First Presidential Contest by Jeffrey L. Pasley

Author:Jeffrey L. Pasley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780700623167
Published: 2017-06-11T04:00:00+00:00

7

HIS ROTUNDITY

THEMES AND ISSUES OF THE

DEMOCRATIC-REPUBLICAN CAMPAIGN AGAINST JOHN ADAMS

The strategy that the Federalists used against Jefferson—sublimating policy positions, political ideologies, and cultural values into character attacks—would have worked less well against John Adams, even if the Democratic-Republicans had bothered to try it. As vivid a character as John Adams becomes when a modern writer or HBO samples his private letters and diaries, the public Adams presented a far less definable and personal face to the world than Jefferson. There was no Monticello, no quirky inventions, no personal testaments like the Notes on the State of Virginia or luminous statements of high principle like the Declaration or the Summary View of the Rights of British America. To this day, despite David McCullough’s best-selling biography, the television series based on it, and a boom in Adams studies, he lags far behind Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, and even Madison in widely known symbols of his life and career: John Adams remains free of major monuments in Washington, D.C., major collegiate namesakes, and likenesses on the currency.1

It was not that different in 1796. Last elected to office in his own right before the Revolution, and buried in diplomatic posts or the vice presidency since, Adams was remembered as a hero of the political struggle for independence, but without many specifics. As he himself preferred, John Adams was a leader for the cognoscenti, a statesman whose greatest deeds were known chiefly by his peers and superiors, not the public at large. If Adams ever gets a monument in Washington, D.C., the check-and-balanced Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 ought to be on it. Adams later became the toast of constitutional historians for this work, and thought so highly of it himself that he brought a copy to show around Paris when he went over to help negotiate the end of the Revolutionary War. Yet in 1796, his role in forging American constitutionalism was barely a rumor as far as the public was concerned.2

The lack of material on John Adams was a problem for panegyrists and critics alike. All a pro-Adams man had to work with were a few biographical facts, mostly concerning his diplomatic career, and a large and growing corpus of writings on political theory. The closest thing to an Adams campaign biography that 1796 produced was a thirty-one page pamphlet reproducing a series over the pen name “Aurelius,” which had appeared in the Boston Columbian Centinel. Written by one John Gardner, from Milton, Massachusetts, near Adams’s hometown of Braintree, it was called A Brief Consideration of the Important Services, and Distinguished Virtues and Talents which Recommend Mr. Adams for the Presidency of the United States. The pamphlet, however, devoted only a few pages to its ostensible subjects; it quoted a few paragraphs from David Ramsay’s history of the Revolution about Adams’s work in the Continental Congress and the diplomatic corps, both quite technical topics apart from the great debates with John Dickinson over independence (later immortalized in the musical 1776). Securing loans from the Dutch

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