Adams’ Duplicitous Cabinet

As John Adams took the presidential oath on March 4, 1797, a foreign policy crisis was hurtling his way. It originated four decades earlier, when France and Britain’s struggle for world hegemony first roiled North America. Ebbing after Britain’s 1763 victory in the French and Indian War, the conflict reignited when France’s vital military aid propelled the American colonies to independence from London. But after the huge cost of that help bankrupted France and triggered its own revolution, whose Jacobin leaders declared war on Europe’s monarchies in 1792 to spread revolt across the continent, George Washington earnestly sought to keep America neutral as the Franco-British clash raged not only on land in Europe but across the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Misreading the new nation’s intentions, each combatant believed America was in league with its enemy and retaliated by harassing American shipping and kidnapping its sailors.

The foreign conflict convulsed America’s domestic politics, too. Adams’s Federalist Party suspected the opposition Democratic-Republicans—Republicans, for short—not only of Jacobin sympathies but also of designs to launch a similar leveling revolt at home. Had not thousands already rioted outside Washington’s house, aiming to force him into a military alliance with the French revolutionaries? The Federalists appeared equally extreme to the Republicans, who imagined they secretly planned to establish a monarchy and ally with their fellow “monocrats” in Britain. Since America’s parties first emerged, each believed the other dead set on subverting the constitutional order, and riot was native to the American Left’s political vocabulary.

It’s no surprise that both France and Britain mistook America’s foreign policy intentions. Even when negotiating the treaty that ended the American Revolution, U.S. diplomats had gone behind their French allies’ backs and signed a pact with Britain that didn’t leave America a French vassal, as France had intended, but big, strong, and a potential commercial partner of the former Mother Country. Even before its own revolution, France had learned to distrust America and suspect it of collusion with its enemy. The 1794 Jay Treaty, which (among other matters) formalized British-American trade relations, provocatively confirmed those suspicions. The British government, by contrast, focused on the Republicans’ noisy acclaim for revolutionary France, including their full-throated support for the French ambassador’s efforts to outfit privateers in American ports to prey on British shipping, hardly evidence (London thought) of the neutrality President Washington had proclaimed and Congress had legislated.

Matters came to a head within days of Adams’s inauguration. As Lindsay M. Chervinsky recounts in Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic (Oxford), newly arrived dispatches from America’s minister to France announced that the French Directory had ordered him out of the country—a usual prelude to war. Worse, France had decreed that neutral American ships carrying British cargoes would now be seized as belligerents, their sailors subject to piracy charges. Hostilities seemed inevitable, but Adams was determined to fend them off, thinking the young nation unready to win a French war. From that moment, his central policy goal for almost his whole term in that era of limited government, when foreign affairs formed the president’s chief responsibility, was forging a new treaty with France that preserved peace and honored American neutrality.

But French bellicosity wasn’t the only obstacle he faced. His equally bellicose cabinet also ached for war. Knowing that George Washington had had trouble hiring replacements when his original, talented cabinet wore out and quit, Adams didn’t try to recruit new lieutenants but asked the existing secretaries to stay on. A big mistake: even though he’d been Washington’s vice president, he’d never been included in cabinet meetings, so he didn’t know these men well and hadn’t seen how little Washington valued or heeded their judgment. Nor did he know that most hadn’t supported him for the presidential nomination. Moreover, as a lawyer and diplomat, he lacked not only Washington’s incomparable prestige but also the executive experience that had taught the general how to manage subordinates. Adding these elements to Adams’s fundamental foreign-policy disagreement with his cabinet amounted to a sure-fire recipe for the tension that troubled almost his entire administration.

The conflict surfaced the day after the inauguration, when Adams broached the idea of a peace mission to France with Treasury Secretary Oliver Wolcott and inquired about making it bipartisan. To include a Republican, Wolcott replied, would lead the whole cabinet to resign. So Adams knew that his lieutenants would balk at following his lead on policy and had already been mulling such matters among themselves—and taking guidance, as Adams did not know, from former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, whom Adams mistrusted. When Adams decided to send peace commissioners and nominated the then non-partisan Elbridge Gerry as one of them, the cabinet actively subverted their boss, with Secretary of State Timothy Pickering lobbying his Federalist friends in the Senate to vote against Gerry’s confirmation. When Pickering informed Adams that Gerry had been approved, with only Federalist votes against him, the president said he was sorry his own party had let him down. Pickering huffed that Adams should have consulted with his cabinet before making the nomination, at which point Adams determined (as he wrote) that “he would not be the slave” to his underlings. He set out to establish that a cabinet might advise and assist the president but would always remain subject to his ultimate authority, unlike the British principle of collective responsibility, which allows a cabinet to overrule the prime minister.

Rather than achieving the desired peace, the commission produced a spectacular scandal. Foreign Minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord declined to receive the three envoys officially but instead sent three underlings — named X, Y, and Z in the envoys’ dispatches home — to set his conditions for meeting them. He’d require the pledge of a loan from the United States and the gift of a sweetener — a £50,000 bribe — for himself. Adams had ruled out any loan in his instructions to the envoys, since the British would view it as aid to their enemy. As for the bribe: “No, no, not a sixpence!” cried one of the outraged Americans.

When the envoys’ top-secret account of the X, Y, Z Affair, as it was dubbed, reached Adams just a year after his inauguration, he told Congress that peace looked improbable and the country should strengthen its defenses. Congressional Republicans, accusing the president of spinning a false account of French intentions to instigate war, demanded to see the dispatches. Adams sent them over, and congressmen found with horror that France had met America’s earnest push for peace with contempt and humiliation.

The result was heightened turmoil both at home and abroad. Within weeks, a riotous clash between 10,000 Federalists and French-supporting Republicans in front of Adams’s house became so violent as to need the militia to break it up and stay on high alert. Many rioters were recent immigrants, and suspicion that immigrants threatened the security of the republic, fanned by a shamelessly partisan press, spread quickly and led Congress to pass four Alien and Sedition Acts, tightening citizenship requirements, making it easier to deport alien dissidents, and scandalously limiting political speech. Though Adams had neither proposed nor supported the laws, he bears the opprobrium of having signed them in July 1798.

That same month, with the three naval frigates ordered in 1794 now ready for action and more under construction, and with the resolute Benjamin Stoddert named secretary of the navy, Congress approved limited naval action against French ships, which had already seized over 300 U.S. merchant vessels. So effective was the newly reconstituted navy in the so-called Quasi-War that ensued that U.S. shipping insurance rates, 33 percent of a cargo’s value just before the war’s start, dropped to between 15 and 20 percent after hostilities began and to 10 percent by the end of 1798. Little wonder that Adams told Secretary of War James McHenry that he would continue to pour money into the navy rather than the army, which his cabinet and their ultra-Federalist allies, who had already reordered his picks for top commanders, were secretly dreaming of using to annex Florida and Louisiana.

The sea war was more than France had bargained for, especially after Napoleon’s loss to Lord Nelson in the Battle of the Nile in August 1798. That month, Adams’s diplomat son, John Quincy, wrote Pickering that a chastened France would now be glad to receive a U.S. envoy respectfully. The duplicitous Pickering suppressed the message, but John Quincy had written the same news to his father. Despite vigorous arguments from the pro-war cabinet to the contrary, Adams broached to Congress the idea of a new peace mission to France in December. In response, Congress wanted to review the diplomatic correspondence from Europe, which Pickering held back for weeks, despite Adams’s urging. Finally, in January 1799, an exasperated president sent a messenger to demand the documents from the secretary of state, and the astonished legislators read of Tallyrand’s urgent wish to resume negotiations. Adams told Pickering to have the cabinet draft a proposed treaty, and Pickering, as usual, stalled. So the secretary was stunned when, in mid-February, Adams sent to the Senate his nomination of a new minister to France, charged with “restoring tranquility,” and he and his cabinet colleagues tried and failed to derail it and then to subvert the mission once Congress had approved it.

Too bad for Adams that news of the Treaty of Mortefontaine’s successful completion didn’t reach America in time for the election of 1800. Even though his cabinet and their ultra-Federalist allies worked against his candidacy, with Hamilton’s publication of a 54-page screed savaging his character as the coup de grace, such a foreign-policy triumph might well have earned him a second term. But the official news from France arrived on the very day in early December when Adams knew he’d lost. No one knew who had won, though, for Jefferson and Aaron Burr were tied for first place. With the contest now to be decided by the House of Representatives, there ensued just over two months of bare-knuckled politicking, trying to sway representatives with deals and even threats of a coup or new convention. Voting began in the House on February 11; it wasn’t until the thirty-sixth ballot six days later that Jefferson became the third president. Adams didn’t stay for the inauguration, heading home to Quincy early that morning on the public coach.

This is a good story, so it’s disappointing that Chervinsky, who heads Mount Vernon’s splendid George Washington Presidential Library, hasn’t succeeded in telling it with the verve and clarity it deserves. Though the prose is pleasant, no character, not even the Adamses, emerges as a fully dramatized, flesh-and-blood individual, and her account of events often confuses. For example, though she tries to explain the era’s complex election procedures not once but twice, she produces muddle rather than clarity. What’s more, Adams’s struggle with his cabinet, which she tries to elevate into a clash over constitutional principle, may just be a tale of a president’s bad personnel judgment, which he should have corrected by firing them promptly rather than almost at the end of his term. Added to these shortcomings is something gratuitously irritating: she tries to link the turmoil around the election of 1800 to the demonstration in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, contrasting Adams’s immaculate refusal to interfere in the resulting tie with what she calls the recent “violent coup attempt” threatening “our democracy,” egged on, she implies, by Donald Trump. A reader who doesn’t share Chervinsky’s complacent certitudes might find everything to reject in these assertions. And since they form the book’s penultimate paragraph, they will leave some readers with a sour taste for the whole.

Myron Magnet, a National Humanities Medalist, is the author of The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817, among other works.