Download 11. Adams and Jefferson - Scarsdale Public Schools

Adams and Jefferson
by Alan Brinkley
This reading is excerpted from Chapter Six of Brinkley’s American History: A Survey (12th
ed.). I wrote the footnotes. If you use the questions below to guide your note taking (which
is a good idea), please be aware that several of the questions have multiple answers.
Study Questions
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Do you have any questions?
What problems did John Adams face that limited his ability to be an effective president?
At the end of the eighteenth century, why were relations between the US and France so poor?
Why did the Federalists sponsor the Alien and Sedition Acts?
Why were the Alien and Sedition Acts so controversial?
Why did Jefferson and Madison write the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions? What do these resolutions argue?
Why was Jefferson reluctant to purchase Louisiana?
The Election of 1796
Despite strong pressure from his many admirers to run for a third term as president, George
Washington insisted on retiring from office in 1797....
With Washington out of the running, no obstacle remained to an open expression of the
partisan rivalries that had been building over the previous eight years. Jefferson was the
uncontested candidate of the Republicans in 1796. The Federalists faced a more difficult choice.
Hamilton, the personification of Federalism, had created too many enemies to be a credible
candidate. So Vice President John Adams, who had been directly associated with none of the
unpopular Federalist measures, became his party’s nominee for president.
The Federalists were still clearly the dominant party, and there was little doubt of their ability
to win a majority of the presidential electors. But without Washington to mediate, they fell
victim to fierce factional rivalries that almost led to their undoing. Hamilton and many other
Federalists (especially in the South) were not reconciled to Adams’s candidacy and favored his
running mate Thomas Pinckney instead. And when, as expected, the Federalists elected a
majority of the presidential electors, some of these Pinckney supporters declined to vote for
Adams; he managed to defeat Jefferson by only three electoral votes. Because a still larger
number of Adams’s supporters declined to vote for Pinckney, Jefferson finished second in the
balloting and became vice president. (Until the Twelfth Amendment was adopted in 1804, the
Constitution provided for the candidate receiving the second highest number of electoral votes to
become vice president—hence the awkward result of men from different parties serving in the
nation’s two highest elected offices.)
Adams thus assumed the presidency under inauspicious circumstances. He presided over a
divided party, which faced a strong and resourceful Republican opposition committed to its
extinction. Adams himself was not even the dominant figure in his own party; Hamilton
remained the most influential Federalist, and Adams was never able to challenge him
effectively.... Austere, rigid, aloof, he had little talent at conciliating differences, soliciting
support, or inspiring enthusiasm. He was a man of enormous, indeed intimidating rectitude, and
he seemed to assume that his own virtue and the correctness of his positions would alone be
enough to sustain him. He was usually wrong.
The Quasi War with France
American relations with Great Britain and Spain improved as a result of [treaties signed during
the Washington administration]. But the nation’s relations with revolutionary France quickly
deteriorated....
Some of President Adams’s advisers favored war, most notably Secretary of State Thomas
Pickering,
a stern New Englander who detested France.
But Hamilton recommended
conciliation, and Adams agreed. In an effort to stabilize relations, Adams appointed a bipartisan1
commission... to negotiate with France. When the Americans arrived in Paris in 1797, three
agents of the French foreign minister, Prince Talleyrand, demanded a loan for France and a bribe
for French officials before any negotiations could begin. [One of the commissioners] responded
succinctly and angrily: “No! No! Not a sixpence!”
When Adams heard of the incident he sent a message to Congress denouncing the French
insults and urging preparations for war.
He then turned the report of the American
commissioners over to Congress, after deleting the names of the three French agents and
designating them only as “Mssrs. X, Y, and Z.” When the report was published, it created
widespread popular outrage at France’s actions and strong support for the Federalists’ response.
For nearly two years after the “XYZ Affair,” as it became known, the United States found itself
engaged in an undeclared war with France.... The United States also began cooperating closely
with the British and became virtually an ally of Britain in the war with France.
In the end, France chose to conciliate the United States before the conflict grew. Adams sent
another commission to Paris in 1800, and the new French government (headed now by “first
consul” Napoleon Bonaparte) agreed to a treaty with the United States that canceled the old
agreement of 17782 and established new commercial arrangements. As a result, the “quasi war”
came to a reasonably peaceful end.
Repression and Protest
The conflict with France helped the Federalists increase their majorities in Congress in 1798.
Armed with this new strength, they began to consider ways to silence the Republican opposition.
The result was some of the most controversial legislation in American history: the Alien and
Sedition Acts.
The Alien Act placed new obstacles in the way of foreigners who wished to become
American citizens, and it strengthened the president’s hand in dealing with aliens.3 The Sedition
Act allowed the government to prosecute those who engaged in “sedition” against the
government. In theory only libelous or treasonous activities were subject to prosecution; but
since such activities were subject to widely varying definitions, the law made it possible for the
1
Bipartisan: consisting of members of both parties
This was the alliance by which France assisted us in the Revolutionary War against Britain.
3 It is a peculiarity of the United States that we have always referred to non-citizen immigrants as “aliens,” as if they
had come to the US from another planet. American exceptionalism?
2
federal government to stifle virtually any opposition. The Republicans interpreted the new laws
as part of a Federalist campaign to destroy them and fought back.
President Adams signed the new laws but was cautious in implementing them. He did not
deport any aliens, and he prevented the government from launching a major crusade against the
Republicans. But the legislation had a significant repressive effect nevertheless. The Alien Act
helped discourage immigration and encouraged some foreigners already in the country to leave.
And the administration made use of the Sedition Act to arrest and convict ten men, most of them
Republicans newspaper editors whose only crime had been to criticize the Federalists in
government.
Republican leaders pinned their hopes for a reversal of the Alien and Sedition Acts on the
state legislatures. (The Supreme Court had not yet established its sole right to nullify
congressional legislation, and there were many who believed that the states had that power too.)
The Republicans laid out a theory for state action in two sets of resolutions in 1798-1799, one
written (anonymously) by Jefferson and adopted by the Kentucky legislature and the other
drafted by Madison and approved by the Virginia legislature. The Virginia and Kentucky
Resolutions, as they were known, used the ideas of John Locke to argue that the federal
government had been formed by a “compact” or contract among the states and possessed only
certain... powers.... If the parties to the contract, the states, decided that the central government
had exceeded those powers, the Kentucky Resolution claimed, they had the right to “nullify” the
appropriate laws. (Such claims emerged again in the South in the decades before the Civil War.)
The Republicans did not win wide support for nullification; only Virginia and Kentucky
declared the congressional statues void. The Republicans did, however, succeed in elevating
their dispute with the Federalists to the level of a national crisis. By the late 1790s, the entire
nation was as deeply and bitterly divided politically as it would ever be in its history.4 ...
The “Revolution” of 1800
These bitter controversies shaped the 1800 presidential election. The presidential candidates
were the same as four years earlier: Adams for the Federalists, Jefferson for the Republicans.
But the campaign of 1800 was very different from the one preceding it. Indeed, it may have
been the ugliest in American history....
The election was close, and the crucial contest was in New York. There, Aaron Burr had
mobilized an organization of Revolutionary War veterans, the Tammany Society, to serve as a
Republican political machine. And through Tammany’s efforts, the Republicans carried the city
by a large majority, and with it the state. Jefferson was... elected.5 ...
After the election of 1800, the only branch of the federal government left in Federalist hands
was the judiciary. The Adams administration spent its last months in office taking steps to make
the party’s hold on the courts secure. By the Judiciary Act of 1801, passed by the lame duck
4
Some have argued that the current divisions in Washington approach—or even exceed—the level of political
disharmony of the late eighteenth century.
5 Although a flaw in the electoral college system, fixed by the Twelfth Amendment, led to Jefferson and his vicepresidential running mate, Burr, being tied. The election was thrown into the House of Representatives. It took the
intervention of Hamilton and some leading Federalists to ensure that Jefferson was elected. Burr never forgave
Hamilton, with fateful—and fatal—results.
Congress, the Federalists reduced the number of Supreme Court justiceships by one but greatly
increased the number of federal judgeships as a whole. Adams quickly appointed Federalists to
the newly created positions. Indeed, there were charges that he stayed up until midnight on his
last day in office to finish signing the new judges commissions. These officeholders became
known as the “midnight appointments.”
JEFFERSON THE PRESIDENT
Privately, Thomas Jefferson may well have considered his victory over John ADams in 1800
to be what he later termed it: a revolution “as real... as that of 1776.” Publicly, however, he was
constrained and conciliatory as he assumed office, attempting to minimize the differences
between the two parties and to calm the passions that the bitter campaign had aroused. “We are
all republicans, we are all federalists,” he said in his inaugural address. And during his eight
years in office, he did much to prove those words correct. There was no complete repudiation of
Federalist policies, no true “revolution.” Indeed, at times Jefferson seemed to outdo the
Federalists at their own work—most notably in overseeing a remarkable expansion of the
territory of the United States....
Jefferson and Napoleon
Having failed in a grandiose plan to seize India from the British Empire, [French Emperor]
Napoleon began turning his imperial ambitions in a new direction: he began to dream of
restoring French power in the New World.... Under the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1800
between the French and the Spanish, France regained title to Louisiana, which included almost
the whole of the Mississippi Valley to the west of the river, plus New Orleans near its mouth.
The Louisiana Territory would, Napoleon hoped, become the heart of a great French empire in
America....
Jefferson was unaware at first of Napoleon’s imperial ambitions in America, and for a time
he pursued a foreign policy that reflected his well-known admiration for France. He appointed
as American minister to Paris the ardently pro-French Robert R. Livingston. He worked to
secure ratification of the Franco-American settlement of 1800 and began observing the terms of
the treaty even before it was ratified. The Adams administration had joined with the British in
recognizing and supporting the rebel regime of Toussaint L’Ouverture in Santo Domingo;
Jefferson assured the French minister in Washington that the American people, especially those
of the slaveholding states, did not approve of the black revolutionary, who was setting a bad
example for their own slaves. he even implied that the United States might join with France in
putting down the rebellion (although nothing ever came of the suggestion).
Jefferson began to reconsider his position toward France when he heard rumors of the secret
transfer of Louisiana.
Jefferson was even more alarmed when, in the fall of 1802, he learned that the [governor of
New Orleans] had announced a disturbing new regulation.
American ships sailing the
Mississippi River had for many years been accustomed to depositing their cargoes in New
Orleans for transfer to oceangoing vessels. The [governor] now forbade the practice... thus
effectively closing the lower Mississippi to American shippers.
Westerners demanded that the federal government do something to reopen the river. The
president faced a dilemma. If he yielded to the frontier clamor and tried to change the policy by
force, he would run the risk of a major war with France. If he ignored the westerners’ demands,
he might lose political support. But Jefferson saw another solution. He instructed Robert
Livingston... to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans. Livingston on his own authority
proposed that the French sell the United States the vast western part of Louisiana as well.
In the meantime, Jefferson persuaded Congress to appropriate funds for an expansion of the
army and the construction of a river fleet, and he deliberately gave the impression that American
forces might soon descend on New Orleans and that the United States might form an alliance
with Great Britain if the problem with France were not resolved. Perhaps that was why
Napoleon suddenly decided to accept Livingston’s proposal and offer the United States the entire
Louisiana Territory....
The Louisiana Purchase
Faced with Napoleon’s startling proposal, Livingston and James Monroe, whom Jefferson had
sent to Paris to assist in the negotiations, had to decide first whether they should even consider
making a treaty for the purchase of the entire Louisiana Territory, since they had not been
authorized by their government to do so. But fearful that Napoleon might withdraw the offer,
they decided to proceed without further instructions from home. After some haggling over the
price Livingston and Monroe signed the agreement on April 30, 1803.
By the terms of the treaty, the united States was to pay a total of 80 million france ($15
million) to the French government. The United States was also to grant certain exclusive
commercial privileges to France in the port of New Orleans and was to incorporate the residents
of Louisiana into the Union with the same rights and privileges as other citizens....
In Washington the president was both pleased and embarrassed when he received the treaty.
He was pleased with the terms of the bargain but uncertain whether the United States had
authority to accept it, since he had always insisted that the federal government could rightfully
exercise only those powers explicitly assigned to it. Nowhere did the Constitution say anything
about the acquisition of new territory. But Jefferson’s advisors persuaded him that his treatymaking power under the Constitution would justify the purchase of Louisiana. The president
finally agreed, trusting, as he said, “that the good sense of our country will correct the evil of
loose construction when it shall produce ill effects.” The Republican Congress promptly
approved the treaty and appropriated money to implement its provisions. Finally, late in 1803,
the French assumed formal control of Louisiana from Spain just long enough to turn the territory
over to General James Wilkinson, the commissioner of the United States.
The government organized the Louisiana Territory much as it had organized the Northwest
Territory, with the assumption that its various territories would eventually become states. The
first of these was admitted to the Union as the state of Louisiana in 1812.