How can so many Americans think
Bill Clinton was a bad president when in fact he was such a good president. Which was
he? “History will decide,” goes the
standard line.
But will it? I was fascinated to read David McCullough’s best-selling
John
Adams, which shows what an underappreciated hero Adams was . . . but then to read Richard Rosenfeld’s
take.
Rosenfeld is the author of
the widely acclaimed American
Aurora: A Democratic-Republican Returns: The Suppressed History of Our Nation's
Beginnings and The Heroic Newspaper That Tried to Report It. In granting permission to share the essay that
follows, Richard writes, “No Democrat or democrat
should be supporting a Washington memorial for John Adams, especially in
the absence of any for the nation's two actual colossi of independence and our greatest
democratic founders, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine.”
[For those short
on time, I have taken the liberty of highlighting a few lines, so you at least get the gist.]
This essay was written at the invitation
of
The Thomas Paine National Historical
Association
and appeared in the
September 2001 Education Issue of
Harper’s Magazine.
THE ADAMS
TYRANNY
Lost
Lessons from the Early Republic
By
Richard N. Rosenfeld
If we knew nothing
more of John Adams than that his alternative life plan was to preach from the
pulpit of Massachusetts' established puritan church, that two of his three
sons, Thomas and Charles, were alcoholics (one died of it), that the third,
John Quincy, who dogged his father's footsteps to the presidency, was, by all
accounts, “a cold, austere, and foreboding character” (J.Q.'s
words), and that leading politicians of his day saw John Adams as emotionally,
shall we say, unbalanced (Benjamin Franklin: “in some things absolutely out of
his senses;” Thomas Jefferson: “sometimes absolutely mad;” Madison: “sometimes
wholly out of his senses;” Hamilton: “liable to paroxysms of anger, which
deprive him of self command”), we might speculate that John Adams was an
overbearing and hypercritical pedant, distant from friends and enemies alike.
But the truth is far worse.
From the time Adams served, during the
Revolution, as an ambassador to America’s only ally, France (French Foreign
Minister Vergennes asked Congress to remove Adams “on account of a
stubbornness, a pedantry, a self-sufficiency, and a self-conceit which render
him incapable of handling political questions”) to his waning days as a
one-term president (many party leaders then found that such character defects,
as Hamilton charged, “unfit him for the office of Chief Magistrate”), John
Adams’ pathological narcissism repeatedly put his country’s interests at risk
and ultimately doomed his Federalist party to extinction. In his own mind, he
was never at fault.
For his abortive diplomacy in France and
thereafter in the Netherlands, where he failed to obtain Dutch help or
recognition until America’s independence had been won, Adams blamed his fellow
ambassador Benjamin Franklin and French Foreign Minister Vergennes: “I was pursued into
Holland by the intrigues of Vergennes and Franklin at least as much as I ever
had been in France, and was embarrassed and thwarted, both in my negotiations
for a loan and in those of a political nature, by their friends, Agents, and
Spies.” For his problems as President,
he blamed Hamilton (“a bastard Bratt of a Scotch Pedlar” is how Adams described him) and disloyal cabinet
members. To himself, John Adams was
always a hero. The historian David McCullough, in his most recent book, John
Adams, has taken a similar view.
From the first sentence of McCullough’s
beautifully written biography
(“In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter,
two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north.”), we
are off on a dramatic and heroic ride with the founding father he aims to
glorify, most effectively through the worshipful phrase “the colossus of
independence,” which he employs as a chapter title and then falsely attributes
to Thomas Jefferson. (This nonexistent quotation has been perpetuated in
reviews and even appeared as the cover line on an issue of The New York
Times Book Review.) To McCullough, Adams’ pursuit of French aid was “one of his
own proudest efforts,” his final receipt of a Dutch loan “simply extraordinary,”
his unsuccessful tenure as ambassador to Britain (where he failed to negotiate a single
commercial agreement) understandable: “Nor could it be imagined that another of
his countryman… could have done better.” Etc.
McCullough is hardly alone in this
approach. In the last half century, as the Massachusetts Historical Society has
published mile after mile of microfilm containing thousands upon thousands of Adams’ writings in justification and
exposition of his life, the sheer volume of this material has shifted the scale
of historical judgment ponderously in his favor. This
cornucopia, so rich in the particulars of what Adams saw, thought, and
felt, has allowed David McCullough and other historians to detail Adams’ trips across the
sea, his relationships with family members, and his arguments with friends and
enemies alike. As a
result, McCullough’s biography of Adams partakes of the aura of autobiography and, in doing so, raises important
questions of identity and verity.
Who was John Adams? “John Adams, it was said,
was a ‘good husband, a good father, a good citizen, and a good man,’“ McCullough reports. This is generally how Adams saw himself, but one wonders whether
his alcoholic sons Charles (“I renounce him,” declared Adams on learning of his son’s condition) or
Thomas (“a brute in manners and a bully in his family,” is how a nephew
described him) would characterize Adams this way. Or whether Congressman Matthew
Lyons, whom Adams jailed for calling his presidency “a
continual grasp for power,” would affirm Adams’ good citizenship. Or whether any of the other democratic newspaper editors whom Adams
imprisoned for criticizing his presidency (a “reign of witches” is how Jefferson
described the period)
would find him admirable. Or whether the fifteen boatloads of would-be
Americans, who fled the country in fear of Adams’ arbitrary powers, would agree that he
was a good man.
“Who
was John Adams?” becomes, therefore, a matter of whom one asks and what one
values, and it is here that David McCullough’s John Adams fails in a
most regrettable way. For McCullough
evidently accepts John Adams’ perspective that Americans define themselves more
by their separation from England (which Adams certainly advocated) than they do
by their devotion to popular democracy and the Bill of Rights (which Adams
tried to suppress). Only by accepting this inverted system of American
priorities could McCullough justify, for example, devoting more than twenty
pages to Adams’ ocean voyages (“brave”) during the Revolution and fewer than
six pages (most of them exculpatory) to his Alien and Sedition Acts. Only by so
doing could McCullough completely disregard the violence and intimidation which
Adams’s federal army and private militias dealt his political enemies, driving
some into shelters for their self-protection. Had McCullough chosen, unlike
Adams, to attach a higher value to popular democracy and to the Bill of Rights
than to the nation’s separation from England, he might have described John
Adams the way many of the nation’s democrats, including Thomas Paine, Thomas
Jefferson, and Franklin’s grandson and protégé, Benjamin Franklin Bache, judged
him, that is, as an admirer of monarchy
who, in fact, opposed popular democracy and trampled on the Bill of Rights.
In the spring of 1776, shortly before the
colonies declared independence, Paine visited John Adams, reporting that Adams “was for independence, because he
expected to be made great by it; but,” Paine added, “his
head was as full of kings, queens, and knaves as a pack of cards.” Paine met
with Adams to discuss Paine’s pamphlet “Common
Sense,” which had electrified the country into support for independence by
arguing, inter alia, that monarchy was unholy
and that power should lie with the democratic majority, expressing itself
through simple representative assemblies whose members would be elected without
regard to wealth or property. Adams saw Paine’s pamphlet as flowing from “a mere desire to please
the democratic party” (and later wrote, “What a poor ignorant, malicious,
short-sighted, crapulous mass, is Tom Paine’s Common Sense”). To counter
the pamphlet’s democratic tendencies, Adams published his own pamphlet, “Thoughts
on Government,” which argued that society’s various “interests,” rather than
its people, should be equally represented in government and that legislative
power should depend on three concurring entities: a house, a senate, and a
chief executive.
Adams put his “interests” concept into
practice three years later, when he drafted Massachusetts’ first state
constitution, dividing legislative power among a house of representatives
(members were required to possess at least 100 pounds in property), a senate
(senators at least 300 pounds in property), and a governor (at least 1,000
pounds in property), each with the right to veto the other and each to be elected
by voters meeting specified qualifications for wealth or property. (In striking
contrast, America’s two leading democrats, Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin,
had superintended the writing of the nation’s most democratic state
constitution – that of Pennsylvania in 1776 – adopting Paine’s model of a
simple legislative assembly without wealth or property qualifications for
voters or representatives.)
The upshot of John Adams’ Massachusetts constitution of 1780 was the Shays
Rebellion of 1786, in which poor farmers from western Massachusetts took up arms to demand, among other
things, the elimination of the wealthy Massachusetts senate (through which their wealthy
creditors had blocked badly needed debt relief) and the adoption of a more
democratic state government, with liberalized representation. Hearing of this,
and knowing that the United States would shortly be designing a federal
constitution for the entire country, Adams worked feverishly in England (where
he was then ambassador) to complete the first of three volumes of his “Defence of The [State] Constitutions of Government of The
United States,” arguing that the best form of government was that of England,
where legislative power was shared and balanced among the one (the king or
chief executive), the few (a property-based aristocracy represented in a House
of Lords or Senate), and the many (the people, represented in a House of
Commons of House of Representatives). As
Thomas Jefferson was to ask, “Can any one read Mr. Adams’ defence
of the American constitutions without seeing he was a monarchist?”
Certainly, many Americans saw Adams this way, including his old and
intimate friend Mercy Otis Warren, who opined, “He became so enamoured with the British constitution, and the
government, manners, and laws of the nation, that a partiality for monarchy
appeared.” Evidence of that partiality appeared again at the start of the
federal government in the spring of 1789, when Adams shocked his senate colleagues with a proposal for George Washington
to be called “His Highness, The President of the United States and Protector of the Rights of the Same.”
Shortly thereafter, Adams’ friend Benjamin Rush cautioned Adams that
monarchical pageantry was unseemly for a republic, to which Adams
caustically replied on June 19th, “You seen determined not to allow
a limited monarchy to be a republican system, which it certainly is, and the
best that has ever been tried.”
It is beyond the scope of this review to
recite the numerous individuals who, from 1776 on, testified to Adams’ belief in monarchy. Suffice it to say
that, at least to this reviewer’s knowledge, not a single person who knew John
Adams defended him against the many charges of monarchism. As Congressman
Gabriel Duvall observed when he informed James Madison of Adams’ loss of Maryland in the election of 1800, “A good deal
of the opposition which has been made to the re-election of Mr. Adams has
proceeded from a belief in many that he is a Monarchist.” Yet for David
McCullough, that belief was mistaken.
What allows McCullough and many other
historians to reject the judgment of so many of Adams’ own generation is, in
large part, a body of exculpatory pleadings that Adams prepared when he was in
his seventies and eighties – this in conjunction with the absence of any
personal diary entries, and a paucity of personal correspondence for the time
Adams was president. In all events, when Adams’ most important detractors –
Paine, Hamilton, Franklin, and Benjamin Franklin Bache – had departed this
realm, when Adams’ old adversary, the now elderly and retired Thomas Jefferson,
nostalgically agreed to indulge his fellow former president in an exchange of
self-serving correspondence for the sake of posterity, and when Adams had fully
digested the revulsion so many Americans felt for his anti-democratic theory
and practice of government, Adams denied
he had ever believed in monarchy and claimed he had saved the country from
war. “I desire no other inscription over my gravestone,” wrote Adams, “than: ‘Here
lies John Adams who took upon himself the responsibility of peace with France in the year 1800.’“ David McCullough
adds this to the chorus: “To his everlasting credit, at the risk of his career,
reputation and his hold on the presidency, he chose not to go to war when that
would have been highly popular and politically advantageous in the short run.”
But here, once again, the picture is less flattering than Adams and McCullough would have us believe.
In 1797, when Adams took office, France and England were
at war with each other, seizing anyone’s shipping (including that of the United
States) to or from each other's ports. In 1795, the Washington administration
had agreed by treaty to allow Britain to continue this practice (contrary to
the principles of America's 1778 alliance with France), which so offended
France that she refused to receive a new American ambassador in 1796. In May of
1797, two months after taking office, Adams learned of the French refusal and
called a special joint session of Congress to deliver a speech which urged
defensive war measures against France, including formation of a provisional
army, strengthening the militia, arming civilian vessels, and building up the
navy. This speech so further upset France that she subsequently refused to
receive Adams' diplomatic emissaries without first receiving an apology for the
speech and some humiliating compensation (even "a bribe"), which, in
turn, provoked Adams to deliver, on March 19, 1798, a second war message to
Congress, which Jefferson characterized as "almost insane."
The president who delivered those
messages was not, as Adams later sought to color himself, a moderate and pacific man
resisting the bellicosity of Hamilton and the so-called “High Federalists.” Adams was then, as always, a “High
Federalist.” Indeed, it was Adams’ cabinet and Hamilton who urged moderation on
a bellicose Adams, whose first three drafts of the March 19th message called
for a Declaration of War against France (though his final message was simply a
call to arms). It was Adams who inflamed the country, declaring days of prayer
and fasting, signing measure after measure of war preparations, exhorting
communities throughout the country to assume a “warlike character,” jailing
newspaper editors who criticized his war measures, ordering his navy to attack
French ships wherever they might be found, encouraging private volunteer
militias (which formed in his name and terrorized his critics), and even
donning a military uniform to receive and address those militias in the
president’s house.
So why, then, did Adams
make peace with France
in 1800? The reasons are far less heroic than McCullough (and Adams) would have
us believe. When Adams
proposed, on February 18th of 1799, to send a final peace mission to France,
there was reason to regard his proposal as an insincere and empty gesture, at
odds with his consistently bellicose personal, professional, and ideological
attitude toward France (and the French Revolution), and as merely a
conciliatory response to the many diplomats and other important citizens who
testified to pacific French intentions, to the private exhortations of even his
own children, and to petitions against his war preparations from 90 percent of
Pennsylvanians who had voted in the prior presidential election. Soon after the
announcement, Adams restructured the mission so that it was
less likely to depart in the foreseeable future and thus would, as Jefferson wrote Madison, “leave more time for new projects of
provocation.” For the next eight months, Adams did absolutely nothing to see that a
peace mission departed.
But then, in October, Adams ordered the peace mission to depart,
against the wishes of Hamilton and some in his cabinet. By this action, Adams earned the admiration of McCullough and
many other historians of the Early Republic who have concluded that Adams was a moderate who defied
High-Federalists in his party. There is, however, much more to the story than
that
A few weeks after the February
announcement and only three days before Adams left Philadelphia for a seven-month
retreat to his home state of Massachusetts (Adams still holds the worst record
for absenteeism of any American president), Adams ordered his brand new federal
army into Pennsylvania’s rural Northampton, Bucks, and Montgomery counties to
suppress “misrepresentations” and other “subversive” anti-war activities of
Pennsylvania farmers, who were then protesting Adams’ war taxes and his Alien
and Sedition Acts. To lead this mission, Adams chose William Macpherson, commander of the private and infamous Macpherson Blues militia legions, which had, for more than
a year, been terrorizing Adams’ political opponents in Philadelphia and
elsewhere. Once in the country, troops of the federal army invaded the private
homes of Pennsylvania farm families, terrorized men, women, and children alike,
tore down symbols of political opposition to Adams (such as “liberty poles”),
and publicly whipped newspaper editors who reported their misconduct.
When the army returned to Philadelphia
in the middle of May, a group of thirty army officers paid a visit to the city’s
leading Jeffersonian newspaper, the Philadelphia Aurora, whose editor, William
Duane, had published charges that certain troops had lived “at free quarters”
(i.e., in people’s homes, without their permission, in contravention of the
Third Amendment). These army officers
dragged Duane into the middle of Philadelphia’s
Market Street
and beat him and his sixteen-year-old son mercilessly until both lay
unconscious on the ground. For the next two weeks, according to the press, “the
streets of Philadelphia
were filled with crowds of people who wanted nothing but the firing of the
first musket to precipitate Pennsylvania,
and perhaps the continent, into the horrors of civil war.”
Pennsylvanians were
outraged. As Adams conceded, “That army was as unpopular, as if
it had been a ferocious wild beast let loose upon the nation to devour it.”
So, in October, just as Adams was
arriving back at the seat of government (which had been temporarily moved
upriver from Philadelphia to Trenton, New Jersey), bonfires were burning across
the Delaware in celebration of the first major state-wide victory for Thomas
Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party in the critical Middle Atlantic states (i.e., Pennsylvania, New
York, and New Jersey), whose electoral votes would – in everyone’s calculation
– decide the upcoming presidential election. It was a sign of things to come. As the
administration’s quasi-official Gazette of the United States had forewarned –
and, more importantly, as John Adams’ favorite publisher, William Cobbett of Porcupine’s Gazette, explained to the world, as
he abruptly closed the nation’s foremost High-Federalist newspaper on October
19th: “The election of my Democratick Judge Thomas
McKean as Governor of Pennsylvania, undeniably the most influential state in
the union, has in my opinion, decided the fate of what has been called
Federalism...” The day before Adams arrived in Trenton, a Philadelphia paper editorialized that if Adams’ party hoped to retain the presidency, it
would have to abandon John Adams and turn again to George Washington.
When Adams returned to the government in October of 1799, he may have been
ready to cancel his proposed peace mission to France (as his army’s Inspector General,
Alexander Hamilton, and some cabinet members were urging). But Pennsylvania showed him, on his arrival, what his
war measures and bellicosity were costing his re-election prospects. Should he
cancel the mission, his Attorney General, Charles Lee, warned, “Such a measure
would exceedingly disappoint the general expectations of America, and . . . afford your enemies the
opportunity of indulging their evil dispositions . . .”
So Adams let the peace mission sail in November,
and a peace treaty was signed in France the following year. Adams had not, as McCullough would have us
believe, chosen peace “at the risk of his career, reputation and his hold on
the presidency.” To the contrary, he chose peace to save his career, his
reputation, and his hold on the presidency, all of which his nation repudiated
when it replaced him with the democrat Thomas Jefferson in the election of
1800.
When
Adams
left the presidency, he did so in disgrace. He was the founding father who had
opposed popular democracy, subverted the Bill of Rights, and brought his nation
to the brink of civil war.
He had visited on his political opponents an American reign of terror, which,
even in old age, Jefferson could never let Adams forget. “Whether the character of the
times is justly portrayed or not,” Jefferson wrote Adams in 1813, “posterity will decide. But on one feature of them
they can never decide, the sensations excited in free
yet firm minds by the terrorism of the day. None can conceive who did not
witness them, and they were felt by one party only.”
When
news of Adams’ defeat reached Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Aurora (whose founding editor, none
other than Benjamin Franklin Bache, died awaiting trial for sedition)
pronounced the nation “rescued from the Talons of Monarchists. In spite of intrigue. In spite of terror. In spite
of unconstitutional laws. In spite of British
influence. In spite of the Standing Army. In
spite of the Sedition Law.” Jefferson’s victory, the paper forecast, “will become as celebrated in history as the 4th of July
1776 for the emancipation of the
American states from British influence and tyranny.” A monarch, it seemed, had
been dethroned.
It would take a mighty hagiographer to
place John Adams on a pedestal, and for two hundred years, no one has been
equal to the task. But now, in the eloquent David McCullough, Adams may finally have found his man.
McCullough’s finely crafted and eminently readable John Adams would
doubtless please the founder whom democrats dubbed “His Rotundity.” But in pandering to the highly remunerative national
yearning for heroes, David McCullough denies Americans the critical lessons in
liberty and democracy that every history of the Early
Republic
should teach.
#
F So there you
have it. An important counterpoint to
the McCullough book, as best I can make out – although the only thing I’m
reasonably sure of is that Benjamin Franklin does deserve a monument. To save money, maybe just rename the airport
after him?
"
