AN INCONGRUOUS PORTRAIT GALLERY
I
It is a pity that in the days of the Adams Administration it was not the
fashion to paint group portraits of the President and his Cabinet. Had
it been the custom, a purely commercial artist might have left us a
conventional picture of no special interest; but had the task fallen to
a great artist of intuitive penetration, capable of seizing upon the
salient characteristics and the soul of his subjects, the result would
have been a fascinating study in incongruities and clashing spirits. The
suspicion on the round, smug face of Adams; the domineering arrogance on
the cold Puritan countenance of Pickering; the suave and smiling
treachery in the eyes of Wolcott; and the effeminate softness and
weakness in the physiognomy of McHenry would have delighted a gallery
through the generations.
Ali Baba among his Forty Thieves is no more deserving of sympathy than
John Adams shut up within the seclusion of his Cabinet room with his
official family of secret enemies. No other President has ever been so
environed with a secret hostility; none other so shamelessly betrayed by
treachery. The men on whose advice he was to rely were not even of his
own choosing. He inherited them--that was his misfortune; but he meekly
accepted them--and that was his weakness. Where Washington had begun
with at least two advisers of transcendent ability, he was to undertake
his task with the assistance of an official family that exceeded
mediocrity only in the field of treachery and mendacity. Not only were
they to disregard his wishes--they were to conspire against him. Not
only were they to ignore his leadership--they were to take orders from a
private citizen who was his political rival and personal foe. Years
later, the relative of one was solemnly to justify their disloyalty with
the remarkable statement that, having been appointed by his predecessor,
‘they owed him nothing’; and to defend their retention of place despite
their indisposition to serve him honestly with the astounding assertion
that ‘the interest of their party and the wishes of their friends
prevented them.’[1192]
We are interested in the personalities of these men primarily because it
was not only not ‘in the interest of their party’ for them to remain,
but ultimately destructive. The taxes, the standing army, the Alien and
Sedition Laws would have weakened, and might have destroyed, Federalism;
the party treachery within the Cabinet would have wrought its ruin
without them.
II
John Adams was a very great man and a pure patriot, with many fatal
temperamental weaknesses. Like Dr. Samuel Johnson, whom he strongly
suggests, he would have thrived in an atmosphere of admiration. Had he
been surrounded by incense-throwers and idolatrous disciples applauding
his every utterance, forgiving his bursts of temper and smiling at the
pinching of their ears and the kicking of their shins, with a worshiping
Boswell jotting down his conversations, he would have been supremely
happy and probably at his best. Like the genius who spread his tail
feathers so proudly at Streatham, he was vain, domineering, ponderous,
at times tempestuous in his bursts of passion, disdainful of finesse,
given to intemperate expressions, learned, prejudiced, often
selfish--and a little fat. But he had played a noble part in the
Revolutionary struggle, a dignified rôle in the diplomacy of the Old
World, and he was entitled to something better than he received.
There was nothing thrilling in the appearance of Adams to captivate the
crowd. Below the medium height and rather full, he looked the stolidity
of the English country gentleman[1193] and invited the sobriquet of the
sharp-tongued Izard of ‘His Rotundity.’[1194] His fat round face would
have been less offensively smug had it not been so cold,[1195] and his
dignity more impressive had it been less aggressive. The top of his head
was bald as a billiard ball, and, while he carefully powdered the
remnant of his hair, nothing could have made this solid gentleman of the
Quincy farm the glass of fashion. Unlike many of the public figures of
the time, he affected no foppery, and, while he dressed with
conventional propriety, his garb was so little a part of himself that
most of the chroniclers of his time ignore it. We know that he appeared
one day for dinner at Mrs. Francis’s boarding-house in a drab-colored
coat[1196] and at his inauguration in ‘a full suit of pearl-colored
broadcloth.’[1197] Even the saturnine Maclay, who poked fun at all his
peculiarities of appearance, could find nothing objectionable but the
sword he affected when he first presided over the Senate.[1198]
Of his manner in company we must reach a conclusion from a composite of
contradictions. Thanks to the Adams spirit of self-criticism, we have a
confession of the manners of his youth when he was prone to make a
display of his intellectual wares, and to prove his parts with sneering
sarcasms about his elders.[1199] Years later, an English tourist was
impressed with his ‘somewhat cold and reserved manner’ and with ‘the
modesty of his demeanor.’[1200] In neither picture do we have an
attractive personality, and are safe in assuming that it was not
pleasing, without drawing on the honest prejudices of Maclay. On the
first attempt of the latter to establish social relations, he found
Adams ‘not well furnished with small talk,’ and he was particularly
struck with his ‘very silly kind of laugh.’[1201] This interested the
sour democrat from the Pennsylvania frontier, and, critically observing
his manner of presiding over the Senate, he complained that ‘instead of
that sedate easy air I would have him possess, he will look on one side,
then on the other, then down on the knees of his breeches, then dimple
his visage with the most silly kind of half smile.’[1202] This smile was
evidently aggravating to the Senator’s gout, for we hear of it again at
a dinner at Washington’s where he was clearly angered when he caught the
great man ‘ever and anon mantling his visage with the most unmeaning
simper that ever mantled the face of folly.’[1203] ‘Bonny Johnny Adams,’
snorts the Senator, more than once.[1204] Thus, painfully
self-conscious, and without capacity for the appealing levity of banter,
he was temperamentally incapable of that personal approach that makes
for the intimacy of friendship. In the parlance of the day, he was a
‘poor mixer,’ and this had the same effect on political fortunes then as
now.
This alone would have made men indifferent, but he had a vanity that
drove them away. If we are to believe the common comment of friend and
foe, he was inordinately vain. With that strange, penetrating insight
into his own character, he appreciated this weakness in his youth, and
no doubt sought to uproot a vice that was in the very fiber of his
being. In the musings of his diary we have the frank admission: ‘Good
treatment makes me think I am admired, beloved, and my own vanity will
be indulged in me; so I dismiss my guard and grow weak, silly, vain,
conceited, ostentatious.’[1205] On another page he promises himself
‘never to show my own importance or superiority.’[1206] But the weakness
increased with age. ‘I always considered Mr. Adams a man of great
vanity,’ wrote the father of one of his Cabinet to his son two weeks
after the inauguration.[1207] This quality was so predominant that both
friend and foe sought to turn it to advantage. Hamilton, in his
ill-advised attack, was able to refer to ‘the unfortunate foibles of
vanity without bounds,’ without fear of contradiction.[1208] After his
election to the Vice-Presidency, this vanity became ‘ridiculous.’[1209]
Strangely enough, there is some evidence that this very weakness was
responsible in part for his election to that post. Referring to the part
played in the event by Dr. Rush and himself, Maclay wrote that ‘we knew
his vanity and hoped by laying hold of it to render him useful among the
New England members in our schemes of bringing Congress to
Pennsylvania.’[1210] But stranger still--and this is something to be
kept in mind throughout--it was reserved for his greatest political
opponent to predict to one of his lieutenants that, while Adams was
‘vain’ and ‘irritable,’ ‘he is so amiable that I pronounce you will love
him.’[1211] The general effect, however, was far different from love. It
unquestionably played into the hands of his enemies and neutralized the
effect of both his ability and militant patriotism.
III
Because of his inordinate vanity, he was susceptible to flattery, and
they who knew him best approached him accordingly. We have an
illustration of it at the time of the decision to dismiss Genêt. There
was some question as to the attitude of Adams, and, knowing of his
secret jealousy of Washington, George Cabot, to whom was assigned the
task of guiding him favorably, called upon him one morning at an early
hour.
‘Mr. Adams, this French Minister’s conduct seems to me to be the most
objectionable,’ ventured Cabot casually.
‘Objectionable? It is audacious, sir,’ stormed Adams.
‘I think if you were President you would not permit him to perform his
office very long,’ said the cunning Cabot.
‘Not an hour, sir. I would dismiss him immediately.’
‘I wish you would allow me to say to the President that such are your
views,’ said Cabot.
‘Certainly, sir; I will say so to the President myself when I see
him.’[1212]
Thus the danger of Adams’s opposition was cleverly removed by conveying
the impression that the suggestion of a dismissal had come from him. So
thoroughly were his enemies imbued with the idea that he could be led by
subtle flattery that the apologists for the traitors in his Cabinet,
taking note of his later harmonious relations with Marshall, explained
that these were due to the genius of the latter in insinuating his own
ideas into Adams’s head. However that may be, there was one thing that
flattery could not do--it could not coax him from a principle or from
the performance of a patriotic duty. When the royal Attorney-General of
Massachusetts undertook to flatter him into the service of the King in
the fight against the people eight years before the Declaration of
Independence, he failed utterly.
The violence of his temper made him difficult even to his friends, and
he had but few. He had a genius for embroilment, and dwelt perpetually
on a battle-field, sometimes real, often imaginary, but always genuine
to him. Liancourt, calling upon him at Quincy and finding his
conversation ‘extremely agreeable,’ noted, however, that it was ‘tinged
with a sort of sarcasm.’[1213] Madison, we have seen, referred to his
‘ticklish’ temper.[1214] If a political opponent could give a moderate
description of his weakness, and a Frenchman one so mild, the members of
his Cabinet felt no compulsion for restraint. Franklin had done him a
grave disservice in a brief but altogether friendly characterization
carrying the suggestion that he sometimes appeared mad. This was a hint
on which his enemies were to play as long as he lived. They took
Franklin literally and called Adams ‘crazy.’ ‘What but insanity’ could
have led him to this or that? asks the biographer of Wolcott.[1215] ‘No
sane mind could have imagined such a thought,’ he says again.[1216] ‘A
weak and intemperate mind,’ writes one of his Cabinet to another.[1217]
Even Jefferson, who was more considerate of him than others, thought his
French war message ‘crazy.’ But it was reserved for McHenry to sum up
his enemies’ case against him. ‘Whether he is spiteful, playful, witty,
kind, cold, drunk, sober, angry, easy, stiff, jealous, cautious,
confident, close, open, it is almost always in the wrong place or to the
wrong person.’[1218] All of which means that he was super-sensitive,
irritable, the victim of an ungovernable temper which drove him into
spluttering rages on ridiculously slight provocations. Men shrank from
conferences with him on subjects involving a difference of opinion. Then
he could be as insulting as Dr. Johnson without the advantage of having
obsequious idolaters on whom to vent his rage. What a joy it would have
been to have pitted these two men against each other on the question of
colonial rights! What a picture Boswell could have made of the
encounter!
Adams was difficult in conference, too, because of his suspicious
disposition. He could never quite persuade himself of the sincerity of
his conferee, and he carried a chip upon his shoulder. This suspicion of
his fellows had been a curse of his youth; it followed him to the grave.
He felt himself surrounded by envy, hatred, malice, and was inclined to
suspect that a good-natured smile was in derision. In youth he fancied
that his neighbors were anxious to retard his progress. He was miserable
in London, where his reception, while cool, was not half so bad as he
imagined. The British Minister in Paris could not disabuse him of the
notion that in London he would be looked upon ‘with evil eyes.’[1219]
His worst fears were realized in ‘the awkward timidity in general’ and
the ‘conscious guilt’ and shame in the countenances of the people.[1220]
This feeling that he was in the midst of enemies made him more than
ever tenacious of his rights. He knew the privileges and civilities to
which his position entitled him, and keenly felt his failure to receive
them. It was something he was never to forgive. The begrudging or
withholding of a right was always, to him, an affront instantly to be
met with a stormy challenge. ‘I am not of Cæsar’s mind,’ he wrote, soon
after becoming Vice-President. ‘The second place in Rome is high enough
for me, although I have a spirit that will not give up its right or
relinquish its place.’[1221] This sense of his deserts, because of
ability and services, goes far to explain his relations with Washington
and Hamilton.
The evidence is abundant that he resented the fame and popularity of
Washington. Like Pickering, he did not share the enthusiasm over the
great man’s military genius. During the war he had sometimes found fault
with his military tactics.[1222] Later, when he became the second
official of the Republic, he secretly resented the distance that
separated him from the chief. He had played the patriot’s rôle long
before Washington had shown a marked interest in the quarrel of the
colonies; had been one of the makers of the Revolution; had served with
distinction in diplomacy; and, unlike Washington, had studied politics
and statecraft all his life. Why should he, with such a record, be so
completely overshadowed, and why relegated to the end that upstarts like
Hamilton--‘the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar’--might be pushed to the
front? This, the reasoning of his jealousy which was to destroy his
perspective and lead him into trouble.
IV
This was due in some measure to the distance between reality and the
dream world in which he lived. As he grew older, he became more and more
impressed with the pomp of power. The son of a Yankee shoemaker was
covetous of the ribbons of distinction. The masses receded to a
respectful distance. In the forefront were the gods, and he among them;
and among these he claimed a right to the front rank. Ceremony became
important. Titles were safeguards of organized society. An order of
nobility sprang up in his imagination. ‘You and I,’ he wrote Sam Adams,
‘have seen four noble families rise up in Boston--the Crafts, Gores,
Dawes, and Austins. These are really a nobility in our town, as the
Howards, Somersets, Berties in England.’ His feet lost contact with the
earth--he soared. ‘Let us do justice to the people and to the nobles;
for nobles there are, as I have proved, in Boston as well as in
Madrid.’[1223] Many things, he thought, can make for nobility--even
matrimony. ‘Would Washington have been Commander of the Revolutionary
army or President ... if he had not married the rich widow of Mr.
Custis? Would Jefferson have been President ... if he had not married
the daughter of Mr. Wales?’ Thus he challenged John Taylor of
Caroline.[1224]
Infatuated with such views, he was naturally in harmony with his party
in its contempt for democracy.[1225] ‘If our government does well I
shall be more surprised than I ever was in my life,’ he said one day,
standing by the stove in the Senate Chamber before the gavel had fallen.
Carroll ventured the opinion that it was strong enough. ‘If it is, I
know not whence it is to arise,’ Adams replied. ‘It cannot have energy.
It has neither rewards nor punishments.’[1226] This distrust of
democracy was ingrained. We find it outcropping in his early life, as
toward the end. When he was summoned to go over the reply of the
Massachusetts Legislature to the pretensions of Hutchinson, the royal
Governor, in 1773, he found ‘the draught of a report[1227] was full of
very popular talk and of those democratical principles that have done so
much mischief to this country.’[1228] Even Paine’s ‘Common Sense,’ which
was tonic to the Revolution, was spoiled for him because ‘his plan was
so democratical.’[1229] Haunting the bookstalls in London he thought
‘the newspapers, the magazines, the reviews, the daily pamphlets were
all in the hands of hirelings,’ and was convinced that the men who
‘preached about ... liberty, equality, fraternity, and the rights of
man’ could be hired ‘for a guinea a day.’[1230] It was after this that
he wrote the ‘Discourses of Davilla’--an onslaught on democracy. And
fourteen years after his retirement he wrote from his library at Quincy
to John Taylor: ‘Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes,
exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not
commit suicide.’[1231] This distrust and distaste for the masses
weakened him as much with the people as his temperamental defects with
his party associates. I have dwelt on these weaknesses because they
explain the tragedy of his failure. There were other qualities that
entitled him to a happier fate.
V
Chief among these were the fervor and the disinterestedness of his love
of country. Had he died the day after the signing of the Declaration, he
would have been assured a permanent place in history. No man played a
more heroic part in the fight for independence. The struggling young
lawyer who refused a position under the Crown that he might not be
embarrassed in supporting his countrymen in their inevitable
struggle;[1232] who, awakened by the sinister drum-beats of the red
coats every morning, ‘solemnly determined at all events to adhere to
[his] principles in favor of [his] country’;[1233] who defended Hancock
in the courts on the charge of smuggling with stubborn tenacity until
the case ‘was suspended at last only by the battle of Lexington’;[1234]
who, when the crisis came, prepared to immolate himself and family upon
the altar of liberty;[1235] and who had the audacity to base an argument
against the Stamp Act on the principles of the Revolution itself, and,
standing four square against more petitions to the King, won the lasting
gratitude and admiration of Jefferson when, as ‘the Colossus of the
Debate,’[1236] he bore the brunt of the battle for the Declaration--that
man could well hold his head high in the presence of Washington himself.
‘Politics,’ he wrote Warren, ‘are an ordeal path among red-hot plough
shares. Who then would be a politician for the pleasure of running about
barefooted among them. Yet some one must.’[1237] And again: ‘At such
times as this there are many dangerous things to be done which nobody
else will do, and therefore I cannot help attempting them.’[1238] Nor
was he blind to his fate in the event of the failure of his cause. ‘I go
mourning in my heart all day long,’ he wrote his wife in dark days,
‘though I say nothing. I am melancholy for the public and anxious for my
family.... For God’s sake make your children hardy, active and
industrious.’[1239] This intense Americanism did not moderate with
time. As a politician he was all too often open to censure; as a patriot
he was above reproach. Jefferson never doubted his absorption in his
country; and Hamilton, temperamentally unable to get along with him,
wrote him down as ‘honest, firm, faithful, and independent--a sincere
lover of his country.’[1240] Because he had more enemies than friends,
and more detractors than admirers, one might conclude from the opinions
of his contemporaries that he had but mediocre ability. There is no
question as to the fallibility of his judgment where his prejudices were
enlisted and the characters of men were involved. Again we find
Jefferson more friendly than the Federalists. ‘A bad calculator of the
force and probable effect of the motives which govern men,’ he wrote;
and then added, ‘This is all the ill that can possibly be said of him;
he is profound in his views and accurate in his judgment except where
knowledge of the world is necessary to form a judgment.’[1241] Hamilton
thought him ‘a man of an imagination sublimated and eccentric,’ and was
not impressed with his intellectual endowments.[1242] The father of
Wolcott thought him ‘of a very moderate share of prudence, and of far
less real abilities than he believes he possesses.’[1243] And McHenry,
having been expelled from the Cabinet for his disloyalty, declared ‘the
mind of Mr. Adams like the last glimmerings of a lamp, feeble, wavering
and unsteady, with occasionally a strong flash of light, his genius
little, and that too insufficient to irradiate his judgment.’[1244] The
Adams who emerges from these opinions is a man of ability often reduced
to impotency by the lack of judgment. This is, no doubt, the whole truth
about his intellect. The sneers from men who could not forgive him for
the wrong they had done him, and from others who could not control him,
cannot stand in the light of what he did, and said, and wrote.
As a writer, he suffers in comparison with Hamilton and Madison, and his
more ambitious productions, like the ‘Discourses of Davilla,’ while
showing much erudition and some ingenuity, are heavy and pompous. But in
the earlier days when he was writing shorter papers for the press, he
did better. Whether he could write or not, he loved to do it. The author
of the earlier period was more interesting and attractive than that of
later times.
However much the critics may quarrel over his capacity to write, the
evidence is conclusive as to his ability to speak. As an orator he was
the Patrick Henry of New England. His argument against the Writs of
Assistance in 1761 fired the heart of Otis and swept him into the ranks
of the active patriots. Jefferson bears testimony to the power of his
eloquence in the fight for the Declaration. Given a cause that appealed
to his heart and imagination, he never failed to find himself by losing
himself in the fervor of the fight.
Nor can there be any question of his courage. It required temerity to
step forth from the patriots’ ranks to face the representative of the
Crown with the most audacious denials of his pretensions; courage, too,
to lead the fight against further attempts at conciliation with the
King. But the most courageous act of his career was his defense in court
of Captain Preston, the British officer charged with murder in the
Boston massacre. Not only physical courage was here demanded, for he
invited personal attack, but moral courage at its highest. He was
dependent for clientage on the Boston public and the victims of the
massacre were Bostonians. He was an American, and he was standing
between a hated redcoat and an American revenge. He gambled with his
career, for he armed his enemies with ammunition, and he was charged
with selling his country for an enormous fee. The fact that he received
but eighteen guineas would have been the answer, but he maintained a
dignified silence. There is nothing finer or more courageous in the
records of a public man.[1245] This courage was to stand him in good
stead when he defied his party for his country in the French
negotiations, and played for the verdict of history.
This courage could only have sprung from the consciousness of an honest
intent--and his honesty, personal or political, has never been
questioned. Sedgwick recommended him to Hamilton for the Vice-Presidency
as ‘a man of unconquerable intrepidity and of incorruptible integrity,’
and Hamilton was to find to his chagrin that the compliment was not
given in a Pickwickian sense.[1246] And yet he was not a Puritan of the
intolerant sort. In early life he was given to the reading of sermons
and at one time confessed to an inclination to the ministry--but it did
not last long. In early manhood, we find him moralizing in his diary
against card-playing, but not on moral grounds. ‘It gratifies none of
the senses ...; it can entertain the mind only by hushing its
clamors.’[1247] Even the scurrility of his times spared him the charge
of immorality. ‘No virgin or matron ever had cause to blush at sight of
me,’ he wrote in his ‘Autobiography.’[1248] And while Franklin and
Morris appear to have taken advantage of the moral laxity of Paris, we
are quite sure that Adams, packed in tight among fashionable ladies
watching the Queen eat soup, never gave a flirtatious glance, and are
more than half persuaded that his declination to join Madame du Barry in
her garden was due to her none too spotless reputation. But if he was
not given to women or to song, it appears that he consumed his full
share of wine. We have his own story of the fashionable dinners in the
Philadelphia of the Continental Congress, when he would sit at the table
from three until nine ‘drinking Madeira, claret and burgundy.’[1249] We
get a glimpse of him in a New York Club before the Revolution with
‘punch, wine, pipes and tobacco.’[1250] And on another occasion he
records with boastful pride that he ‘drank Madeira at a great rate and
found no inconvenience in it.’[1251] Even so, we may be sure that he
seldom drank to excess.
Such the man who sat facing the Cabinet he did not choose--stubborn,
suspicious, vain, jealous, courageous, honest, irascible, tempestuous,
patriotic, and rising above its members in ability and public service as
a mountain above the pebbles at its base.
VI
No student of physiognomy, familiar with the character of Adams, could
have glanced at the stern, cold Puritan face of Timothy Pickering, his
Secretary of State, without a premonition of certain estrangement. The
long, thin, super-serious features were as uncongenial and unresponsive
as though carved from granite. The thin, silvery locks and the
spectacles combined to create an unpleasant impression of asceticism;
and the cold eyes that peered through the glasses spoke of the narrow,
uncompromising mind of a follower of Cromwell. There, too, he could
read the insatiable ambition, the audacious courage, the relentless will
of the Roman conqueror. Seldom did that face soften with a smile; for he
had no sense of humor. His portrait, by Stuart, as a frontispiece to a
volume of old New England blue laws would have symbolized the spirit of
the book. No Indian stoic ever presented a countenance less revealing in
repose, or more stone-like in composure. The resemblance to the
Roundhead fanatic was accentuated in the extreme simplicity, the
Quaker-like plainness of his garb.
Here was clearly a man to whom joyous frivolity was indecent
dissipation; with whom the scrutiny of suspicion was a duty; and to whom
duties were the sum total of life. But beneath the repellently cold,
metallic exterior there were volcanic fires of passion, and when he
emerged from the deadly calm of composure it was to storm. It was not in
his nature to confer, but to lay down the law. So lacking was he in a
sense of humor that he honestly persuaded himself that he always stood
at Armageddon and battled for the Lord. Even when he was moved to
treachery by an ambition wholly incongruous to his capacity, he really
felt that he was detached from all personal considerations and was
fighting for the abstract principle of right.[1252] Never once in his
long life, even when he was a cheap conspirator planning the destruction
of the Union, did he think himself in the wrong. Never once in his
voluminous correspondence does he hint at a possible mistake. He was, in
his political views and his personal relations, impeccably pure--and he
admitted it. Not only did he admit it--he impassionedly proclaimed it,
and this alone made him an impossible adviser for John Adams. He was the
smug, self-righteous type that would remake the world in its own image.
They who disagreed with him were hounds of the devil to be thrown
without pity into the uttermost darkness. And he was sincere in it all.
He was fond of hymns and psalms, in church devout, at prayer most
fervent, and he read the Bible habitually without discovering the
passage about the throwing of stones.[1253]
This temperament made him difficult in even ordinary conversation. He
had an excellent command of language, but he preferred the harsher
words. There was no twilight zone for him. Things were white or black.
He was violent in his opinions and violent in the gesticulation with
which he tried to force them on his hearers. So little could he see
himself as others saw him that, when he once exclaimed, ‘I abhor
gesticulation,’ with a powerful sweep of his muscular arms, he could not
understand the smile of his auditor.[1254] But for this intemperance,
all too much like that of Adams to make harmony possible, he would have
been a great conversationalist. He used words with accuracy, was
interesting in narrative, and had read widely and wisely; but too
frequently to converse with Pickering was to quarrel. This unhappy
quality, along with his poverty, explains why he did not figure in the
social life of the Federalist capital. His tactlessness and bluntness,
which he confused with honesty, were intolerable. In a letter to a
friend who had given an acquaintance a note of introduction, he wrote
that he should ‘not put myself to the expense nor my family to the
trouble of a splendid exhibition at table.’[1255] It must have caused
some mirth in the home of the elegant Binghams to read his reply to an
invitation to dinner: ‘Mrs. Pickering and I are constrained to forego
many pleasures of society, because we cannot persuade ourselves to enter
on a career of expenses, which, being far beyond our income, would lead
to ruin. For this reason, Mrs. Pickering chooses to dine abroad only at
Mrs. Washington’s, as a consequence of my official station; and this as
seldom as decency will permit.... But Mrs. Pickering is aware that as a
public man I cannot seclude myself ... and therefore often urges, on my
part singly, an intercourse which is useful as well as agreeable. I
shall, then, with pleasure, dine with you occasionally, but without
promising to reciprocate all your civilities.’[1256]
Here we have one of several traits that make him stand out among the
other Federalist leaders as an exotic. He was poor, but not so poor as
the letter indicates; nor was he so completely shut off from society,
despite his frugality. If he gave no fashionable entertainments, his was
a home of hospitality, and he who promised no reciprocation for the
entertainments of the Binghams was able to entertain at his board a
future King of France.[1257] But, unfashionable, and plain as a Yankee
huckster, he found the ways of fashion irksome and offensive. Writing
his wife disgustedly of the enormous head-dresses of the Philadelphia
ladies, he added: ‘But you know, my dear, I have old-fashioned notions.
Neither powder nor pomatum have touched my head these twelve months, not
even to cover my baldness.’[1258] And the ‘extravagance of the
prevailing fashions,’ suggested by the introduction of ‘the odious
fashion of hoops’ convinced him that many families would be
ruined.[1259] Verily such a creature would have been grotesquely out of
place among his fellow Federalists in the gay drawing-rooms of Mrs.
Bingham.
He differed from them, too, theoretically at least, on a more vital
point. They were thorough aristocrats; he was instinctively a
democrat--though he seemed to prefer it as an ideal rather than as a
reality. Lodge recognizes this difference and explains that ‘he had all
the pride of the Puritan who gloried in belonging to the chosen people
of God.’[1260] We can well believe the assertion of his son and
biographer that he liked the common people because among them he
belonged. Then, too, he inherited a respect for them from his father who
ardently espoused the cause of equal rights for all men, and was prone
to apologize for the weaknesses of the poor, and to criticize people of
wealth and power.[1261] With this inheritance he was to enter the field
of controversy at twenty-five in a newspaper battle with the Tories of
Salem with a letter which might have been written by Jefferson. ‘For
whom was government instituted?’ he wrote. ‘Was it solely for the
aggrandizement of the few, who, by some fortunate accident, have been
bred in a manner which the world calls genteel? or to protect the lives,
liberty and property of the body of the people? Is government supported
by the better sort? On the contrary, has not every attack on the laws
and constitution proceeded from that class? The very phrase, “friends of
government” is invidious and carries with it an impudent insinuation
that the whole body of the people, the pretended friends of government
excepted, are enemies to government; the suggestion of which is as
ridiculous as it is false.’[1262]
The tall, gaunt figure in plain garb, seated in company with the
fashionable Hamilton or Morris, was not more incongruous than the mind,
capable even in youth of such heretical and ‘demagogic’ thoughts.
Stranger still, this liking for the common herd never wholly left him.
Thus his experiment in pioneering in the western wilderness--where
democracy thrived best. A wholly admirable figure, this Pickering of the
frontier, applying brain and brawn to the conquering of the woods,
organizing civil government, battling at the peril of his life for law
and order, kidnaped and carted away. His own story of this adventure is
as thrilling as a dime novel.[1263] Even then his faith in the people
was not destroyed.
Thus Pickering finally entered public life--a ‘friend of the people,’
farmer, frontiersman, unsuccessful merchant. About him there was no
glamour of success. He had been a failure. At Harvard he had made a fair
record, and his meager career as a lawyer was unsuccessful. He had
failed as a farmer, failed as a pioneer, failed as a Philadelphia
merchant because unfit for commercial life. He had played a spinet and a
violin and given lessons in sacred music at Salem and Marblehead, but
that could scarcely be deemed success;[1264] and in the army, where he
was capable as a trainer of raw recruits, his courage, energy, and
promptness might have taken him far but for the handicap of
short-sightedness and glasses.[1265] Thus, when he entered the public
service at forty-six his career had been one of failure, and he was to
get this new chance through importunate applications to a man he little
respected--for he had a poor opinion of the ability of Washington. Here
again he differed from other Federalists holding a similar opinion; he
did not simulate admiration.[1266] The naming of a child after
Washington called for his sarcasm.[1267] He was disgusted during the war
when a rustic was heard to say, ‘I suppose he [Washington] is the
greatest man in the world.’[1268] He criticized Washington as
over-cautious[1269] and refused to hail him as a hero because he thought
him lacking in ‘eminent military talents.’[1270] He thought the army
suffered through his procrastinated decisions.[1271] Serving on the
committee at the close of the struggle to formulate the answer of the
officers to the ‘Farewell Orders to the Armies of the United States,’ he
referred sarcastically to the word ‘Orders,’ and wrote his wife:
‘Though it is rather modest, or in other words does not abound in
panegyric, I think it (the reply) will be graciously received.’[1272] To
another he boasted that the reply was marked ‘as the Italians do some
strains of music--moderato.’[1273]
But land poor, and a failure, he was quite willing to serve under the
man he did not appreciate. From the organization of the government, he
was an office-seeker, looking, not for a career, but for a job. There
was no demand for his services--he urged them. His brother-in-law, a
member of Congress, became his broker. He applied to Hamilton for an
assistant secretaryship of the Treasury, to find it promised.[1274] In
August his broker wrote him of a prospective vacancy in the
postmaster-generalship and suggested that he see Washington at
once.[1275] A month later, Pickering made application,[1276] but his
interview with the President only resulted in a temporary position as a
negotiator with the Indian tribes. In May, 1791, he asked Washington for
the Comptrollership of the Treasury, to be refused,[1277] and it was not
until August, after more than a year of persistent wire-pulling, that he
was recognized with the then comparatively unimportant post of
Postmaster-General, which was not at that time a Cabinet position.
Thus he came into close contact with Hamilton, entered into his plans,
made himself useful, and slowly ascended, finally reaching the State
Department with some misgivings, and only after many others had declined
the place. He owed everything to Hamilton, nothing to Adams, and, as he
sat in sphinx-like silence at the Cabinet table, it was to Hamilton, not
to Adams, that he looked as chief.
VII
The same was true of Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury, albeit
these two men were, in most respects, the antitheses of each other.
There was nothing of saturnity and brooding silence in Wolcott--he
smiled. Both wore masks--one that of a stoic, the other that of a
smiling epicurean. They resembled in a common capacity for uncommon
treachery. In this, they both excelled. Both were professional feeders
at the public crib and passionate panters after office.
The handsome Wolcott had infinitely more finesse in the art of
double-dealing. He had read his Machiavelli to better advantage. If he
was to conspire with the enemies of the chief, he was to present an
ever-smiling face to Adams in the conference room. He was too exquisite
a conspirator to seem one. He had early learned the advantage of smiling
through; and leaving Adams, with his face wreathed in friendly smiles,
he could sit down to the writing of a letter to Hamilton with the same
smile still on his face. Life was altogether lovely and interesting to
this happy warrior who delivered his sword thrusts through curtains.
The son of an idol of Connecticut Federalists who was repeatedly elected
to the governorship, Wolcott passed his boyhood in and near Litchfield,
ministering to a frail constitution by tending cattle and working on the
farm. He did not permit the war to interfere with his career at Yale,
felt no sentimental call to Valley Forge, and found that the rattle of
musketry need not interfere with his preparations for the Bar. Almost
immediately on the conclusion of these preparations, he found a job as a
clerk in the office of the Committee of Pay Table, and such was his
industry and methodical efficiency that he rose in that line of the
civil service to be Comptroller of Public Accounts before the formation
of the National Government.
This opened a new and fairer vista for an efficient bureaucrat, and the
moment the department of the Treasury was established he was ‘induced by
his friends’ to offer himself for a position.[1278] Even then,
professional office-seekers merely yielded to the importunities of
admirers. The congressional delegation for Connecticut pressed hard for
an appointment, and he was offered the post of Auditor of the Treasury
at fifteen hundred dollars a year. We can scarcely conceive that he
hesitated, though it is of record that his sponsors urged him to accept,
and that Hamilton expressed the hope that he would not refuse. He had
hoped for the Comptrollership--but that might follow. The fact that
Hamilton had favored him for the better place was promising.[1279]
Meanwhile, on the salary, he could ‘live cheap and snug as you
please.’[1280] Thus he went upon the Federal payroll. Thus he came under
the observation and supervision of the genius at the head of the
Treasury,
[Illustration]
then the most powerful dispenser of patronage. Thus he was able to
practice his ingratiating arts on one worth while. In little more than a
year he was made Comptroller on the recommendation of Hamilton, and when
that statesman retired to private life, it was he who lifted the
faithful servitor into the Cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury. There
Adams found him; there, unhappily for him, he let him remain.
It would be unjust to leave the impression that Wolcott was without
merit. He was not brilliant, but he possessed an infinite capacity for
taking pains. Even in college, where he failed to sparkle, he was a hard
student with ‘the strong reasoning faculties of the Wolcott family’ a
little neutralized by ‘some eccentricities in reasoning.’[1281] In the
Treasury, in subordinate positions, he had shown good judgment, much
practical sense, a comprehensive acquaintance with business and business
needs, exceptional power of sustained application, no imagination, and a
dog-like devotion to Hamilton. The latter found this combination of
virtues had not only made his conduct good, ‘but distinguished.’ More,
he had ‘all the requisites which can be desired,’ and these were
‘moderation with firmness; liberality with exactness, indefatigable
industry with an accurate and sound discernment, a thorough knowledge of
business, and a remarkable spirit of order and arrangement.’[1282] In
brief, he was the perfect bureaucrat, the indispensable man Friday. If
he brought no political strength to the Administration, he could, with
dependability, do the drudgery and register the will of others who
could.
If he was not a friend of the people, nor the electorate of him, he was
the courtier and friend of the powerful, and thus his was one of the
first careers created by the social lobby. If he did not cultivate the
voters, he selected his friends with fine discrimination with the view
of his own advancement. At Yale he cultivated Noah Webster and Uriah
Tracy, a potent writer and a powerful politician; he early profited by
the popularity and prestige of his father, and through his father’s and
his family’s influential friends; and socially, he made himself the
‘bonny boy’ of the Hamiltonian circle, and smiled and joked himself into
the affections of the Bingham set. A beautiful and brilliant sister
brought him the championship of the clever Chauncey Goodrich and his
associates. A charming wife threw wide all the doors of the capital.
While he was earning the grateful appreciation of Hamilton and the Essex
Junto, this attractive wife was winning and deserving the tender
affection of Mrs. Washington, with whom she was on terms of intimacy,
and she was corresponding regularly with Nellie Custis.[1283] When
Washington left public life, his wife gave the wife of Wolcott a lock of
the General’s hair and one of her own. The social lobby looked after its
own--and Wolcott was its very own.
For this cultivation of the social lobby, he was well adapted, for he
had a genius for society, with his cheerful disposition, his playful
manner, his conversation, which, while sometimes sober, was usually gay.
The ‘small talk’ that Adams lacked, Wolcott had in full measure running
over. A master of the art of banter, no one with entrée to Mrs.
Bingham’s could tell a joke better or more noisily enjoy one. His laugh
was hearty, frequent, and infectious. Living in a world of statistics,
he at least affected a love of literature, was fond of quoting poetry,
and interested in the personalities of distinguished writers. His
conversation after office hours could be light and graceful. Gracious,
smiling, ingratiating, this bureaucrat--one of the first--created and
sustained by the social lobby as one of its first exhibits. He differed
from Pickering as day from night, but like his sphinx-like colleague of
Salem, he owed everything to Hamilton, nothing to Adams; and as he sat,
suave and smiling, at the Cabinet table, it was to Hamilton, not to
Adams, that he looked as chief.
VIII
If Pickering was a conspirator against Adams and did not care who knew
it, and Wolcott a conspirator trying to conceal it, James McHenry, the
Secretary of War, was a conspirator and scarcely knew it. The simplicity
of this Irish immigrant is most disarming. Left alone, he would have
been harmless. His was only another instance of loving, not wisely, and
too well. Born in comfortable circumstances in Ireland, the impairment
of his health through intensive application to his studies in an
academy in Dublin brought him to America on a recuperative voyage. So
favorably was he impressed that his family soon followed and his father
opened a general store in Baltimore. A year later, we find him in an
academy in Newark, Delaware, and then in Philadelphia studying medicine
under the celebrated Dr. Rush. But he took as little to his profession
as to the prosaic duties of the counting-room, and, thanks to inherited
property, lived through the greater portion of his life as a gentleman
of leisure. In nothing that he ever undertook did he attain distinction.
The practice of his profession was limited to a brief period as surgeon
in the army; his career in commerce was almost as much curtailed; and he
employed his leisure as a dilettante in politics and literature.
Had McHenry remained in Ireland, it is easy to imagine him as a young
blade about Dublin, affecting the fashions, a bit dandified in dress,
over-fond of society, given to verse. A searcher of souls might have
discovered in him an ambition--to write poetry. Even in his academy days
at Newark he was an inveterate verse-maker, and he thought enough of his
effusions to send them to the papers. It was a weakness he never
overcame, and at his death they found a great portfolio full of rhymes.
It is possible--and it is this pathetic touch that makes one almost love
him--that he hoped for a posthumous volume as a memorial and
monument.[1284] Some of these lyrics are clever, light and graceful,
reminders of the sort that even Curran liked to make for the amusement
of his friends--thoroughly Irish. He could never have become a poet, but
there is evidence in his letters that had he turned his attention to the
humorous essay, he might have produced things worth while. These
epistles are charming in their playfulness, sprightly, witty, glowing
with humor. No one among the public men of the period could have made
posterity so much their debtor with letters on men, women, and
events--not even Morris, Ames, or Goodrich. He was really made for an
observer, rather than participant, in the harsh conflicts of life--more
of a Horace than a Robert Walpole, more of a Boswell than a Johnson.
Dinners, dances, routs, these, and the writing of light verses, were
enough to make him happy.
And yet he was not effeminate. If he did not play his part in the
affairs of men with brilliancy or even efficiency, he did with courage
and to the best of his ability. We have few references to his services
as surgeon in the army. It was when he became one of Washington’s
secretaries that he fell completely under the fascination of Hamilton.
Even before his resignation from the army, he had entered politics as a
member of the State Senate in Maryland, a rather important body
consisting then of but fifteen members. Here he was the representative
of the commercial class. In the Constitutional Convention he was
obscure, and strangely enough his views were the very opposite of
Hamilton’s. Speaking seldom, his voice was raised in warning against too
much centralization.[1285] He was even favorable to a mere amendment to
the Articles of Confederation,[1286] and his chief interest was in the
provisions for the regulation of commerce.[1287] When the work was over,
he signed with avowed reluctance, and solely on the ground--which was
characteristic--that he distrusted his own judgment, that amendments
might be made, and he was willing to take a chance.[1288] In the bitter
fight over ratification in the Maryland Convention, he took but little
part.
Even so, the confidence and friendship of Washington and Hamilton were
not weakened. To him they looked from the beginning for advice on
Maryland patronage, and Washington found it convenient to use him as an
agent in matters of this sort.[1289] Hamilton thus employed him
frequently.[1290] Taking seriously his rôle as the Federalist boss and
distributer of the loaves and fishes, he resented the disregarding of
one of his recommendations, and even the long explanatory letter of
Hamilton failed to smooth his ruffled feathers.[1291] More than two
years were to elapse before his woman-like affection for his idol gained
the ascendancy over his resentment. ‘I have not ceased to love you nor
for a moment felt an abatement of my friendship,’ he wrote impulsively
after the long silence.[1292]
Like Pickering and Wolcott, McHenry was persistent in his hints for
place. Six years before the Constitution went into effect, we find him
soliciting the influence of Washington to get him a diplomatic post in
Europe, and the great man tried and failed.[1293] Among the first
letters Hamilton received on entering the Cabinet was one from McHenry.
‘I am not wholly lost to ambition,’ he wrote, ‘and would have no
objection to a situation where I might indulge and improve at the same
time my literary propensities, with, perhaps, some advantage to the
public. Would you, therefore, be good enough to feel ... whether the
President has thought of me, or would, in such a case, nominate me. I
wish you would do this for me as a thing springing entirely from
yourself.’[1294] Nothing came of it, and the faithful party hack
continued to run the errands of the Administration in Maryland. Three
years later, he took his courage in both hands and wrote directly to
Washington asking to be sent to Paris and Vienna to attempt to secure
the release of Lafayette. He wanted a change of air. It would be no use,
the President replied.[1295] It was not until near the close of
Washington’s eight years in office--and only then because many others
had declined--that he was finally summoned to Philadelphia to become
Secretary of War. Would he have felt so much elated had he read
Hamilton’s comment on his capacity? ‘McHenry, you know,’ wrote the
leader. ‘He would give no strength to the Administration but he would
not disgrace the office. His views are good.’[1296] But happily he did
not know, and jubilantly he gave up all private enterprises as
incompatible with public office--for in such matters he was meticulously
proper--and, mounting his horse, he rode to Philadelphia. He carried the
conviction with him that he owed his honor to the earnest persistency of
his idol. To the extent indicated, this was true. The great genius of
Federalism, now planning to continue his domination of the Government
from his law office in New York, had reasons to believe that whoever
might be President, McHenry would be his own faithful servitor. When
Hamilton had married Betty Schuyler, his friend had journeyed to Albany
with some verses for the event. Was it with an indulgent smile that the
bridegroom acknowledged the poem? ‘You know I often told you you wrote
prose well, but had no genius for poetry. I retract.’[1297] Six years
before the first inauguration of Washington, this ardent friend had
written Hamilton: ‘Were you ten years older and twenty thousand pounds
richer, there is no doubt but that you might obtain the suffrages of
Congress for the highest office in their gift.’[1298] Verily it was not
without an eye to the future that Hamilton found a place for such an
idolater and political valet in the Cabinet.
There is something a bit wistful and pathetic about McHenry that
persuades forgiveness for even his treachery to Adams. His were the sins
of a lover, and love covers a multitude of sins. Nature intended him for
a snug harbor, and fate pushed him out upon tempestuous seas. His own
best epitaph has been written by himself: ‘I have built houses. I have
cultivated fields. I have planned gardens. I have planted trees. I have
written little essays. I have made poetry once a year to please my wife;
at times got children, and at all times thought myself happy.’[1299]
Like Pickering and Wolcott, he owed everything to Hamilton--nothing to
Adams; and as he faced Adams in the Cabinet room, it was to
Hamilton--not to Adams--that he looked as chief.
The other member of the Cabinet, the Attorney-General, was a political
cipher. Knowing what we now know of the characters and factional
affiliations of the President and his advisers, it will not be difficult
to follow the serpentine trail of the next four years, nor to understand
one of the forces that worked with Jefferson for the utter destruction
of the Federalist Party.