The American Vice Presidency (4 page)

For his own part, the American vice president felt compelled in a series of essays, later known as
Discourses on Davila
, to reaffirm his conviction that free-wheeling passions could imperil democracy.
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In the process, however, he again fed suspicions of monarchist inclinations of his own. The essays also conveyed his appreciation for the causes of the French Revolution while expressing his fears of the ultimate outcome. He predicted that the choice of only one legislative body, as opposed to his own preference for two, as in the new American government, could only result in “great and lasting calamities,” and he feared “a republic of thirty million atheists,” with all institutions, including the church, shattered.
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Adams’s views on the political explosion in France inevitably put him in conflict with Jefferson, as was expressed in written exchanges over a year’s time. When Adams wrote somewhat skeptically in
Discourses on Davila
of the possible negative ramifications of the French Revolution and of “the monarchical principle,” Jefferson penned a reference to “the political heresies that have sprung up amongst us.”
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It caused a public furor over an apparent rift between them. Jefferson, insisting he had intended the reference to be private, subsequently wrote to Washington that he was “mortified,” adding that he had “cordial esteem” for Adams despite “his apostasy to hereditary monarchy.” There again was that allusion to the alleged affection toward royal regimes.
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When Congress addressed two significant problems, the vice president was again shunted to the sidelines by the limits imposed on the presiding officer of the Senate. The first was the debate over locating the permanent capital of the country. New Yorkers and many New Englanders wanted it to stay at its temporary home. Pennsylvania argued for the more centrally located Philadelphia. Southerners and particularly Virginians lobbied for the construction of a new capital city on the banks of the Potomac River as the gateway to their region.

One morning in June outside Washington’s house in New York, when Hamilton encountered Jefferson, now back from France and serving as
secretary of state, the treasury secretary suggested they join in a compromise. For Jefferson’s support of the bill, Hamilton said he would urge the Pennsylvania congressional delegation to vote for the Potomac site for the permanent capital, with the proviso that the temporary site be moved to Philadelphia.
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When the compromise came before the Senate on a motion to keep the capital at New York for two more years, a tie vote resulted. Adams broke the tie, casting in the negative, and in July both houses of Congress voted to shift the capital to Philadelphia for ten years, after which it would be moved to the banks of the Potomac, where no city yet existed.

The second problem was how to cope with the huge public debt accumulated in the War of Independence. Hamilton, as Washington’s secretary of the treasury and a zealous advocate of a strong central state, proposed that the federal government assume the debts of all of the states along with its own. But southerners particularly feared their interests would be undermined by the debt assumption, and, led by Madison, they defeated the proposal in April 1790.

Although the original intent of the founders was that the new nation could be governed without its elected officials breaking into “factions,” the party system was already emerging. Washington and Hamilton, and nominally Adams, were seen in the Federalist camp of centralized, business orientation; the rest, mostly rural and agricultural-based, were at first lumped together simply as Anti-Federalists, with the Virginians Jefferson and Madison in the forefront against Hamilton’s proposed national bank.

From the Senate president’s chair, Adams professed to be presiding with “no party virulence or personal reflections.”
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In general, he observed, “There is nothing I dread so much as the division of the Republic into two great parties, each under its leader.… This, in my humble opinion, is to be feared as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”
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But all members of Washington’s cabinet were Federalists except Jefferson, as secretary of state, leading an eminent historian later to observe, “Federalists thought of themselves as a government, not as a party.”
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In May 1792, as the second presidential election approached, Washington was still telling colleagues he wanted to retire. But in the face of continued pleas that he seek a second term, he had not yet made a decision. Adams therefore was in limbo about his own future and returned home to
Massachusetts for the summer. Clinton and Senator Aaron Burr also were contenders for the vice presidency, with Burr particularly dismissed as “an embryo Caesar in the United States” by his fellow New Yorker Hamilton in letters to friends.
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It was not until November that Washington agreed to run for a second term, at which time Adams returned to Philadelphia. Again there was no active campaigning by any of those on the presidential ballot, and Washington was reelected unanimously with Adams as vice president, having received seventy-seven of the second votes to fifty for Clinton, four for Jefferson, and one for Aaron Burr. John Adams was back in the isolation of his office of low public regard, but with less than the resounding margin of victory for which he had hoped and believed was his due.

Throughout the second term, Abigail chose to remain at the farm in Quincy, the new name taken for their town after it was split off from Braintree. Her health was part of the reason for passing up the arduous journey by carriage to Philadelphia, but family finances were also a factor. The vice president’s annual salary of only five thousand dollars would be stretched hard, and Congress would be in session only for six months. The decision ensured that the couple’s remarkable correspondence would continue, a bonus to the written history of the time.

Of Adams’s placid if humdrum routine, he wrote to Abigail, “I go to the Senate every day, read the newspapers before I go and the public papers afterward, see a few friends once a week, go to church on Sundays; write now and then a line to you and Nabby, and oftener to Charles than to his brothers to see if I can fix his attention and excite some ambition”—the latter a reference to his son’s unfocused path.
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Washington’s second term was dominated by foreign-policy crises, in which his vice president played little role. Although Adams had served as an American minister in both Paris and London, the president made no notable use of him in dealing with the war between England and France. When Paris sent the young and impetuous Edmond Genet to Philadelphia to rally support for the French side, Washington turned to Jefferson, as his secretary of state, not Adams, in weighing whether to lay out a red carpet at the risk of offending London. Jefferson enthusiastically embraced “Citizen” Genet and urged Washington to do likewise. The president, however, was determined to remain neutral, aware of British protests against
French privateer seizures of English ships in U.S. ports and enlistments of American sailors to man the French vessels. Genet’s brazen intrusions into American policies eventually embarrassed Jefferson and weakened his hand with Washington, without appreciably strengthening that of Adams in the debate over how to deal with the war between the British and the French.

Meanwhile, expectations that the first president would not stand for a third term also fanned the embers of growing factionalism between Hamilton Federalists and their critics rallying behind Jefferson. On the last day of 1793, Jefferson resigned as secretary of state. Adams, who had remained on friendly terms with the man while disagreeing with him, particularly on his ardor for France and his rejoicing in its revolution, wrote Abigail that he regretted his resignation. “But his want of candor,” he confessed to her, “his obstinate prejudices of both aversion and attachment, his real partiality in spite of all his pretensions, his low notions about many things, have so utterly reconciled me to [his departure] … that I will not weep.” Adams concluded on Jefferson’s return to Monticello, “Jefferson went off yesterday, and a good riddance to bad ware.”
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With the arrival of spring, however, Adams reconnected with Jefferson, sending him a book and sharing with him their mutual pleasure in rural life and desire for peace with England, the United States now threatened by British seizures of American merchant ships and sailors. As president of the Senate, Adams blocked a suspension of trade with Great Britain by breaking a tie vote in opposition, and he informed Jefferson of Washington’s decision to send Chief Justice John Jay to London to try to avert war. The exchanges of correspondence continued for two years, sustaining the personal friendship, without enhancing Adams’s role.
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Jay in London got no assurances that the British would open their ports to American ships or guarantee American sailors’ protection against seizure; they agreed only to pull out remaining troops in forts in the American western outposts. In June 1795, Washington invited Adams to dinner and the next day presented the Jay Treaty to the Senate for ratification. With Adams presiding but taking no other part, the Senate bitterly debated the treaty behind closed doors for thirteen days, before ratifying it by the required two-thirds majority, with the vice president not called upon to vote. When the news broke, Washington and Jay were roundly castigated in the opposition press. But Adams stood solidly behind the president, even as
he was left out of the administration’s foreign-policy strategy, for all his diplomatic experience in London. He wrote to Abigail, “My own Situation is of such compleat Insignificance that I have scarcely the Power to do good or Evil.”
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As the next presidential election approached in 1796, Adams could say or do nothing about his own ambitions or plans to reach for the presidency until Washington announced he would not stand for a third term. As vice president, Adams was a logical replacement for the Federalists, and he did indeed regard himself as the “heir apparent,” as he told Abigail. As far as she was concerned, he had to seek the presidency, because, according to her, he had declared at one point, “I will be second under no man but Washington.”
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Adams himself expressed concern whether he could physically handle the pressures of the presidency, though he regularly walked up to five miles daily. But his eyes were growing weak, and he had lately been experiencing trembling in his hands, observing it was “painful to the vanity of an old man to acknowledge the decays of nature.”
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He confided to John Quincy, “A pen is as terrible to me as a sword to a coward, or as a rod to a child,” even as he was spending hours writing long letters and essays.
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Early in the election year, he told Abigail, “I am weary of the game. Yet I don’t know how I would live out of it.” Serving as president, she warned, would not be easy. “You know what is before you—the whips, the scorpions, the thorns without roses, the dangers, anxieties, the weight of empire.”
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Yet there was little doubt he would seek the office.

Not until mid-September, with the electoral college due to meet in December, did Washington finally say he would retire, and Adams as the Federalist and Jefferson as the Anti-Federalist became the leading opposing candidates to succeed him. Two others, the Federalist Thomas Pinckney and the Anti-Federalist Burr, were also running ostensibly for the vice presidency, although all four would be on the presidential ballot. Each presidential elector again would cast two ballots for president, with the winner becoming the chief executive, the vice president his standby. Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, one of the Federalists’ prime orators, called Washington’s much-awaited announcement “a signal, like dropping a hat, for the party pacers to start.”
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Jefferson, who by now was using his free time in retirement to build his
loose faction into a party, continued to stay at Monticello. Not satisfied with their being known as the Anti-Federalists, Jefferson, in a 1792 letter to Washington, first referred to his movement as Republican, later changing it to Democratic-Republican and then simply Democratic. Whatever the name, Jefferson earlier had famously said, “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go at all.” Two centuries later, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was moved to observe, “The quadrennial presidential contest served, after Washington’s retirement, both as an inescapable focus for national party competition and as a powerful incentive to national party organization. Even Jefferson soon decided that, with the right party, he would be willing to go, if not to heaven, at least to the White House.”
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Although Jefferson did not overtly campaign for the presidency, his vigorous organizational efforts for the new party amounted to running for the office. Adams, in Quincy, and Jefferson, at Monticello, remained at home while their backers launched fierce verbal and written attacks on the other. Hamilton, as he had done before in 1792, plotted secretively, lobbying for electors’ votes for Thomas Pinckney to win the presidency and Jefferson the vice presidency, hoping to leave Adams in the cold. Of the declared candidates, only Burr took to the road courting electors in New England, raising questions among Republicans in the South whether he sought to undercut their native son, Jefferson.

In the leading Republican paper of the day, the
Aurora
, Adams was castigated again as a defender of monarchy, while Jefferson was praised as “the friend of the people.”
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The Federalists meanwhile hammered at Jefferson as a “Jacobin” apologist for the French and as an atheist. The shape of party politics was emerging more clearly now: the Federalists behind Hamilton, identified as sympathetic to the British, were referred to as “the English party”; Jefferson and his Republican cohorts, as “the French party.”