On the night of October 15th Adams, calm, cold, thrice-armed, sat about the table with his Cabinet, no longer deceived by any of them save Wolcott. The purpose was the consideration of the instructions that had been prepared. Some changes were made. Adams asked advice on certain points. At eleven o’clock the instructions were unanimously approved. The Cabinet lingered, but Adams brought up no new subject. Out into the dark Trenton streets trooped the conspirators, almost hopeful. They were still at breakfast the next morning when orders were received from Adams that the instructions should be put in shape, a frigate be placed in readiness to receive the envoys who should sail not later than the first of the month.
The conspiracy had failed and John Adams was actually President.
The Jeffersonians were jubilant. Duane wrote that Adams had ‘crossed the Rubicon,’ but that the rumor that Pickering and Wolcott had resigned was groundless. ‘They will never sacrifice their places to squeamish feelings.’[1693] Hamilton had sought to deter the President, but to his honor ‘he resisted every seducement and repelled every insinuation.’[1694] The Hamiltonians were either furious or depressed. The Southern Federalists under Marshall approved, as did Jay, and the ‘Centinel’ commended the act, but the men who had made and maintained the prestige of the Federalist Party were in murderous mood. The mission would succeed—they knew it. There would be no war, and the army would have to go. With that would go the instrument for keeping down insurrections in America or for waging a war of conquest in South America. With one masterful effort, Adams had pulled down the pillars of the party temple and he could not escape in its fall. But it was the proudest and most masterful moment in his life, and he was content. Long after the débâcle he was to write that he asked no better epitaph than the sentence that he had taken upon himself the responsibility of the peace with France.
IX
From that moment the Federalists were a house divided against itself, and the cloud burst and the rain descended and beat upon it, and the days were dark. Dreary, indeed, that winter of 1799. ‘Porcupine’ was driven from Philadelphia, and young Fenno, disgusted, gave up his paper with a farewell address so contemptuous of democracy and American institutions that the wiser leaders trembled at his temerity. M’Kean, the Democrat, had been swept into the gubernatorial office. Washington had died, and could no longer be used to advance the party interest. Even the dashing Harper, clever in political fight or social frolic, had despaired of the future in politics, resigned his seat, and made arrangements to move to Baltimore as the son-in-law of Carroll of Carrollton.[1695] Duane was firing relentlessly at the scandals and finding flesh, and there was no ‘Porcupine’ to return the fire. The brilliant and audacious Charles Pinckney had appeared in the Senate to give a militant leadership to the Jeffersonians that the Federalists could not match. Into the House had come a giant, in John Marshall, to give to a later-day Federalism a sanity that came too late, but he was with Adams, not Hamilton.
The shadows even fell on the brilliant Federalist society. Hamilton was there that winter, to be sure, ‘to keep the watch,’ as Duane put it, and through an unhappy coincidence ‘The Aurora’ was able to add that ‘Mrs. Reynolds, the sentimental heroine,’ was back in town. But something like tragedy had fallen on the Holland House of Federalism, and weeping was heard in the rooms once given to gayety and laughter. One night Marie Bingham, not sixteen, slipped out of the home of her father, with Count de Tilly, age forty-five, a dissolute scion of the French aristocracy with an eye to the Bingham fortune, and was married at two o’clock in the morning. The couple were found in the home of a French milliner in the early morning, and physicians worked over the brilliant Mrs. Bingham, who was in hysterics. Money soon dissolved the union, but the lights were never quite so bright thereafter in the princely mansion of the cleverest hostess in Philadelphia. The rain fell even upon the House of Bingham.[1696]
CHAPTER XIX
‘THE GRAPES OF WRATH’
I
WHEN Congress convened in the winter of 1799, the Federalists thoroughly appreciated the desperation of their situation. The tide of public opinion was rising against them rapidly because of their measures, and they were divided against themselves. As the sun of the once brilliant party went down, there was one colossal figure of brilliant promise silhouetted against the darkening sky, but John Marshall, now a member of the House, was not in good odor with the Hamiltonians because of his opposition to the Alien and Sedition Laws. The irrepressible clash of contending policies and ambitions had been foreshadowed in the difficulties Marshall had encountered in framing a Reply to Adams’s Address that could command the united support of the party, and he had succeeded measurably by giving the Reply a meaningless phrasing. For a moment it seemed that Marshall might regain the confidence of his fellow partisans when, in a speech of brilliancy and force, he had demolished the flimsy case of the Democrats against the President in the matter of Jonathan Robbins. With his characteristic readiness to concede the full strength of an enemy, Jefferson had written Madison that in the debate on Robbins ‘J. Marshall [distinguished himself] greatly.’[1697] But the Federalist cheers for their new leader were speedily turned to groans and hisses—and thereon hangs a tale of political infamy scarcely approached in audacity in American history.
Almost two years before, when the French war hysteria was at its height and the Federalists were cocks of the walk, the inner circle of the party in the Senate met one night about the table in the Bingham dining-room with the more moderate senatorial members. To assure party solidarity on all important party measures, it was proposed to bind all by the votes of the majority in a party caucus. The extremists had a slight majority over the moderate element. Thus, for a season, the Government was, to all practical purposes, in the hands of a Senate oligarchy composed of a minority of the Senators. From the summer of 1799, the extremists entertained no illusions as to their popularity with the country. The election of Jefferson seemed imminent—provided a way could not be found to cheat him of his victory. From that moment on until the hour of his final triumph by the vote of the House in 1801, there was not a moment when the Federalist leaders were not ready to adopt any method, however disreputable and desperate, to accomplish their purpose. In this spirit they conceived the wicked scheme to rob Jefferson of his victory through an amazing measure prescribing the mode of deciding disputed elections for President and Vice-President. Senator Ross of Pennsylvania agreed to sponsor the bill.