XV.

CHAPTER place them both behind the two opposition candidates The mass of the Federals remained ignorant of the bit 1900. ter feud which had sprung up among the leaders. That feud was still a political secret into which few were in itiated, and but very slightly alluded to in the public prints. The feeling against Adams was confined, in a great measure, to a few active politicians. The attempt to diffuse their feeling among the mass could only give rise to dissensions in a party whose united force was hardly able to withstand the external pressure against it. Yet there were some so embittered against Adams as to be ready to operate for his defeat, even at the risk of bringing in Jefferson. Such was the feeling of Wolcott, who seems to have been chief engineer for the dissatisfied. Other cooler heads perceived that by no means whatever could the Federal leaders opposed to Adams more effectually destroy themselves in the public estimation than by following out a plan of impotent resentment, and thus bringing about the election of a man whom they had so long combined to hold up as devoid of every good principle, religious or political. In what a ridiculous position would they place themselves, after lauding Adams for four years as the wisest and firmest of men, to turn about and denounce him as one whose weakness, caprices, selfishness, and vanity made him unfit to be the head of a party or a nation!

The painful and almost helpless position of these inJuly 22 triguers is graphically portrayed in a letter from M'Henry to Wolcott. "Have our party shown that they possess the necessary skill and courage to deserve to be continued to govern? What have they done? They did not (with a few exceptions), knowing the disease, the man, and his nature, meet it, when it first appeared, like wise and resolute politicians; they tampered with it, and

XV.

thought of palliations down to the last day of the late CHAPTER session of Congress. Nay, their conduct even now, notwithstanding the consequences full in view, should the 1800. present chief be re-elected, in most, if not in all of the states, is tremulous, timid, feeble, deceptive, and cowardly. They write private letters. To whom? To each other. But they do nothing to give a proper direction to the public mind. They observe, even in their conversation, a discreet circumspection, ill calculated to diffuse information, or to prepare the mass of the people for the result. They meditate in private. Can good come out of such a system? If the party recover its pristine energy and splendor, shall I ascribe it to such cunning, paltry, indecisive, back-door conduct?" The Federal leaders in New England, dreading the weight of Adams's name and influence, desired that the first open demonstration against him, if any was to be made, as to which they very much doubted, should come from Maryland or New Jersey. But the Federalists of these two states, accustomed to look to New England for leadership, did not think it at all expedient to place themselves at the head of so serious a movement.

Fully aware of the intrigues going on against him, Adams was not the man to remain quietly on the defensive. He freely denounced his Federal opponents under the appellation of the "Essex Junto"-several of their chief leaders in Massachusetts being residents in or connected with that maritime county-as a faction devoted to England, and whose real ground of complaint against him was that he had refused to involve the nation in an unnecessary war with France. Thus, both personally and through his partisans, he appealed to that spirit of animosity against England, deeply rooted in his own breast, and still operating with great force on the

XV.

1800.

CHAPTER popular mind. The men thus struck at thought it hard indeed that this imputation of subserviency to England -a long-standing accusation of the opposition as against the whole Federal party, and of which Adams himself had been a special mark-should now be caught up by him and pointed exclusively against them; nor could they see any thing in it but a mere electioneering trick, a dishonest appeal to the passions and prejudices of the Aug 3. multitude. "You will at length," so Ames wrote to Wolcott, "clearly discern in the gazettes the whole plan of a certain great man. It is by prating about impartiality, Americanism, liberty and equality, to gull the weak among the Feds. Half the wealthy can be made to repine that talents without wealth take the right hand of them. Purse-pride works in Boston. They are vexed that an Essex Junto should be more regarded than the men whose credit in money matters so far outweighs them. The Federalists hardly deserve the name of a party. Their association is a loose one, formed by accident, and shaken by every prospect of labor or hazard.”

Yet this charge of devotion to England, though some what exaggerated, was not by any means without foun dation. Though, when first brought forward against the whole Federal party, it had been a mere chimera, the offspring of that unsatiated hatred which saw in any thing approaching to moderation and candor symptoms of a culpable attachment, it had come now in the course of events to describe something that actually existed—a counterpart, though comparatively a very modest one, to that French faction which had exercised so powerful an influence upon the national politics. Sympathy for revolutionary France, regarded as the champion of political and social reforms as against the ancient despotisms of Europe, had created a faction in the United States, the

XV.

object of which seemed to be to throw America headlong CHAPTER into the arms of France-an object supported and encouraged, to a very considerable extent, by the general 1800. opposition of which this faction formed a part. At first these enthusiasts had found their principal resistance in the firmness of Washington, the sagacity of Hamilton, and especially from that inertia which always opposes itself to any great and sudden movement. But those excesses of the French Revolution which, at the moment of their happening, had seemed to strike the public attention as little more than a horrible dream, had begun, in the minds of a large portion of the community, to assume the character of terrible realities, and to be brooded over, without any very nice analysis of their real causes, as the necessary consequences of the practical application of those principles which the leaders of the French Revolution had proclaimed-principles held up to execration under what had now become the odious name of Jacobinism. As developed in practice, whatever it might be in theory, the system of Jacobinism had turned out to be nothing more than the violent seizure of power by suc cessive factions of audacious, enthusiastic, and turbulent men, impatient of all control and greedy of authority, who, as the pretended agents of the people, and in the name of the rights of man, had successively exercised a horrible despotism, not to be paralleled except by the worst passages in the history of the worst times. A natural reaction against the admirers and would-be imitators of such a system and such men, joined to the late outrageous conduct of France, and to the fact that England seemed to be the only power capable of offering to her any effectual resistance, had in many bosoms extinguished the Revolutionary antipathy to Great Britain, and had gradually brought her to be regarded as the great

XV.

1800.

CHAPTER champion of law, order, religion and property, against what seemed the demoniac fury of the French Revolutionists. Of those entertaining these feelings there were many ready and anxious to join England in the war against France, as the only means of saving the United States from French influence and Jacobin triumph. Naturally enough, they had been greatly displeased at the renewal of negotiations with the Directory; and these were the men whom Adams denounced, and not altogether without reason, as constituting an English faction. With the same degree of truth with which they had charged French influence as operating on Jefferson and his associates, they might be now said to be themselves acting under English influence. French sympathies and English sympathies, would, in either case, have been the more accurate expression; but the language of political passion, always greatly exaggerated, makes, at the best, only a certain approach toward the truth.

Very unfortunately for Adams, as to this point of British influence, his enemies of both parties were enabled, just at this moment, to put him to a mortifying disadvantage. An old letter of his, made public by a gross breach of confidence-the same referred to in Walcott's account of the opening of the late session of Congress, quoted in the preceding chapter-displayed in a striking light some of the weakest points of his character. Like all persons of his impulsive temper, always too ready to betray himself by his tongue or his pen, Adams had been inveigled, during Washington's first term of office, into a confidential correspondence with Tench Coxe, a mousing politician and temporizing busybody, though a man of considerable financial knowledge and ability, who held at that moment the place of Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. The insignificance of