John Adams

• 1. Introduction

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  John Adams died on the 4th of July 1826. Exactly fifty years earlier, Congress had approved the Declaration of Independence, and Adams had been among those who made that vote happen. He was the second president of the United States, serving from 1797 to 1801. He was also irascible, ambitious, and stubborn, and he knew it. His career took him through Boston courtrooms, the Continental Congress, the courts of Europe, and finally the highest office in a country he had helped create. Several questions run through that career. Why would a rising lawyer defend soldiers whom his neighbors wanted punished? Why did a man so confident in his own talents step aside from the most famous writing assignment of his age? And how did a president who kept his country out of a major war end up attacked by his own party?

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• 2. Farm, Books and Abigail

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  John Adams was born on the 30th of October 1735 on his family's farm in Braintree, Massachusetts. His father, John Sr., was a deacon in the Congregational Church, a farmer, a cordwainer, and a lieutenant in the militia. His mother, Susanna Boylston, came from a leading medical family in what is now Brookline. Two younger brothers, Peter and Elihu, followed. Adams often praised his father and remembered their closeness.

  At age six he began at a dame school, a lesson room in a teacher's home built around The New England Primer. He then moved to the Braintree Latin School under Joseph Cleverly, where he met Latin, rhetoric, logic, and arithmetic. He skipped classes, disliked his master, and wanted to be a farmer. His father ordered him to stay in school. A new schoolmaster, Joseph Marsh, won the boy over. Looking back, Adams credited his mother with shaping the children, calling her "anxious and capable to form the characters of her children."

  In 1751, at sixteen, Adams entered Harvard College, where he studied under Joseph Mayhew. He graduated with an A.B. in 1755. Later he read Thucydides, Plato, Cicero, and Tacitus in their original languages. His father expected a minister. Adams taught school in Worcester while he weighed his future, and in those years he admitted a craving for "Honour or Reputation" and a determination to be "a great Man." He chose law. He told his father that lawyers achieved "noble and gallant achievements," while some clergy showed only the "pretended sanctity of some absolute dunces." The French and Indian War stirred another longing. At nineteen he felt guilty to be the first in his family who was not a militia officer, and he wrote that he longed more ardently to be a soldier than a lawyer.

  In 1756 he began reading law under James Putnam, a leading Worcester lawyer. Harvard granted him an A.M. in 1758, and he was admitted to the bar in 1759. That same year he met fifteen-year-old Abigail Smith, a third cousin, through his friend Richard Cranch, who was courting her older sister. Adams had earlier fallen for Hannah Quincy, but friends interrupted him just as he meant to propose. Of the three Smith sisters he wrote that they were not "fond, nor frank, nor candid." His opinion of Abigail changed. They married on the 25th of October 1764, over the objection of her mother. They shared a love of books and were honest in praising and criticizing each other.

  After his father died in 1761, Adams inherited a farm and a house, and the couple lived there until 1783. They had six children. Abigail, called Nabby, was born in 1765, John Quincy in 1767, Susanna in 1768, Charles in 1770, Thomas in 1772, and Elizabeth in 1777. Susanna died at one year old, and Elizabeth was stillborn. All three sons became lawyers. Charles and Thomas had little success and became alcoholics, while John Quincy rose to the presidency himself. Adams and John Quincy are the only presidents among the first twelve who never owned slaves.

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• 3. Facts Are Stubborn Things

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  In 1761, the Boston lawyer James Otis Jr. challenged the legality of British writs of assistance, which let officials search a home without notice or reason. Adams recorded his impressions in his diary, and Otis's argument pulled him toward the colonial cause. In 1763 he wrote seven essays for Boston newspapers under the pen name "Humphrey Ploughjogger." They ridiculed the selfish thirst for power he saw among the colonial elite. His older cousin Samuel Adams was better known at first, and John's influence grew from his constitutional lawyering and his study of history.

  The Stamp Act of 1765 made John Adams a public figure. Parliament passed it without consulting colonial legislatures, and it taxed stamped documents to pay for the Seven Years' War. Enforcement went to vice admiralty courts, which sat without juries and were widely disliked. That year Adams wrote the "Braintree Instructions," a letter to his town's representatives in the Massachusetts legislature. It argued that the Act took away two rights owed to every Englishman: taxation only by consent, and trial by a jury of one's peers. Other towns copied it as a model. In August he revived Ploughjogger for four articles in the Boston Gazette. The London Chronicle reprinted them in 1768 as True Sentiments of America, or A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law.

  Samuel Adams, a leader of the street protests, tried to pull his cousin into mob actions and demonstrations. John refused. That December he told the governor and council that the Stamp Act was invalid without Massachusetts representation in Parliament. A Braintree town meeting elected him selectman in 1766. In April 1768 he moved his family to Boston to concentrate on his practice. They rented a house on Brattle Street that neighbors called the "White House."

  In 1768 Adams successfully defended the merchant John Hancock, who was accused of violating British trade laws in the Liberty Affair. Then Jeremiah Gridley died and James Otis Jr. suffered a mental collapse. Those two events left Adams as the most prominent lawyer in Boston.

  On the 5th of March 1770, a mob accosted a lone British sentry in Boston. Eight fellow soldiers came to reinforce him, and the crowd grew to several hundred. Snowballs, ice, and stones struck the soldiers. In the chaos they fired and killed five civilians. The Townshend Acts of 1767 had already revived tensions and brought more troops into the colonies. The soldiers were arrested for murder, and no other attorney would defend them. Adams did, despite the risk to his reputation. He believed that no person should be denied counsel and a fair trial.

  The trials were postponed so that passions could cool. The week-long trial of the commander, Captain Thomas Preston, began on the 24th of October and ended in acquittal, because nobody could prove he had ordered the shooting. The other soldiers were tried in December. There Adams made his best-known argument about juries, declaring that "Facts are stubborn things," and that neither wishes nor passions can alter the state of facts and evidence. Six soldiers were acquitted. Two, who had fired directly into the crowd, were convicted of manslaughter. Adams received only a small payment.

  The biographer John E. Ferling is not wholly admiring. He writes that during jury selection Adams "expertly exercised his right to challenge individual jurors and contrived what amounted to a packed jury." Several jurors had business ties to the British army, and five later became Loyalist exiles. Ferling adds that a weak prosecution helped, yet Adams "performed brilliantly." He also suspects that Adams was encouraged to take the case in return for political office. A Boston seat in the legislature opened soon afterward, and the town chose Adams to fill it. His law practice grew more prosperous, and so did the demands on his time.

  In 1771 he moved his family to Braintree while keeping his office in Boston, noting that with his family away he felt no temptation to be anywhere but at work. He soon found Braintree rural and "vulgar." In August 1772 he moved them back to Boston and bought a large brick house on Queen Street, near his office. In 1774, with Boston growing unstable, the family went back to the Braintree farm for good.

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• 4. Road to Independence

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  In 1772, the Crown began paying the salaries of Governor Thomas Hutchinson and his judges, a duty that had belonged to the Massachusetts legislature. Adams had insisted until then that British actions were wrong but open rebellion was unwarranted. He still preferred peaceful petition and a place inside Great Britain. The new arrangement shifted his thinking. He wrote in the Gazette that it would destroy judicial independence and bind the colony more tightly to the Crown. Hutchinson answered with a speech declaring Parliament's powers absolute and any resistance illegal. Adams, Samuel Adams, and Joseph Hawley then drafted a resolution, adopted by the House, which threatened independence as the alternative to tyranny. It argued that the colonists had never been under Parliament's sovereignty, since their charter and their allegiance belonged to the King alone.

  On the 16th of December 1773, protesters destroyed 342 chests of tea, worth about ten thousand pounds, aboard the schooner Dartmouth in Boston harbor. The ship's owners briefly retained Adams as counsel about their liability. He cheered the Tea Party as the "grandest Event" in the history of colonial protest and wrote in his diary that it was "absolutely and indispensably" necessary.

  In 1774 Massachusetts sent four delegates to the First Continental Congress, called in response to the Intolerable Acts. Adams went despite a heartfelt plea from his friend, Attorney General Jonathan Sewall, to stay home. In Philadelphia he joined the 23-member Grand Committee that was to draft a letter of grievances to King George III. The committee split into conservative and radical camps. Adams criticized conservatives such as Joseph Galloway, though his own views then resembled those of John Dickinson. He mocked the delegates' pomposity in a letter to Abigail. If someone moved that three and two make five, he wrote, they would be treated to two whole days of logic, rhetoric, law, and history before voting yes. Adams helped engineer a compromise, and Congress endorsed the Suffolk Resolves, which called for a boycott of British goods.

  Abigail, left alone with the household, still urged him on. She wrote that she did not wish to see him an inactive spectator, though if the sword were drawn she bade farewell to domestic happiness. When news came of the battles at Lexington and Concord, Adams rode into a militia camp three days later. He liked the men's spirits but was distressed by their poor condition and discipline.

  In May 1775 he returned to Philadelphia as head of the Massachusetts delegation for the Second Continental Congress. Publicly he spoke for "reconciliation if practicable." Privately he agreed with Benjamin Franklin that independence was inevitable. In June he nominated George Washington of Virginia as commander-in-chief of the army around Boston, praising his "skill and experience." Adams fought the Olive Branch Petition, writing that "Powder and Artillery" were the most reliable conciliatory measures available. Then came a blunder. A private letter calling Dickinson a "piddling genius" was intercepted and printed in Loyalist newspapers. Dickinson refused to greet Adams, who was for a time largely shunned. Ferling still concluded that by the fall of 1775 no one in Congress worked harder to hasten separation. That fall Adams was named chief judge of the Massachusetts Superior Court, though he never served and resigned in February 1777.

  In 1776 he wrote the pamphlet Thoughts on Government, in answer to questions from other delegates, laying out an influential framework for republican constitutions. He grew impatient at the pace of the debate. He helped push through a plan to arm ships for raids on enemy vessels, and he drafted the first rules for the provisional navy. On the 7th of June 1776, he seconded Richard Henry Lee's resolution declaring the colonies "free and independent states," after drafting its preamble.

  Before the vote, Adams organized the Committee of Five to write a declaration. He chose himself, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman. Jefferson thought Adams should write it. Adams persuaded the others to choose Jefferson, and years later he explained why. "Reason first, you are a Virginian," he wrote. "Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular." His third reason was that Jefferson could write ten times better. The committee kept no minutes, and the later accounts by both men often contradict each other. Jefferson wrote the first draft, but Adams took a major part.

  On the 1st of July the resolution reached the floor, with Dickinson leading opposition. Jefferson, a poor debater, stayed silent while Adams argued for adoption. Jefferson later called him "the pillar of the Declaration's support on the floor of Congress." On the 2nd of July, twelve colonies voted yes and New York abstained. The next day Adams wrote to Abigail that the day just past would be "the most memorable epoch in the history of America" and that it would be celebrated annually. Congress approved the Declaration on the 4th of July.

  Adams sat on ninety committees in that Congress and chaired twenty-five, a workload no one else matched. Benjamin Rush said he was acknowledged "to be the first man in the House." As head of the Board of War and Ordnance, he kept records of officers, troop positions, and ammunition. He worked up to eighteen hours a day, and people called him a "one man war department." He wrote the "Plan of Treaties" spelling out what Congress wanted from France. His delegate's pay did not cover his expenses, and he longed to go home. Then the Continental Army lost the Battle of Long Island on the 27th of August 1776.

  Admiral Richard Howe asked Congress for representatives to discuss peace, and on the 11th of September Adams, Franklin, and Edward Rutledge met him on Staten Island. Howe could treat the Americans only as British subjects. Adams replied that his lordship might consider him in any light, "except that of a British subject." Years later Adams learned that his name was on a list of people excluded from Howe's pardons. He went home in October and returned to Congress in January 1777.

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• 5. Envoy to a Skeptical Europe

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  In November 1777, Adams learned that he would replace Silas Deane as commissioner to France, joining Franklin and Arthur Lee in Paris. The delegate James Lovell praised his "inflexible integrity" and argued that a younger man was needed to balance Franklin's age. Adams accepted on the 27th of November. Months earlier he had written the Model Treaty, which allowed commerce with France but offered no formal recognition or military help. It rested on the idea that "free ships make free goods." By late 1777, the British had captured Philadelphia, and Congress wanted more than commerce.

  Adams sailed on the 17th of February 1778 aboard the frigate Boston under Captain Samuel Tucker, taking ten-year-old John Quincy with him. The voyage was stormy. British ships chased them, and Adams picked up a weapon himself to help capture one. A malfunctioning cannon wounded several sailors and killed one. On the 1st of April the Boston reached France, and Adams discovered that the alliance had been agreed on the 6th of February.

  Paris disappointed him. He thought Lee paranoid and cynical, and he found Franklin popular but lethargic and too deferential to the French. In December he wrote to the foreign minister Vergennes, urging naval support in North America. Franklin softened the letter, and Vergennes ignored it anyway. In September 1778 Congress named Franklin sole minister plenipotentiary and sent Lee to Spain. Adams received no instructions, and left with John Quincy on the 8th of March 1779. They reached Braintree on the 2nd of August.

  By late 1779 Congress had made him the sole minister to negotiate a commercial treaty with Britain and end the war. He left for France again in November with John Quincy and nine-year-old Charles. A leak forced the ship to land at Ferrol, Spain, and the party spent six weeks traveling overland to Paris. There he learned French and often cast the deciding vote in the commission. He wrote Abigail about every ten days and supervised his sons' schooling.

  Adams doubted the alliance. In his view the French acted from self-interest, wanting to keep their hands "above our chin to prevent us from drowning, but not to lift our heads out of water." In March 1780 Congress devalued the dollar to curb inflation, and Vergennes demanded that Adams ask Congress to reverse course. Adams answered bluntly. Rochambeau's army had done nothing of note, he argued, and the French navy had gone to the West Indies instead of America. Vergennes replied that he would deal only with Franklin, who wrote home criticizing Adams. Adams left France on his own.

  In mid-1780 he turned to the Dutch Republic, one of the few other republics of the time, hoping to secure a loan. He took up residence in Amsterdam in August and enjoyed the city, until the Dutch, fearing British reprisals, refused to meet him. After five months without seeing one Dutch official, he called Amsterdam "the capital of the reign of Mammon." He presented his credentials at The Hague on the 19th of April 1781, but they brought no promise of help. Meanwhile he blocked an attempt by neutral powers to mediate the war without American input.

  In July 1781 John Quincy went with the secretary Francis Dana to Saint Petersburg as a French interpreter, seeking Russian recognition. Homesick Charles went home with Adams's friend Benjamin Waterhouse. In August, soon after losing sole control of the peace negotiations, Adams suffered "a major nervous breakdown." That November he heard that American and French troops had beaten the British at Yorktown, a victory owed largely to the French navy and one that vindicated his plea for naval aid.

  He recovered and went to The Hague in January 1782 to demand answers to his petitions. When the States General stalled, he appealed to the Dutch public, using pro-American sentiment to win over several provinces. On the 19th of April the States General recognized American independence and accepted him as ambassador. On the 11th of June, helped by the Patriotten leader Joan van der Capellen tot den Pol, he secured a loan of five million guilders. In October he negotiated a treaty of amity and commerce. The house he bought there became the first American embassy on foreign soil.

  After the Dutch loan, Adams was reappointed to negotiate the Treaty of Paris. Vergennes and the French minister Anne-César de La Luzerne disliked him, so Franklin, Jefferson, John Jay, and Henry Laurens were named as colleagues. Jefferson did not at first go, and Laurens was posted to the Dutch Republic after imprisonment in the Tower of London. The hardest issue was fishing rights off Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island. Adams insisted that American fishermen be able to cure their fish on Newfoundland's shores. Vergennes quietly told the British that France felt no duty to sustain these "pretentious ambitions."

  Overruling Franklin, Jay and Adams chose to deal with the British directly, without consulting France. Adams pointed out that his fishing terms were more generous than those France had offered in 1778, and that accepting would build goodwill while pressuring France. Britain agreed, and the other provisions followed. Vergennes was angry when Franklin told him, but he did not demand a new negotiation, and he was surprised at how much the Americans won. The separate talks also let the French claim innocence to their Spanish allies, whose demands for Gibraltar might have caused trouble. The treaty was signed on the 3rd of September 1783.

  In 1785 Adams became the first American ambassador to Great Britain. His first audience with King George III came on the 1st of June, and he recorded it carefully in a letter to Jay. The king remarked that some people believed Adams was not the most attached of Americans to the manners of France. Adams replied, "That Opinion sir, is not mistaken... I have no Attachments but to my own Country." The king answered, "An honest Man will never have any other."

  Abigail joined him in London. Courtiers treated them with hostility, and they sought refuge with Richard Price, the minister of Newington Green Unitarian Church. Jefferson visited in 1786 while serving as minister to France, and the two toured the countryside. Adams also met his old friend Jonathan Sewall, but they had grown too far apart. Sewall judged that Adams could handle the mechanical parts of an ambassador's work, yet "cannot dance, drink, game, flatter, promise, dress, swear with the gentlemen." In London, Adams wrote the three-volume A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, answering European critics of the state governments.

  His posting was hampered because neither country kept its treaty promises. American states were behind on debts owed to British merchants, so the British would not leave forts in the northwest. News of Shays' Rebellion deepened his anxiety. He asked Jay to relieve him, and in 1788 he took leave of George III. At The Hague he said goodbye as ambassador and arranged refinancing, which let the United States meet its obligations on earlier loans. He reached Massachusetts on the 17th of June 1788 to a triumphant welcome.

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• 6. Second Place

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  On the 4th of February 1789, electors cast their ballots for the first president, and each had two votes. Washington won unanimously with 69. Adams received 34, second place, and became the first vice president. He still took offense that Washington had more than twice his total. He did not know that Alexander Hamilton had persuaded at least seven electors to withhold their votes from him, to make certain that Adams could not accidentally win. Once he learned of the manipulation, though not who was behind it, he wrote to Benjamin Rush that the result was "a curse rather than a blessing." Because he arrived late in New York, he did not begin serving until the 21st of April.

  The vice president's only constitutional duty is to preside over the Senate and break ties. Early on, Adams plunged into a long fight over titles for the president and other officers. The House was content with "George Washington, President of the United States." Adams favored the style of Highness, with the added title Protector of Their Liberties, because he thought the office needed dignity and splendor. Anti-federalists heard monarchy in every proposal. Jefferson called the options "superlatively ridiculous."

  Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania became Adams's fiercest critic. "For forty minutes he harangued us from the chair," Maclay wrote, and he likened Adams to a monkey just put into breeches. Ralph Izard proposed calling him "His Rotundity," a joke that spread fast. On the 14th of May 1789 the Senate settled on "Mr. President." Adams privately conceded that he might have been abroad too long to judge public feeling. Washington quietly showed displeasure.

  Adams generally sided with the Washington administration and the emerging Federalists. He cast 29 tie-breaking votes, and only two other vice presidents have cast more than 20. He voted against a Maclay bill that would have required Senate consent to remove confirmed executive officials. During the 1790 bargain over Hamilton's debt plan and the location of the capital, he cast a tie-breaking vote against a last-minute motion to keep the capital in New York.

  His influence stayed small. He attended few cabinet meetings, and Washington rarely asked his advice. By mid-1789 he had found the job "too inactive, and mechanical," and he complained that his country had contrived "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived." His envy of others showed too. He predicted that the history of the Revolution would be "one continued lie," in which Franklin's electrical rod struck the earth and General Washington sprang up. He won reelection in 1792 with 77 votes, against 50 for George Clinton.

  The French Revolution began on the 14th of July 1789. Republicans cheered it. Adams offered cautious optimism at first, then denounced the revolutionaries as barbarous and tyrannical. When John Jay came back from London in 1795 with a treaty on unfavorable terms, Adams urged Washington to sign it to prevent war. Protests and riots followed, and Adams warned Abigail that ratification would divide the nation. Washington consulted him more often only near the end of his term, after Hamilton and Jefferson had resigned.

  The election of 1796 was the first contested race for president. Washington would not run for a third term, and the rift between Hamilton and Jefferson had produced the Federalist and Republican parties. Jefferson and Aaron Burr were the Republican choices, and Adams and Thomas Pinckney the Federalist ones. Of the four, only Burr campaigned actively. Adams said he wanted to stay out of the "silly and wicked game" of electioneering. Hamilton's supporters worried that Adams was too vain, unpredictable, and stubborn to take direction. Adams did not see himself as a strong party man and warned that Hamilton's banking-centered economic plans would "swindle" the poor.

  Hamilton wanted "a more pliant president than Adams" and tried to tip the vote to Pinckney. He pressed South Carolina Federalist electors to scatter their second votes among others. Several New England electors learned of the scheme and agreed not to vote for Pinckney, which undid it. Adams later called Hamilton a "proud Spirited, conceited, aspiring Mortal," and he attacked him in harsh terms for the rest of his life. He won with 71 electoral votes to 68 for Jefferson, who became vice president. Pinckney had 59 and Burr 30. It remains the only election in which the president and vice president came from opposing tickets.

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• 7. The French Question

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  On the 4th of March 1797, Adams was sworn in as the nation's second president. Historian Joseph Ellis writes that his presidency was destined to be dominated by a single question to a degree rarely seen in later administrations. That question was whether to fight France or find peace. Britain and France were at war, and Federalists leaned toward the British monarchy while Jefferson's Republicans backed the French. After the Jay Treaty, the French saw America as Britain's junior partner and began seizing American merchant ships. Most Americans still felt grateful to France and would not tolerate war.

  On the 16th of May 1797, Adams addressed both houses of Congress. He announced a peace commission to France but also called for a military buildup. Federalists applauded, and he was pictured as an eagle holding an olive branch in one talon and emblems of defense in the other. Republicans were furious. He named John Marshall, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and Elbridge Gerry as commissioners.

  A French consul in Philadelphia, Joseph Letombe, reported to Paris on four meetings with Jefferson. According to Letombe, Jefferson advised treating the American ministers civilly while dragging out talks, and he called Adams "vain, suspicious, and stubborn." When the envoys reached France in October, they were made to wait for days. They got a fifteen-minute meeting with Foreign Minister Talleyrand. Then three of his agents, later code-named X, Y, and Z, said there would be no negotiation unless the United States paid enormous bribes to France and to Talleyrand himself. The Americans refused. Marshall and Pinckney came home, and Gerry stayed.

  A memorandum from Marshall brought the news on the 4th of March 1798. Adams told Congress the mission had failed but held back the details, hoping to avoid inflaming the public. He asked for stronger defenses. Suspecting that he was hiding material favorable to France, Republicans in the House demanded the papers, and some Federalists who had heard rumors joined them. Once released, they left the Republicans, in Abigail's words, "struck dumb." Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the Philadelphia Aurora, still blamed Adams's aggression. Across the country, though, support for France collapsed, and Adams reached the height of his popularity.

  The Federalists responded to unrest with the Alien and Sedition Acts, four laws passed within two weeks. Jefferson called it an "unguarded passion." Three of them targeted immigrants, especially the French, by widening deportation power and lengthening paths to citizenship. The Sedition Act made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against the government. Adams had not promoted any of them, but in June 1798 he signed them, urged on by his wife and cabinet.

  The administration brought at least fourteen indictments under the Sedition Act and sued five of the six most prominent Republican newspapers. Most cases began in 1798 and 1799 and went to trial on the eve of the 1800 election. Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont was sentenced to four months in jail for criticizing the president. The alien laws were seldom enforced, because Adams resisted Secretary of State Timothy Pickering's attempts at deportation, though many foreigners left anyway. Jefferson stayed publicly silent. With Madison he secretly drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, in which Jefferson wrote that states had a "natural right" to nullify unconstitutional acts. The acts energized the Republicans and did little for Federalist unity.

  In May 1798, a French privateer seized a merchant vessel off New York Harbor, and attacks at sea multiplied. This was the undeclared Quasi-War. Adams knew his divided country could not win a major conflict against a France that dominated most of Europe. His plan was to harass French ships just enough to stop the assaults. That month Congress created a separate Navy Department. Adams then built up the fleet, adding six fast, powerful frigates, most notably the USS Constitution.

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• 8. Hamilton's Shadow

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  In May 1798 Congress authorized a provisional army of 10,000 soldiers, and in July it added twelve infantry regiments and six cavalry companies. That exceeded Adams's requests but fell short of what Hamilton and the "High Federalists" wanted. Many Federalists pressed Adams to give Hamilton, once Washington's aide-de-camp, command of the army. Adams distrusted him, fearing a plot against his own administration. Without asking, he chose Washington. Washington accepted on the condition that he could name his subordinates, and he wanted Henry Knox second, then Hamilton, then Charles Pinckney. Adams had hoped to name Republicans such as Burr and Frederick Muhlenberg to make the army look bipartisan. Washington's list was entirely Federalist.

  On the 2nd of June, Hamilton wrote that he would not serve unless made Inspector General and second-in-command. Adams sent Secretary of War James McHenry to Mount Vernon to persuade Washington. Adams agreed to submit the names of Hamilton, Pinckney, and Knox, in that order, but reserved final rank to himself. Knox refused to serve under those terms. Adams wanted to give Hamilton the lowest possible rank, while Washington and other Federalists insisted the order of the names decided seniority. On the 21st of September a letter from McHenry relayed Washington's threat to resign if Hamilton were not second-in-command. Adams gave in despite bitter resentment, with Abigail's illness adding to his suffering. Because of Washington's age, Hamilton became the army's de facto commander and took control of War Department supplies.

  In October 1798, Gerry wrote from Paris that the French wanted peace and would receive a delegation. Adams passed that along to Congress in December while urging adequate defenses. The speech angered Federalists, many of whom wanted a request for a declaration of war, and it angered Republicans too. Hamilton secretly backed a plan, which Adams had already rejected, for American and British troops to seize Spanish Florida and Louisiana. Critics, Abigail among them, saw an aspiring military dictator in his buildups.

  On the 18th of February 1799, Adams nominated William Vans Murray for a peace mission to France. He consulted neither his cabinet nor Abigail, who called it a "master stroke." To placate Republicans he named Patrick Henry and Ellsworth to go with Murray, and the Senate approved them on the 3rd of March. Henry declined, and William Richardson Davie took his place. Hamilton and the cabinet objected. Adams again questioned his cabinet's loyalty but did not remove anyone. He spent March to September 1799 at Peacefield, irritating many people.

  A letter from Talleyrand confirmed that American ministers would be received, and Adams went to Trenton, where the government had relocated because of yellow fever. He arrived on the 10th of October. Soon afterward Hamilton came uninvited, breaking military protocol, and urged him to ally with Britain to restore the Bourbons. Adams recalled hearing him with good humor, though he never heard a man "talk more like a fool." The commissioners sailed on the 15th of November.

  Paying for the buildup meant the Direct Tax of 1798, a land tax of up to 1 percent of property value. Washington's government had relied on excise taxes and tariffs, and direct federal taxation was unpopular. In March 1799, rural German-speaking farmers in eastern Pennsylvania, led by the Revolutionary War veteran John Fries, intimidated tax collectors in the bloodless Fries's Rebellion. Hamilton led the army to end it. Fries and two others were convicted of treason and sentenced to hang. The cabinet unanimously advised refusing their pardon requests. Adams pardoned them anyway, calling it a riot rather than a rebellion. Hamilton later wrote in a pamphlet attacking Adams that it was impossible to commit a greater error.

  On the 5th of May 1800, Adams's frustration with the Hamilton wing exploded in a meeting with McHenry, a Hamilton loyalist whom even Hamilton considered an inept Secretary of War. Adams accused him of servility to Hamilton and said he would rather serve as Jefferson's vice president, or as minister at The Hague, than owe the presidency to Hamilton. McHenry offered to resign, and Adams accepted. On the 10th of May he asked Pickering to resign, and Pickering refused. The election of 1800 lay ahead. Adams would lose it to Jefferson, but he later broke the silence between them by writing first, and their letters continued.

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