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- [00:00]
A
Happy 4th of July to our Bulwark Book Club fans. I hope you all are having a fantastic holiday. Before we jump into today's episode, I just wanted to alert everyone that Bill Kristol and I are going to be doing the August Book Club. We have chosen Pudd' Nhead Wilson by Mark Twain. Now, I haven't read it, but it comes highly recommended by both of our spouses. And it is the story of, in the antebellum south, babies who are switched at birth, one black, one white. And it has gotten great praise from reviewers and critics over the years. So we are really looking forward to jumping in and talking about Mark Twain in general and little American history. But it's a novel for August. For those of you going to the beach, I hope you can join us. I've looked it up. It is available all over the place and for free on Kindle if you want to get it that way. So hope you'll join us for, for that. And now on to this month's selection.
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B
Political speech in newspapers was asking and calling for violence, and people were responding. So newspaper editors would call for mobs to attack their enemies, and they did. And there were threats of arson in Philadelphia. Death threats were delivered to the President's house. And so I think there was a genuine good faith concern about the role of political speech and violence, but it was then used by the Federalist Party and perverted for partisan gain. And so I think it's really essential that we don't dismiss the fear because that is something I think some of it we can identify with. We just can't allow it to be thwarted in that way.
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A
Welcome to the Mona Charon Show. So glad you could join me today. This is our second or third Bulwark Book Club, so we are thrilled if you've had a chance to read the book that we're going to discuss. But even if you haven't, I know you'll find the conversation interesting. My guest is Lindsay Chervinsky, who is the author of Making the John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic. Lindsay, you are the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. So you are also an expert on Washington. And if you were writing about important precedents that were set at the beginning of our Republic, why did you choose Adams? Why not the first precedent setter?
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B
Well, thank you so much for having me. I am a big Bulwark fan, a sometimes Bulwark contributor, and a great admirer of your work. So I'm thrilled to be here. And I, I Love, General Hurtling. So I'm honored to follow in his footsteps with this book club. But I wrote a book about Washington's Cabinet and the creation of the presidency, all of the precedents he established, and really the formation of institution of an institution, a presidential institution. And then I was wondering about what to do next. And I started thinking about what would it look like to have someone else in that office? How did these precedents and norms survive? How did they become something powerful and tangible that we still have with us today? And that led me to John Adams. And then as I was starting to work on that book, I watched January 6th happen as we all did. And I realized how much I was taking for granted the peaceful transfer of power. And I figured if I was, then probably some others were too, and started to explore where that. That that practice came from. And it turns out that Adams was absolutely essential to the first couple of transitions. And that very much framed this book.
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A
It taught me so much. One thing I have to confess is I kept having to remind myself as I was reading it that all of the action takes place in Philadelphia. We always think about presidents living and working in Washington, D.C. and of course, that didn't happen until very far into the Adams administration. He only. He was the first president to live in the White House, you say, but he only lived there for what, four months before he was defeated for re election and had to vacate. But you give such an evocative sense of what it was like in Philadelphia, of the distances involved. And so Adams comes into office, and the first thing that happens is that he is sort of besieged on all sides, both by his own party and by the other party. So tell us a little about that, if you would.
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B
Absolutely. Well, I think the important thing to know, and it's hard for us to kind of envision this because we're reading history backwards, but in 1797, when John Adams took office, there were real, tangible, and frightening questions about whether or not this institution would work, if anyone else was in it. The powers were enormous. And these were people that had very intentionally thrown off a monarchy. And so there were questions about whether or not anyone else could be trusted with that. There were questions about whether or not the institution would work and other nations would respect it, or whether it would work with the other institutions in our republic. And those fears and those concerns were ever present and very pervasive. And so Adam showed enormous political courage by just being willing to even go into this office to prove that someone else could do it, that the office was bigger than any one person. And that meant from the very beginning that he was grappling with how do you serve as president when your vice president is a person from the other party? Thomas Jefferson, of course, came in second. And at this point, that's how the Constitution picked the president and vice president. He was dealing with Washington's cabinet that he had inherited because there was no precedent of replacing your cabinet secretaries. And he had a lot of good reason to think that they would continue to be loyal to the office. And he was dealing with threats from France because tensions with France had been ratcheting up for the last couple of years. And they kind of broke over his head when he took office. And, and everyone kind of knew that this was going to happen. Thomas Jefferson was very happy to have lost that election and said that he, he felt like John Adams was left holding the bag. That's a direct quote. So this was an incredibly tumultuous time and everyone knew going to be.
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A
So one of our readers who sent in a question asked something very relevant to this. Norbert Pridge said, considering the trouble that Washington's cabinet caused for John Adams during his time in office, why didn't he sweep them out much earlier and nominate folks that were actually loyal to him?
- [07:16]
B
Oh, this is such a good question. So he didn't initially, because Washington had had a really hard time getting people into office. Once that first batch of ca Cabinet secretaries, the famous Hamilton Jefferson duo, left, the positions were not nearly as prestigious as they are today. The pay was relatively low. You were going to be away from your home and families for months at a time because travel was difficult and dangerous. And you were opening yourself up to enormous political criticism at a time when many people were very wary of that. So he knew that if Washington had trouble, he was going to have trouble. He very much did not want to split the Federalist party so early into his administration by replacing people. And again, he didn't know that that was necessary because he had never sat in on a single cabinet meeting. Washington didn't include him at all. And critically, Washington did not say, hey, you know, these guys are actually not great. You might want to consider someone else, which, if I could ask Washington some questions, that would be one of them, top of the list.
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A
So that is. And that is a pattern that is repeated by so many later presidents. Right? Not bringing their vice president, president in, not letting them know what's going on. Famously, Truman didn't even know about the Manhattan Project. I mean, there are many, many examples. Did Washington just not trust Adams, didn't he like him? What was the. Do you have any insight into why he kept him so much at arm's length for eight years?
- [08:44]
B
Yeah, there. Well there are two theories and I find one far more compelling than the other. So the first was that the Vice President was very much seen as part of the Senate at the time. The Vice President sat in on every Senate session and was there to casting tie breaking votes. So there's one argument that Washington would have seen that as a violation of separation of powers if he included John Adams in his cabinet meetings. I find that less compelling because he had no problem sending the Chief justice on diplomatic missions. And that seems to me like a little bit of a blending of separation of powers to me. I think the far more compelling answer is that they had never been particularly close. Adams had criticized Washington's. Some of Washington's choices, especially in 1776 with the military and, and rightfully so. Washington made some battlefield mistakes. And while Washington was very willing to hear criticism face to face, if you said it publicly then he had a hard time forgiving that. And so he definitely held that against Adams. But I think the most pressing issue was in the summer of 1780 when they were trying to figure out what to call the President. Adams had suggested a very ostentatious title, something like his elected magistrate and protector of our liberties which does not roll off the tongue. And I think he had understandable reason for that because he had just come from the Court of St. James and had been at Versailles and had seen the majesty of those institutions. And he worried that foreign representatives would come to the United States and think what is this podunk nothing backwater nation? And so he thought a title would help. And that was a very unpopular decision. It very much undercut his political support. And I think Washington came to distrust his political judgment. But that's kind of reading between the lines. We don't have a great answer there. But to close off the question about Adams cabinet, he certainly could have replaced the cabinet secretaries earlier than he did. He didn't fire Timothy Pickering until May of 1800. I think he was worried with the possible threat of France what it would do to tear apart the Federalist Party. And he was desperately trying to hold the union together. And there were real questions about whether or not the President had the right to do so. The Constitution doesn't specify anything about the department secretaries other that they will eventually exist. And the legislation creating the department secretaries in the summer of 1789 doesn't say how they were to be removed because Congress couldn't agree. So they just punted on the decision. And Washington had never fired a Cabinet secretary if he was displeased with them. They just resigned in horror. And so there was a real legal question about whether or not he had the right to. And in fact, when Adams did appoint John Marshall as Timothy Pickering's replacement, the Senate debated for a couple of days whether they would accept it. And they ultimately decided that Marshall was the best replacement that they could get. And so they accepted the, the appointment. But that that precedent was then ultimately upheld in the 1920s by the Supreme Court. But there was a lot of legal questions around the decision.
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A
So I had always thought of the Federalists in kind of vague terms, you know, that they were the sort of New England pro business, pro Britain party as opposed to the Republicans who were pro France and slave owners and whatever. But this book really gets into the intra Federalist fighting. And so whereas one might have thought that with a Federalist president like John Adams that he would be hostile to France, in fact the arch Federalists in his cabinet were. And Hamilton is behind the scenes. Like all these cabinet members you point out in the book are reporting to Hamilton. They're all like in correspondence with him, really colluding with him and they really want a war with France. But Adams is keen to keep the US out of a war which by the way, seems very consistent with Washington's foreign policy. It's a shame Washington didn't give him a little bit more support. Support in this. But anyway, what's your sense of that?
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B
Absolutely. I think this was part of the story that for me was the most fascinating and in some ways one of the things that was so relevant to today about this book in terms of the parallels between the 1790s and now. If Washington and Adams had had a telephone, I think things would have gone a lot better because they were actually so aligned on so many things. And the distance between them allowed the Cabinet, with Hamilton's participation, to really pit them against each other and collude to achieve what they wanted to achieve. And that was that this new army that Congress had built to defend the United States against a potential French invasion was essentially a spoil system for the Federalist Party. And Hamilton had these grand notions of marching it south through Virginia to crush the Democratic Republicans and then go on to South America and stir up some rebellions for good measure. So when I, when I'm talking about this book, I'll sometimes say that Adams really slow rolled the creation of the army and kind of Tried to put up obstacles to its evolution. And that sounds like something we would never want a president to do. But I also say this is not the army that we have today. This is not the army we want. It was a very partisan organization. And Adams had the incredible good sense to know that a war would be potentially fatal to the nation, especially with this is Napoleon's France at this point. So this is a massive army. And he had been abroad and he had the incredible diplomatic experience and expertise to know that European nations did not care at all about what happened to the United States and were always acting in their own best interests. So he was able to pursue diplomacy. And that really did fracture the party. But what I found so interesting is because it was a very weak party. This is. These are not the political parties of, you know, like the 1980s or even today. The moment he pursued diplomacy, the extreme wing of the party turned on him and started referring to him as an evil to be endured and undermining his re election campaign, undermining his foreign policy, anything that they could do to make his presidency weaker. But the rhetoric they used about people not being federalist enough or not being strong enough against their enemies or their opponents reminds me so much of their rhetoric today. In that we have a weak party. We have weak parties, such that the extreme voices are the ones often attacking the moderates.
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A
Yeah. So interesting. Okay, so I'm fascinated by the relationships. So we've probed a little bit the relationship between Washington and Adams. Can we talk for a minute? You refer to this about the relationship between Washington and Jefferson, because there was this mazai letter. Am I mispronouncing that?
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B
I think it's maze misse. Okay, but my Italian is not great, so who knows?
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A
So this is published. This is a private letter Jefferson wrote to a friend who was in Italy at the time, in Pisa. And it is pretty scurrilous, pretty horrible about Washington. And I'm just curious, like, okay, so he never denied being the author of this. Jefferson did not deny it. So I'm asking, did Washington know about this? How did it affect their relationship?
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B
He absolutely knew. And this is again where Washington was very tolerant of criticism in private, especially if it was to his face. If you were honest with him in private about what you thought, he was very accepting of that and even welcomed it in his cabinet. But if you publicized the criticism or you went behind his back, then he never really forgave that and can be quite thin skinned. So at this point, by the time Adams was president, Washington and Jefferson were kind of on the outs anyway. Jefferson, of course, had started an opposition newspaper to the Washington administration while he was still acting as Secretary of state, which Washington knew and tolerated for a shocking amount of time, and didn't demand that Jefferson fire the person that was responsible for this newspaper. He permitted a really surprising degree of opposition from within the administration because he saw the value in having both Jefferson and Hamilton there to balance one another. After Jefferson left as Secretary of state, he then really became the leader of this new opposition party and was quite critical of the Washington administration. So their relationship was further strained. They managed to continue to send letters back and forth occasionally, as long as they focused on safety subjects like farming and agriculture, and not talk about anything political. But the Mose letter was really probably one of the last draws. And after that, they didn't speak much. And while this is a little bit of. We're not sure how much of this is myth and how much of this is accurate. After Washington died, Jefferson did go visit Martha, and she said it was one of the worst days of her life because she never forgave him either.
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A
Ooh, that's interesting.
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B
Well, it's, you know, it's a good reminder. We are often much more forgiving of those who trespass against us and less forgiving of those who trespass against our loved ones.
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A
Against our loved ones, Absolutely. You also relate that, though Washington was pretty sparing in what he would say to Adams, that Martha did say to him on the occasion of his inauguration, that the president and she were both very happy about the outcome of the. The election or something like. It may not have been at the inauguration, but it was.
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B
It was not long after. And I suspect those remarks were quite intentional because she was. Although she hated politics, she was very circumspect. And she and George were very meticulous about any conversation or correspondence that could be deemed political or diplomatic. So, for example, in 1798, she wrote a letter to Henrietta Liston, who was the wife of the British minister to the United States. And George Washington wrote out the response, a draft. And then she copied it out in. In final. In her hand. So they were colluding on what she would say to basically a harmless letter, but it could be deemed partisan or political or. Or diplomatic. And so my guess is those remarks were. Were very intentional.
- [19:37]
A
Yeah. Interesting. Your book says that Adams was responsible for some very, very important precedents that set the tone for what would come after. And so part of it, if I understand it correctly, is that people weren't sure whether, you know, because, yes, Washington created a lot of precedents, but would they be followed by anybody who wasn't Washington because his stature was so incomparable, that maybe it was the case that, well, Washington could do it, but nobody else could? Is that. Is that right? And then Adams sort of gave the. The signal that, no, the president can fire a cabinet member. It doesn't have to be Washington.
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B
Absolutely. So, I mean, I think some context is so helpful here. This was a world of monarchs and military dictators, and in which power was often embodied in the physical person of one being. It wasn't necessarily in an office. And so when you had hereditary passing down of power from one monarch to the next, there's a lot of religious connotation, there's a lot of divine right that is folded into those things that gives power to this person who's on the throne? They were unfamiliar with a government or an institution or an office that had the power contained in the office, not necessarily in the person. And so that was something that Americans had to be taught how to participate in, how to respect and how to uphold. And for Washington, it was complicated because before he even became president, people were already calling him the father of the country. So he had a lot of that personal prestige in a way that no other president has ever had since. And, you know, that kind of language almost feels uncomfortable to us today because we are so unwilling, most of us are so unwilling to celebrate politicians in that type of way. And the closest that I can think of is, like, Dolly Parton is kind of universally beloved, but she's obviously not a political figure. So imagine someone who is that universally loved, but also the most powerful office. It was a combination that was never going to be able to be recreated. And so Adams challenge was to prove that the office mattered. It wasn't necessarily about the person, and Washington helped him in that way. When Adams was inaugurated, after the inauguration, he walked out of the building and Washington walked out behind him. And it was the first time in probably about 30 years that Washington had walked out of the room behind another man, which was an enormous symbolic gesture that he was just a citizen now like everyone else, and the office was bigger than him. So a lot of that theater had to go into this learning process for the American people. And then I mentioned that, you know, when. When Adams fired Pickering in May of 1800, that legal precedent is essential, because if secretaries can't be fired, if they can pursue whatever agenda they want, then it splits the executive into an executive by committee, essentially like a privy council, like you have in Britain, where the other members of the Cabinet have their own base of authority. And so in firing Pickering, not only was Adams removing an enormous thorn in his side, but he was also defending the character of the executive as Washington had established it. It.
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A
The descriptions in the book of this cabinet are just unbelievable. So the Cabinet was really small then. Okay. But these guys are just. They're treating Adams like a factotum. Like, you can stay home and Quincy, we'll handle everything. I mean, they really. And they were just defying his orders outright. And it was completely unclear who was in charge. Right. I mean, for a while.
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B
Yeah. And it, you know, it blows my mind because it's one thing if someone like Jefferson, who at least had diplomatic experience, was sort of claiming this authority. But what I find so befuddling about Timothy Pickering is Timothy Pickering thought he was the smartest person in the room all the time.
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A
He was a Secretary of State.
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B
Yes. And he. I mean, think about some of the rooms that he was.
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A
Who.
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B
Who he was with. I mean, he was with people like Hamilton and Jefferson and Adams and. Washington. Washington. And he thought that he was smarter all the time and he had never left the country, so he was trying to establish foreign policy and had no diplomatic experience whatsoever. I also find it, you know, really interesting. Hamilton and Adams despised each other. They hated each other. And they had a major clash over foreign policy, too. And Hamilton was lecturing Adams on what was going to happen in France and what was going to happen in London, and he had never been to those places. And I can just imagine the rage boiling up in Adam's head at this. Nobody who was, you know, lecturing him about things he had known.
- [24:38]
A
And you tell one of the stories. I remember this from the book where you said the. I think it was Hamilton who was saying, Louis the 18th is going to be on the throne in a couple weeks. Right. Isn't that one of the stories?
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B
Yeah. So this was in. He's like, that's not how this is going to work. In 17. It was in 1799. And Adams was. No, it was. Yeah, 1799. And Adams was getting ready to send this diplomatic mission to France to try and negotiate a peaceful settlement. And Hamilton comes to see him and is trying to convince him not to send the peaceful settlement because he says, Louis XVIII is going to be back on the throne any day and will give them better terms. Well, for those of you who are familiar with your French history, Louis XVIII does. I mean, the Bourbon kings are eventually restored, but it doesn't go very well for them. And it takes a long time to get to that point. And so it just showed a real lack of understanding about European dynamics, which Adams had firsthand experience with and knew quite well.
- [25:43]
A
He had been a diplomat himself. He also had some diplomats abroad that reported directly to him, you know, bypassing Pickering. And those were his son, John Quincy Adams. And the other one's name, who was the one in the Hague?
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B
Oh, William Vans Murray, who was a friend of John Quincy Adams and. And was a very savvy diplomat in his own right. And yes, they were both. They were both absolutely giving him information. They were sending it to the Secretary of State, as they were supposed to, but they were also sending it directly to Adams, not trusting Secretary of State Timothy Pickering to pass it along, which
- [26:28]
A
was fair because Pickering did sometimes put things in a bottom drawer. By the way, I love the picture in the book of the young John Quincy Adams because you always see the picture of the elderly guy who I respect tremendously because of what he did. I mean, I love John Quincy. But anyway, he. He chose to become a congressman after having served as president and he was a great voice for AB to the point where they actually gagged him in Congress. But he's always shown old. And in the picture of him as a young man, he was quite handsome. I have to say.
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B
He was. And he was apparently pretty charming. He loved poetry. He really had a. He loved the theater. He had a great taste in music. He could be prickly, but he could be quite charming when he wanted to be.
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A
And he was apparently brilliant. Like, he knew Latin and Greek at very young age.
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B
And so admittedly, he's. He is the subject of my next book, which you. Very lovely preempted. It was a wonderful way to introduce it. And he is quite a source that has been a source of fascination for quite some time. I don't know if anyone saw my dog come in. His John Quincy dog, Adams, and you
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A
thank him for acknowledgments. I don't know that I've ever seen. Seen anybody thank their dog in the acknowledgment section.
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B
He's the best writing advice. Getting a dog is the best writing advice I've. I can give to anyone. But, yes, John Quincy was utterly brilliant. He spoke like five languages by the time he was 12 and had a. I know, I agree, because I'm a terrible linguist and had his own diplomatic appointment when he was 14 to go to Russia to serve as a French translator for the envoy to Russia. So he just was A remarkable human.
- [28:18]
A
Yeah. By the way, one of our readers, speaking of John Quincy says, this is from Charles Michaels. He says, can Lindsay Chervinsky settle a long standing argument that he has with his wife? He says, were both John Adams and John Quincy Adams born in Braintree?
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B
Yes, they both were. They were born in houses right next to each other. So John Adams was born in one house and then came back and lived in the house right next door with Abigail when they were newlyweds. And that was where John Quincy was born. Which must have been really fun for Abigail to live right next to her mother in law. I'm sure she really enjoyed that.
- [28:58]
A
By the way, I love the references to places that are still here. So at one point, you're describing Adams coming to Alexandria just, just down the road from me here. And, and, and you mentioned Gatsby's Tavern, which is still there. So anybody who comes to the D.C. area, if you go to Alexandria, Gatsby's Tavern is still there. Okay. So we talked about a number of relationships. Now, I wanted to get to Jefferson and Adams. When we were preparing this podcast and discussion with you, one of my colleagues said, you know, oh, somebody wrote, wrote. One of the readers wrote in and mentioned that both died on the same day on July 4, 1826, Adams and Jefferson. And she, this was the first she had heard about it and she thought it was so cool. And so why don't we talk about that for a minute? Because this relationship was so fascinating. The fact that they went from friends to real, pretty much enemies to friends again at the end of their lives. Can we just spend a minute on that? And then, of course, the fact that they both died on July 4, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, same day.