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A committee appointed to consider the issue reported back with the suggested title “His Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of the Rights of the Same.” But it was Adams who took the lead in advocating titles, voicing his views in direct opposition to a strong-willed senator from Pennsylvania, William Maclay. Indeed, had it not been for Adams and Maclay the issue might have come to little more than it did in the House. Instead, it occupied the Senate for nearly a month.
Only Maclay was keeping a private journal of what transpired, and being the only account, it would be quoted repeatedly by latter-day historians. Maclay's rendition of Adams was devastating. Adams's version of what happened, written a few years later, would be quite different. According to Adams, his supposed passion for titles amounted merely to a reasonable request for advice from the Senate on how to address Washington:
Whether I should say, “Mr. Washington,” “Mr. President,” “Sir,” “may it please your Excellency,” or what else? I observed that it had been common while he commanded the army to call him “His Excellency,” but I was free to own it would appear to me better to give him no title but “Sir” or “Mr. President,” than to put him on a level with a governor of Bermuda.
Adams believed everything possible should be done to bring dignity and respect to the central government and thus strengthen the union. If the central government was to have greater authority and importance than the state governments, then the titles of federal office ought to reflect that. It was thus essential to adorn the office of the President, the highest office, with commensurate “dignity and splendor.” Titles were symbols, just as impressive buildings were symbols, except that titles, unlike buildings, cost nothing.
Like Richard Henry Lee, Adams believed the need for “distinctions” ran deep in human nature and that to deny this was unrealistic. The love of titles was like the love of parades and pageantry. The title did not make the man, of course, but it enhanced the standing of the man in the eyes of others. Rank and distinction were essential to any social organization, be it a family, a parish, or a ship, Adams would say. He cared intensely about the future of the republic and, as he had tried to explain in his Defence of the Constitutions, he saw men of education, ability, and wealth as “the natural aristocracy,” the great strength and blessing of society, but potentially also a great threat to liberty, if their power and energies were misdirected. These were not hereditary titles he was proposing, but titles conferred by society for merit and that went only with positions of high federal responsibility. He was convinced that the modest compensation and heavy burdens of public service—the disruption of family life, the criticism and insults one was subjected to—must be compensated for, if ever people of ability were to take part. He believed that honorable titles of a kind not to be acquired in any other line of work could make a difference. To him personally, he insisted, they mattered not at all. It was his thought that Washington should be called “His Majesty the President,” or something of the sort.
But there was no popular support for grand titles. Adams was woefully out of step with the country. Had he been in New York two years earlier, almost certainly he would have seen a play called The Contrast, if for no other reason than it was written by Nabby's former suitor, Royall Tyler. The first American play to be produced on stage, it opened with the lines:
Exult each patriot heart! This night is shewn
A piece which we may fairly call our own;
Where the proud titles of “My Lord! Your Grace!”
To humble Mr. and plain Sir give place.
One wonders, too, what effect Abigail might have had on her husband had she been with him during his first weeks as Vice President. It was not titles that gave men preeminence in America, she had lectured the “haughty Scotchman” on her voyage to England and to the solid approval of her shipmates.
James Madison, in an address to the House, had expressed the conviction of most Americans when he said, “The more simple, the more republican we are in our manners, the more national dignity we shall acquire.”
But Adams would not be stilled. It was almost as if he had to go against the current, lest anyone doubt his independence. He repeatedly intruded on the Senate's time to voice his views, even lecturing the Senate, as if back at his schoolmaster's desk. “For forty minutes he harangued us from the chair,” wrote Senator Maclay of one such disquisition.
Maclay, the most radical and outspoken Anti-Federalist in the Senate, was a rough-hewn lawyer from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania who stood six feet three and believed he was serving among a “set of vipers.” Caustic, opinionated, he disliked just about everyone. In the privacy of his journal he called Alexander Hamilton “a damnable villain”; Robert Morris, “the greatest blackguard”; and referred to James Madison as “His Littleness.” For Adams he felt only contempt. Earlier Benjamin Rush had encouraged Maclay to support Adams for Vice President and to be friendly to him after Adams took office, with a view to the help Adams might provide in making Philadelphia the capital. “We knew his vanity,” Maclay wrote, “and hoped by laying hold of it to render him useful among the New England men in our scheme of bringing Congress to Pennsylvania.” Accordingly, Maclay treated Adams with feigned deference, hating every moment of it, as he wrote in his journal. He thought Adams “silly,” said he had “the face of folly.” Whenever he looked at the Vice President presiding in his chair, wrote Maclay, “I cannot help thinking of a monkey just put into breeches.”
It was the spirit of the Constitution that most Americans wanted, Maclay insisted, rising repeatedly to address the Senate. “Let us read the Constitution,” he declared. “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States.” Any such attributes were “contraband language” in America.
To judge by what Maclay recorded, Adams made a fool of himself every time he opened his mouth, while he, Maclay, remained the voice of reason and the people's will. Possibly, Adams was as ludicrous as Maclay portrayed him. But given Maclay's contempt for Adams—a contempt so blatant that some in the Senate urged him to exercise some self-restraint—it is hard to imagine that what he wrote was not highly colored by bias.
Persisting in his futile effort, Adams made himself a mockery, even among some who were on his side. When Ralph Izard suggested that Adams himself be bestowed with a title, “His Rotundity,” the joke rapidly spread. In the House, Representatives John Page of Virginia, Jefferson's lifelong friend, and Thomas Tucker of South Carolina relieved the tedium of extended debates by penning and exchanging doggerel at the Vice President's expense. “In gravity clad, He has nought in his head, But visions of Nobels and Kings,” wrote Tucker, as a poetic query, to which Page responded:
I'll tell in a trice—
'Tis old Daddy Vice
Who carries of pride an ass-load;
Who turns up his nose,
Wherever he goes,
With vanity swelled like a toad.
On May 14, exactly as the House had done, the Senate voted that Washington's title be simply and only “The President of the United States.”
Clearly the issue had been blown out of proportion. As even Madison admitted on the floor of the House, it was not a question of vital importance. Nor had Adams proven himself a monarchist, as some like Maclay kept insisting. Privately, Adams knew what a bad start he had made, and to be the butt of jokes, after all he had been through, was hurtful. But as any adverse or critical comment on Washington, any ridicule at all, would have been considered unacceptable at this stage, Adams served as a convenient target for mockery and humor, and would again, just as he would be subject to the easiest, most damaging of smear words: monarchist. He was the first, but by no means the last, Vice President to take abuse in the President's place, though much of it, to be sure, he brought on himself.
Most serious perhaps was the damage he had done to his standing with Washington, who was privately advised that the fuss over titles had made Adams not just unpopular in Virginia but “odious.?
?? Washington was thereafter to maintain an appreciable distance from Adams, thus diminishing still more the importance of the vice presidency and Adams's part in the scheme of things.
Yet through it all, true to his promise, Adams had shown no anger or acted discourteously to anyone. At one point he also conceded from the chair that perhaps he had been out of the country too long and failed to know the temper of the people.
To compound his troubles, word had been passed to him for the first time explaining the “dark and dirty intrigue” used to deny him votes for Vice President, and it sickened him. “Is not my election to this office in the scurvy manner in which it was done a curse rather than a blessing?” he asked Benjamin Rush in a letter charged with disgust. He had not yet learned who was behind the scheme, only that it had originated in New York, and the more he observed of life in New York, the more disconsolate he grew. To William Tudor, he railed against the “corruption of ambition,” the “ungovernable rage” for money and luxury he saw on all sides. Later, Adams would attribute such “scrawls” to “gloomy times and desperate circumstances.” He felt miserably alone. His accommodations with John Jay were the finest possible, and occasional Sundays with Nabby and her family helped greatly. But his need for Abigail, his ballast, was acute.
By mid-May he had located a house and posted an urgent plea for her to come at once. From her letters he knew the trouble she was having finding someone to lease the farm, and that she was short of funds. He told her to borrow whatever she needed, or sell off some of the livestock, “anything at any rate” rather than delay a day longer. If no one would take the place, she should “leave it to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field,” he told her. In the meantime, he was desperate for books to be sent—Hume, Johnson, Priestley, Livy, Tacitus, Cicero, “and a Plutarch in French or English.”
As to the nature of his “difficulties,” he gave no explanation. Of all that had been going on in the Senate and his part in it, he said only that he had survived largely through prayer.
“My sincere thanks to Mr. Wibird for his remembrance of me in his prayers,” he told Abigail. “It is to me a most affecting thing to hear myself prayed for, in particular as I do every day in the week, and disposes me to bear with more composure, some disagreeable circumstances that attend my situation.”
The suspicion that Adams was a monarchist at heart grew stronger, and understandably, as in his Defence of the Constitutions of Government he did seem to lean in that direction. Distraught over what he had heard, Benjamin Rush wrote to caution his “dear friend” to think again and remember all he had espoused at the start of the Revolution.
In fact, Adams had done serious damage to his reputation and among others besides Rush whose opinions he most valued. It appeared that the man who put such stress on balance in government was himself a little unbalanced. Writing Madison from Paris, Jefferson dismissed the Senate's proposed title for Washington as “the most superlatively ridiculous thing” he had ever heard of, and called Adams's part in such business “proof that Franklin's characterization of Adams as “sometimes absolutely mad” was the right one.
As so often before when feeling battered and unappreciated, Adams poured out his fury and frustration on paper. To Rush he insisted he was as much a republican as ever. Still, he did not see hereditary monarchy and aristocracy as necessarily contrary to human nature. Nor was it beyond reason to imagine that the time could come when America, of necessity, might have to resort to something of the kind—as “an asylum against discord, seditions, and civil war”—in order to preserve the laws and liberties of the people. He did not expect to see anything like this happen in his lifetime. He was only saying it was conceivable.
“I am a mortal and irreconcilable enemy to monarchy,” he would later tell Rush, after Rush expressed worry that Adams had abandoned the ideals of 1776. “I am no friend to hereditary limited monarchy in America,” Adams wrote explicitly. “Do not, therefore, my friend, misunderstand me and misrepresent me to posterity.
I deny an “attachment to monarchy,” and I deny that I have “changed my principles since 1776.”... The continent is a kind of whispering gallery and acts and speeches are reverberated around from New York in all directions. The report is very loud at a distance when the whisper is very gentle in the center.
But this was written later, when the new government, as well as Adams's own role in it, had become more stable. In the meanwhile, even Rush conceded that he was equally distraught over the moral temper of the times and the long-range prospects for America. “A hundred years hence, absolute monarchy will probably be rendered necessary in our country by the corruption of our people,” wrote the usually optimistic physician. He asked only that the republican ideal be given a fair chance, which Adams was not only willing, but determined, to do.
Many years afterward, reflecting on his friend Adams and the charge that he had been corrupted by his years in Europe, Rush wrote that, in fact, there had been no change at all. Adams was as “familiar and unaffected” as ever, “strictly upright,” and “a real American in principle and conduct.”
As distressing as almost anything for Adams was the flood of requests for his help in securing government jobs. His response was to refuse them all on the grounds that only the President had the power to make appointments. He himself, he insisted, had no say on patronage. Even appeals from deserving friends were denied. When Mercy Warren asked him to arrange a suitable position for her husband James, Adams replied huffily that he had no such influence and that even if he did he could not possibly allow the authority entrusted to him to become “subservient to my private views, or those of my family or friends.”
Adams detested the idea of friends trying to use him, but he could readily have done something for the Warrens, and with perfect propriety.
One further aggravation were the reports from home about young Charles, who had gotten into a scrape at Harvard. Abigail wrote of suffering “anxious hours” over what she had heard, though given the company Charles had been keeping, she was not surprised. She thought the boy belonged with his father. To Cotton Tufts, who apparently supplied more details on the matter, Adams wrote helplessly, “What shall I do with that tender-hearted fool?”
The exact nature of Charles's difficulties was never defined in the correspondence, but from fragmentary Harvard records it appears that one student was expelled, others reprimanded, when the one, or all, ran naked through Harvard Yard, and the implications are that there had been drinking involved. In any event, Charles was with Abigail when she arrived by packet boat in New York at the start of summer, and life for the Vice President took a decided turn for the better.
• • •
ALL THE FRUSTRATIONS and feelings of stagnation that went with the vice presidency, all that so many others who followed in the office were to bemoan down the years, were felt intensely by the first Vice President. Yet for Adams it was by no means a time of unrelieved misery. Indeed, in their private lives, it was as happy a stretch of years as he and Abigail knew, beginning from the day of her arrival, June 24, 1789. “We are all very happy,” wrote Adams to Cotton Tufts. And so they were.
He had rented a proper country seat, Richmond Hill, a mile north of town on a high promontory beside the Hudson, with sweeping views and nearly always a breeze. Adams loved the location and that the rent was considerably less than for a comparable house in town. His salary as Vice President, a subject of much debate in Congress, would be set at $5,000, a figure lower than previously understood, and whether he could thus afford to live in a style befitting the office remained a worry.
“We are delightfully situated,” Abigail reported to Mary Cranch. “The prospect all around is beautiful to the highest degree.” Sailing ships of every kind were constantly in view, passing up and down the wide tidal river.
On one side we see a view of the city and of Long Island. The river [is] in front, [New] Jersey and the adjacent country on the other side. You turn a little from the roa
d and enter a gate. A winding road with trees in clumps leads to the house, and all around the house it looks wild and rural as uncultivated nature.... You enter under a piazza into a hall and turning to the right hand ascend a staircase which lands you in another [hall] of equal dimensions of which I make a drawing room. It has a glass door which opens into a gallery the whole front of the house which is exceeding pleasant.... There is upon the back of the house a garden of much greater extent than our Braintree garden, but it is wholly for a walk and flowers. It has hawthorne hedge and rows of trees with a broad gravel walk.
She had her usual complaints—repairs were needed, good servants impossible to find, the local prices outrageous—but the longer she stayed at Richmond Hill, the more attached she became, and Adams concurred. “Never,” he wrote, “did I live in so delightful a spot.”
They were both happy to be near Nabby and the grandchildren, and Abigail unhesitatingly assumed her social obligations as the wife of the Vice President, making and receiving calls. “At Richmond Hill it is expected that I am at home both to gentlemen and ladies whenever they come out, which is almost every day... besides it is a sweet morning ride.” After she and Nabby paid a first call on Mrs. Washington, Abigail expressed complete approval. “She is plain in dress, but that plainness is the best of every article.... Her hair is white, her teeth beautiful.” Having attended several of the President's levees, Abigail could attest that the “court” of the Washingtons was as crowded, the company as brilliantly dressed as at St. James's, with the difference that here she thoroughly enjoyed herself. Her “station” at levees, she explained to Mary, was to the right of Mrs. Washington—though this Mary must keep to herself, “as all distinction you know is unpopular.” If someone mistakenly stood in her place, the President never failed to see the situation corrected without anyone being offended. He “has so happy a faculty of appearing to accommodate and yet carrying his point that if he was not really one of the best intentioned men in the world, he might be a very dangerous one.
