstituted team of Adams and Jefferson, which had performed so brilliantly in previous political assignments, might enjoy at least a fighting chance of sustaining the legacy of national leadership that Washington had established. Abigail supported the initiative; indeed, it might very well have been her idea in the first place, convinced as she was that the political split between Jefferson and her husband had not destroyed the mutual affection and trust that had built up over the previous twenty years of friendship.
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