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Quasi-War

Abigail Adams Attacked Thomas Jefferson As No One Else Dared To Do

In 1804, Abigail Adams attacked Thomas Jefferson in an angry letter unlike any he had ever received.

No one else ever addressed Thomas Jefferson that way. Not even George Washington, and he had good reason to be angry with Jefferson.

abigail-adams-attacked-thomas-jefferson-portrait

Abigail Adams by Gilbert Stuart

Unlikely Friends

She was her husband’s closest political confidante, and both had considered Jefferson a dear friend. Party politics, something new in America, turned them into frenemies.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had made an unlikely pair. Adams was short, chubby, blunt, combative. Jefferson was tall, handsome, evasive and calm.

Jefferson lived in princely style in Monticello with slaves to do the work. Adams wielded his own scythe on his family farm in Braintree.

Despite their differences, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson ranked as the two most prominent revolutionaries in the United States after George Washington. Together in Philadelphia they had argued to cut ties with England and worked on the Declaration of Independence. Adams, the better thinker, deferred to Jefferson, the better writer, to pen the document.

Diplomatic Ties

When the revolutionary war ended, Adams and Jefferson both served as diplomats in Europe. The Adams and Jefferson households spent many friendly evenings together in Paris. They were so close that Adams commented his son John Quincy was as much Jefferson’s boy as his own.

The Adamses continued on to London, where Abigail took care of Jefferson’s young daughter Maria until she reunited with her father in Paris. Maria and Abigail grew close, further cementing the ties between the two families.

Thomas Jefferson in London, 1786, by Mather Brown.

When George Washington won election as the nation’s first president, Adams and Jefferson returned to the United States. Adams served as the great man’s vice president, Jefferson as his secretary of state.

But Jefferson grew wary of the Federalist Party, led by Washington, Adams and Alexander Hamilton. He feared a strong central government, and he especially didn’t like Washington’s friendly overtures to Britain.

The Jay Treaty

Washington had good reason to get along with his former enemy. Britain and France were still at war, and he wanted no part of it. He feared the fragile young United States couldn’t survive another conflict so soon after the last one. Adams agreed.

Jefferson, on the other hand, supported the French revolutionaries. So when Washington’s ambassador, John Jay, negotiated a peace treaty with Britain, Jefferson broke with his president. He didn’t do it openly, though. He did it by spreading rumors in Virginia. Washington was a washed-up soldier, he said, fronting for the power-mad money men of the Federalist Party.

Washington knew what Jefferson had said, and he called him on it. Their friendship effectively ended. They exchanged a few cordial letters between Monticello and Mount Vernon, but then they stopped.

Succeeding Washington

The next president, everyone knew, would have to have revolutionary credentials second only to George Washington. Only John Adams and Thomas Jefferson fit that bill. And neither could fill Washington’s shoes. He was, after all, America’s greatest hero.

So Adams and Jefferson ran against each other to succeed Washington as president. Politics were different then, and candidates didn’t campaign. Adams beat Jefferson by three electoral votes, and Jefferson accepted defeat graciously. He didn’t even want the job, he told Adams.

When Washington left office in March of 1797, he knew he had stuck Adams with difficult challenges. “Ay, I am fairly out and you are fairly in! See which of us will be happiest!” he muttered to Adams after he’d taken the oath of office.

abigail-adams-attacked-thomas-jefferson-washington

George Washington,
Landsdowne Portrait, Brooklyn Museum of Art

France posed one of Adams’ biggest problems. The treaty with Britain had offended the French. So had the United States’ refusal to repay its war debt. Now French privateers were attacking U.S. shipping in the Caribbean.

Adams didn’t want war with France any more than Washington wanted war with Britain. So he asked his old friend Thomas Jefferson to join his cabinet and help negotiate a peace treaty with France.

Jefferson considered the offer, but then decided his job was to lead the Democratic-Republicans in opposition to the Federalists. Never mind that he was John Adams’ vice president.

Jefferson did his job and then some.

Alien and Sedition Acts

As Adams struggled to make peace with France, hostilities between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans grew intense inside the United States.

John Adams

The thin-skinned Adams began silencing his critics by sending them to jail. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 gave him the power to do so. Two prominent Vermonters, U.S. Rep. Mathew Lyon and publisher Anthony Haswell, went to prison for their attacks on Adams. That did not endear him to the American people.

By the end of his first term, President Adams had managed to win peace with France. But he had lost popularity as he sought reelection. Thomas Jefferson decided to run against his old friend for president — again.

This time, Jefferson hired a scandalmonger named James Callendar to write a hit piece on Adams. Callendar wrote The Prospect before Us, calling Adams a half-mad warmonger who intended to crown himself king. Adams had him prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition Acts, and James Callendar went to prison.

But Callendar’s diatribe against Adams worked, and Thomas Jefferson won election to the presidency. President Jefferson pardoned Callendar on his first day in office, but Callendar wanted more – a job as postmaster in Richmond, Va. Jefferson refused, so Callendar went after Jefferson.

He revealed not only that Jefferson had paid for the libelous screed against John Adams, but that he’d fathered five or six children with his mixed-race slave Sally Hemings.

Abigail Adams Attacked Thomas Jefferson

In 1804, Jefferson’s daughter Maria died in childbirth. Only an event as sad and tragic as Maria’s death could have moved Abigail to write Jefferson. In her consolation letter, she hinted she hadn’t forgiven him for the way he treated her husband. In her last line, she described herself as one “who once took pleasure in subscribing Herself your Friend.”

Jefferson didn’t take the hint. Instead, he replied by bringing up a personal grudge. In the last days of his presidency, Adams had appointed John Marshall, a strong Federalist, to the U.S. Supreme Court. Jefferson thought Adams should have let him fill the judgeship and called the Marshall appointment “personally unkind.”

She furiously picked up her pen. Abigail Adams attacked Thomas Jefferson in a letter unlike any he had ever received before or would ever receive again.

She seemed to build up a head of steam as she wrote.

She now viewed him, she wrote, in a much different light than she had previously.

Her husband had a duty under the Constitution to fill vacant offices, she wrote. George Washington had done the same thing.

Then she went on the attack. Jefferson’s campaign for president had her “utter abhorrence and detestation, for they were the blackest calumny and foulest falshoods.”

Jefferson’s pardon of Callendar set a bad moral example for the nation, she continued. He allowed a private resentment to influence his public conduct, and he endorsed a “base calumniater.”

At first she didn’t even believe he could have done such a horrible thing.

“Untill I read Callenders 7th Letter containing your compliment to him as a writer and your reward of 50 dollars, I could not be made to believe, that such measures could have been resorted to,” she wrote.

Like an Asp

And then she let loose about Callendar’s disclosure of his affair with Sally Hemings. “The Serpent you cherished and warmed, bit the hand that nourished him, and gave you Sufficient Specimins of his talents, his gratitude, his justice and his truth.”

Jefferson, no doubt stung, replied that he knew nothing of Callendar’s activities. She wrote back that she didn’t believe him. And she added to his list of sins: He had used his position as Adams’ vice president to undermine his policies.

Abigail’s letter to Jefferson has gone down in history as the bluntest, angriest missive he ever received. And Jefferson received more than 26,000 letters in his lifetime.

The USS Constellation attacks the French frigate L’Insurgente during the Quasi-War.

John Adams

John Adams did not know that Abigail Adams attacked Thomas Jefferson. He didn’t see their letters until months later. He wrote for the record that the entire correspondence had gone on without his knowledge.

“I have no remarks to make on it at this time and in this place,” he wrote.

The two men hadn’t spoken for four years and wouldn’t correspond for another eight. But on Jan. 1, 1812, John Adams would make the initial overture. They would renew their friendship, and die on the same day — exactly 50 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed.

With thanks to Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis. This story was updated in 2022.

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John Adams Supports Toussaint Louverture, Horrifies Jefferson

From 1798 to 1801, President John Adams recognized a government led by Toussaint Louverture, a former slave, a self-educated black man and a fellow revolutionary. Thomas Jefferson, a slaveowner, found Adams’ action alarming.

Toussaint Louverture, as depicted in an 1802 French engraving

The Haitian Revolution, a series of conflicts, began on Aug. 22, 1791 and ended in 1804 with Haitian independence. Slaves burned sugar plantations, killed slave owners and then took over the cities.

In the midst of it in 1797, Toussaint Louverture became military commander of the insurrectionists in what was then known as the French colony of Saint-Domingue.

Two months earlier Adams took office as president of the United States.

Adams’ predecessor, George Washington, had no use for the black leaders of Saint-Domingue. Nor did Adams’ vice president, Thomas Jefferson. He dreaded the prospect of black sailors, supercargoes and missionaries spreading the message of freedom and revolution into the Southern states. “We have to fear it,” Jefferson wrote Adams.

Adams, who opposed slavery, saw Saint-Domingue as a useful ally. He viewed it as another new country trying to navigate a world dominated by hostile European powers. So Adams established diplomatic and trade relations with Saint-Domingue. From 1798 to 1801, the U.S. government treated leaders of African descent with the same respect accorded Europeans. That wouldn’t happen again until after the Civil War.

Toussaint Louverture

Saint-Domingue was the size of Maryland, but it created as much wealth for France as all 13 colonies did for England.

Its coffee and sugar plantations, worked by 500,000 enslaved workers, made Saint-Domingue the richest colony in the world. One reason France supported the rebel side in the American Revolution. was to protect its Caribbean colony. In 1779, several hundred free Saint-Dominguans of African descent — gens de couleur — joined the French military and took part in the siege of Savannah.

A naval battle in the Quasi War

Trade also flourished between the United States and Saint-Domingue. Ships from the continent brought lumber and food, primarily salt cod, to the French colony. Then they came home with molasses for New England refineries to turn into rum.

In February 1790, a Rhode Islander saw 50 American vessels in the harbor at Cap-Francois. More arrived every day. During the year 1797, 600 U.S. ships with 5,000 seamen traded with Saint-Domingue.

Jefferson had reason for alarm. About 15 percent of those sailors were of African descent, newsmongers to African-Americans at home. They carried news of the Haitian Revolution and the emancipation of slaves.

Then starting in 1798 came the Quasi-War between the United States and France. French privateers in the Caribbean were attacking U.S. ships, and Congress responded by passing an embargo against France. Trade with Saint-Domingue stopped abruptly. Soon the colony was in dire need of food.

Secret Dinner

John Adams

At 3 pm on Dec. 26, 1798, Joseph Bunel went to a private home in Philadelphia for a secret dinner with Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and a few friends.

Bunel was a white, French-born merchant married to a free-black Creole. He supported the Haitian Revollution and became Louverture’s trade envoy. Over dinner, Bunel told Pickering and his guests that Louverture offered to protect U.S. shipping against privateers. In exchange, he wanted trade and diplomatic support.

Timothy PIckering

Adams then got word of the offer and concluded he had to do something. Within six months, the United States and Saint-Domingue entered into a treaty that reopened trade.

But Adams did more than that. He had intelligence that the Dominguans had enough strength to win independence from France. So Adams supported Toussaint Louverture with economic aid, arms, munitions and the U.S. Navy.

Louverture then faced a mutiny from Andre Rigaud, his mixed-race rival who controlled the southern part of the island. In the spring of 1800, Adams sent five military vessels — the USS Constitution, USS Boston, USS Connecticut, USS General Greene and USS Norfolk — to Louverture’s aid. It was the U.S. Navy’s first military action on behalf of a foreign ally.

American commanders planned joint operations with their multiracial Dominguan counterparts. They guarded the southern coast and bombarded a port town held by Rigaud.

The Navy brass also did something unusual: placed U.S. ships and crews under Dominguan command. White U.S. Naval officers dined with black Dominguan officers, finding themselves in the racial minority.

What Might Have Been

Thomas Jefferson

Adams lost reelection to Thomas Jefferson, who took office in March of 1801. The next year, Napoleon’s forces invaded Saint-Domingue. Louverture was betrayed, arrested and sent to France, where he died in prison in 1803. But then Dominguan forces defeated the French and became an independent nation on Jan. 1, 1804.

After losing Saint-Domingue, Napoleon then sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States. Historian Douglas R. Egerton speculates that if Adams had been reelected, Louisiana might have been acquired as a Free Soil rather than a slave state. American history might then have turned out very, very differently.

This story was updated in 2022.

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John Adams Outlaws Fake News in 1798 – and Dooms His Presidency

Government criticism of ‘Fake news’ is nothing new. And trying to silence it was as unpopular in the early days of the United States as it is today.

By 1799, U.S. and French relations had reached new lows. The possibility of war against France weighed heavily on John Adams’ mind as his presidency neared its end.

The Signing of the Treaty of Mortefontaine, 30th September 1800 by Victor-Jean Adam

In all but name only, the two nations were already waging war. In fact, it had a name — the Quasi-War.

France didn’t appreciate America declaring neutrality in European conflicts, especially after all it had done to help win the War for Independence. Nor did France appreciate George Washington cozying up to England. So U.S. foreign policy led to the French seizing U.S. ships in the Caribbean.

The French had captured close to 400 American ships, and an American military buildup pushed back against French ships.

Fake News

The Adams administration had tried for several years to bring the fighting to a halt, but it had failed. The release of papers detailing the negotiations, sent Americans into an uproar. They revealed that French negotiators asked the United States to pay $250,000 to start peace talks. The papers had expunged the names of the three French negotiators, replacing them with the letters X, Y and Z.

Though such payments weren’t uncommon in Europe, the request smacked of extortion in the United States. French ships had seized some $20 million worth of American goods aboard ships in Caribbean waters. U.S. ship owners expected their government to demand French repayment – not to make payment to France.

Some in America urged war.

John Adams

In 1798, the Congress gave Adams expanded powers to limit the entry of foreigners to the country and expel foreign agitators. It further criminalized fake news, or making false criticisms of the federal government.

Under the law, known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, some of Adams’ political enemies received fines and jail sentences. Though Adams never deported anyone using his expanded powers he did fine and jail two political enemies from Vermont: U.S. Rep. Mathew Lyon and publisher Anthony Haswell.

The government even imprisoned one of Adams’ critics who heard a gun salute to the president and said, “I hope it hit Adams in the arse.” The crackdown on freedom of expression did not endear Adams to much of the public.

Peace

Adams finally threw away all hope for a second term as president to win peace with France. Adams first ordered William Vans Murray, U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands and an unquestioning Adams loyalist to negotiate peace with France. When Congress and members of his own cabinet erupted in outrage, Adams added Connecticut’s Oliver Ellsworth and North Carolinian William Richardson Davie to the negotiating team.

Oliver and Abigail Ellsworth by Ralph Earl

Ellsworth was a consummate political insider. An ally of George Washington’s in the Senate and chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, he confounded his opponents by operating in secrecy.

With political turmoil in France having turned power over to Napoleon, the three-member team reached a quick agreement with the French. However, they had to concede that the United States, not France, would repay damages to U.S. ship owners.

The terms of the treaty were not positively received in the United States. But they did reflect the reality of America’s position vis-à-vis Europe. If the U.S. entered the fighting between England and France, its puny Navy would have negligible effect. But if it stayed neutral, it could perhaps be valuable as a supplier of food.

President Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale

The U.S. Congress ultimately ratified the Treaty of Mortefontaine, though well after Thomas Jefferson took control of the presidency. Jefferson’s government would repeal most of the Alien and Sedition Acts that gave government power to imprison and silence its critics.

Adams would later say that his all-in pursuit of peace with France was worth putting the final nail in his presidential coffin. He proclaimed he would be completely satisfied if his epitaph read: “Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of the peace with France in the year 1800.”

Of course, his critics might have argued the country would never have come so close to war if not for his leadership. But they could have been imprisoned for saying it.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Lt. Col. Ebenezer Huntington, Discouraged Revolutionary, Bemoans ‘Rascally Stupidity’ of His Countrymen

On July 7, 1780, a despairing Lt. Col. Ebenezer Huntington of Norwich, Conn., had no way of knowing the United States would defeat Britain at Yorktown in a little over a year.

Lt. Col. Ebenezer Huntington was one of Washington’s officers at the surrender of Lord Cornwallis. Painting by John Trumbull.

He was awaiting provisions near New York with Gen. George Washington’s army of 6,650 poorly fed, badly clothed and unpaid men. That the army existed at all was a credit to Washington’s leadership. The war, at that point, was one of attrition for the colonists. All they could hope for was to keep the British bottled up in New York City and avoid annihilation.

Ebenezer Huntington was 25 years old, an ardent patriot who had left Yale College without permission on April 21, 1775, to enlist in the 2nd Connecticut Regiment . He participated in the Siege of Boston, marched with Washington to New York, and fought in the battles of Long Island, Rhode Island and Springfield.

He wrote a letter to his brother Andrew Huntington from Passaic Falls, N.J., on July 7, 1780. In it, he described the Battle of Springfield and complained about the ‘rascally stupidity’ that prevailed in the country. Clearly, Ebenezer Huntington wrote his letter in a passion.

Ebenezer Huntington Writes

He first apologized to his brother for not writing, but “our very rambly Situation will not admit of any Conveniency for writing, this I write on my knee ”

Huntington then described how the regiment took the field on March 7, 1780, “not from inclination but from necessity.” The enemy had moved so near their huts that they had to send their baggage to the rear. “We have lain in the Woods without any Covering but what the Almighty gives the Brute Creation to which State we verge fast.”

The whole army, he wrote, amounted to two-thirds of the enemy’s force. He then described how the enemy landed in New Jersey the militia harassed them. That, “for some reason induc’d the Enemy to burn wherever they went.”

Battle of Springfield

The British then maneuvered as if they intended to move up the North River. In response, Washington marched five brigades toward West Point. He left behind Gen. Nathanael Greene and 1,500 men, including John Stark’s brigade, to which Huntington’s regiment belonged.

On June 23, “the Enemy moved from Elizabeth town (to which Place they had Previously retir’d) toward Springfield where our troops lay except Parties advanced,” wrote Huntington.

Continentals repulsing the enemy at Springfield, by John Dunmore

“Our People fought them as they advanc’d but when they had got to Springfield they endeavor’d to turn our left flank at the same time pushing a heavy column toward our Centre,” he wrote. The Continentals repulsed them on the left, though the British overwhelmed the center after 40 minutes of very heavy firing.

Then Huntington described how Col. Israel Angell’s regiment with some small detachments fought the enemy’s main force during that 40 minutes. Forty-one men were killed and wounded. “The Enemy suffered much by their own accounts, he wrote. “Our troops behav’d well.” Greene thanked the troops.

At about 3 PM, wrote Huntington, the British retired, harassed in the rear by the Continentals. The next night they retreated to Staten Island.

What Huntington could not have known when he wrote his letter was that the Battle of Springfield effectively ended the war in New Jersey.

He left something else out of the letter, probably something he didn’t know–but which went down in history as a key moment in the battle. When Angell’s artillerymen ran low on wadding, James Caldwell, the Continental Army chaplain, brought up a load of hymn books published by Isaac Watts to use instead. “Give ’em Watts, boys,” he said.

Rascally Stupidity

His regiment began to march to join the main army on June 25, he wrote. “We lie in the Woods as stated in the beginning of this letter, hoping to be able to have tents in a few days.”

Ebenezer Huntington by John Trumbull

And then he let loose. “The Rascally Stupidity which now prevails in the Country at large, is beyond all descriptions,” he wrote. He complained that people saw their illustrious commander at the head of 2,500 or 3,000 “ragged tho’ virtuous good men,” obliged to put up with what no troops ever did before.

“Why dont you Reinforce your Army, feed them Clothe and pay them, why do you Suffer the Enemy to have a foot hold on the Continent?,” he wrote. “You Can prevent it, send your Men to the field, believe you are Americans Not suffer yourselves to be dup’d into the thought that the french will relieve you.”

“Fight your battles,” he implored. He then complained about Congress asking for foreign aid. “It is a Reflection too much for a Soldier, You dont deserve to be freemen unlefs you can believe it yourselves, when they arrive they will not put up with such treatment as your Army have done they will not serve Week after Week without Meat without Cloathing, paid in filthy Rags.”

‘All this for my cowardly countrymen’

Ebenezer Huntington continued in his letter to work himself into a froth.

“I despise My Countrymen. I wish I could say I was not born in America, I once gloried in it but am now ashamed of it,” he wrote.

“The Insults ” Neglects which the Army have met with from the Country, Beggers all description, it must Go no farther they can endure it no longer.”

He admitted he wrote in a passion. “Indeed I am scarce ever free from it. Clothed in rags, he had lain in the rain on the ground for the past 40 hours. To eat, he had only had a “junk of fresh beef without salt to dine on this day.” He hadn’t been paid since December.

“All this for my Cowardly Countrymen who flinch at the very time when their Exertions are wanted, he wrote.[They] “hold their Purse Strings as tho they would Damn the World, rather than part with a Dollar to their Army.”

Life improved for Ebenezer Huntington. The Americans won, of course, and he ended the war as a lieutenant colonel. He married twice, had 10 children and served as adjutant general of the Connecticut militia for 30 years. He won a promotion to brigadier general during the Quasi-War with France in 1798. He also served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This story was updated in 2021.

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