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John Adams

October 30, 1735 - July 4, 1826

The removal of the government from Philadelphia to the new Federal City by the Potomac was scheduled to take place in June. Adams, with his memories of Paris and London, with his fondness for Philadelphia and his belief that the capital of a great nation ought to be a great city, could have been appalled by the whole place and seen it as a colossal blunder. He could have dismissed it as Jefferson's city, Jefferson having devoted more time and thought to the project than anyone in government. Everything considered, there was almost no reason for Adams to have liked anything about it.

Yet by all signs he was quite pleased. "I like the seat of government very well," he wrote Abigail. He stayed ten days, lodging at Tunnicliffe's City Hotel, near the Capitol. He was joined by his new appointments, Secretary of State Marshall and Secretary of War Dexter, who with the rest of the executive branch had made the move from Philadelphia, along with the complete files of the President and the departments shipped in eight packing cases.

Adams made a brief inspection of the new President's House. Once, when asked by Washington how he thought a President ought to live-in what manner and style-Adams had said it should be in a fairly grand way. And though he had said nothing specific about the sort of house a President should have, this under construction seems to have met his approval.

For several days toward the end of October, plasterers and painters at work on the President's House in Washington, as well as the Commissioners of the District of Columbia, had been keeping an eye out for the President, not knowing just when he might appear. With the imponderables of travel, no one's arrival could be predetermined or planned for precisely, not even a President's.

The immense house was still unfinished. It reeked of wet plaster and wet paint. Fires had to be kept blazing in every fireplace on the main floor to speed up the drying process. Only a twisting back stair had been built between floors. Closet doors were missing. There were no bells to ring for service. And though the furniture had arrived from Philadelphia, it looked lost in such enormous rooms. Just one painting had been hung, a full-length portrait of Washington in his black velvet suit, by Gilbert Stuart, which had also been sent from Philadelphia.

The house stood in a weedy, wagon-rutted field with piles of stone and rubble about. It all looked very raw and unkempt. Yet the great whitewashed stone building, the largest house in America - as large as the half of the Capitol that had been erected - was truly a grand edifice, noble even in its present state.

At midday, Saturday, November 1, Commissioners William Thornton and Alexander White were inspecting the main floor, when, at one o'clock, the President was seen rolling up to the south entrance in his coach-and-four. He was accompanied still by Billy Shaw and John Briesler following on horseback. There was no one else, no honor guard, no band playing, no entourage of any kind.

The two commissioners and a few workers at hand comprised the welcoming committee for the arrival of John Adams, the first President to occupy what only much later would become known as the White House. An office was made ready in an ample room with a southern exposure on the second floor, next door to what was to be Adams's bedroom. Secretaries Marshall and Stoddert, the two in the cabinet Adams counted on, came to pay their respects. Later, supper finished, he climbed the back stairs candle in hand and retired for the night. At his desk the next morning, on a plain sheet of paper, which he headed, "President's House, Washington City, Nov. 2, 1800," he wrote to Abigail a letter in which he offered a simple benediction:

I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.

That the contest for the presidency in 1800 was to be unlike any of the three preceding presidential elections was clear at once. For the first (and last) time in history, the President was running against the Vice President. The two political parties had also come into their own with a vitality and vengeance exceeding anything in the country's experience.

Further, under the Sedition Act anyone openly criticizing the President ran the risk of being fined or sent to prison. Since the first sensational case against Congressman Matthew ("Spitting") Lyon of Vermont, eleven others had been charged and convicted under the law. In one instance, a New Jersey tavern loafer who had done no more than cast aspersions on the President's posterior was arrested, prosecuted, and fined $ 150.

That spring of 1800, the notorious James Callender reemerged, determined to defeat "the wretch" Adams, elect his patron Jefferson, and make himself a martyr. Matthew Lyon, after being sentenced to four months in a foul Vermont Fall, had become a national hero and was overwhelmingly reelected to Congress.

Callender, who had quit Philadelphia, was now working as a Republican propagandist in Richmond, Virginia, with the encouragement and financial support of Jefferson, who, at the same time, was actively distributing a variety of campaign propaganda throughout the country, always careful to conceal his involvement. "Do not let my name be connected with the business," he advised James Monroe. That Adams was never known to be involved in such activity struck some as a sign of how naive and behind the times he was.

On Inauguration Day, Wednesday, March 4, John Adams made his exit from the President's House and the capital at four in the morning, traveling by public stage under clear skies lit by a quarter moon. He departed eight hours before Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office at the Capitol, and even more inconspicuously than he had arrived, rolling through empty streets past darkened houses, and again with Billy Shaw and John Briesler as his companions.

To his political rivals and enemies Adams's predawn departure was another ill-advised act of a petulant old man. But admirers, too, expressed disappointment. A correspondent for the Massachusetts Spy observed in a letter from Washington that numbers of Adams's friends wished he had not departed so abruptly. "Sensible, moderate men of both parties would have been pleased had he tarried until after the installation of his successor. It certainly would have had good effect."

By his presence at the ceremony Adams could have set an example of grace in defeat, while at the same time paying homage to a system whereby power, according to a written constitution, is transferred peacefully. After so vicious a contest for the highest office, with party hatreds so near to igniting in violence, a peaceful transfer of power seemed little short of a miracle. If ever a system was proven to work under extremely adverse circumstances, it was at this inauguration of 1801, and it is regrettable that Adams was not present. It would also have been more politic to have expressed confidence in his successor, but, such expressions were not Adams's way if he did not mean them.

No President having ever been defeated for reelection until then, there was no tradition of a defeated president appearing at the installation of the winner. It is also quite possible that Adams was not invited to attend, or made to feel he would be welcome. When it was rumored, for example, that Adams might deliver a valedictory to Congress, the Aurora had questioned how possibly the "Duke of Braintree" could ever consider appearing before "a body in which his former friends are his enemies, and his former opponents the only persons who pity him." Adams, said the Aurora, was a man who had been cast out by God like "polluted water out at the back door." "May he return in safety to Braintree, that Mrs. Adams may wash his befuddled brains clear."

Perhaps, given what Adams had been through at the hands of the Republicans and a number of Federalists still in Congress, those who had done all they could to overthrow him, he simply could not face being made a spectacle of their triumph.

Also, Adams's departure was no sudden, dark-of-the-night impulse. It had been planned more than a week in advance, as is clear from the correspondence of Billy Shaw, and there was no secret about it. To get to Baltimore in a day, one had to take the early stage, and the early stage departed at four in the morning.

Adams himself never explained why he did not stay for Jefferson's inauguration, but then it seems he was never asked. "We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists," Jefferson said famously in his inaugural address before a full Senate Chamber, his voice so soft many had difficulty hearing him. A passing tribute to Washington was made before he finished, but of Adams he said nothing.

To the victorious Republicans, and to generations of historians, the thought of the tall Jefferson, with his air of youth at fifty-seven, assuming the presidency in the new Capitol at the start of a new century, his eye on the future, would stand in vivid contrast to a downcast, bitter John Adams, old and "toothless" at sixty-five, on his "morning flight" to Baltimore.

Downcast, bitter, Adams may have been, but there is no evidence to support such a description. Adams loved the start of a new day, loved being on the move. Conceivably he felt immense relief to be homewardbound, free finally of his burdens, his conscience "neat and easy," as he would say. No one will ever know, but it is perfectly possible that as the sun rose higher that cloudless morning, Adams felt contentment of a kind he had not known for years - once he got over the fact that traveling with him on the same stage, as chance would have it, was Theodore Sedgwick. Like two warring boys who are made to sit in the same room until they get along, they would ride together all the way to Massachusetts.

Whatever Adams's state of mind, he was leaving his successor a nation "with its coffers full," as he wrote, and with "fair prospects of peace with all the world smiling in its face, its commerce flourishing, its navy glorious, its agriculture uncommonly productive and lucrative."

In turbulent, dangerous times he had held to a remarkably steady course. He had shown that a strong defense and a desire for peace were not mutually exclusive, but compatible and greatly in the national interest. The new navy was an outstanding achievement. In less than two years, it had grown from almost nothing to 50 ships, including the frigates United States, Constitution, and Constellation, and over 5,000 officers and seamen, and this bore heavily on the outcome of the negotiations with France. Indeed, Adams's insistence on American naval strength proved decisive in achieving peace with France in 1800. Further, by undercutting Hamilton and making his army useless, he may have saved the country from militarism.

In his four years as President, there had been no scandal or corruption. If he was less than outstanding as an administrator, if he had too readily gone along with the Alien and Sedition Acts, and was slow to see deceit within his own cabinet, he had managed nonetheless to cope with a divided country and a divided party, and in the end achieved a rare level of statesmanship. To his everlasting credit, at the risk of his career, reputation, and his hold on the presidency, he chose not to go to war when that would have been highly popular and politically advantageous in the short run. As a result, the country was spared what would almost certainly have been a disastrous mistake.

In much the way he had rushed out in the night to help fight fires in Philadelphia and Washington, he had done his all to put out the fire of war - to the immeasurable benefit of the American people, and with no loss of honor or prestige to the nation. It was a brave, heroic performance.

Adams understood clearly the importance of what he had accomplished. To his dying day he would be proudest of all of having achieved peace. As he would write to a friend, "I desire no other inscription over my gravestone than: `Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of peace with France in the year 1800.'"

In the brief spell of goodwill that followed Adams's inaugural address in 1797, Benjamin Bache had reminded the country that the new President was a "man of incorruptible integrity," "dignity," exceptional "resources of mind," and high purpose. "He declares himself the friend of France and of peace, the admirer of republicanism, the enemy of party. ... How characteristic of a patriot." The same could have been said at the conclusion of Adams's presidency no less than at the beginning.

Subjected to some of the most malicious attacks ever endured by a president, beset by personal disloyalty and political betrayal, suffering the loss of his mother, the near death of his wife, the death of a son, tormented by physical ailments, he had more than weathered the storm. His bedrock integrity, his spirit of independence, his devotion to country, his marriage, his humor, and a great underlying love of life were all still very much intact.

If Adams found any relief or pleasure in his duties, it was approving, on April 24, legislation that appropriated $5,900 to "purchase such books as may be necessary" for a new Library of Congress. It was one of the few measures upon which he and the Vice President could have heartily agreed.

David McCullough. . Simon & Schuster, 2002.

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