dismissal of his cabinet officers and the construction of a new cabinet.
The pardon of Fries, who had been convicted of treason for armed resistance to the levy of certain direct taxes in Pennsylvania, was regarded by many at that time as a piece of misplaced lenity on the part of Adams, dictated, it was said, by a mean desire of popularity in a case where the severest example was needed. But Adams can hardly suffer with posterity from his unwillingness to be the first president to sign a death warrant for treason, especially as there was room for grave doubts whether the doings of this person amounted to treason as defined by the constitution of the United States.
In this divided condition of the Federal party the presidential election came on. Adams was still too popular with the mass of the party to think of dropping him altogether, and the malcontents reduced to the old expedient of attempting, by secret understanding and arrangements, to reduce his vote in the electoral college below that of C. C. Pickney, the other candidate on the federal ticket.
The Republicans, on the other hand, under the prospect of an arrangement with France, rapidly recovered from the blow inflicted upon them by the violence and mercenary rapacity lately charged upon their French friends, but which they now insisted, was a charge without foundation.
Taking advantage of the dissatisfaction at the heavy taxes necessarily imposed to meet the expenses of warlike preparations, and especially of the unpopularity of the alien and sedition laws--two acts of congress to which the prospect of war had led--they pushed the canvass with great energy; while in Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr they had two leaders unsurpassed for skill in party tactics, and in Burr at least, one little scrupulous as to the means to be used.
Not only was the whole blame of the alien and sedition acts, to which he had merely assented without even recommending, laid on Adams' shoulders, but he was the object of vehement and most bitter attacks for having surrendered, under one of the provisions of Jay's treaty, one Thomas Nash, an English sailor, charged with mutiny and murder. Nor was it against his public acts alone, nor even to his political opponents, that these assaults on Mr. Adams were confined. With strong feeling and busy imagination, loving both to talk and write, Adams had been betrayed into many confidences and into free expressions of feeling, opinions, and even conjectures and suspicions--a weakness very unsuited to the character of a statesman, and one which Adams had during his life many times the occasion to rue.
During Washington's first term of office, Adams had thus been led into a confidential correspondence with Tench Coxe, who at that time held the position of assistant secretary of the treasury and had afterward been appointed supervisor of the internal revenue. Since Adam's accession he had been dismissed from his place on the charge of being a spy upon the treasury department in the service of the _Aurora_, the principal newspaper organ of the opposition,--with which party Coxe sympathized, and, since his recent dismissal from office, acted.
In this state of mind Coxe betrayed a confidential letter to him from Adams; which, after being handed around in manuscript for some time, to the great damage of Adams with his own party, was finally printed in the _Aurora_, of which Coxe had become one of the principal contributors.
The purport of this letter, written as long ago as May, 1792, was to give countenance to the charge of the opposition that Washington's cabinet, and of course Adams' which followed the same policy, was under British influence; and that the Pickney brothers, candidates with Adams on the presidential ticket, were especially liable to this suspicion.
The publication of this letter was followed by a still more deadly blow in the shape of a pamphlet, written, printed and signed by Hamilton,--probably intended by him for private distribution among his friends, but which was made public by Aaron Burr, who had succeed in obtaining some of the proof sheets.
This pamphlet had its origin in the same charge against Hamilton of being under the influence of British gold, thrown out by Adams in private conversation. To this he had refused to give any explanation when written to by Hamilton, though when a similar request was made by C. C. Pickney in consequence of the publication of the letter to Coxe, Adams fully exonerated, in a published letter, both Pickney and his brother from any suspicion which his letter to Coxe might seem calculated to convey.
Hamilton declared in the conclusion of his pamphlet that, as things then stood, he did not recommend the withholding of a single vote from Adams.
Yet, it was the leading object of his pamphlet to show, without denying Adams' patriotism or integrity, or even his talents, that he had great defects of character which disqualified him for the position of chief magistrate, and the effect which he desired it to have must have been to give C. C. Pickney the presidency, by causing a certain number of votes to be withheld from Adams.
The result of the election, however, was to throw out both the federal candidates, while Adams receiving forty-five votes and Pickney fifty-four; Jefferson and Burr each received seventy-three. In the ensuing struggle between Jefferson and Burr, Adams took no part whatever. Immediately on the expiration of his term of office he left Washington, where shortly before the seat of government had been moved, without even stopping to be present at the inauguration of Jefferson, against whom he felt a sense of personal wrong, probably thinking he had been deluded by false professions as to Jefferson's views on the presidential chair.
Though both were much given to letter-writing, and had to within a short time before been on terms of friendly intercourse, this state of feelings, on the part of Adams, led to strict non-intercourse for the next thirteen years. The only acknowledgment which Adams carried with him, in this unwelcome and mortifying retirement for his twenty-five years' services was the privilege, which had been granted to Washington on his withdrawal from the presidency, and after his death to his widow, and bestowed likewise upon all subsequent ex-presidents and their widows, of receiving his letters free of postage for the remainder of his life.
Fortunately for Adams, his thrifty habits and love of independence, sustained during his absence from home by the economical and managing talents of his wife, had enabled him to add to what he had saved from his profession before entering public life, savings from his salaries, enough to make up a sufficient property to support him for the remainder of his life, in conformity with his ideas of a decent style of propriety and solid comfort. Almost all his savings he had invested in the farming lands about him. In his vocabulary, property meant land. With all the rapid wealth then being made through trade and navigation, he had no confidence in the permanency of any property but land, views in which he was confirmed by the commercial revulsions of which he lived to be a witness.
Adams was the possessor, partly by inheritance and partly by purchase, of his father's farm, including the house in which he himself was born.
He had, however, transferred his own residence to a larger and handsomer dwelling near by, which had been forfeited by one of the refugee tories of the revolution and purchased by him, where he spent the next quarter of a century.
In this comfortable home, acquired by himself, he sought consolation for his troubled spirit in the cultivation of his lands, in books and in the bosom of his family. Mrs. Adams, to her capacities as a house-keeper, steward and farm manager, added a brightness and activity of mind and a range of reading, such as fully qualified her to sympathize with her husband in his public as well as his private career. She shared his tastes for books, and as his letters to her are unsurpassed by any American letters ever yet published, so hers to him, as well as to others, from which a selection has also been published, show her, though exhibiting less of nature and more of formality than he, yet worthy of admiration and respect as well as of the tenderness with which he always regarded her.
To affections strong enough to respond to his, a sympathy equal to his highest aspirations, a proud feeling and an enjoyment of it equal to his own, she added what is not always found in such company, a flexibility sufficient to yield to his stronger will without disturbance to her serenity or his, and without the least compromise of her own dignity or her husband's respect and deference for her. While she was not ignorant of the foibles of his character, and knew how to avail herself of them when a good purpose was to be served by it, yet her admiration of his abilities, her reliance upon his judgment, her confidence in his goodness, and her pride in his achievements, made her always ready to yield and to conform. His happiness and honor were always her leading object. This union was blessed with children well calculated to add to this happiness.
Just at the moment of his retirement from office private grief was added to political disappointment by the death of his second son Charles, who had grown to manhood, had been married and had settled in New York with flattering prospects, but had died under painful circumstances, which his father speaks of in a contemporary letter as the deepest affliction of his life, leaving a wife and two infant children dependent on him.
Colonel Smith, an officer of the revolution, who had been Adams'
secretary of legation at London and who had married his only daughter, did not prove in all respects such a son-in-law as he would have wished.
Smith's pecuniary affairs becoming embarrassed, his father-in-law had provided for him by several public appointments, the last of which was that of the surveyor of New York, which position he was allowed to hold until 1807, when he was removed from it in consequence of his implication in Miranda's expedition. Nor did Thomas, the third son, though a person of accomplishments and talents, fully answer the hopes of his parents.
But all these disappointments were more than made good by the eldest son, John Quincy, who subsequently to his recall from the diplomatic service abroad, into which Washington had introduced him and in which his father, urged by Washington, had promoted him, was chosen one of the senators in congress from Massachusetts.
All consolations, domestic or otherwise, at Mr. Adam's command, were fully needed. Never did a statesman sink more suddenly,--at a time too when his powers of action and inclinations for it seemed unimpaired--from a leading position to more absolute political insignificance. His grandson tells us that while the letters addressed to him in the year prior to March 1st, 1801, may be counted by the thousands, those of the next year scarcely numbered a hundred, while he wrote even less than he received. Nor was mere neglect the worst of it.
He sank, loaded with the jibes, the sneers, the execrations even, of both political parties into which the nation was divided. In his correspondence, which appears to have gradually increased and extended itself, Mr. Adams loved to re-explain his theoretical ideas of government, on some points of which he pushed Jefferson hard, and which the result of the French revolution so far as then developed seemed to confirm.
Another subject in which he continued to feel a great interest was theology. He had begun as an Arminian, and the more he had read and thought, and the older he grew to be, the freer views he took. Though clinging with tenacity to the religious institutions of New England, it would seem from his correspondence that he finally curtailed his theology to the ten commandments and the sermon on the mount. Of his views on this point, he gave evidence in his last public act, to which we now approach.
Mrs. Adams had died in 1818, but even that shock, severe as it was, did not loosen the firm grasp of the husband on life, its enjoyments and its duties. When, in consequence of the erection of the district of Maine into a State, a convention was to meet in 1820 to revise the constitution of Massachusetts, in the framing of which Mr. Adams had taken so leading a part, though in his eighty-sixth year, he was chosen a delegate by his townsmen. Upon his first appearance, with a form yet erect, though tremulous with age, in this Convention, which was composed of the very cream of the great minds with which the State abounded, Mr. Adams was received by members standing, and with every demonstration of affection and esteem; and a series of resolutions were forthwith passed, containing an enumeration and warm acknowledgement of some of his principal public services, and calling on him to preside.
But this, while duly acknowledging the compliment, he declined, on the score of his age and infirmities. The same cause also prevented his taking any active part in the proceedings. Yet he labored to secure a modification of the third article of the bill of rights, on the subject of public worship and its support, an article which, when originally drafting the rest of that instrument, he had passed over to other hands.
But the time had not yet come for such changes as he wished. The old puritan feeling was still too great to acknowledge the equal rights, political and religious, of other than Christians. Yet, however it might be with his colleagues and fellow-citizens, Mr. Adams, in this movement, expressed his own ideas. One of his latest letters, written in 1825, and addressed to Jefferson, is a remarkable protest against the blasphemy laws, so-called, of Massachusetts, and the rest of the Union, as being utterly inconsistent with the right of free inquiry and private judgment. It is in the letters of Mr. Adams, of which but few have ever been published, that his genius as a writer and a thinker, and no less distinctly his character as a man, is displayed. Down even to the last year of his protracted life, his letters exhibit a wonderful degree of vitality, energy, playfulness, and command of language.
As a writer of English--and we may add as a speculative philosopher--little as he ever troubled himself with revision and correction, he must be placed first among Americans of all the several generations to which he belonged, excepting only Franklin; and if Franklin excelled him in humor and geniality, he far surpassed Franklin in compass and vivacity. Indeed, it is only by the recent publication of his letters that his gifts in these respects are becoming well known.
The first installment of his private letters published during his lifetime, though not deficient in these characteristics, yet having been written under feelings of great aggravation, and in a spirit of extreme bitterness against his political opponents, was rather damaging to him than otherwise. In the interval from 1804 to 1812, Mr. Cunningham, a maternal relative, had drawn him into a private correspondence in which, still smarting under a sense of injury, he had expressed himself with perfect unreserve and entire freedom as to the chief events of his presidential administration and the character and motives of the parties concerned in them.
By a gross breach of confidence, of which Mr. Adams, like other impulsive and confiding persons, often had been the victim, those letters were sold by Cunningham's heir in 1824, while the writer and many of the parties referred to were still alive. They were published as a part of the electioneering machinery against John Quincy Adams. They called out a violent retort from Colonel Pickering, who had been secretary of State to Washington and Adams, till dismissed from office by the latter; but though Mr. Jefferson was also severely handled in them, they occasioned no interruption to the friendly relation which had been re-established between him and Mr. Adams.
Those two leading actors in American politics, at first so co-operative and afterward so hostile, again reunited in friendly intercourse, having outlived almost all of their fellow-actors, continued to descend hand in hand to the grave. Adams lived to see his son president, and to receive Jefferson's congratulations on the same. By a remarkable coincidence, they both expired on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, in which they both had taken so active a part, Adams, however, being the survivor by a few hours.
Of Adams' personal appearance and domestic character in his old age, his grandson gives the following account: "In figure, John Adams was not tall, scarcely exceeding middle height, but of a stout, well-knit frame, denoting vigor and long life, yet as he grew old inclining more and more to corpulence. His head was large and round, with a wide forehead and expanded brows. His eye was mild and benignant, perhaps even humorous when he was free from emotion, but when excited it fully expressed the vehemence of the spirit that stirred within."
"His presence was grave and imposing on serious occasions, but not unbending. He delighted in social conversation, in which he was sometimes tempted to what he called rodomontade. But he seldom fatigued those who heard him; for he mixed so much of natural vigor of fancy and illustration with the store of his acquired knowledge, as to keep alive their interest for a long time."
"His affections were warm, though not habitually demonstrated toward his relatives. His anger, when thoroughly aroused, was for a time extremely violent, but when it subsided it left no trace of malevolence behind.
Nobody could see him intimately without admiring the simplicity and truth which shone in his actions, and standing in some awe of the power and energy of his will. It was in these moments that he impressed those around him with a sense of his greatness. Even the men employed on his farm were in the habit of citing instances, some of which have been remembered down to the present day."
"At times his vehemence became so great as to make him overbearing and unjust. This was apt to happen in cases of pretension and any kind of wrong-doing. Mr. Adams was very impatient of cant, or of opposition to any of his deeply established convictions. Neither was his indignation at all graduated to the character of the individuals who might happen to excite it. He had little respect of persons, and would hold an illiterate man or raw boy to as heavy a responsibility for uttering a crude heresy, as the strongest thinker or the most profound scholar."
The same writer makes the following remarks on his general character: "His nature was too susceptible to emotions of sympathy and kindness, for it tempted him to trust more than was prudent in the professions of some who proved unworthy of his confidence. Ambitious in one sense he certainly was, but it was not the mere aspiration for place or power. It was a desire to excel in the minds of men by the development of high qualities, the love, in short, of an honorable fame, that stirred him to exult in the rewards of popular favor. Yet this passion never tempted him to change a course of action or to suppress a serious conviction, to bend to a prevailing error or to disavow one odious truth."
In these last assertions we do not fully concur. They involve some controverted points of history; however, they may be made with far more plausibility of Mr. Adams than of the greater portion of political men.
There is much in the life of John Adams worthy of careful consideration.
He rose from poverty to distinction; he was a capable man, capable of filling the highest place in the estimation of his posterity, yet his serious faults led to his political ruin. The careful perusal of his life will enable one to understand the principles of the two great parties of to-day, modified though they be, the fundamental principles remaining the same.
THOMAS JEFFERSON.
The subject of this narrative was born in Virginia, in the year 1743, on the 2nd day of April. As young Jefferson was born to affluence and was bountifully blessed with all the educational advantages which wealth will bring, many of our young readers may say--well, I could succeed, perhaps, had I those advantages. We will grant that you could provided you took means similar to those used by Jefferson, for while we must admit that all cannot be Jeffersons, nor Lincolns, nor Garfields, still we are constantly repeating in our mind the words of the poet:--
"Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time,"
it has been said that where twenty enter the dry-goods trade nineteen will fail and from their despair behold the odd one succeed--utilizing the very weapons within their own grasp to bring about his success. This is true, not only of the dry-goods trade but of all trades, of all professions, and to resume our subject--Jefferson had much with which to contend.
He finally attended school at William and Mary College for two years.
Here he strove to cultivate friendly feelings with all whom he met, with excellent success, becoming very popular with both companions and teachers. It was while a student that he heard the famous speech of Patrick Henry; and those immortal words, "GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH," seemed to kindle within him a patriotic spirit which grew until it burst forth in that noble statue to his memory,--the Declaration of Independence, which was the work of his pen. He studied law for a time, after a two years' college course, when, in 1767 he began its practice.
As Mr. Jefferson is described as tall and spare with gray eyes and red hair, surely his success is not due to his personal appearance. At the beginning of his practice he was not considered what might be termed brilliant, but the fact that he was employed on over two hundred cases within the first two years of his practice proves the secret of his success to have been his undefatigable energy. It is also stated that he rarely spoke in public which shows his good sense in discovering where his strength lay,--then pushing on that line to success.
He was elected by his countrymen to the house of Burgesses where he at once took a decided stand against parliamentary encroachment. It was in this first of his legislative efforts that he brought forward a bill tending to the freedom of slaves, provided their masters felt so disposed, but this measure was defeated. The house of Burgesses appointed him a member of the committee of correspondence. The duty of this committee was to disseminate intelligence upon the issues of the day, notably the system of taxation which the mother-country was trying to impose upon the colonies.
His article entitled: "A Summary View of the Rights of British America,"
was a masterly production, clearly defining the right of the colonies to resist taxation, and it was the principles here set forth that were afterwards adopted as the Declaration of Independence. This, paper was printed, not only in America, but in England, where its author was placed on the roll of treason and brought before parliament. This document also placed Jefferson in America among the foremost writers of that age; it also showed him to be a bold and uncompromising opponent of oppression, and an eloquent advocate of constitutional freedom.
He was sent to the Continental Congress. On the floor he was silent but he had the 'reputation of a masterly pen,' says John Adams, and in committee was a most influential member. He drafted the Declaration of Independence, and on June 28th it was laid before Congress and finally adopted, with but a few verbal changes. This document probably has the greatest celebrity of any paper of like nature in existence.