that it was not sufficiently high-spirited to com
port with the national dignity. Then the party
divided, and they said that Adams was to blame.
Their conclusion does not seem to be fully sup
ported by the facts.

But the allotment of responsibility between
Adams and Hamilton and the dispute as to
which of them was better entitled to establish
the party policy are matters of vastly less im
portance than the question upon which side
right and wisdom lay. This seems to require
no discussion beyond the briefest statement of
the great facts. War was avoided, by means
which no one now thinks of stigmatizing as
degrading. The method was devised by Mr.
Adams, and the result was won by his persist
ent adherence to that method. One is inclined
to say that, if in all this he ran counter to the
policy of his party, it was very discreditable to
the party to have such a policy. In fact, pretty
much all writers now agree that Adams behaved
with courage, patriotism, and sound judgment,
and that he placed the country under a great
debt of gratitude ; a debt which was never paid
in his lifetime, and only since his death has
been very tardily and ungraciously acknow
ledged.



304 JOHN ADAMS

Whether or not Mr. Adams was a parricide
as towards his party, he was certainly a suicide
as towards himself. The act of Curtius in leap
ing into the gulf to save Rome was a more pic
turesque but not a more unquestionable deed of
patriotic self-immolation. From that fifth day
of November, 1799, Mr. Adams was a doomed
man. No effort could now restore harmony
among the discordant ranks of the Federalists.
For the future all the earnest fighting on their
part was done inside their own camp and against
each other. It is a melancholy and unprofitable
story of personal animosities, which may be
briefly told.

That Mr. Adams anticipated the results which
followed his action is not probable. There is
nothing to indicate that he had any idea that
he was disrupting and destroying the Federal
party. But to his credit it should also be said
that there is no indication that he considered
this matter at all. Every particle of evidence
at least all which has been published goes
to show that his mind was wholly occupied with
the interests of the nation, to the utter exclusion
of any thought of his party or of himself. After
the irretrievable ruin which overtook him, amid
the execrations of the Federalists, who attrib
uted their utter destruction wholly to him, he
never gave a symptom of regret, never said a



THE PRESIDENCY 305

word except in strenuous support of his action.
Beyond question he was too profoundly con
vinced that he was right to be moved from his
opinion by any consequences whatsoever. His
unchangeable sentiments were those expressed
by him in 1815, in one of his letters to James
Lloyd : " I wish not to fatigue you with too long
a letter at once, but, sir, I will defend my mis
sions to France as long as I have an eye to
direct my hand or a finger to hold my pen.
They were the most disinterested and meritori
ous actions of my life. I reflect upon them
with so much satisfaction, that I desire no other
inscription over my gravestone than : Here lies
John Adams, who took upon himself the respon
sibility of the peace with France in the year
1800. " Substantially this has been also the
verdict of posterity, and a transaction which at
the time of its occurrence found hardly any
defender, now finds hardly any assailant. Mod
ern writers of all shades of opinion agree that
Adams acted boldly, honestly, wisely, and for
the best welfare of the country, in a very criti
cal peril.



CHAPTER XII

THE BREAKING UP

Semel insanivimus omnesf In this chapter
the behavior of many wise and illustrious men
is to bear evidence to the truth of this adage.
For madness certainly ruled the closing months
of Adams s administration.

The foregoing pages have given glimpses
rather than a complete picture of the unhappy
relationship existing between the President and
three of his secretaries. Nothing more unfor
tunate befell any one of them throughout his
career. In the prosecution of the quarrel each
appears at his worst; Mr. Adams s foibles of
hot-headedness and of a vanity almost incredible
in its extravagance stand out in painful relief.
Pickering, Wolcott, and McHenry, honest men
all, do the only ignoble acts of their lives. All
four seem crazed by prejudice and rage. They
are so bereft of all fair intelligence as utterly
to ignore not only the character but the effect
of their own acts, which run counter to sound
judgment even more than to right feeling. By
the time to which our narrative has come the



THE BREAKING UP 307

secretaries absolutely hated the President ; they
were in such a state of mind that, without
appreciating it, they treated him with thor
oughly bad faith ; they betrayed all official dis
cussions to Hamilton ; they sought and followed
Hamilton s advice. They did this for the pur
pose of gaining Hamilton s invaluable aid in
their opposition to their proper chief, and they
deceived themselves into a belief that in thus
conducting themselves they were doing strictly
right. Their vindication was that Adams s
policy was destructive of their party, and was
intrinsically wrong ; that therefore it was their
duty to counteract it by all the means which
even their office as his confidential advisers put
in their power. Their ethics were singular and
have not generally been accepted as sound.
According to received principles, fair dealing to
Mr. Adams, even justice to themselves, would
have led them to resign, when they so utterly
differed from him that their sole aim was to
thwart him. But however this may have been,
certain it is that any decent sense of propriety,
nay, for the word must be used, of honor, would
have led them to refrain from communicating
cabinet secrets for use against the President by
his avowed enemy. Mr. Adams did not know
what was going on ; he even went down to his
grave ignorant of much of this mechanism by



308 JOHN ADAMS

which he had suffered so severely. But without
fully knowing the cause he could dimly per
ceive where it lay. He wisely concluded that
some changes in the cabinet could be advan
tageously made.

McHenry was the first to go. He had been
laborious and was in the main a well-meaning
and amiable man, but he was notoriously incom
petent for his position. His wonderfully ill-
written sketch of his parting interview with Mr.
Adams, the only existing account of a strange
scene, is worth repeating in full. On May 5,
1800, the President sent for him.

" The business appeared to relate to the appoint
ment of a purveyor. . . . This settled, he took up
other subjects ; became indecorous and at times out
rageous. General Washington had saddled him with
three secretaries, Wolcott, Pickering, and myself. I
had not appointed a gentleman in North Carolina, the
only elector who had given him a vote in that state,
a captain in the army, and afterwards had him ap
pointed a lieutenant, which he refused. I had biased
General Washington to place Hamilton in his list of
major-generals before Knox. I had eulogized Gen
eral Washington in my report to Congress, and had
attempted in the same report to praise Hamilton. In
short, there was no bounds to his jealousy. I had
done nothing right. I had advised a suspension of
the mission. Everybody blamed me for my official
conduct, and I must resign."



THE BREAKING UP 309

Before such a storm of abuse Me Henry went
down at once. He "resigned the next morn
ing." This lively picture certainly shows Mr.
Adams in one of his worst moods, mingled of
anger, egotism, and that one great foolish jeal
ousy of his life, which consumed his heart when
ever he heard the praises of Washington. His
grandson admits, with nepotal gentleness of
phrase, that he was not upon this occasion either
considerate or dignified ; but says that he ap
peared to much more advantage soon afterward
in ridding himself of Pickering. So he did.
Pickering richly deserved unceremonious expul
sion ; but Mr. Adams courteously offered him
the opportunity to resign. It may be admitted
that he probably would have been much less
considerate had his knowledge of Pickering s
behavior been less imperfect. The stiff-backed
and opinionated old Puritan, full of fight and
immutable in the conviction of his own right
eousness, refused to appear to go voluntarily,
and was thereupon dismissed. On the whole, it
was probably fortunate that Mr. Adams did not
know how badly these gentlemen had been be
having towards him, or scenes of awful wrath
and appalling violence would have enlivened the
biographic page.

The vacancies thus made were filled more
easily than might have been expected. Mar-



310 JOHN ADAMS

shall, having declined the position of secretary
of war, accepted that of secretary of state, and
Samuel Dexter took the war department. Wol-
cott, who deserved to go quite as much as either
of the others, remained ; but he only remained
to do further injury to his own good name, and
to enact a very ungenerous part. He had habit
ually spoken the President so fair that he was
regarded by Mr. Adams as a friendly adviser,
though very far from really being so. He now
continued for some months longer to combine
external civility and deference to the President
with the function of cabinet - reporter, so to
speak, and to avoid the word spy, for Mr.
Hamilton. In the following November, amid
all the vexations which that ill-starred season
brought to Mr. Adams, he sent in his resigna
tion to take effect at the end of the year, thus
leaving the President to look for an incumbent
who would be willing to hold the office for two
months with the certainty, of course, of being
superseded immediately upon Jefferson s acces
sion. Yet, strange to say, Adams always felt
kindly towards Wolcott, and among the last acts
of his administration made him a judge. Never
to his dying day did he learn how false Wolcott
had played him.

The story went, at the time, that Mr. Adams
had turned out Pickering in order to conciliate



THE BREAKING UP 311

Samuel and Robert Smith of Baltimore, and to
gain their votes and influence in the electoral
college. The malicious calumny was afterward
abundantly disproved. Another piece of hostile
electioneering gossip was called forth by the
pardon of Fries. This man had led the riots,
or, as some preferred to say, the rebellion, in
eastern Pennsylvania, in 1799. Twice he was
convicted of treason and was sentenced to death,
which certainly he abundantly deserved. Mr.
Adams pardoned him, and was at once reviled
as having done so only because it was " a popu
lar act in Pennsylvania." But such attacks as
these were the most commonplace features of
this presidential campaign of 1800. Never did
a political party enter into such a contest in
so sorry a condition as that of the Federalists.
Harassing as Mr. Adams had found the presi
dency, he burned with ambition to obtain it
again. Before his election, discussing the com
parative prospects of Jefferson, Jay, and him
self, he had said : "If Jefferson and Jay are
President and Vice-President, as is not improb
able, the other retires without noise, or cries, or
tears to his farm." But circumstances were dif
ferent now. He had been pitted against bitter
opponents in a fierce controversy of great mo
ment, which had divided the country. It was
not unnatural that he should desire a popular



312 JOHN ADAMS

ratification of his policy. The Hamiltonian sec
tion, filled with implacable rage towards him,
contemplated the possibility of his success with
utter sickness at the heart. Could nothing be
done to prevent it? Could no means be devised
for setting him aside ? Their first plan reflected
no credit upon themselves. It was to induce
Washington to come out from his retirement
and stand as their candidate. It is improbable
that any force of personal influence would have
sufficed to give success to so unworthy, so cruel
a scheme for making a selfish and partisan use
of this noble patriot in the days of his old age.
If any such danger to him existed, it was indeed
an opportune death which rescued him from it.
He escaped even the injury of the proposition.
After this chance was, it may almost be said for
tunately, eliminated, Hamilton traveled through
New England to feel the pulse of the party. He
was compelled sadly to report, that though " the
leaders of the first class " were all right, " the
leaders of the second class " were all wrong ; he
saw plainly that, when it came to scoring votes,
Adams was the only Federalist who could bring
out the party strength in this section of the
country. This fact was undeniable and conclu
sive ; Adams must be the candidate. The old
scheme indeed might be resorted to ; equal vot
ing for Adams and Pinckney might be urged



THE BREAKING UP 313

upon the New England electors, with the secret
hope that some faithless Southerner might throw
out Mr. Adams and make Mr. Pinckney Presi
dent ; or that in case of real good faith Congress
might accomplish the same result. But this
poor and exploded device had no virtue in it.
Then there was some talk of setting up Pinck
ney openly to supersede Adams ; but this also
was mere folly and desperation. The truth had
to be faced. Hamilton mournfully told his
friends, who could not contradict him, that the
fight lay between Adams and Jefferson, and that
in such a dilemma they were bound to support
Mr. Adams. With wry faces they came up to
swallow the nauseous dose.

The Hamiltonian Federalists had for some
time past been fond of extending to Mr. Adams
such unkind charity as lies in the excuse of
madness. He must be insane, they said ; and
sometimes they seemed more than half in .ear
nest in the remark. But with all his anger,
bitterness, and mortification, it soon appeared
that there were crazier men than he at work
in these acrimonious days. Chief among them
was Hamilton himself, who, however, was not
without assistants well worthy of the same un
pleasant description. Made more vindictive
than ever by the necessity of actually aiding
the cause of the man whom he hated, Hamil-



314 JOHN ADAMS

ton now determined on the extraordinary step
of writing a public letter containing an arraign
ment of Mr. Adams in his administration. He
professed that he did not intend to do this by
way of opposition to Adams s reelection ; on the
contrary, he said that he should close, and finally
he actually did close, this singular document
with the advice that this unfit man should be
again charged with those duties which he had
just been shown to be so incapable of perform
ing wisely, safely, or honestly. For material for
the criminatory portion of this startling com
pilation, Hamilton relied in part upon Picker
ing and McHenry, now out of office and most
willing and vengeful coadjutors ; but chiefly he
depended upon Wolcott, who was still secretary
of the treasury and could give the latest and by
far the most valuable information. It is painful
to know that Hamilton applied to him, and that
he promised to give and did give the disgrace
ful aid which was demanded. Nay, he did it
readily and with actual pleasure.

This project of Hamilton spread profound
alarm among those of his political friends who
had not been personally engaged in the conflict
with the President, and who therefore retained
their self-possession and coolness of judgment.
They remonstrated against the publication with
as much earnestness as they ever dared to show



THE BREAKING UP 315

in differing from their autocratic commander.
But they had scant influence over him. The
volcano was full to bursting, and the pent-up
fury must find vent. Hamilton was doubtful
only on the point of form. He would have
liked to seem to write in self-defense. In order
to obtain a plausible basis, he addressed a letter
to Adams asking an explanation concerning
charges of belonging to a British faction, which
charges he was pleased to say that the President
had preferred against him. This artifice failed;
but it was mere matter of detail. Hamilton
was, as he admitted, " in a very belligerent
humor," and was bent on writing the letter,
with an excuse or without it, as might be. He
would only promise his alarmed and protesting
friends that it should be privately and discreetly
distributed, in such a prudent manner that it
should not affect the electoral votes. His friends,
unconvinced, were still laboring with him, when
all choice and discretion in the matter were
suddenly taken both from him and from them.
The document had already been put in print;
no copies had been sent out, but by some cov
ert means Aaron Burr had obtained one. By
this accident all possibility of secrecy came to
an end. The paper was spread far and wide
through the country as the best campaign docu
ment of the Democrats, and then at last even
Hamilton could no longer deny his blunder.



316 JOHN ADAMS

If before there had been any hope for a Fed
eralist success, this wretched transaction utterly
destroyed it. The party went into the elec
tions divided, dispirited, full of internal dis
trust. New York had already been lost; and the
causa causans of the loss, as Mr. C. F. Adams
explains, had been the machinations of Hamil
ton intended to bring in Pinckney in place of
Adams. It required no gift of prophecy now
to see that defeat was inevitable. It came ; but
Jefferson and Burr, coming in evenly with only
seventy-three votes apiece, against sixty-five for
Adams and sixty-four for Pinckney, 1 showed
that a contest, which under such circumstances
was so close, might have had an opposite con
clusion had it been more wisely and happily
waged by the Federalists. It was a fair con
clusion that Mr. Adams would have been re-
elected had it not been for the hostility of Mr.
Hamilton and his clique.

If Mr. Adams as President had served his
country better than he had served his party, at
least one of the latest acts of his administration
was an equal service to both. Having offered
the chief justiceship of the United States to
Jay, who declined it, he then nominated John
Marshall. The Parthian shot went home. Half

1 An elector from Rhode Island voted for Adams and Jay,
instead of for Adams and Pinckney.



THE BREAKING UP 317

of what the Democrats seemed to have done by
the election of Jefferson was undone by the
appointment of Marshall. By it the Federalists
got control of the national judiciary, and inter
preted the Constitution in the courts long after
they had shrunk to utter insignificance as a
political party.

Adams sat signing appointments to office
and attending to business till near the close of
the last hour of his term. Then, before the
people were astir on the morning which ushered
in the day of Jefferson s inauguration, he drove
out of Washington. He would not wait to see
the triumph of his successor. Mr. C. F. Adams
seeks to throw a cloak of fine language over this
act of childish spite and folly, but to no purpose.
It was the worst possible manifestation of all
those petty faults which formed such vexatious
blemishes in Adams s singularly compounded
character.

But it is needlessly cruel in this hour of his bit
ter mortification to sneer at his silly egotism, to
laugh at his ungoverned rage. He was crushed
beneath an intense disappointment which he did
not deserve, he was humiliated by an unpopu
larity which he did not merit. For he had done
right in great national matters, and had blun
dered only in little personal ones. Yet he felt
and declared himself a " disgraced " man. The



318 JOHN ADAMS

word was too strong ; yet certainly he was an
unfriended, hated, and reviled man. He was
retiring full of years but not full of honors.
He had been as faithful, as constant, as labori
ous a patriot as Washington; and, taking his
whole career from the beginning, his usefulness
to the country had been second only to that of
Washington. He had lately done an immense
service to his country in saving it from war.
Had he not a right to repine and to feel bitter
at the reward allotted to him? Certainly he
had had very hard luck ; everything might have
gone so differently had it not been for the
antipathy of a single individual towards him.
Had it not been for this he might have had real
coadjutors in the members of his cabinet ; he
might have acted with coolness and dignity,
having his temper relieved from the multitudi
nous harassments which he had felt though he
could not explain them. He might with a clear
mind have moulded and carried out a strong,
consistent policy, in an even-handed and digni
fied manner, which would have made it impossi
ble for the Democrats to defeat him. All this
would have been probable enough, if the disturb
ing influence of Hamilton had been withdrawn.
To that one man it seemed due, and perhaps
it really was due, that Adams was ending his
public life in humiliation and unhappiness.



THE BREAKING UP 319

This volume has grown to such length that a
few lines only can be given to Mr. Adams s
remaining years. He passed them in his plea
sant homestead near the roadside in Quincy,
among his family and friends. They were tran
quil and uneventful to a degree which must
often have seemed tedious to one who had led
so stirring a life in busy capitals amid great
events. Yet he seems in the main to have been
cheerful and contented. The town was full of
his kindred and his friends, and he was always
met with gratifying kindliness and respect.
His wife survived until the autumn of 1818,
when she died of typhus fever on October 28.
He was then eighty-three years old. His son,
John Quincy Adams, could be little at home ;
but the cause of his absence, in his steady
ascent through positions of public trust and
honor, must have gone far to prevent regret.
The father had the pride and pleasure of wit
nessing his elevation to the presidency in 1825,
and fortunately did not survive to know of the
failure and disappointment four years later.

But Adams was too active and too irrita
ble to feel no regret at decadence ; at times
the gloominess so often accompanying old age
seemed to get the better of his courage. It was
in such a temper that he wrote to Rufus Kino-,
in 1814 : "I am left alone. . . . Can there be



320 JOHN ADAMS

any deeper damnation in this universe than to
be condemned to a long life in danger, toil,
and anxiety ; to be rewarded only with abuse,
insult, and slander ; and to die at seventy, leav
ing to an amiable wife and nine amiable chil
dren nothing for an inheritance but the con
tempt, hatred, and malice of the world ? How
much prettier a thing it is to be a disinterested
patriot like Washington and Franklin, live and
die among the hosannas of the multitude, and
leave half a million to one child or to no child ! "
Such moods of repining at their lots, and of
dissatisfaction with the rewards meted out for
their services, were of frequent occurrence both
with John Adams and with his son, John
Quincy Adams. The same habit is noticeable,
however, as prevailing, though in a less degree,
among many of their contemporaries; it was
the fashion of the day, and may be considered
as the New England form of development of
the famous habit of grumbling and fault-find
ing notoriously belonging to John Bull. At
least Mr. Adams s high appreciation of his own
preeminent merits and distinguished services
remained with him to comfort and console him
to the end. His vanity and supreme self-sat
isfaction passed away only with his passing
breath.

He read a great deal during his old age, even



THE BREAKING UP 321

then constantly extending his knowledge and
preserving his native thirst for information still
unquenched. His interest in affairs was as
great as ever, and he kept his mind in activity
and vigor. At times he fought the old battles
o er again with not less spirit than in younger
days. His first purpose after his retirement
was to write a vindicatory reply to Hamilton s
tirade against him ; but his zeal cooled during
the work so that he never finished it. Then
he began an autobiography, but this too he left
in the shape of a mere fragment. When John
Quincy Adams, unable to stomach the increas
ing British aggressions at the time of the at
tack by the Leopard upon the Chesapeake,
severed his connection with the feeble remnant
of the Federal party, John Adams was in full
sympathy with him. Pickering published a
pamphlet arraigning the administration, and
Adams replied to it, actually appearing as the