Vice presidency and presidency of John Adams

Soon after his return to the United States, Adams found himself on the ballot in the presidential election of 1789. Washington was the unanimous selection of all electors, while Adams finished second, signaling that his standing as a leading member of the revolutionary generation was superseded only by that of Washington himself. Under the electoral rules established in the recent ratified Constitution, Adams was duly elected America’s first vice president.

This meant that Adams was the first American statesman to experience the paradox of being a heartbeat away from maximum power while languishing in the political version of a cul-de-sac. Adams himself described the vice presidency as “the most insignificant office that ever the Invention of man contrived or his Imagination conceived.” His main duty was to serve as president of the Senate, casting a vote only to break a tie. During his eight years in office, Adams cast between 31 and 38 such votes, more than any subsequent vice president in American history. He steadfastly supported all the major initiatives of the Washington administration, including the financial plan of Alexander Hamilton, the Neutrality Proclamation (1793), which effectively ended the Franco-American Alliance of 1778, the forceful suppression of an insurrection in western Pennsylvania called the Whiskey Rebellion (1794), and the Jay Treaty (1795), a highly controversial effort to avoid war with England by accepting British hegemony on the high seas. When Washington announced his decision not to seek a third term in 1796, Adams was the logical choice to succeed him.

In the first contested presidential election in American history, Adams won a narrow electoral majority (71–68) over Jefferson, who thereby became vice president. Adams made an initial effort to bring Jefferson into the cabinet and involve him in shaping foreign policy, but Jefferson declined the offer, preferring to retain his independence. This burdened the Adams presidency with a vice president who was the acknowledged head of the rival political party, the Republicans (subsequently the Democratic-Republicans). Additional burdens included: inheritance of Washington’s cabinet, whom Adams unwisely decided to retain, and whose highest loyalty was to Washington’s memory as embodied in Hamilton; a raging naval conflict with the French in the Caribbean dubbed the “quasi-war”; and the impossible task of succeeding—no one could replace—the greatest hero of the revolutionary era.

Despite Washington’s plea for a bipartisan foreign policy in his farewell address (1796), the “quasi-war” produced a bitter political argument between Federalists, who preferred war with France to alienating Britain, and Democratic-Republicans, who viewed France as America’s only European ally and the French Revolution as a continuation of the American Revolution on European soil. Adams attempted to steer a middle course between these partisan camps, which left him vulnerable to political attacks from both sides. In 1797 he sent a peace delegation to Paris to negotiate an end to hostilities, but when the French directory demanded bribes before any negotiations could begin, Adams ordered the delegates home and began a naval buildup in preparation for outright war. The Federalist-dominated Congress called for raising a 30,000-man army, which Adams agreed to reluctantly. If Adams had requested a declaration of war in 1798, he would have enjoyed widespread popularity and virtually certain reelection two years later. Instead, he acted with characteristic independence by sending yet another, and this time successful, peace delegation to France against the advice of his cabinet and his Federalist supporters. The move ruined him politically but avoided a costly war that the infant American republic was ill-prepared to fight. It was a vintage Adams performance, reminiscent of his defense of British soldiers after the Boston Massacre, which was also principled and unpopular.

If ending the “quasi-war” with France was Adams’s major foreign policy triumph, his chief domestic failure was passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), which permitted the government to deport foreign-born residents and indict newspaper editors or writers who published "false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States." A total of 14 indictments were brought against the Republican press under the sedition act, but the crudely partisan prosecutions quickly became infamous persecutions that backfired on the Federalists. Although Adams had signed the Alien and Sedition Acts under pressure from the Federalists in Congress, he shouldered most of the blame both at the time and in the history books. He came to regard the sedition act as the biggest political blunder of his life.

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The election of 1800 again pitted Adams against Jefferson. Adams ran ahead of the Federalist candidates for Congress, who were swept from office in a Republican landslide. However, thanks to the deft maneuvering of Aaron Burr, all 12 of New York’s electoral votes went to Jefferson, giving the tandem of Jefferson and Burr the electoral victory (73–65). Jefferson was eventually elected president by the House of Representatives, which chose him over Burr on the 36th ballot. In his last weeks in office, Adams made several Federalist appointments to the judiciary, including John Marshall as chief justice of the United States. These “midnight judges” offended Jefferson, who resented the encroachment on his own presidential prerogatives. Adams, the first president to reside in the presidential mansion (later called the White House) in Washington, D.C., was also the first—and one of the very few—presidents not to attend the inauguration of his successor. On March 4, 1801, he was already on the road back to Quincy.

Retirement

At age 65 Adams did not anticipate a long retirement. The fates proved more generous than he expected, providing him with another quarter century to brood about his career and life, add to the extensive marginalia in his books, settle old scores in his memoirs, watch with pride when John Quincy assumed the presidency, and add to his already vast and voluminous correspondence. In an extensive exchange of letters with Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia physician and patriotic gadfly, Adams revealed his preoccupation with fame and developed his own theory of the role ambition plays in motivating man to public service. Along the way he placed on the record his own candid and often critical portraits of the other vanguard members of the revolutionary generation.

In 1812, thanks in part to prodding from Rush, he overcame his bitterness toward Jefferson and initiated a correspondence with his former friend and rival that totaled 158 letters. Generally regarded as the most intellectually impressive correspondence between American statesmen in all of American history, the dialogue between Adams and Jefferson touched on a host of timely and timeless subjects: the role of religion in history, the aging process, the emergence of an American language, the French Revolution, and the party battles of the 1790s. Adams put it most poignantly to Jefferson: “You and I ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.”

More than the elegiac tone of the letters, the correspondence dramatized the contradictory impulses generated by the American Revolution and symbolized by the two aging patriarchs. Adams was the realist, the skeptic, the principled pessimist. Jefferson was the idealist, the romantic, the pragmatic optimist. As if according to a script written by Providence, the “Sage of Quincy” and the “Sage of Monticello” died within hours of each other on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary to the day of the Declaration of Independence.