I
IT is a pity that in the days of the Adams Administration it was not the fashion to paint group portraits of the President and his Cabinet. Had it been the custom, a purely commercial artist might have left us a conventional picture of no special interest; but had the task fallen to a great artist of intuitive penetration, capable of seizing upon the salient characteristics and the soul of his subjects, the result would have been a fascinating study in incongruities and clashing spirits. The suspicion on the round, smug face of Adams; the domineering arrogance on the cold Puritan countenance of Pickering; the suave and smiling treachery in the eyes of Wolcott; and the effeminate softness and weakness in the physiognomy of McHenry would have delighted a gallery through the generations.
Ali Baba among his Forty Thieves is no more deserving of sympathy than John Adams shut up within the seclusion of his Cabinet room with his official family of secret enemies. No other President has ever been so environed with a secret hostility; none other so shamelessly betrayed by treachery. The men on whose advice he was to rely were not even of his own choosing. He inherited them—that was his misfortune; but he meekly accepted them—and that was his weakness. Where Washington had begun with at least two advisers of transcendent ability, he was to undertake his task with the assistance of an official family that exceeded mediocrity only in the field of treachery and mendacity. Not only were they to disregard his wishes—they were to conspire against him. Not only were they to ignore his leadership—they were to take orders from a private citizen who was his political rival and personal foe. Years later, the relative of one was solemnly to justify their disloyalty with the remarkable statement that, having been appointed by his predecessor, ‘they owed him nothing’; and to defend their retention of place despite their indisposition to serve him honestly with the astounding assertion that ‘the interest of their party and the wishes of their friends prevented them.’[1192]
We are interested in the personalities of these men primarily because it was not only not ‘in the interest of their party’ for them to remain, but ultimately destructive. The taxes, the standing army, the Alien and Sedition Laws would have weakened, and might have destroyed, Federalism; the party treachery within the Cabinet would have wrought its ruin without them.
II
John Adams was a very great man and a pure patriot, with many fatal temperamental weaknesses. Like Dr. Samuel Johnson, whom he strongly suggests, he would have thrived in an atmosphere of admiration. Had he been surrounded by incense-throwers and idolatrous disciples applauding his every utterance, forgiving his bursts of temper and smiling at the pinching of their ears and the kicking of their shins, with a worshiping Boswell jotting down his conversations, he would have been supremely happy and probably at his best. Like the genius who spread his tail feathers so proudly at Streatham, he was vain, domineering, ponderous, at times tempestuous in his bursts of passion, disdainful of finesse, given to intemperate expressions, learned, prejudiced, often selfish—and a little fat. But he had played a noble part in the Revolutionary struggle, a dignified rôle in the diplomacy of the Old World, and he was entitled to something better than he received.
There was nothing thrilling in the appearance of Adams to captivate the crowd. Below the medium height and rather full, he looked the stolidity of the English country gentleman[1193] and invited the sobriquet of the sharp-tongued Izard of ‘His Rotundity.’[1194] His fat round face would have been less offensively smug had it not been so cold,[1195] and his dignity more impressive had it been less aggressive. The top of his head was bald as a billiard ball, and, while he carefully powdered the remnant of his hair, nothing could have made this solid gentleman of the Quincy farm the glass of fashion. Unlike many of the public figures of the time, he affected no foppery, and, while he dressed with conventional propriety, his garb was so little a part of himself that most of the chroniclers of his time ignore it. We know that he appeared one day for dinner at Mrs. Francis’s boarding-house in a drab-colored coat[1196] and at his inauguration in ‘a full suit of pearl-colored broadcloth.’[1197] Even the saturnine Maclay, who poked fun at all his peculiarities of appearance, could find nothing objectionable but the sword he affected when he first presided over the Senate.[1198]
Of his manner in company we must reach a conclusion from a composite of contradictions. Thanks to the Adams spirit of self-criticism, we have a confession of the manners of his youth when he was prone to make a display of his intellectual wares, and to prove his parts with sneering sarcasms about his elders.[1199] Years later, an English tourist was impressed with his ‘somewhat cold and reserved manner’ and with ‘the modesty of his demeanor.’[1200] In neither picture do we have an attractive personality, and are safe in assuming that it was not pleasing, without drawing on the honest prejudices of Maclay. On the first attempt of the latter to establish social relations, he found Adams ‘not well furnished with small talk,’ and he was particularly struck with his ‘very silly kind of laugh.’[1201] This interested the sour democrat from the Pennsylvania frontier, and, critically observing his manner of presiding over the Senate, he complained that ‘instead of that sedate easy air I would have him possess, he will look on one side, then on the other, then down on the knees of his breeches, then dimple his visage with the most silly kind of half smile.’[1202] This smile was evidently aggravating to the Senator’s gout, for we hear of it again at a dinner at Washington’s where he was clearly angered when he caught the great man ‘ever and anon mantling his visage with the most unmeaning simper that ever mantled the face of folly.’[1203] ‘Bonny Johnny Adams,’ snorts the Senator, more than once.[1204] Thus, painfully self-conscious, and without capacity for the appealing levity of banter, he was temperamentally incapable of that personal approach that makes for the intimacy of friendship. In the parlance of the day, he was a ‘poor mixer,’ and this had the same effect on political fortunes then as now.
This alone would have made men indifferent, but he had a vanity that drove them away. If we are to believe the common comment of friend and foe, he was inordinately vain. With that strange, penetrating insight into his own character, he appreciated this weakness in his youth, and no doubt sought to uproot a vice that was in the very fiber of his being. In the musings of his diary we have the frank admission: ‘Good treatment makes me think I am admired, beloved, and my own vanity will be indulged in me; so I dismiss my guard and grow weak, silly, vain, conceited, ostentatious.’[1205] On another page he promises himself ‘never to show my own importance or superiority.’[1206] But the weakness increased with age. ‘I always considered Mr. Adams a man of great vanity,’ wrote the father of one of his Cabinet to his son two weeks after the inauguration.[1207] This quality was so predominant that both friend and foe sought to turn it to advantage. Hamilton, in his ill-advised attack, was able to refer to ‘the unfortunate foibles of vanity without bounds,’ without fear of contradiction.[1208] After his election to the Vice-Presidency, this vanity became ‘ridiculous.’[1209] Strangely enough, there is some evidence that this very weakness was responsible in part for his election to that post. Referring to the part played in the event by Dr. Rush and himself, Maclay wrote that ‘we knew his vanity and hoped by laying hold of it to render him useful among the New England members in our schemes of bringing Congress to Pennsylvania.’[1210] But stranger still—and this is something to be kept in mind throughout—it was reserved for his greatest political opponent to predict to one of his lieutenants that, while Adams was ‘vain’ and ‘irritable,’ ‘he is so amiable that I pronounce you will love him.’[1211] The general effect, however, was far different from love. It unquestionably played into the hands of his enemies and neutralized the effect of both his ability and militant patriotism.