Jefferson and Hamilton

CHAPTER XIV

AN INCONGRUOUS PORTRAIT GALLERY

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.

III

Because of his inordinate vanity, he was susceptible to flattery, and they who knew him best approached him accordingly. We have an illustration of it at the time of the decision to dismiss Genêt. There was some question as to the attitude of Adams, and, knowing of his secret jealousy of Washington, George Cabot, to whom was assigned the task of guiding him favorably, called upon him one morning at an early hour.

‘Mr. Adams, this French Minister’s conduct seems to me to be the most objectionable,’ ventured Cabot casually.

‘Objectionable? It is audacious, sir,’ stormed Adams.

‘I think if you were President you would not permit him to perform his office very long,’ said the cunning Cabot.

‘Not an hour, sir. I would dismiss him immediately.’

‘I wish you would allow me to say to the President that such are your views,’ said Cabot.

‘Certainly, sir; I will say so to the President myself when I see him.’[1212]

Thus the danger of Adams’s opposition was cleverly removed by conveying the impression that the suggestion of a dismissal had come from him. So thoroughly were his enemies imbued with the idea that he could be led by subtle flattery that the apologists for the traitors in his Cabinet, taking note of his later harmonious relations with Marshall, explained that these were due to the genius of the latter in insinuating his own ideas into Adams’s head. However that may be, there was one thing that flattery could not do—it could not coax him from a principle or from the performance of a patriotic duty. When the royal Attorney-General of Massachusetts undertook to flatter him into the service of the King in the fight against the people eight years before the Declaration of Independence, he failed utterly.

The violence of his temper made him difficult even to his friends, and he had but few. He had a genius for embroilment, and dwelt perpetually on a battle-field, sometimes real, often imaginary, but always genuine to him. Liancourt, calling upon him at Quincy and finding his conversation ‘extremely agreeable,’ noted, however, that it was ‘tinged with a sort of sarcasm.’[1213] Madison, we have seen, referred to his ‘ticklish’ temper.[1214] If a political opponent could give a moderate description of his weakness, and a Frenchman one so mild, the members of his Cabinet felt no compulsion for restraint. Franklin had done him a grave disservice in a brief but altogether friendly characterization carrying the suggestion that he sometimes appeared mad. This was a hint on which his enemies were to play as long as he lived. They took Franklin literally and called Adams ‘crazy.’ ‘What but insanity’ could have led him to this or that? asks the biographer of Wolcott.[1215] ‘No sane mind could have imagined such a thought,’ he says again.[1216] ‘A weak and intemperate mind,’ writes one of his Cabinet to another.[1217] Even Jefferson, who was more considerate of him than others, thought his French war message ‘crazy.’ But it was reserved for McHenry to sum up his enemies’ case against him. ‘Whether he is spiteful, playful, witty, kind, cold, drunk, sober, angry, easy, stiff, jealous, cautious, confident, close, open, it is almost always in the wrong place or to the wrong person.’[1218] All of which means that he was super-sensitive, irritable, the victim of an ungovernable temper which drove him into spluttering rages on ridiculously slight provocations. Men shrank from conferences with him on subjects involving a difference of opinion. Then he could be as insulting as Dr. Johnson without the advantage of having obsequious idolaters on whom to vent his rage. What a joy it would have been to have pitted these two men against each other on the question of colonial rights! What a picture Boswell could have made of the encounter!

Adams was difficult in conference, too, because of his suspicious disposition. He could never quite persuade himself of the sincerity of his conferee, and he carried a chip upon his shoulder. This suspicion of his fellows had been a curse of his youth; it followed him to the grave. He felt himself surrounded by envy, hatred, malice, and was inclined to suspect that a good-natured smile was in derision. In youth he fancied that his neighbors were anxious to retard his progress. He was miserable in London, where his reception, while cool, was not half so bad as he imagined. The British Minister in Paris could not disabuse him of the notion that in London he would be looked upon ‘with evil eyes.’[1219] His worst fears were realized in ‘the awkward timidity in general’ and the ‘conscious guilt’ and shame in the countenances of the people.[1220] This feeling that he was in the midst of enemies made him more than ever tenacious of his rights. He knew the privileges and civilities to which his position entitled him, and keenly felt his failure to receive them. It was something he was never to forgive. The begrudging or withholding of a right was always, to him, an affront instantly to be met with a stormy challenge. ‘I am not of Cæsar’s mind,’ he wrote, soon after becoming Vice-President. ‘The second place in Rome is high enough for me, although I have a spirit that will not give up its right or relinquish its place.’[1221] This sense of his deserts, because of ability and services, goes far to explain his relations with Washington and Hamilton.

The evidence is abundant that he resented the fame and popularity of Washington. Like Pickering, he did not share the enthusiasm over the great man’s military genius. During the war he had sometimes found fault with his military tactics.[1222] Later, when he became the second official of the Republic, he secretly resented the distance that separated him from the chief. He had played the patriot’s rôle long before Washington had shown a marked interest in the quarrel of the colonies; had been one of the makers of the Revolution; had served with distinction in diplomacy; and, unlike Washington, had studied politics and statecraft all his life. Why should he, with such a record, be so completely overshadowed, and why relegated to the end that upstarts like Hamilton—‘the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar’—might be pushed to the front? This, the reasoning of his jealousy which was to destroy his perspective and lead him into trouble.

IV

This was due in some measure to the distance between reality and the dream world in which he lived. As he grew older, he became more and more impressed with the pomp of power. The son of a Yankee shoemaker was covetous of the ribbons of distinction. The masses receded to a respectful distance. In the forefront were the gods, and he among them; and among these he claimed a right to the front rank. Ceremony became important. Titles were safeguards of organized society. An order of nobility sprang up in his imagination. ‘You and I,’ he wrote Sam Adams, ‘have seen four noble families rise up in Boston—the Crafts, Gores, Dawes, and Austins. These are really a nobility in our town, as the Howards, Somersets, Berties in England.’ His feet lost contact with the earth—he soared. ‘Let us do justice to the people and to the nobles; for nobles there are, as I have proved, in Boston as well as in Madrid.’[1223] Many things, he thought, can make for nobility—even matrimony. ‘Would Washington have been Commander of the Revolutionary army or President ... if he had not married the rich widow of Mr. Custis? Would Jefferson have been President ... if he had not married the daughter of Mr. Wales?’ Thus he challenged John Taylor of Caroline.[1224]

Infatuated with such views, he was naturally in harmony with his party in its contempt for democracy.[1225] ‘If our government does well I shall be more surprised than I ever was in my life,’ he said one day, standing by the stove in the Senate Chamber before the gavel had fallen. Carroll ventured the opinion that it was strong enough. ‘If it is, I know not whence it is to arise,’ Adams replied. ‘It cannot have energy. It has neither rewards nor punishments.’[1226] This distrust of democracy was ingrained. We find it outcropping in his early life, as toward the end. When he was summoned to go over the reply of the Massachusetts Legislature to the pretensions of Hutchinson, the royal Governor, in 1773, he found ‘the draught of a report[1227] was full of very popular talk and of those democratical principles that have done so much mischief to this country.’[1228] Even Paine’s ‘Common Sense,’ which was tonic to the Revolution, was spoiled for him because ‘his plan was so democratical.’[1229] Haunting the bookstalls in London he thought ‘the newspapers, the magazines, the reviews, the daily pamphlets were all in the hands of hirelings,’ and was convinced that the men who ‘preached about ... liberty, equality, fraternity, and the rights of man’ could be hired ‘for a guinea a day.’[1230] It was after this that he wrote the ‘Discourses of Davilla’—an onslaught on democracy. And fourteen years after his retirement he wrote from his library at Quincy to John Taylor: ‘Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.’[1231] This distrust and distaste for the masses weakened him as much with the people as his temperamental defects with his party associates. I have dwelt on these weaknesses because they explain the tragedy of his failure. There were other qualities that entitled him to a happier fate.

V

Chief among these were the fervor and the disinterestedness of his love of country. Had he died the day after the signing of the Declaration, he would have been assured a permanent place in history. No man played a more heroic part in the fight for independence. The struggling young lawyer who refused a position under the Crown that he might not be embarrassed in supporting his countrymen in their inevitable struggle;[1232] who, awakened by the sinister drum-beats of the red coats every morning, ‘solemnly determined at all events to adhere to [his] principles in favor of [his] country’;[1233] who defended Hancock in the courts on the charge of smuggling with stubborn tenacity until the case ‘was suspended at last only by the battle of Lexington’;[1234] who, when the crisis came, prepared to immolate himself and family upon the altar of liberty;[1235] and who had the audacity to base an argument against the Stamp Act on the principles of the Revolution itself, and, standing four square against more petitions to the King, won the lasting gratitude and admiration of Jefferson when, as ‘the Colossus of the Debate,’[1236] he bore the brunt of the battle for the Declaration—that man could well hold his head high in the presence of Washington himself. ‘Politics,’ he wrote Warren, ‘are an ordeal path among red-hot plough shares. Who then would be a politician for the pleasure of running about barefooted among them. Yet some one must.’[1237] And again: ‘At such times as this there are many dangerous things to be done which nobody else will do, and therefore I cannot help attempting them.’[1238] Nor was he blind to his fate in the event of the failure of his cause. ‘I go mourning in my heart all day long,’ he wrote his wife in dark days, ‘though I say nothing. I am melancholy for the public and anxious for my family.... For God’s sake make your children hardy, active and industrious.’[1239] This intense Americanism did not moderate with time. As a politician he was all too often open to censure; as a patriot he was above reproach. Jefferson never doubted his absorption in his country; and Hamilton, temperamentally unable to get along with him, wrote him down as ‘honest, firm, faithful, and independent—a sincere lover of his country.’[1240] Because he had more enemies than friends, and more detractors than admirers, one might conclude from the opinions of his contemporaries that he had but mediocre ability. There is no question as to the fallibility of his judgment where his prejudices were enlisted and the characters of men were involved. Again we find Jefferson more friendly than the Federalists. ‘A bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men,’ he wrote; and then added, ‘This is all the ill that can possibly be said of him; he is profound in his views and accurate in his judgment except where knowledge of the world is necessary to form a judgment.’[1241] Hamilton thought him ‘a man of an imagination sublimated and eccentric,’ and was not impressed with his intellectual endowments.[1242] The father of Wolcott thought him ‘of a very moderate share of prudence, and of far less real abilities than he believes he possesses.’[1243] And McHenry, having been expelled from the Cabinet for his disloyalty, declared ‘the mind of Mr. Adams like the last glimmerings of a lamp, feeble, wavering and unsteady, with occasionally a strong flash of light, his genius little, and that too insufficient to irradiate his judgment.’[1244] The Adams who emerges from these opinions is a man of ability often reduced to impotency by the lack of judgment. This is, no doubt, the whole truth about his intellect. The sneers from men who could not forgive him for the wrong they had done him, and from others who could not control him, cannot stand in the light of what he did, and said, and wrote.

As a writer, he suffers in comparison with Hamilton and Madison, and his more ambitious productions, like the ‘Discourses of Davilla,’ while showing much erudition and some ingenuity, are heavy and pompous. But in the earlier days when he was writing shorter papers for the press, he did better. Whether he could write or not, he loved to do it. The author of the earlier period was more interesting and attractive than that of later times.

However much the critics may quarrel over his capacity to write, the evidence is conclusive as to his ability to speak. As an orator he was the Patrick Henry of New England. His argument against the Writs of Assistance in 1761 fired the heart of Otis and swept him into the ranks of the active patriots. Jefferson bears testimony to the power of his eloquence in the fight for the Declaration. Given a cause that appealed to his heart and imagination, he never failed to find himself by losing himself in the fervor of the fight.

Nor can there be any question of his courage. It required temerity to step forth from the patriots’ ranks to face the representative of the Crown with the most audacious denials of his pretensions; courage, too, to lead the fight against further attempts at conciliation with the King. But the most courageous act of his career was his defense in court of Captain Preston, the British officer charged with murder in the Boston massacre. Not only physical courage was here demanded, for he invited personal attack, but moral courage at its highest. He was dependent for clientage on the Boston public and the victims of the massacre were Bostonians. He was an American, and he was standing between a hated redcoat and an American revenge. He gambled with his career, for he armed his enemies with ammunition, and he was charged with selling his country for an enormous fee. The fact that he received but eighteen guineas would have been the answer, but he maintained a dignified silence. There is nothing finer or more courageous in the records of a public man.[1245] This courage was to stand him in good stead when he defied his party for his country in the French negotiations, and played for the verdict of history.

This courage could only have sprung from the consciousness of an honest intent—and his honesty, personal or political, has never been questioned. Sedgwick recommended him to Hamilton for the Vice-Presidency as ‘a man of unconquerable intrepidity and of incorruptible integrity,’ and Hamilton was to find to his chagrin that the compliment was not given in a Pickwickian sense.[1246] And yet he was not a Puritan of the intolerant sort. In early life he was given to the reading of sermons and at one time confessed to an inclination to the ministry—but it did not last long. In early manhood, we find him moralizing in his diary against card-playing, but not on moral grounds. ‘It gratifies none of the senses ...; it can entertain the mind only by hushing its clamors.’[1247] Even the scurrility of his times spared him the charge of immorality. ‘No virgin or matron ever had cause to blush at sight of me,’ he wrote in his ‘Autobiography.’[1248] And while Franklin and Morris appear to have taken advantage of the moral laxity of Paris, we are quite sure that Adams, packed in tight among fashionable ladies watching the Queen eat soup, never gave a flirtatious glance, and are more than half persuaded that his declination to join Madame du Barry in her garden was due to her none too spotless reputation. But if he was not given to women or to song, it appears that he consumed his full share of wine. We have his own story of the fashionable dinners in the Philadelphia of the Continental Congress, when he would sit at the table from three until nine ‘drinking Madeira, claret and burgundy.’[1249] We get a glimpse of him in a New York Club before the Revolution with ‘punch, wine, pipes and tobacco.’[1250] And on another occasion he records with boastful pride that he ‘drank Madeira at a great rate and found no inconvenience in it.’[1251] Even so, we may be sure that he seldom drank to excess.

Such the man who sat facing the Cabinet he did not choose—stubborn, suspicious, vain, jealous, courageous, honest, irascible, tempestuous, patriotic, and rising above its members in ability and public service as a mountain above the pebbles at its base.

VI

No student of physiognomy, familiar with the character of Adams, could have glanced at the stern, cold Puritan face of Timothy Pickering, his Secretary of State, without a premonition of certain estrangement. The long, thin, super-serious features were as uncongenial and unresponsive as though carved from granite. The thin, silvery locks and the spectacles combined to create an unpleasant impression of asceticism; and the cold eyes that peered through the glasses spoke of the narrow, uncompromising mind of a follower of Cromwell. There, too, he could read the insatiable ambition, the audacious courage, the relentless will of the Roman conqueror. Seldom did that face soften with a smile; for he had no sense of humor. His portrait, by Stuart, as a frontispiece to a volume of old New England blue laws would have symbolized the spirit of the book. No Indian stoic ever presented a countenance less revealing in repose, or more stone-like in composure. The resemblance to the Roundhead fanatic was accentuated in the extreme simplicity, the Quaker-like plainness of his garb.

Here was clearly a man to whom joyous frivolity was indecent dissipation; with whom the scrutiny of suspicion was a duty; and to whom duties were the sum total of life. But beneath the repellently cold, metallic exterior there were volcanic fires of passion, and when he emerged from the deadly calm of composure it was to storm. It was not in his nature to confer, but to lay down the law. So lacking was he in a sense of humor that he honestly persuaded himself that he always stood at Armageddon and battled for the Lord. Even when he was moved to treachery by an ambition wholly incongruous to his capacity, he really felt that he was detached from all personal considerations and was fighting for the abstract principle of right.[1252] Never once in his long life, even when he was a cheap conspirator planning the destruction of the Union, did he think himself in the wrong. Never once in his voluminous correspondence does he hint at a possible mistake. He was, in his political views and his personal relations, impeccably pure—and he admitted it. Not only did he admit it—he impassionedly proclaimed it, and this alone made him an impossible adviser for John Adams. He was the smug, self-righteous type that would remake the world in its own image. They who disagreed with him were hounds of the devil to be thrown without pity into the uttermost darkness. And he was sincere in it all. He was fond of hymns and psalms, in church devout, at prayer most fervent, and he read the Bible habitually without discovering the passage about the throwing of stones.[1253]

This temperament made him difficult in even ordinary conversation. He had an excellent command of language, but he preferred the harsher words. There was no twilight zone for him. Things were white or black. He was violent in his opinions and violent in the gesticulation with which he tried to force them on his hearers. So little could he see himself as others saw him that, when he once exclaimed, ‘I abhor gesticulation,’ with a powerful sweep of his muscular arms, he could not understand the smile of his auditor.[1254] But for this intemperance, all too much like that of Adams to make harmony possible, he would have been a great conversationalist. He used words with accuracy, was interesting in narrative, and had read widely and wisely; but too frequently to converse with Pickering was to quarrel. This unhappy quality, along with his poverty, explains why he did not figure in the social life of the Federalist capital. His tactlessness and bluntness, which he confused with honesty, were intolerable. In a letter to a friend who had given an acquaintance a note of introduction, he wrote that he should ‘not put myself to the expense nor my family to the trouble of a splendid exhibition at table.’[1255] It must have caused some mirth in the home of the elegant Binghams to read his reply to an invitation to dinner: ‘Mrs. Pickering and I are constrained to forego many pleasures of society, because we cannot persuade ourselves to enter on a career of expenses, which, being far beyond our income, would lead to ruin. For this reason, Mrs. Pickering chooses to dine abroad only at Mrs. Washington’s, as a consequence of my official station; and this as seldom as decency will permit.... But Mrs. Pickering is aware that as a public man I cannot seclude myself ... and therefore often urges, on my part singly, an intercourse which is useful as well as agreeable. I shall, then, with pleasure, dine with you occasionally, but without promising to reciprocate all your civilities.’[1256]

Here we have one of several traits that make him stand out among the other Federalist leaders as an exotic. He was poor, but not so poor as the letter indicates; nor was he so completely shut off from society, despite his frugality. If he gave no fashionable entertainments, his was a home of hospitality, and he who promised no reciprocation for the entertainments of the Binghams was able to entertain at his board a future King of France.[1257] But, unfashionable, and plain as a Yankee huckster, he found the ways of fashion irksome and offensive. Writing his wife disgustedly of the enormous head-dresses of the Philadelphia ladies, he added: ‘But you know, my dear, I have old-fashioned notions. Neither powder nor pomatum have touched my head these twelve months, not even to cover my baldness.’[1258] And the ‘extravagance of the prevailing fashions,’ suggested by the introduction of ‘the odious fashion of hoops’ convinced him that many families would be ruined.[1259] Verily such a creature would have been grotesquely out of place among his fellow Federalists in the gay drawing-rooms of Mrs. Bingham.

He differed from them, too, theoretically at least, on a more vital point. They were thorough aristocrats; he was instinctively a democrat—though he seemed to prefer it as an ideal rather than as a reality. Lodge recognizes this difference and explains that ‘he had all the pride of the Puritan who gloried in belonging to the chosen people of God.’[1260] We can well believe the assertion of his son and biographer that he liked the common people because among them he belonged. Then, too, he inherited a respect for them from his father who ardently espoused the cause of equal rights for all men, and was prone to apologize for the weaknesses of the poor, and to criticize people of wealth and power.[1261] With this inheritance he was to enter the field of controversy at twenty-five in a newspaper battle with the Tories of Salem with a letter which might have been written by Jefferson. ‘For whom was government instituted?’ he wrote. ‘Was it solely for the aggrandizement of the few, who, by some fortunate accident, have been bred in a manner which the world calls genteel? or to protect the lives, liberty and property of the body of the people? Is government supported by the better sort? On the contrary, has not every attack on the laws and constitution proceeded from that class? The very phrase, “friends of government” is invidious and carries with it an impudent insinuation that the whole body of the people, the pretended friends of government excepted, are enemies to government; the suggestion of which is as ridiculous as it is false.’[1262]

The tall, gaunt figure in plain garb, seated in company with the fashionable Hamilton or Morris, was not more incongruous than the mind, capable even in youth of such heretical and ‘demagogic’ thoughts. Stranger still, this liking for the common herd never wholly left him. Thus his experiment in pioneering in the western wilderness—where democracy thrived best. A wholly admirable figure, this Pickering of the frontier, applying brain and brawn to the conquering of the woods, organizing civil government, battling at the peril of his life for law and order, kidnaped and carted away. His own story of this adventure is as thrilling as a dime novel.[1263] Even then his faith in the people was not destroyed.

Thus Pickering finally entered public life—a ‘friend of the people,’ farmer, frontiersman, unsuccessful merchant. About him there was no glamour of success. He had been a failure. At Harvard he had made a fair record, and his meager career as a lawyer was unsuccessful. He had failed as a farmer, failed as a pioneer, failed as a Philadelphia merchant because unfit for commercial life. He had played a spinet and a violin and given lessons in sacred music at Salem and Marblehead, but that could scarcely be deemed success;[1264] and in the army, where he was capable as a trainer of raw recruits, his courage, energy, and promptness might have taken him far but for the handicap of short-sightedness and glasses.[1265] Thus, when he entered the public service at forty-six his career had been one of failure, and he was to get this new chance through importunate applications to a man he little respected—for he had a poor opinion of the ability of Washington. Here again he differed from other Federalists holding a similar opinion; he did not simulate admiration.[1266] The naming of a child after Washington called for his sarcasm.[1267] He was disgusted during the war when a rustic was heard to say, ‘I suppose he [Washington] is the greatest man in the world.’[1268] He criticized Washington as over-cautious[1269] and refused to hail him as a hero because he thought him lacking in ‘eminent military talents.’[1270] He thought the army suffered through his procrastinated decisions.[1271] Serving on the committee at the close of the struggle to formulate the answer of the officers to the ‘Farewell Orders to the Armies of the United States,’ he referred sarcastically to the word ‘Orders,’ and wrote his wife: ‘Though it is rather modest, or in other words does not abound in panegyric, I think it (the reply) will be graciously received.’[1272] To another he boasted that the reply was marked ‘as the Italians do some strains of music—moderato.’[1273]

But land poor, and a failure, he was quite willing to serve under the man he did not appreciate. From the organization of the government, he was an office-seeker, looking, not for a career, but for a job. There was no demand for his services—he urged them. His brother-in-law, a member of Congress, became his broker. He applied to Hamilton for an assistant secretaryship of the Treasury, to find it promised.[1274] In August his broker wrote him of a prospective vacancy in the postmaster-generalship and suggested that he see Washington at once.[1275] A month later, Pickering made application,[1276] but his interview with the President only resulted in a temporary position as a negotiator with the Indian tribes. In May, 1791, he asked Washington for the Comptrollership of the Treasury, to be refused,[1277] and it was not until August, after more than a year of persistent wire-pulling, that he was recognized with the then comparatively unimportant post of Postmaster-General, which was not at that time a Cabinet position.

Thus he came into close contact with Hamilton, entered into his plans, made himself useful, and slowly ascended, finally reaching the State Department with some misgivings, and only after many others had declined the place. He owed everything to Hamilton, nothing to Adams, and, as he sat in sphinx-like silence at the Cabinet table, it was to Hamilton, not to Adams, that he looked as chief.

VII

The same was true of Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury, albeit these two men were, in most respects, the antitheses of each other. There was nothing of saturnity and brooding silence in Wolcott—he smiled. Both wore masks—one that of a stoic, the other that of a smiling epicurean. They resembled in a common capacity for uncommon treachery. In this, they both excelled. Both were professional feeders at the public crib and passionate panters after office.

The handsome Wolcott had infinitely more finesse in the art of double-dealing. He had read his Machiavelli to better advantage. If he was to conspire with the enemies of the chief, he was to present an ever-smiling face to Adams in the conference room. He was too exquisite a conspirator to seem one. He had early learned the advantage of smiling through; and leaving Adams, with his face wreathed in friendly smiles, he could sit down to the writing of a letter to Hamilton with the same smile still on his face. Life was altogether lovely and interesting to this happy warrior who delivered his sword thrusts through curtains.

The son of an idol of Connecticut Federalists who was repeatedly elected to the governorship, Wolcott passed his boyhood in and near Litchfield, ministering to a frail constitution by tending cattle and working on the farm. He did not permit the war to interfere with his career at Yale, felt no sentimental call to Valley Forge, and found that the rattle of musketry need not interfere with his preparations for the Bar. Almost immediately on the conclusion of these preparations, he found a job as a clerk in the office of the Committee of Pay Table, and such was his industry and methodical efficiency that he rose in that line of the civil service to be Comptroller of Public Accounts before the formation of the National Government.

This opened a new and fairer vista for an efficient bureaucrat, and the moment the department of the Treasury was established he was ‘induced by his friends’ to offer himself for a position.[1278] Even then, professional office-seekers merely yielded to the importunities of admirers. The congressional delegation for Connecticut pressed hard for an appointment, and he was offered the post of Auditor of the Treasury at fifteen hundred dollars a year. We can scarcely conceive that he hesitated, though it is of record that his sponsors urged him to accept, and that Hamilton expressed the hope that he would not refuse. He had hoped for the Comptrollership—but that might follow. The fact that Hamilton had favored him for the better place was promising.[1279] Meanwhile, on the salary, he could ‘live cheap and snug as you please.’[1280] Thus he went upon the Federal payroll. Thus he came under the observation and supervision of the genius at the head of the Treasury,