USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 3 > Part 23
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PRESIDENT ADAMS'S POLICY
so dishonorable, so ruthless and so fatal to the welfare of his administration as to seem almost incredible, and with- out counterpart in our political history. They respected Washington as they did not respect Adams, although Picker- ing during the Revolution had always disparaged Washing- ton, and they were all henchmen of Hamilton, persistent place-hunters who owed to Hamilton their positions and promotions and were accustomed to look to him for orders. Pickering appears here as a jejune Pharisee, who had failed in everything until at forty-six he began his hunt for a political job under the great man whom he had traduced; Wolcott appears as a suave sycophant and drudge; Mc- Henry, compared with these two, was a dilettante, but he had served in the Maryland senate and the Constitu- tional Convention, and tried for a diplomatic post in Europe before applying to Hamilton for some position in which he could indulge his "literary propensities." Like Wolcott, he idolized Hamilton; Pickering idolized nobody.
All looked to Hamilton, not to Adams, as their chief. They regularly reported to him the plans and purposes of the administration, gained from their confidential cabinet positions; and he shamelessly accepted and invited their reports as contributions to his party capital, however op- posed his schemes to the President's desires. At no point in his career does Hamilton appear in so unpleasant a light as in his dealings with John Adams and his administration. Common honesty would have commanded all the ministers to resign when they found themselves out of harmony with the administration; but Hamilton did not suggest it, and all stayed on. It was not until the last year of his ad- ministration that Adams discovered their treachery, if he ever fully discovered it. Then he dismissed McHenry stormily and Pickering decorously, and put Marshall and Samuel Dexter into their places. Wolcott, as treacherous as his colleagues, but more adroit, remained.
PRESIDENT ADAMS'S POLICY (1797 - 1801)
The Alien and Sedition laws, which Jefferson so effectu- ally overthrew and which it has long been fashionable to execrate, although in our time we have witnessed epidemics
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akin to them, were sanctioned by John Adams, and years afterwards he pronounced them salutary. These did not trouble his party, for most of the Federalists approved them. What won their disfavor and their wrath was his course in keeping them out of war with France.
If ever there was provocation for war, the United States had it at that time, as concerned both France and England. The course of the French foreign office, especially, under Talleyrand, was so offensive, insulting, and corrupt, his treatment of our ambassadors so intolerable, that the Presi- dent himself, supported by the universal popular indignation, felt compelled to military preparations for possible con- tingencies. Washington accepted the command of a pro- visional army, with the understanding that he should not be called to active service unless there should be imperative need; and he named Hamilton, Pinckney and Knox as his general officers. The graduation of these officers brought new strain between Adams and Hamilton. The constitu- tional authority to determine the rank of officers resided with the President; and the President distinctly preferred Knox for the first place, as the more experienced military man, and so declared. Hamilton, whose dearest ambition was for military distinction, was peculiarly anxious for this leadership; and the secretaries, always ready to thwart Adams for Hamilton's sake, urged Hamilton's claims secretly and strenuously upon Washington, who was personally pre- disposed in his favor. When Washington finally expressed his desire with emphasis, Adams would not oppose him, nor would it have been politic; but the clash intensified the bitterness.
PEACE WITH FRANCE (1800)
The army and its generals were not destined to come into operation. A better mind came to Tallyrand, a per- ception probably that he had gone too far, and it was reliably communicated to Adams that he would receive becomingly a new ambassador. The session of Congress was approaching. The President asked the advice of the Cabinet on the proposal. The Cabinet officers and the gen- erals were for a "spirited" policy; they really wanted war. The proposal to nominate a new minister to France was
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PEACE WITH FRANCE
not pleasing to them; and they united in drafting sug- gestions to the President for his opening speech to Congress. It would be "an act of humiliation," to send another minister; but if France should send a minister to America to negotiate he would be received with honors. But the President did not give them heed. He frankly and clearly reviewed the events, declared that under the circumstances vigorous preparations for war were indispensable, but that our government adhered always to a "humane and pacific policy." It was for France to take the requisite steps for the restoration of harmony. "Harmony may be restored at her option. . . . In demonstrating by our conduct that we do not fear war in the necessary protection of our rights and honor, we shall give no room to infer that we abandon the desire of peace."
In the midst of the bluster and insanity, the President was sensible and sane. He knew that there was no ade- quate ground for war, and that war could bring only evil to the country; he knew that the whole Republican party under Jefferson was opposed to the war, and that the country could not be united; and he had come to know English politics too well to yield to the obsession for Eng- land which inspired much of the fury against France. Yet the Federalist fury against himself for his conciliatory mes- sage was intense; and it was intenser when after further assurances he proceeded to nominate a minister to negotiate with France. "We have all been shocked," Pickering wrote to Hamilton. "I beg you to be assured that it is wholly his own act, without communication with any of us." "Had the foulest heart and the ablest head in the world been permitted to select the most embarrassing and ruinous measure," Sedgwick wrote to Hamilton, "perhaps it would have been precisely the one which has been adopted." Hamil- ton was statesman enough to check the measures which his followers in Congress proposed to block the President's program for a commission for France; and after vexatious embarrassments working relations were reestablished.
Adams had cleared the air. His mind had throughout been wholly concerned with the interests of the country, with no thought of himself or of his party; and he had rendered one of the greatest services to the country which
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any President ever rendered. It was with justifiable and honorable pride that he said fifteen years afterwards, "I desire no other inscription over my gravestone than: 'Here lies John Adams who took upon himself the responsibility of the peace with France in the year 1800."
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1800
It has been often said that the French mission was the death blow of the Federalist party. The party fell because it was split: its Hamiltonian leaders were wrong and John Adams was right. The appeal was to history; and history has justified him. The presidential election was at hand. Hamilton was compelled to face the fact (especially after a tour of investigation through New England) that no other Federalist leader could score so many votes as Adams; and he bowed to the inevitable, although most ungraciously. He wrote an insane pamphlet, embodying the statement that he should support Mr. Adams, but devoted to the most censorious review of his adminis- tration, in the preparation of which he was helped by Pickering, McHenry, and Wolcott, the last actually in the Cabinet at the time. His prudent friends urged him not to publish it; and he was considering its merely private circulation, when Aaron Burr, who somehow had obtained a copy, dishonorably gave it out, and it was spread broad- cast, becoming a powerful engine in the Republican cam- paign and sealing the Federalist doom.
For the first time Adams realized the extent of Hamil- ton's perfidy, and his feeling toward him from then on was increasingly bitter. In his early retirement at Quincy, he began to prepare a reply to Hamilton; but he got sick of the task and did not finish it, though he wrote long afterwards: "Whether Hamilton was a man wiser and more righteous than myself I shall endeavor to furnish posterity with the information necessary to form an im- partial and enlightened judgment."
He never got sick of hating Hamilton; and he once surveyed Hamilton's life as an illustration of his conten- tion that "one of the first decisive symptoms of insanity is knavery." "I knew so much of the malice of Hamilton
RELATIONS WITH THOMAS JEFFERSON 245
against Burr," he wrote to Dr. Waterhouse in 1811, "and his indefatigable exertions to defame him, that I wondered a duel had not taken place seven years before it did. I could have produced such a duel at any moment; but I kept the secrets inviolable."
The close of Adams's administration was sorry. The petulance with which he left Washington without taking his appropriate part in Jefferson's inauguration is capable of a more creditable explanation than the common one; but his auspicious appointment of John Marshall to the chief justiceship does not atone for his proceedings with Marshall in filling offices with Federalists on the very eve of the new administration, into which their terms extended, almost to the dawn of the inauguration day.
RELATIONS WITH THOMAS JEFFERSON (1797 - 1817)
Jefferson had treated Adams with unvarying courtesy. Even to Adams's personal beratings when he called on him after the election, he had responded with a friendly com- posure which compelled a change of tone. During his vice-presidency under Adams they did not come into per- sonal collision. When Adams was elected President, Jef- ferson rejoiced that he had not been "cheated out of the succession by a trick," and he paid warm tribute to him when he himself took his chair in the Senate in 1797. Mrs. Adams expressed pleasure then in Jefferson's own success. Between Jefferson and her husband there had "never been any animosity."
Indeed it is doubtful whether Adams was ever per- sonally drawn more warmly to any of his contemporaries than to Jefferson. He liked him from the time when as a young man Jefferson came into the Congress of 1775; and Jefferson on his part found no man there who in the fateful year which followed reflected so completely as Adams his own impetuosity and resolution. They had been sympathetic comrades in their diplomatic days in Paris and London. During his presidency, Adams tended more and more towards Jefferson's position; and in the great crisis, when Adams's party colleagues were execrating him, they stood together: "I do not believe," Jefferson said,
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"that Mr. Adams wishes war with France, nor do I be- lieve he will truckle to England."
Adams indeed would have liked to have Jefferson go on one of the French missions; but both agreed that this would not comport with Jefferson's official place.
More and more after his retirement did Adams gravitate to Jefferson's support. When John Quincy Adams in 1807 finally severed his connection with the moribund Federalist party, his father was in full sympathy with him; and when Pickering at the same time, with his strong English pro- clivities, came out with a pamphlet arraigning the adminis- tration, Adams himself came from his retirement into the public arena with a powerful defense of Jefferson's policies. At the end of Madison's first term, Adams in 1812 heartily supported his reelection, "because I know of no man who would do better." At the same time he voted for Elbridge Gerry for governor of Massachusetts, "because I believe him to be incomparably the most independent, disinterested and capable man for the office," and gave as a distinct reason for his action the fact that war with England seemed impending and the administration should be supported.
THE TWO VENERABLE SAGES (1817 - 1828)
Honored in his old age by appointment as a presidential elector, he cast his vote for the reelection of James Monroe; and when his son, Monroe's own secretary of state, was elected to the presidency in 1824, it was in the apostolic succession from Jefferson.
In fact, John Adams was never a Federalist of the Hamilton school. He stood much closer to Jefferson in his general principles. He called the Hamiltonians "Hyper- federalists"; and when Dr. Rush, in 1811, was seeking to end Adams's long and unhappy estrangement from Jef- ferson, occasioned by false reports of something that Jef- ferson had said or done, he wrote to Rush; "I know of no difference between him and myself relative to the Con- stitution or to forms of government in general. In meas- ures of administration we have differed in opinion; but
247
RETIREMENT AND OLD AGE
I have raised no clamor nor made any opposition to any of these measures."
The correspondence of Adams and Jefferson, following a silence of ten years or more, and extending to the year of their deaths in 1826, is of distinct historical importance, and in the lives of the two men is of high significance. It reveals the depth of their sympathy and joy in its re- newed expression. "I love you with all my heart," Jeffer- son wrote in one of the later letters; and Adams wrote in 1823, "Nothing revives my spirits so much as your letters, except the society of my son and his family, who are now happily with me." Adams is perhaps the more exuberant, writing a hundred letters to Jefferson's fifty, and usually the longer letters. It was manifestly his chief outside solace in those last years, as he had no great active pub- lic interest such as Jefferson had in the creation of the University of Virginia.
The letters cover a wide range,-democracy and aristoc- racy, agriculture and the Indians, memories of the old days, the question whether they would like to live their lives over again, Christianity and Greek philosophy, death and immortality. Adams's word in one of his letters, "Without virtue there can be no political liberty" deserves to be bracketed with Jefferson's "Democracy and ignorance can- not exist together." In his last letter, written in March, 1826, little more than three months before their death-a letter acknowledged by Adams in April as "one of the most beautiful letters I have ever received"-Jefferson wrote: "It was the lot of our early years to witness nothing but the dull monotony of a colonial subservience, and of our riper years to breast the labors and perils of breaking out of it."
RETIREMENT AND OLD AGE (1801 - 1826)
The quarter century of Adams's retirement in his simple Massachusetts home were years of dignity and of much loneliness. He was devoted to his home and friends and farm, his studies and his correspondence. In 1812 he wrote of his "eleven years in a hermitage at Quincy"; and there were times later when he felt yet more solitary. He undeniably felt a sense of neglect. In Massachusetts,
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he wrote, "as soon as a man has done great services, made great sacrifices, and acquired a name, envy runs him down"; and with this Massachusetts spirit, as at the moment he defined it, he contrasted, with questionable warrant, the attitude of Virginia toward her great sons.
In truth, Massachusetts always honored John Adams. His return to his home after the inauguration of Jefferson was greeted by official and personal expressions of respect and affection, in cheering contrast to the inhospitable cold- ness of the national capital; and to the last he always knew that in his town and his state friends were around him. The death of his wife in 1818 closed a companion- ship unique in its nobility and greatness, and life could no longer be the same; but he was sustained by an unfail- ing belief in immortality, to which the comfort in letters from Jefferson also gave strong expression. He was sustained, too, as he surveyed his life, by an unfailing confidence in its uprightness and, as he believed, its wisdom.
He thought much about the stirring early days of the Revolution. Ten years before his death he wrote the graphic letters to William Tudor, picturing such episodes as Otis's speech against the Writs of Assistance, and Samuel Adams before Hutchinson sturdily demanding the removal of the troops. He often wished that he might write a history of the Revolution. Even in 1776 he had written to his wife from Philadelphia, "I feel an inclination some- times to write the history of the last three years, in imi- tation of Thucydides." Nothing could have been more useful to later generations; for of all the Revolutionary fathers he had the most vivid imagination and the warmest narrative style. For the many fragments which he did leave us, we are grateful indeed.
More and more his mind was occupied by memories of the heroic days of 1776. As the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approached, the mind of the country was fixed upon the two revered leaders who had been the supreme actors in the great drama. It was still hoped that they might be able with their presence to crown the jubilee. It was too late. They were passing. On the eve of the celebration, when John Adams was already very weak, he was asked for a toast for the
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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Quincy observance; and he gave "Independence forever." At sunset on the Fourth of July, amid the sound of bells and cannon, heard by other ears but no longer by his own, he died. His last words were, "Thomas Jefferson still survives." But Jefferson had died earlier in the day. It was one of the most eloquent and memorable coincidences in history. In life they were united; in death they were not divided; and their names shall live together evermore.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADAMS, JOHN .- Works (10 vols., Little, Brown, 1850-1856)-Edited by C. F. Adams. Volume I is devoted to a life of John Adams, the standard biography; it was revised and published separately in two volumes in 1871. Vols. II and III contain large selections from John Adams's diary and autobiography, his notes on Otis's speech on the Writs of Assistance, his draft of the Declaration of Rights at the First Con- tinental Congress in 1774, and his early dissertations on the Canon and Feudal Law. Vol. IV contains the Novanglus letters on the history of the dispute with America from 1754, and the writings on Government prepared for Lee and the Virginia reformers. Vols. IV-VI contain his Defence of the American Constitutions. Vol. VI contains the Discourses of Davila and correspondence with Samuel Adams and Roger Sherman on the Constitution of the United States. Vols. VII-X are devoted to letters, speeches, and official proclamations. ADAMS, JOHN .- A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, against the Attack of M. Turgot (3 vols., Phila., W. Cobbett, 1797)-The volumes were published separately, the first as early as 1787. This (third) edition contains a list of subscribers, which has some historical interest. The work shows immense research, and is almost unparalleled among American political studies of the period in its encyclopedic survey of past forms of government, republican and other.
ADAMS, JOHN .- History of the Dispute with America, from its Origin in 1754 (London, J. Stockdale, 1784)-An Abridgment of Letters of Novanglus, which first appeared in 1774.
ADAMS, JOHN, and ADAMS, Mrs. ABIGAIL .- Familiar Letters of John Adams and his Wife Abigail Adams, during the Revolution (N. Y., Hurd, Houghton, 1876)-Edited by C. F. Adams. Contains a memoir of Mrs. Adams.
ADAMS, JOHN, and JEFFERSON, THOMAS .- Correspondence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, (1812-1826) (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1925) -Selected with comment by Paul Wilstach.
ADAMS, JOHN, and WATERHOUSE, BENJAMIN .- Statesman and Friend, Correspondence of John Adams with Benjamin Waterhouse, 1784- 1822 (Boston, Little, Brown, 1927)-Edited by W. C. Ford.
ADAMS, JOHN, and WARREN, Mrs. MERCY (OTIS)-"Correspondence be- tween John Adams and Mercy Warren Relating to her History of the American Revolution, July-August, 1807 (Mass. Historical So- ciety, Collections, Fifth Series, Vol. IV, pp. 315-491. Boston, 1878)- This correspondence, while constantly showing Adams's arrogant, intolerant, and other unpleasant traits, throws distinct light on many issues of historic importance. It is pervaded throughout by his absolute self-confidence.
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ADAMS, JOHN QUINCY, and ADAMS, CHARLES FRANCIS .- Life of John Adams (2 vols., Phila., Lippincott, 1871)-This is the standard biog- raphy, revised and corrected from the form in which it first ap- peared as the first volume of his Works.
BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY .- Catalogue of John Adams's Library (Boston, 1917).
CHAMBERLAIN, MELLEN .- John Adams, the Statesman of the American Revolution (Boston, 1884)-Address before the Webster Historical Society, at its annual meeting in Boston, January 18, 1884. A markedly able study.
GIBBS, GEORGE .- Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams, edited from the papers of Oliver Wolcott (Printed for the subscribers, [W. Van Norden, printer], 1846)-A careful work, giv- ing much valuable information, but pervaded by strong. Wolcott sym- pathies and bitter prejudice against Adams.
GOULD, ELIZABETH PORTER .- John Adams and Daniel Webster as School- masters (Boston, Palmer, 1903).
MCLAUGHLIN, ANDREW CUNNINGHAM .- The Confederation and the Con- stitution, 1783-1789 (N. Y., Harper, 1905)-See critical and biblio- graphical final chapter.
MORSE, JAMES TORREY .- John Adams (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1898)- The only critical life of Adams besides the standard biography by C. F. Adams.
PARKER, THEODORE .- Historic Americans (Boston, Fuller, 1870)-The chapter on John Adams is one of the best in this able volume.
WALSH, CORREA MOYLAN .- The Political Science of John Adams (N. Y., Putnam's, 1915)-A scholarly survey of Adams's career and theories, pervaded by special hostility to the bicameral system and his reliance on checks and balances, and chiefly valuable for the summaries of Adams's views and development.
WEBSTER, DANIEL .- The Bunker Hill Monument; Adams and Jefferson; two orations (Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, 1893)-The latter discourse, delivered in Faneuil Hall, August 2, 1826, was the most memorable of the many eulogies which followed the deaths of Adams and Jeffer- son in 1826.
WILSON, DANIEL MUNRO .- Where American Independence Began; Quincy, its Famous Group of Patriots (Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, 1904)- See pp. 62-105, "The Great Advocate of Independence, John Adams," a markedly able study.
CHAPTER IX THE MASSACHUSETTS LOYALISTS (1775-1783)
BY LAWRENCE SHAW MAYO
DIVISION BY BIRTH AND REGION
Every prolonged war produces economic changes that inevitably have their effect upon society. Old fortunes are apt to be increased; new fortunes are certain to be made; and too often at the end of a war those who were in moderate but comfortable circumstances find themselves obliged to practise economies to which they are unaccus- tomed. This general rule applies to Massachusetts in the American Revolution, but in this case the social upheaval was more violent than usual because the conflict was to a certain extent a civil war.
The earlier chapters of this work have made it clear that the political cleavage between "patriot" and "Tory" did not break into an American-born group on one side and a British-born group on the other. Far from it. In some cases the longer a family had been in the Bay Colony the closer it clung to the British government. In other instances men whose ancestors had come over in the May- flower or the Arbella looked forward to independence from almost the beginning of the dispute. Could wealth or lack of wealth have been the basis of the division? At first glance one is inclined to think that it may well have been so; for the majority of the rich merchants of Boston were pro-British in their sympathies. Upon a wider survey he finds most of the well-to-do of the country towns prominent in one way or another among the forces of the liberals. In desperation the investigator is on the point of con- cluding that there is no satisfactory explanation except
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THE MASSACHUSETTS LOYALISTS
that everyone is born "either a little liberal or a little conservative."
Then it occurs to him to look at the situation from a geographical angle. This procedure seems to yield a fairly convincing theory : the line between patriot and Tory, between liberal and conservative was a line separating agrarian Massachusetts from mercantile and office-holding Boston. Despite the fact that conspicuous Tories were to be found in country towns throughout the province, and despite the fact that the most flagrant outbursts of "patri- otic" zeal occurred in the metropolis itself, it seems to be true that in 1775 the country towns were predominantly anti-British, and that the town of Boston was the strong- hold of loyalism.
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