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The world was growing more enlightened, Adams conceded. “Knowledge is more diffused.... Man, as man, becomes an object of respect.” But, he insisted, there was “great reason to pause and preserve our sobriety.
Amidst all their exultations, Americans and Frenchmen should remember that the perfectibility of man is only human and terrestrial perfectibility. Cold will still freeze, and fire will never cease to burn; disease and vice will continue to disorder, and death to terrify mankind.
Between Jefferson and Adams there was no discussion of their diverging views. To Jefferson, Adams had become an embarrassment, and while always pleasant in social encounters, Jefferson had as little as possible to do with him. On matters of foreign relations, where Adams's judgment could have been of value, Jefferson would never seek his counsel or include him in deliberations. Washington seldom asked Adams for views, but Jefferson, who in Europe had deferred repeatedly to Adams, asked for them not at all.
Like Washington and many others, Adams had become increasingly distraught over the rise of political divisiveness, the forming of parties or factions. That political parties were an evil that could bring the ruination of republican government was doctrine he, with others, had long accepted and espoused. “There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader and converting measures in opposition to each other,” Adams had observed to a correspondent while at Amsterdam, before the Revolution ended. Yet this was exactly what had happened. The “turbulent maneuvers” of factions, he now wrote privately, could “tie the hands and destroy the influence” of every honest man with a desire to serve the public good. There was “division of sentiments over everything,” he told his son-in-law William Smith. “How few aim at the good of the whole, without aiming too much at the prosperity of parts!”
Then, in May, with the weather unseasonably wet and cold and influenza rampant in the city, Washington was suddenly taken so ill it appeared the one unifying force respected by all was in mortal jeopardy.
In the first six months of his presidency, Washington had lived in a comparatively modest house on Cherry Street, but had since moved to grander quarters, a mansion on Broadway, where now the street was cordoned off to give him some quiet. One doctor after another came and went at the front door. For several days, until the fever broke, it appeared the President was dying. Senator Maclay, on a call at the house, found “every eye full of tears.” When the President's presiding physician allowed that death was all but certain, alarm swept through the city. Calamity faced the country.
For the Adamses, they were days of extreme anxiety. When the crisis passed, Abigail tried to convey to Mary Cranch the degree to which the union and permanency of the government depended on Washington's life. “At this early day when neither our finances are arranged, nor our government sufficiently cemented to promise duration, his death would, I fear, have had most disastrous consequences.” The prospect of anyone succeeding to Washington's place was unthinkable, but the realization that there was indeed “only one breath,” as John had put it, between him and the presidency, and that it would be he who would have to face the “disastrous consequences,” had struck her full force as it had not before. “I feared a thousand things which I pray I never may be called to experience,” she continued. “Most assuredly I do not wish for the highest spot. I never before realized what I might be called to do, and the apprehension of it only for a few days greatly distressed me.”
Meantime, the entire household at Richmond Hill was stricken with influenza, with the exception of the Vice President. James Madison had been laid up. One congressman died. Jefferson was out of circulation for a month, confined to his house in the grip of excruciating headaches.
That one had to keep “a good heart,” come what may, was Abigail's lifelong creed. “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine,” she loved to say, quoting Proverbs. “I hate to complain,” she now wrote. “No one is without difficulties, whether in high or low life, and every person knows best where their own shoe pinches.”
That June of 1790, with the President recovered, the French diplomat, Louis-Guillaume Otto, summing up the situation in New York for his government, reported that the influence and importance of the Vice President were “nil.” If Washington had an heir apparent, by all rights it was Jefferson.
It appears certain at present that he [Adams] will never be President and that he will have a very formidable competitor in Mr. Jefferson, who, with more talents and knowledge than he, has infinitely more the principles and manners of a republican.
• • •
THAT SUMMER Congress worked itself to a fever pitch over two issues certain to be of long-lasting consequence. The question of where to locate the national capital had been a topic of rancorous discussion since the summer before, and was again at the forefront, along with a proposal for the federal government to assume some $25 million in debts incurred by the states during the Revolution. The “assumption” plan was the work of the youthful Hamilton, who, since his appointment, had swiftly made the Treasury the most creative department in the government, and was commonly recognized as having extraordinary ability.
An immigrant of illegitimate birth, Hamilton had arrived in New York from the West Indies at age fifteen. In less than ten years he had distinguished himself as a scholar at King's (later Columbia) College, served as Washington's aide in the war, led an assault at Yorktown, and married into the wealthy, influential Schuyler family of New York, which did him no harm when, after the war, he turned his energies to the law and politics. Brilliant to the point of genius, he exuded vitality and could turn on great charm when needed. His capacity for hard work was almost superhuman. Though somewhat shorter than Adams—about five feet seven—he was attractively slender, handsome, with clear blue eyes and sandy red hair, and dressed so as never to be lost in a crowd, in perfectly tailored coats, waistcoats, and breeches in a rainbow of colors. Even his ambition seemed to become him—Adams wrote of Hamilton's “high-minded ambition”—and his incurable love of intrigue had thus far alienated no one.
As one of the principal authors, along with Madison, of the Federalist Papers, Hamilton ranked as a leading proponent of a strong central government, and his name was commonly linked with that of Madison, with whom he remained on friendly terms. Further, both were highly esteemed by the President, which was of considerable importance.
Madison, a tiny, sickly-looking man who weighed little more than a hundred pounds and dressed always in black, had emerged as the most formidable figure in the House, largely on the strength of a penetrating intelligence and a shrewd political sense. Adams thought him overrated, but in time Adams would change his mind.
Hamilton's assumption plan had first been laid before Congress the previous January, 1790, as part of a large report in which he argued that a sound public credit was essential to economic growth and national unity. He had called for the central government to pay off all federal debt and to assume the debt of the states as well, on the grounds that they had been incurred in the common cause of independence. Boldly, Hamilton argued that such an increase in the national debt would be a blessing, for the greater the responsibility of the central government, the greater its authority.
He was vehemently opposed, however, by those who saw it as an overreaching and very unrepublican move to concentrate power in the central government to the detriment of the states. To southerners in the Congress the scheme would not only reduce the importance of the states, but would lead to a dangerous, ultimately corrupting concentration of wealth and power in the North. And it was Madison now, breaking with Hamilton, who led the opposition in the House, where assumption was put to the vote on April 12 and narrowly defeated.
Still, the battle continued, and at the same time that the location of the capital—the “residence” issue—had become a subject of equal rancor. New Yorkers, eager to keep the capital where it was, had begun building an executive mansion for Washington by the B
attery, with a grand panorama of the harbor. New Englanders also favored New York, it being much the easiest location for them to reach, though Philadelphia, adamantly espoused by the Pennsylvanians, was considered an acceptable alternative.
The Virginians wanted no part of either of the northern cities and were strongly committed to bringing the capital south to a site on the Potomac River not far from Washington's home at Mount Vernon. Those “most adjacent to the seat of legislation will always possess advantages over others,” said Madison, who feared that the South and its agrarian way of life would suffer were the capital to remain in the North.
In the Senate, charges and countercharges were voiced with increasing vehemence. Adams struggled to keep order and apparently with little effect. “John Adams has neither judgment, firmness of mind, nor respectability of deportment to fill the chair of such an assembly,” scoffed the ever-splenetic William Maclay.
Then, on a morning in June, the historic “compromise of 1790” began to take form, when Hamilton and Jefferson met outside the President's house and Hamilton, taking Jefferson by the arm, walked him up and down for half an hour, urging him, for the sake of the union, to join in “common cause” and resolve acceptance of the assumption bill. Professing that reasonable men ought to be able to reach a compromise, Jefferson invited Hamilton and Madison to dine at his house the next day. And there, over a bottle of Jefferson's best wine, the bargain was struck. In return for southern support for the assumption bill, Hamilton agreed to do all he could to persuade the Pennsylvanians to vote for a permanent capital by the Potomac, if it were agreed to move the capital temporarily to Philadelphia. Madison said he would not vote for assumption, but then neither would he be “strenuous” in opposition.
Whether, in fact, the outcome was resolved in this fashion is not altogether clear, but certainly Jefferson believed the bargain had been settled, for on July 1 he wrote William Short in Paris to have his furniture and paintings shipped to Philadelphia.
The crucial vote on residence, however, was made not in the House but in the Senate, where apparently an agreement had already been reached between the Pennsylvanians and the Virginians. When a last-minute motion to keep the capital in New York for two more years resulted in a thirteen-to-thirteen tie, Adams cast a nay vote.
By July 12 both houses of Congress had voted to relocate the capital in Philadelphia for ten years—until the turn of the century—after which it would move to a permanent site on the Potomac. The Pennsylvanians went along with the agreement, convinced that once the capital was located in Philadelphia it would never move. Adams was inclined to agree. A capital, he said, ought to be in a great city, an idea no Virginian would ever have entertained.
With the passage of the assumption bill at the end of the month came cries of “intrigues, cabals, and combinations.” New Yorkers were outraged. Senator Maclay speculated that, if the truth were known, Washington was behind the whole arrangement, which indeed he was, and in the first public criticism of the President, the New York Advertiser charged him with gross ingratitude to the city of New York.
• • •
As SOON AS CONGRESS ADJOURNED on August 12, the government began packing for the move. The President and Mrs. Washington departed for Mount Vernon, while the Vice President set off for Philadelphia to find a house, leaving Abigail in despair over the thought of leaving Richmond Hill, and particularly as Nabby gave birth to a third child that summer, another boy, named Thomas.
By late fall the Adamses were resettled in a substantial brick house two miles west of Philadelphia overlooking the Schuylkill. Called Bush Hill, it was another setting of idyllic charm, except that the British army, during the occupation, had left hardly a tree or bush standing.
Washington arrived and moved into the Robert Morris house on Market Street, considered the grandest residence in Philadelphia. (General Sir William Howe had made it his headquarters during the occupation.) Jefferson, too, took a house on Market, just blocks away, where his additions this time included a library, stable, and garden house. He had furniture sent on from Monticello and eventually his treasures from France arrived in no less than eighty packing cases, a quantity of purchases such as no one American had ever brought back from Europe.
On Monday, December 6, Congress reconvened in Congress Hall, formerly the Philadelphia County Courthouse, a two-story red-brick building erected since the war on the west side of the State House. As at Federal Hall in New York, the House of Representatives met on the first floor, the Senate on the floor above. The Supreme Court would sit in what had been City Hall, a corresponding brick building on the east side of the State House.
For all that Philadelphia had grown and changed, it was familiar territory for Adams, filled with memories. He was happy to be back, and once she had overcome another spell of poor health, Abigail was writing of her delight in seeing “the dazzling Mrs. Bingham again,” and of Mrs. Washington's Friday evenings, where “fine ladies show themselves, and as candlelight is a great improver of beauty, they appear to great advantage.” The President was as fond of theater as were the Adamses, and invited them to accompany him and Mrs. Washington to performances at the Southwark Theater. They dined several times at the presidential mansion, and the President and his lady, in a rare exception to his rule of accepting no invitations, came to dine at Bush Hill.
So bone-chilling was the cold of that winter, every fireplace at Bush Hill had to be kept blazing and Abigail's principal problem with new servants this time was that they were so frequently drunk. But her house was full of life, as she wrote. Son Thomas, having finished at Harvard, came to live with his mother and father. Charles rode down from New York for periodic visits, bringing his customary good cheer. When John Quincy traveled from Boston for a stay in February, Abigail was able to report to sister Mary that for the first time in years she had all three sons together under her roof.
Like her husband, Abigail had the highest hopes for their eldest son. The time would come, she said, when “this young man will be sought as a jewel of great price.” But John Quincy did not look well and seemed to have lost “much of his sprightliness and vivacity.” The year before, while still at Newburyport, he had fallen in love with a fifteen-year-old girl, Mary Frazier, and was strongly advised by his parents that both he and the girl were too young for a serious “attachment.” By autumn the romance was broken off. Now, Abigail reported to Mary Cranch, the young man fretted that his Boston law practice was so slow taking hold. “We all preach patience to him.”
But her greater worry was Nabby, whose husband, with a growing family and no profession, had suddenly gone off to England on some kind of speculative venture.
Happily, America was prospering, commerce and agriculture both nourishing, and there was increasing confidence everywhere. Secretary Hamilton's proposed national bank, the centerpiece of his plan and now before Congress, had the support of nearly everyone, Abigail reported to Cotton Tufts. There was not a doubt that the bill would pass and by a considerable majority, she assured the trusted family adviser.
As she predicted, the bill for the Bank of the United States passed by a sizable majority, despite opposition from Madison and Jefferson, who urged the President to exercise a veto on constitutional grounds. But Hamilton's views carried greater weight with Washington, who signed the bill on February 25.
Better versed on financial matters than her husband, Abigail wanted to invest immediately in government securities, but as she told Cotton Tufts, “Mr. Adams held to his faith in land as true wealth.”
Indeed, Adams not only put his trust in land as the safest of investments, but agreed in theory with Jefferson and Madison that an agricultural society was inherently more stable than any other—not to say more virtuous. Like most farmers, he had strong misgivings about banks, and candidly admitted his ignorance of “coin and commerce.” Yet he was as pleased by the rise of enterprise and prosperity as anyone, and in moments of discouragement over public life, even contemplated going into th
e China trade! As strong as his attachment to life lived close to the land may have been, Adams liked what he saw happening. “Never since I was born was America so happy as at this time.”
Had the Adamses invested in government securities as Abigail wished, they would, almost certainly, have wound up quite wealthy.
• • •
NOWHERE IN THE DOZENS of personal letters they had written in more than a year had either John or Abigail made mention of Jefferson. To judge by their correspondence he might still have been in France. It was not that they never saw him. Rather, it seems that if they had nothing good to say, they said nothing. But then that spring of 1791, Adams and Jefferson were caught up in a public controversy that neither anticipated or wanted and that put the first severe strain on their already cooling friendship. The effect on national politics would be profound, and as was perhaps inevitable, the root cause was the revolution in France.
In furious response to Edmund Burke's book Reflections on the Revolution in France, Thomas Paine, who was then in England, had produced a pamphlet, The Rights of Man, that attacked Burke and set forth an impassioned defense of human rights, liberties, and equality. Jefferson, on receiving an early copy, promptly passed it on to a Philadelphia printer with a note warmly endorsing it as the answer to “the political heresies that have sprung up among us.” When the printer published a first American edition, Jefferson's endorsement appeared prominently on the title page and was attributed to the Secretary of State.
The endorsement caused a sensation. Jefferson claimed to be astonished but privately confirmed that by “political heresies” he meant the writings of John Adams. In a letter of explanation to Washington, he said he was “mortified” to be “thus brought forward on the public stage... against my love of silence and quiet, and my abhorrence of dispute.” He greatly regretted that “the indiscretion of a printer” had doubtless offended his “friend Mr. Adams, for whom, as one of the most honest and disinterested men alive, I have cordial esteem,” despite “his apostasy to hereditary monarchy.” But to Adams, Jefferson said nothing. Weeks passed, during which Adams, deeply offended, kept silent, then returned to Braintree for a brief visit.
