Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire”
“Do not, however, I pray you call me . . . ‘The Founder of the American Empire.’”
- John Adams, 1813.
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ADAMS AND AMERICAN LEADERSHIP:
ARISTOCRACY AND EMPIRE by
Alan Taylor
History Department
University of California at Davis
Davis, CA 95616
(astaylor@ucdavis.edu)
March 2004
In 1807 an elderly John Adams recovered with delight a letter he had written as a young man of nineteen. Drafted two decades before the American Revolution, the letter expressed a precocious confidence that the colonies would soon inherit the power and glory of Great Britain.
Citing the naval potential and prodigious population growth of colonial America, Adams predicted the “transfer [of] the great seat of Empire into America.” He concluded: it will be easy to obtain the mastery of the seas, and then the united force of all
Europe, will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves, is to disunite Us. Divide et impera. Keep us in distinct Colonies, and then, some great men in each Colony, desiring the Monarchy of the Whole, they
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004 will destroy each other’s influence and keep the Country in Equilibrio.
Looking back from 1807, Adams claimed, “Jefferson has acquired such glory by his declaration of independence in 1776 that I think I may boast of my declaration of independence in 1755, twenty-one years older than his.” 2
By belatedly focusing only on the letter’s bright anticipation, Adams truncated its complexity, detaching the dream of empire from his pervasive fear of an interacting trinity of horrors: disunion, aristocracy, and foreign intervention. Throughout his political career, Adams counterpoised the threat of regional divisions to the potential greatness of a united America.
And he persistently dreaded the voracious ambition of “great men” as the engine of internal rupture. And he suspected European designs to subvert American potential by cultivating those men of reckless ambition. Fear, rather than assurance, insecurity rather than ambition, drove his generation’s defensive pursuit of empire.
Adams famously suffused his political writings with schemes to contain and manage the ominous power of an American aristocracy. Adams regarded aristocracy as inevitable, even in
America (no, especially in America), because he defined it primarily in functional terms as men of superior talents and ambition. Inherited status and wealth helped, but fundamentally his aristocracy was a meritocracy capable of manipulating the common people of lesser abilities and aspirations. If managed properly, by carefully designed constitutional institutions, that inevitable aristocracy might, in pursuit of public honors, serve the common good. But if left to their own ambitious devices, the aristocrats would pull apart the American empire in their violent contentions for ever greater power and wealth.
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004
Possessing exalted education, driving ambition, and formidable talents, Adams belonged to such an aristocracy - which invested his fears with personal, psychological energy. He saw in other great men the dangers he suspected in himself. He then sought to serve the republican empire by spotlighting its danger from men so very like himself - while denying his own complicity. In later celebrating his 1755 letter, Adams insisted:
I never engaged in public affairs for my own interest, pleasure, envy, jealousy, avarice, or ambition, or even the desire of fame. . . . In every considerable transaction of my public life, I have invariably acted according to my best judgment for the public good, and I can look up to God for the sincerity of my intentions.
Indeed, Adams did often sacrifice his interest and fortune to protect the public good - but he always expected fame, and he frequently expressed envy and jealousy. Only by constant battle against other aristocrats could John Adams protect his own soul - as well as the republic - from the temptations of aristocracy. But that combative drive troubled his relationships with almost all other men of ambition and ability.
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Confronted with Adams’s raw, confrontational writings, historians often depict him as an exceptional and troubled mind outside of the political mainstream of the founding, as a dour pessimist at odds with the emerging American future of liberal democracy. I will, instead, treat
Adams as an especially acute observer offering a crystallization of anxieties widespread in his founding generation of American leaders. In a particularly forceful form, Adams expressed a pervasive set of contradictory expectations: that collective expansion might be the antidote to
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004 regional resentments and conflicts; that imperial dimensions might divert aristocratic ambitions from making regional trouble; but that such expansion might , instead, ramify aristocratic energy to produce an American Caesar who would destroy the republic. In almost the same breath,
Adams and the other founders shifted back-and-forth between dreading and celebrating an imperial scale, between finding safety or destruction in expansion.
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Adams and his fellow founders pursued an expansive American empire as the best means to insulate the United States from a world of predatory European powers. Rather than emphasize the commercial benefits of expansion, the founders dwelled on their dread of neighboring colonies, held by European empires, as bases for subverting the American republic and union by both invasion and the manipulation of regional or partisan divisions within America. Fearing their own internal fault lines, these defensive imperialists sought to maximize American territory as the means to eliminate (or preclude) British and French colonies on the borders of the fragile, new United States. Only their own empire of liberty could permit a neutral isolation from
European conflicts that, otherwise, threatened to reach into, and pry apart, the United States through the medium of contentious aristocrats.
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Throughout his political life, Adams married his regional loyalty to New England with an expansive vision of continental empire. As a New Englander, he found other Americans relatively wanting in the virtue needed to sustain a republic. Southern gentlemen, in particular, seemed insufficiently egalitarian and excessively passionate, indolent, and domineering. But
Adams understood that New England faced a bleak and embattled future without an American union. He hoped, therefore, to situate New England (and himself) within an extensive,
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004 progressive, and powerful empire that could ramify his own and his region’s influence on a continental scale. As a Yankee nationalist, Adams especially longed to construct that empire to the north: to secure the Newfoundland fishery and the Canadian provinces of the British empire.
Duty to the union obliged satisfying the southern states with expansion into Florida and
Louisiana. Love of New England (and fear of southern power) compelled his special drive for northern acquisitions to, at least, keep pace, preserving a regional balance of interest in the confederacy.
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But is it appropriate to call the expansive American union, an “empire”? From the perspective of its own citizens (primarily defined by their white race), the union fundamentally differed from European empires by institutionalizing the rapid promotion of frontier territories
(colonies) into states of equal standing with the original members. But that distinction was lost on the Indians, Hispanics, and French who experienced unilateral and violent annexation by the
United States. Moreover, American citizens proudly described their expanding union as an empire because of its immense scale. In 1779 a magazine writer referred to the “several states in the union of the empire.” In 1783 George Washington exhorted his countrymen to lay the
“foundation of our empire.”
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We often think of the new republic as born innocent of imperial ambition - as if that aspiration appeared belatedly and artificially in the 1890s. In fact, from the beginning, Adams and his peers intertwined the pursuit of empire with the defense of independence. In old age,
Adams satirically insisted that he never wished to be called the “Founder of the American
Empire.” But, along with Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson, Adams played a leading role.
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire”
INDEPENDENCE
March 2004
In April of 1775, the bloodshed at Lexington and Concord persuaded Adams that the colonies must declare independence, form republican state governments, and unite in a confederation that could entirely oust Great Britain from North America. Only in combination could Americans achieve independence, republicanism, union, and empire. During the spring of
1775 in Congress, he pushed for the military invasion of Canada - overcoming considerable reluctance from congressional moderates. He justified the expedition as, in contemporary parlance, a preemptive war against British efforts to rally “all the numerous Tribes of Indians, extending along the Frontiers of all the Colonies . . . to take up the Hatchett, and Spread Blood and Fire among the Inhabitants.” He also slyly expected an American victory to exhilarate the public with imperial visions, rendering independence irresistible.
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But the prospect of conquest raised the tricky question of how to govern the conquered.
“This appears to me as curious a Problem as any We shall have to solve,” Adams confessed. On the one hand, he doubted that the victorious Americans could or should deny to the Canadians the right to frame and elect their own government - and then to join the union as equals. The alternative, imposing a military governor to govern Canada as a subordinate colony, would embarrass Americans posing as freedom’s champions in the court of European public opinion.
And for how long, and at what cost (both financial and moral), could the American Congress maintain and enforce subordination on restive Canadians? On the other hand, most congressmen, including Adams, doubted the Canadians as republican partners because most
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004 were French, Catholic, and illiterate.
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Adams framed an enduring dilemma for republican expansionists, one repeated in the nineteenth-century acquisitions of French Louisiana and Hispanic Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and California. On the one hand, the millennial, universalistic rhetoric of the American
Revolution demanded making republican citizens and republican states in any new territories.
On the other hand, most Protestant Anglo-Americans distrusted and despised Indian, French, and
Hispanic cultures as inferior and unsuited to republican institutions. During the spring of 1776, however, the British army spared Congress from the embarrassing dilemma in Canada by routing the American invasion, to Adams’s deep frustration.
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To rally an American majority for independence, Adams and his colleagues needed to counteract the pessimistic realpolitik expressed by the Loyalists. Preoccupied with immediate
American weakness (rather than future American grandeur), they dreaded British military might, if employed against the colonies, and coveted that power to defend them against predation by the
French and Spanish empires. Thomas Bradbury Chandler warned, “Should it be known abroad that Great-Britain had withdrawn her protection, within the compass of one year our sea-ports would be ravaged and our vessels plundered as soon as they left our harbours.” Recalling the partition of Poland in 1772, Daniel Leonard dreaded that an independent America would soon become an “easy prey, and would be parcelled out, Poland like.” Short of that, the colonies would at least have to submit to commercial domination by either Spain or France as the price of their protection against Great Britain. Or perhaps Britain could buy French assistance by returning Canada. Under that scenario, even if the colonists won independence they would face
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004 an old nemesis to their north.
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The Whigs acknowledged the brutality of imperial competition and noted the real dangers of forsaking British rule for that of France and Spain. But the Whigs felt more confidence in the potential strength of an independent America. In reply to Leonard, John
Adams insisted, “In a land war, this continent might defend itself against all the world.” The
Whigs also asserted that other European empires, solicitous of the balance of power, would intervene to prevent Spain or France from seizing British America. Finally, the Whigs argued that promptly declaring independence would best avert a foreign partition - for the commerce of an independent America could entice the French and Spanish to offer favorable terms.
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To achieve American independence, the British had to be defeated and brought to recognize the United States within expansive borders in a formal peace treaty. But given
American weakness in troops, ships, and money, the new United States desperately needed foreign military assistance to survive. The revolutionaries naturally looked to the French, the great European rival to British power in the Atlantic and the Americas. But what price would the French seek for their help? Independence from Britain would be worth little if purchased by submitting to French domination.
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Quicker and better than any other congressman, Adams understood that Americans needed to prepare a diplomatic place in a world order dominated by the contending superpowers of the Atlantic: France and Great Britain. He insisted, “That these three Measures,
Independence, Confederation and Negotiations with foreign Powers, particularly France, ought to go hand in hand, and be adopted all together.” To sustain true independence, the United
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004
States needed to operate beside, rather than within, the European balance of power which enlisted smaller states in alliances dominated by the powerful for frequent wars. The trick was to avoid “entanglements,” the better to exploit European conflicts for commercial and territorial advantage in North America. Adams argued that, in seeking immediate aid, the Americans must avoid mortgaging their future independence as a neutral nation:
That our real if not our nominal Independence would consist in our Neutrality. If
We united with either Nation [France or Britain], in any future War, We must become too subordinate and dependent on that nation, and should be involved in all European Wars as We had been hitherto. That foreign Powers would find means to corrupt our People to influence our Councils, and in fine We should be little better than Puppetts danced on the Wires of the Cabinetts of Europe. We should be the Sport of European Intrigues and Politicks.
As always, Adams looped back from European power-politics to the internal vulnerability of a diverse and large republic to factional divisions. Weakness within required power without.
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During the summer of 1776, with his trademark thoroughness, Adams designed a comprehensive plan for American treaties with the European powers, beginning with France. To procure military aid, Adams advised offering “Only a Commercial Connection” without any entangling alliance to obligate Americans to help France militarily. He preached, “Our Business with them and there’s with Us, is Commerce, not Politicks, much less War. America has been the Sport of European Wars and Politics long enough.” He hoped that the chief economic boon to American independence - liberation from the British Navigation Acts - could perform double
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004 duty as the principal incentive for French assistance. By opening ports to reciprocal trade, the
Americans could enhance their prosperity; smite the British; and allure the French, who should ask nothing more from the United States.
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Banking heavily on the allure of American commerce, Adams proposed requiring territorial concessions from France. Reserving British North America for the United States, he stipulated that the French king
Shall never invade, or get Possession, for himself of Labradore, New Britain,
Nova Scotia, Accadia, Canada, Florida, nor any of the Countries, Cities, or
Towns, on the Continent of North America, nor of the Islands of Newfoundland,
Cape Breton, St. Johns, Anticoste, nor of any other Islands lying near to the Said
Continent, in the Seas, or in any Gulph, Bay or River, it being the true intent and meaning of this Treaty, that the Said united States Shall have the Sole, exclusive undivided and perpetual Possession of all the Countries, Cities, and Towns, on the
Said Continent, and of all Islands near to it, which now are, or lately were under the Jurisdiction of or subject to the King or Crown of Great Britain.
Despite the American defeats in Canada in early 1776, Adams persisted in pressing for northern conquest as essential to American security: “The Unanimous Voice of the Continent is [that]
Canada must be ours. Quebec must be taken.”
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Adams’s aversion to a French alliance defied the desperation of the United States: lacking a fleet, desperately short of soldiers, and almost utterly without funds or credit - while fighting for survival against the world’s premier empire. More pragmatic congressmen
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004 recognized the need to secure French military assistance by committing to a formal alliance which Benjamin Franklin negotiated in Paris in early 1778. That treaty of alliance did, however, preserve Adams’s insistence that France renounce any claims in North America.
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Given the superior French power (especially financial), the alliance inevitably placed the impoverished and embattled United States in a junior position, obliged to heed the advice of the
French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes. That inequality aggravated John Adams who joined Franklin in Paris as an American diplomat in 1778. Adams dreaded Vergennes as cunning and deceitful, and Adams distrusted Franklin as corrupt, lazy, and insufficiently wary of
French domination. Unlike the smooth and ingratiating Franklin, Adams adamantly refused to flatter and humor Vergennes. Adams “suspected he had a design to make me his dependant, and to have claims upon my gratitude.” By preserving his own prickly independence, Adams believed that he defended his nation. He acted as if the future greatness of America should count far more than her present desperation. Anticipating that the United Sates would become the
“greatest Power on Earth,” Adams insisted that the Americans “might bid Defyance to all the
Potentates of Europe if united against them.” Far better for the French, therefore, if they immediately cultivated American goodwill by fulfilling his every request. But his blunt and demanding approach offended Vergennes, which irritated Franklin, who better recognized the present realities of American weakness and dependence on France.
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PEACE
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004
During 1779 Congress spent eight months wrangling over their wish list for peace terms.
Congressmen pressed varying regional agendas. New Englanders wanted access to the fisheries off Newfoundland and possession of Canada and Nova Scotia. Southerners wanted borders stretching south to the thirty-first parallel - if not to the Gulf of Mexico - and west to the
Mississippi, with the right to convey produce down that river to the Gulf of Mexico. Lacking the power to make tough decisions at regional expense, Congress expected the British to make expansive concessions to satisfy every region. Congress needed most, if not all of British North
America to sustain their union.
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Although embattled west of the Appalachians and defeated in Canada, Congress still hoped through diplomacy to acquire all of British North America. In the Articles of
Confederation, the Congress pre-approved Canada as a future member of the union. In 1776
Benjamin Franklin insisted that the British must surrender the Floridas, Bahamas, Bermuda, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec, St. John’s, and Nova Scotia - because “it was absolutely necessary for us to have them for our own security.” In 1780, Adams concurred, “If a Peace should unhappily be made leaving England in Possession of Canada, Nova Scotia, the Floridas or any one spot of Ground in America, they will be perpetually encroaching upon the states of
America.” Leaving any of these colonies in British hands would “only lay a Foundation for future Wars.” In other words, the bold territorial demands derived from a consciousness of weakness: a fear that the republic could not survive unless the British Empire was entirely removed from North America.
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In April of 1782 in preliminary negotiations with a British emissary (Richard Oswald),
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004
Franklin urged the cession of Canada. Franklin insisted that only such territorial generosity could preclude future boundary disputes and reconcile Americans enraged by wartime atrocities.
Adams endorsed Franklin’s proposal as ideal, but agreed to settle for a British stipulation to withdraw its troops and to maintain no forts along the border. He anticipated that a demilitarized
Canada and Nova Scotia would soon fall into American hands: “The Revolt of all the English
Colonies, after the Independence of the thirteen States, is most certain. The People will never bear their Government, if they can be admitted into the Confederation.” 23
Franklin’s proposed terms defied the French, who opposed the American acquisition of
British North America. Neither the Americans nor the French wanted the other to possess the
Canadian provinces. During the war, the French minister in Philadelphia discouraged American plans to mount a renewed invasion of Canada. In European diplomacy, Vergennes favored the
British retention of Canada lest “too great an aggregation of power” render the Americans indifferent to their alliance with France. Previously so solicitous of French approval, Franklin would break with his nation’s ally to seek Canada, which attested to the premium he placed on eliminating the British as neighbors in North America.
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During the summer of 1782, Franklin and his fellow peace commissioners John Adams and John Jay concluded that the French and the Spanish meant to perpetuate American dependence by imposing unfavorable boundaries in a final peace treaty. In Adams’s words, they meant to “Keep us poor. Depress us. Keep us weak.” The French and Spanish negotiators proposed to restrict American power in the west by awarding the lands north of the Ohio River to the British and those south of the Tennessee River to the Spanish. Such bounds would keep
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004 the United States east of the Appalachian Mountains except for a western bulge in the middle to accommodate settlements in Kentucky and Tennessee. Worse still, in Adams’s opinion, the
French refused to support American claims Canada or to fishing rights on the banks of
Newfoundland - rights essential to the maritime economy of New England. Adams believed that France hoped by these restrictions - at sea and by land - to perpetuate sources of friction that would provoke future wars where a relatively weak United States would again need French help.
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Congress had instructed her peace commissioners in Paris to defer to France in negotiations. Rejecting those instructions as naive, the commissioners entered secret negotiations directly with Britain to seek more favorable terms than the French favored.
Initially, the lead British negotiator, Richard Oswald, supported uniting all of North America
“under the cover of one and the same political constitution.” He reflected the paradoxical thinking of his superior, Lord Shelburne, the Secretary of State who supervised the British negotiations. Shelburne believed that indulging the United States with vast boundaries would sooth the American passion for independence. Diffused over a vast territory, the Americans would remain farmers, perpetuating their dependence on British manufactured goods. In addition to profiting British manufacturers, that economic dependence would soon induce the
Americans to give up their formal independence to affiliate with the British empire in some form of commonwealth. Shelburne insisted that “the Constitution of Great Britain is sufficient to pervade the whole world.” And he devoutly believed that Americans “would not be so happy without, as with the connection with Great Britain.” 26
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004
But the American negotiators - John Jay, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin - insisted upon an immediate British recognition of American independence, as a precursor to negotiations.
Obliged to make that concession, Shelburne backed away from conceding Canada and Nova
Scotia. The final peace settlement drew the northern border through the Great Lakes and their connecting rivers. Instead of becoming republican states in the American union, Nova Scotia and Canada became havens for about 50,000 Loyalist refugees. Their influx strengthened British control in the northern provinces, rendering more unlikely an American conquest. The Loyalist settlements gave the new border an ideological edge as the frontier between revolutionary republicanism and the British empire.
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Otherwise, Oswald offered remarkably generous terms, on the theory that a secure United
States would more quickly reject its French alliance and return gradually to the British orbit, at least commercially. To make future trouble for the Spanish, the British readily conceded the western and southern boundaries sought by the Americans: the Mississippi River to the west and the St. Mary’s River and 31 st parallel to the south. The British also granted the Americans access to the fisheries off of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. In return, the Americans agreed to pay their pre-war debts to British merchants. The Americans also pretended to accommodate the
Loyalists by pledging to recommend that the states restore their confiscated properties - a recommendation that surely would be ignored. And the British pretended that such a hollow pledge would benefit the Loyalists. On November 30, 1782 the delegations signed the preliminary treaty, which became finalized on September 3, 1783.
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire”
SYSTEMS
March 2004
In 1785 Adams became the first American minister to Great Britain, a position he coveted as an opportunity to consolidate the peace treaty by reconciling the British to American independence. If the British treated the United States with respect, the United States could become more truly independent of France, perfecting American neutrality.
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But Adams understood that true reconciliation hinged upon Great Britain compromising the foundation of her maritime empire: the Navigation Acts System that subordinated colonial trade to metropolitan interests. By controlling and channeling colonial trade, at the expense of rival empires, the British bolstered their navy, which (in turn) protected and policed that commerce. Particularly in wartime, the Navigation System provoked weaker nations because the
Royal Navy stopped, inspected, and often confiscated neutral shipping suspected of trading with the enemy. Into the bargain, British naval commanders filled out their crews by impressing sailors from the inspected ships - alleging (sometimes accurately) that those sailors were Britons.
Adams anticipated that American independence would prove fundamentally incompatible with the British Navigation Acts System:
The true American System will be Peace, eternal Peace: but this very System will provoke England. In future Times, America at Peace, and England at War, what will become of her? How many will fly, Sailors especially, to the standard of the
Olive Branch. Will not this excite her Envy, her Jealousy, her Rage?
In sum, as an appealing alternative, the United States threatened the British maritime empire
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004 with a hemorrhaging of trade and sailors. Adams presciently predicted that the British would respond violently, threatening American sovereignty on the high seas.
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Fulfilling Adams’s fears rather than his hopes, the British refused to accept American economic independence. Seeking the commercial benefits of empire without the administrative costs, in 1783 Great Britain applied their Navigation Act system to the United States by excluding American shipping from Canada and the British West Indies. This threatened the
American economy, which before the war had relied upon the British West Indies as a market for its lumber, fish, livestock, and grains. The British permitted American fishers and farmers to supply the West Indies but only via British vessels - a grievous blow to the shippers of New
England. Dependent upon British markets for produce and addicted to British manufactured consumer goods, the American states failed to impose a reciprocity in trade. Nor could the confederacy government impose a uniform trade policy toward Great Britain. That impotence gave the British no reason to humor Adams’s importunities for a commercial treaty.
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The American states also put Adams in an awkward position by failing to fulfill two stipulations of the peace treaty: to pay pre-war debts and restore properties confiscated from
Loyalists. Again the confederacy could do nothing to compel the states. Noting American weakness and treaty violations, the British refused to evacuate forts along the southern shores of the Great Lakes, within the boundaries granted to the United States. The British also declined to compensate southern masters for slaves taken or liberated by British troops during the war.
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Adams also worried over the confederacy’s impotence to regulate the rapid expansion of the American population across the Appalachians into the Mississippi valley. Hostile to Indians
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004 and resistant to political authority, the western settlers threatened to form new states, to break with the confederacy, and to provoke expensive frontier wars. In 1785 Adams regretted “the disposition to crumble into little separate societies” and “of multiplying the members of the confederation without end, or of setting up petty republics, unacknowledged by the confederacy, and refusing obedience to its laws.” In the mania to speculate in western land, Adams also feared the consolidation of landed wealth in relatively few hands, producing an aristocracy hostile to the republic. Unable to control the dual processes of expansion and speculation, the union would become their victim, dissolving into contentious regions. If so, he feared the
“Consequences of a Division of the Continent,” as various states chose opposing sides in renewed European conflicts - rendering wars internal and perpetual. Only by gaining control over expansion could the union avoid violent dissolution.
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During the mid-1780s, as the British threat receded, Americans rediscovered their regional resentments and distrust. Frustrated in their bid to acquire Canada, New Englanders seemed crowded into an infertile corner of diminishing potential and power. They envied the
Southern access to the immense tracts of fertile land to their west in the Mississippi Valley. And they dreaded political eclipse in the confederation if the South grew more rapidly in population and wealth thanks to their superior capacity for territorial expansion. In 1782 William Gordon of
Massachusetts warned Adams that “the Northern States will be insignificant provinces” in a
Southern dominated empire. Adams worried, “The great division of our country into a northern and southern interest will be a perpetual source of Parties and Struggles.” His solution remained a balanced expansion to benefit both regions: “The navigation of the Mississippi in the south,
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004 and the fisheries in the north, have ever appeared to me [as] objects without which the union cannot be preserved.”
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Resigning his post in London, Adams returned home in 1788 and won election as the first vice president under the new constitution which mandated a stronger national government. Nine years later he succeeded Washington as the American president. As vice-president and, especially, as president, Adams struggled to keep the United States neutral as Europe erupted in renewed warfare that again pitted France against Great Britain. That traditional enmity took on a new, ideological edge as the French embarked on a violent revolution that introduced a radical republican regime, culminating in the execution of their king in 1793. Like Washington, Adams recognized that a prolonged peace would permit the United States to grow in population and wealth - to become too formidable for any European power to disturb.
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In early 1794 the British provoked a crisis with the United States by tightening enforcement of their Navigation System on American ships and sailors. Although disgusted by that system, Adams preferred peace and patience over a renewed war with Great Britain. He warned:
Another War would add two or three hundred Millions of Dollars to our Debt, raise up a many headed and many bellied Monster of an Army to tyrannize over
Us, totally dissadjust our present Government, and accelerate the Advent of
Monarchy and Aristocracy by at least fifty Years. Those who dread Monarchy and Aristocracy and at the same time Advocate War are the most inconsistent of all Men.
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004
The United States dodged a war with Great Britain in late 1794, when John Jay concluded a treaty that induced the British to surrender the border posts on the Great Lakes (but not to provide compensation for the taken slaves). The treaty obliged the Americans to pay their prewar debts (but not to satisfy the Loyalists).
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That American rapprochement with Great Britain outraged the French who considered their treaty of alliance violated. In 1797, the French began to seize American merchant ships trading with the British. Adding insult to injury, the French demanded bribes and tribute from
American diplomats in Paris. News of the seizures and indignities produced a popular backlash in the United States against France, which the governing Federalists exploited to mobilize an army and a navy and to tar the opposition party as traitors.
The crisis with France led to an unprecedented cooperation between an American administration and the British empire. The British supplied cannon for American coast defense; permitted the purchase of munitions previously barred from export; extended naval protection to
American merchant ships threatened by French privateers; and shared secret diplomatic and espionage information on France. In Santo Domingue (Haiti), the British and Americans worked together to woo the black revolutionary regime of Toussaint L’Ouverture and to share in the island’s trade. Sounding a surprising new note, President Adams assured his Secretary of State:
“Harmony with the English, in all this business with St. Domingo, is the thing I have most at heart.”
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The two nations even found grounds for cooperation in Canada - previously an object of
American dread and lust. The Adams administration assisted the British in detecting and
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004 destroying a plot by filibusterers financed by the French, based in Vermont, and bent on promoting a French-Canadian insurrection in Quebec. In 1797 the American government applauded, rather than protested, when the British tried and executed the lead plotter, David
McLane of Vermont. The Quebec prosecutor, Jonathan Sewell, Jr., was the son of John
Adams’s dear friend who had remained loyal during the Revolution. The Federal government also tacitly approved of the British seizure on the high seas of an arms shipment bound to
America to assist the plot. In April of 1798 Pickering even offered American troops to help defend British Canada in the event of a French invasion or insurrection. British retention of
Canada seemed far more palatable when French occupation became the alternative.
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Despite this unprecedented level of cooperation, President Adams and his cabinet balked at any overt alliance as unpopular and entangling. Worried that the British might lose their war and succumb to a radical revolution, Adams asked his cabinet, “In case of a revolution in
England, a wild democracy will probably prevail for as long a time as it did in France; in such case, will not the danger of reviving and extending that delirium in America, be increased in proportion to the intimacy of our connection with that nation?” Finally, the American public would react badly to a treaty of alliance, reviving the republican opposition party. Already
Pennsylvanian farmers spread wild rumors of a secret alliance that featured an arranged marriage of the president’s son, John Quincy Adams, to a daughter of King George III to produce a child meant to reign as an American king.
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In fact, Adams never felt comfortable with the drift to war and toward closer ties with
Great Britain. Ever distrustful of the British Empire, Adams longed for American superiority.
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004
He assured Abigail Adams:
I wish that misfortune and adversity could soften the temper and humiliate the insolence of John Bull; but he is not yet sufficiently humbled. If I mistake not, it is to be the destiny of America one day to beat down his pride. But the irksome task will not soon, I hope, be forced upon us.
And he could never forget his own slights as minister to Great Britain during the 1780s: “I know their jealousy, envy, hatred, and revenge, covered under pretended contempt.” Indeed, while
British officials promoted an alliance, their naval commanders persisted in seizing some
American ships and sailors on the high seas - politically embarrassing the Adams administration.
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Adams worried that war with France and a virtual alliance with Britain would rupture the American union and destroy republican government. The Federalist-dominated Congress passed unpopular measures to suppress domestic dissent, to levy new taxes, and to build a substantial army and navy. Those measures provoked protests and riots in much of rural
America, and especially in Pennsylvania. Republican-controlled legislatures in Kentucky and
Virginia passed resolves to nullify the new Federal laws against domestic criticism. And
Virginia purchased firearms and established arsenals in anticipation of a civil war. In response,
Alexander Hamilton proposed employing the army, under his command, to “put Virginia to the test of resistance.” Appalled, Adams concluded that the Hamilton and his Federalist supporters were the aristocrats he had dreaded since 1755: men of talent, wealth, and overbearing ambition who would threaten the American union by their aggressive pursuit of domination.
41
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004
In 1799 Adams defied the Hamiltonians to suspend military preparation and, instead, renew negotiations with France. Two years later, those negotiations culminated in a peace treaty that restored American neutrality. Adams ultimately defended the distinctively American foreign policy he had promoted since 1775: “This principle was that we should make no treaties of alliance with any European power; that we should consent to none but treaties of commerce; that we should separate ourselves as far as possible and as long as possible from all European politics and wars.” He despised the Hamiltonians as “Tories” who served the British in the
European game of power politics by preferring a diabolical policy: “a War with France, an
Alliance with England, and a dependence on the British Navy for the protection of their
Commerce.” By rupturing his own Federalist party, Adams lost his bid for re-election to
Thomas Jefferson, who succeeded to the presidency in 1801. But in defeat, Adams claimed a moral victory: defending the union by reviving neutrality and defeating aristocrats.
42
RETIREMENT
In political retirement, Adams continued to fear that partisan and regional divisions would invite intervention by the European belligerents. He warned Benjamin Rush, “This our beloved country, my dear friend, is indeed in a very dangerous situation. It is between two great fires in Europe and between two ignited parties at home, smoking, sparkling, and flaming, ready to burst into a conflagration.” Adams regarded “the National Government , as our only Rock of
Safety against the Storm,” but that rock seemed threatened by the political interplay of ascendant
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004
Southern Jeffersonians with embattled New England Federalists. Adams distrusted the Southern great planters as a domineering aristocracy hostile to the true republicanism found in New
England. But Adams also dreaded the Federalists of New England, led by Timothy Pickering, who threatened secession in deepening frustration with their national impotence. “The Union is still to me an Object of as much Anxiety as ever Independence was,” Adams assured Jefferson in
1812.
43
In late 1807 President Jefferson tried to avoid war but punish Britain by imposing an
Embargo on American overseas trade - a measure that Adams opposed: “The Embargo is a cowardly measure.” Ineffectual against the British, the Embargo damaged the commercial economy of New England, benefitting in politics the hardline Federalists who promoted regional secession. Or those Federalists might recover national power and, at last, produce their coveted war on France, which, Adams feared, would cast the United States into British dependence, rendering independence a mere shadow.
44
If there must be a war, let it be with Great Britain, for Adams no longer saw any comparable danger of dependence on France. Fighting the British would renew the American
Revolution by unifying the nation. Victory would also compel the British respect and concessions essential to a true American independence. Adams reverted to his rhetoric of the revolution: that war could purify, restoring the public virtue so desperately needed to sustain the republic. He assured Jefferson’s presidential successor, James Madison, “It is the decree of
Providence, as I believe, that this nation must be purified in the furnace of affliction.” Adams even speculated that Americans needed a war every twenty-five years to preserve their virtue
24

Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004 from their avarice. “Another war,” he promised his son, “will transmit the eternal hatred of
England to our American Posterity.” For Adams, hatred of England was essential to American nationalism and independence.
45
Once again, Adams promoted the conquest of British Canada. In June of 1812, Congress declared war and Adams assured Jefferson, “I believe with you that another Conquest of Canada will quiet the Indians forever and be as great a Blessing to them as to Us.” At the end of 1812,
Adams rued the botched campaign, which he blamed on a failure to mobilize sufficient troops and armed vessels to command the Great Lakes. He boasted, “I would have made short work with Canada and incorporated it into the union.” 46
Adams insisted that Americans must also fight that war on the high seas. Proud of the
American navy as his creation, Adams argued that it was “the only Arm that can protect us, or preserve the Union.” For only a navy could shield New England from British attack and assure that region of an honored place in the Union - without which the Federalists might rally a local majority for secession. And only by preserving the union could Americans pursue the empire that was its security. Ultimately an American navy could “destroy the despotism of Great
Britain; the universal government of Great Britain; the universal empire of Great Britain over the ocean and consequently over the globe.” In its place, the victorious Americans could “establish a universal and perpetual liberty for all nations.” Adams asserted, “The trident of Neptune is the sceptre of the world.”
47
Consequently, Adams deeply regretted the indifference, if not hostility, toward an
American navy by southern Jeffersonians. With a false economy and immense naivete, those
25

Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004
Jeffersonians tried in 1812 to win a cheap and easy victory by marching undisciplined troops into British Canada - where smaller numbers of British regulars, Canadian militia, and Indian warriors routed them. Only at sea did the Americans win some surprising victories with their small but skilled navy. Of course Adams felt exhilarated and vindicated by those naval triumphs. “Did we not always tell you so?” he exulted. In the public celebrations of naval victories, Adams felt a new hope for a unifying nationalism: “They will ferment in the Minds of this People till they generate a national self respect, a Spirit of Independence and a national Pride which has never before been felt in America.” 48
Adams expressed frustration when the Treaty of Ghent ended the war in late 1814 without smashing the Navigation System or subtracting Canada from the British empire.
Haunted by the persistent power of the British empire, in 1816 Adams warned Jefferson:
Britain will never be our Friend, till We are her Master. This will happen in less time that you and I have been struggling with her Power - provided We remain
United. Aye! There’s the rub! I fear there will be greater difficulties to preserve our Union, than You and I, our Fathers, Brothers, Friends, Disciples, and Sons have had to form it. Towards G[reat] B[ritain] I would adopt their own Maxim.
An English Jocky says, “If I have a wild horse to brake I begin by convincing him that I am his Master. And then I will convince him that I am his Friend.’ I am well assured that nothing will restrain G[reat] B[ritain] from injuring Us, but fear.
As in his precocious letter of 1755, so too near life’s end in 1816, Adams insisted that only imperial superiority could protect an independent American republic from British domination;
26

Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004 but to achieve that power, Americans needed to transcend the regionalism that threatened to dissolve the union in civil war.
49
Adams could still not be sure whether the pursuit of continental empire would accelerate or postpone the rupture of the American republic. He recalled too well the militarism and western filibustering promoted by Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. In 1819 he confessed to
Jefferson:
I know it is high treason to express a doubt of the perpetual duration of our vast
American Empire, and our free Institution[s] . . . but I am sometimes Cassandra enough to dream that another Hamilton, another Burr might rend this mighty
Fabric in twain, or perhaps into a leash, and a few more choice Spirits of the same
Stamp, might produce as many Nations in North America as there are in Europe.
And of course Adams was right to worry, for the union did dissolve into bloody civil war in
1861. Ultimately, Americans fought over the very issue that had so long exercised John Adams: the relationship of territorial expansion to the regional balance of power within the union.
50
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004
NOTES
1. Adams to Benjamin Waterhouse, Aug. 16, 1812, in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed.,
Statesman and Friend: Correspondence of John Adams with Benjamin Waterhouse, 1784-1822
(Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1927), 81.
2. Adams to Nathan Webb, Oct. 12, 1755, in Robert J. Taylor, et al , eds., Papers of John Adams,
I, 4-5 (“transfer”); Adams to Benjamin Rush, May 1, 1807, in John A. Schutz and Douglass
Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805-1813 (San
Marino, Cal.: The Huntington Library, 1966), 80-84 (“Jefferson”).
3. John R. Howe, Jr., The Changing Political Thought of John Adams (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1966), 136-42, 164-74; Joseph J. Ellis, Passionate Sage: The
Character and Legacy of John Adams (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993), 131-36, 156-65.
4. Adams to Rush, May 1, 1807, in Schutz and Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame, 83.
5. For a depiction of Adams’s isolation, see Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American
Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), Chapter 14
[[pages?]]. For an appreciation of Adams’s acute perception, see John Patrick Diggins, The Lost
Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (New York:
1984). Jefferson is often cast as the optimistic and liberal foil to the pessimistic and traditional
Adams, but they shared many of the same anxieties over how to construct an empire that could sustain a republic. See Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American
Nationhood (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 5-10.
6. Reginald C. Stuart, United States Expansionism and British North America, 1775-1871
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 3, 8, and 25; Peter S. Onuf, “The
Expanding Union,” in David Thomas Konig, ed., Devising Liberty: Preserving and Creating
Freedom in the New American Republic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 52-55.
7. Howe, Changing Political Thought of John Adams, 99; Adams to Joseph Hawley, Nov. 25,
1775, in Edmund C. Burnett, ed., Letters of Members of the Continental Congress (Washington,
D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1921-1936), I, 260.
8. Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 268-70; Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, 57-58
(includes the two quotations).
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004
9. Adams to Benjamin Waterhouse, Aug. 16, 1812, in Ford, ed., Statesman and Friend, 81.
10. Howe, Changing Political Thought of John Adams, 6-7, 53-55, 61-62; Adams to James
Warren, Feb. 17, 1776, and June 16, 1776, in R. J. Taylor, ed., Papers of John Adams, IV, 28,
317 (“numerous Tribes”); Adams, “Autobiography,” in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Diary and
Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), III, 324-
25.
11. Adams to James Warren, Oct. 8, 1775, in R. J. Taylor, et al , eds., Papers of John Adams, III,
192 (“This appears”); Stuart, United States Expansionism, 10-15.
12. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, 53-79; Adams to Samuel Cooper, June 9, 1776, and to William
Cushing, June 9, 1776, in R. J. Taylor, ed., Papers of John Adams, IV, 242-43, 245; Adams to
Abigail Adams, July 3, 1776, in Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Papers, II, 29-30.
13. James H. Hutson, John Adams and the Diplomacy of the American Revolution (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1980), 13-14, 21-23; Thomas Bradbury Chandler, A Friendly
Address to all Reasonable Americans (New York, 1774), 24-25; Daniel Leonard,
Massachusettensis (London, 1776), 61.
14. Hutson, John Adams and the Diplomacy, 16-23; John Adams to Daniel Leonard, Feb. 6,
1775, in R. J. Taylor, et al , eds., Papers of John Adams, II, 253.
15. Adams to James Warren, Apr. 16, 1776, and Adams to John Winthrop, June 23, 1776, in R.
J. Taylor, et al , eds., Papers of John Adams, IV, 122-23, 331-32.
16. Adams, “Autobiography,” in Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, III,
327 (“three Measures”), 329 (“That our real”).
17. Gregg L. Lint, “John Adams and the ‘Bolder Plan,’” in Ryerson, ed., John Adams and the
Founding of the Republic,107; John Adams, “Plan of Treaties,” June 12-Sep. 17, 1776, in R. J.
Taylor, et al , eds., Papers of John Adams, IV, 260-302; Adams to Benjamin Rush, Sep. 30, 1805, in Schutz and Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame, 38-40.
18. Adams to Janes Warren, Feb. 18, 1776, and Adams, “Plan of Treaties,” July n.d. 1776, in R.
J. Taylor, et al , eds., Papers of John Adams, IV, 27-28 (“Unanimous Voice”), 267-68 (“Shall never”).
19. Lint, “John Adams and the ‘Bolder Plan,’” 107-08; Hutson, John Adams and the Diplomacy,
27-29; Robert J. Taylor, et al , eds., Papers of John Adams, IV, 265n and 300n; Gregory L. Lint,
“Preparing for Peace: The Objectives of the United States, France, and Spain in the War of the
American Revolution,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Peace and the Peacemakers:
The Treaty of 1783 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 35.
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004
20. Lint, “John Adams and the ‘Bolder Plan,’” 109-11; Howe, Changing Political Thought of
John Adams, 113-22; Richard Alan Ryerson, “John Adams and the Founding of the Republic:
An Introduction,” in Ryerson, ed., John Adams and the Founding of the Republic (Boston:
Massachusetts Historical Society, 2001), 12; Richard B. Morris, The Peacemakers: The Great
Powers and American Independence (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 196-97; Adams to
Abigail Adams, Dec. 18, 1780, in Adams Family Correspondence, IV, 35 (“suspected”); Adams to Horatio Gates, Mar. 23, 1776, in R. J. Taylor, et al ., eds., Papers of John Adams, IV, 58-60
(“bid Defyance”); Adams quoted in Hutson, John Adams and the Diplomacy, 7 (“greatest
Power”).
21. William C. Stinchcombe, The American Revolution and the French Alliance (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1969), 24-26, 62-76; Lint, “Preparing for Peace,” 32-40. In the end,
Congress reduced the bid for Canada and Nova Scotia to desiderata rather than ultimatums..
22. Stuart, United States Expansionism, 17; Benjamin Franklin, “Sketch of Propositions for a
Peace,” in Leonard W. Labaree, et al , eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 26 vols. (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1959- ), XXII, 630-33; Adams to Edme Jacques Genet, May 17,
1780, and Adams to Antoine Marie Cerisier, Oct. 23, 1780, in R. J. Taylor, et al , eds., Papers of
John Adams, IX, 323 (“If a Peace”), and X, 298 (“only lay”); Stinchcombe, American
Revolution and the French Alliance, 24-26. See also Adams to James Warren, July 26, 1778, and to Samuel Adams, July 28, 1778, in R. J. Taylor, et al , eds., Papers of John Adams, VI, 321,
326
23. Morris, Peacemakers, 262-64, 267; Adams to William Lee, Dec. 6, 1780, in R. J. Taylor, et al , eds., Papers of John Adams, X, 396 (“The Revolt”); Adams to Franklin, Apr. 16, 1782, in
Carl Van Doren, ed., Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiographical Writings (New York: 1945), 526-
27.[[check for in Works]]
24. Morris, Peacemakers, 211-12, 219-20, 262-64 (Vergennes quoted: “too great” on 264);
Stinchcombe, American Revolution and the French Alliance, 26-28; Lint, “Preparing for Peace,”
36-37.
25. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography, II, 446 (“Keep us”), IV, 245-47; Hutson, Adams and the Diplomacy, 119-22. In fact France had her own interests in promoting her own fisheries at Newfoundland and in satisfying her old ally Spain in the west.
26. Morris, Peacemakers, 263-67 (Oswald quoted on 263, Shelburne on 265 and 267).
27. Morris, Peacemakers, 270, 301-03; Stuart, United States Expansionism, 22-24; Hilda
Neatby, Quebec: The Revolutionary Age, 1760-1791 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966),
208-09.
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004
28. Hutson, Adams and the Diplomacy, 123-41; John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (New York:
Henry Holt and Co., 1996), 251-52.
29. Hutson, Adams and the Diplomacy, 122; Ferling, John Adams, 255-56, 274-75.
30. Adams to Edmund Jenings, June 11, 1780, in R.J. Taylor, et al , eds., Papers of John Adams,
IX, 408 (“true American System”); Adams to John Jay, Nov. 24, 1785, in C. F. Adams, ed.,
Works of John Adams, VIII, 345.
31. Adams to John Jay, Oct. 21, 1785, in C. F. Adams, ed., Works of John Adams, VIII, 325-33;
Adams to Jefferson, Nov. 5, 1785, in Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The
Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, 2 vols.
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), I, 93; Howe, Changing Political
Thought of John Adams, 124-26; Ferling, John Adams, 284-85.
32. Adams to John Jay, Dec. 3, 1785, in C. F. Adams, ed., Works of John Adams, VIII, 354-56;
Hutson, Adams and the Diplomacy, 154; Ferling, John Adams, 285.
33. Alan Taylor, “Land and Liberty on the Post-Revolutionary Frontier,” in Konig, ed.,
Devising Liberty, 99; Adams to John Jay, Nov. 24, 1785, in C. F. Adams, ed., Works of John
Adams, VIII, 347-48 (“the disposition”); Adams to Thomas Jefferson, May 8, 1787, quoted in
Howe, Changing Political Thought, 153 (“Consequences”). For dread of land speculators, see
Howe, Changing Political Thought, 134-41.
34. Gordon quoted in Reginald Horsman, “The Dimensions of an ‘Empire for Liberty’:
Expansion and Republicanism, 1775-1825,” Journal of the Early Republic, IX (Spring 1989), 4-
5; Adams, “Discourses on Davila,” in C. F. Adams, ed., Works of John Adams, VI, 79-80 (“The great division”), 267-70; Adams to John Jay, May 8, 1787, in C. F. Adams, ed., Works of John
Adams, VIII, 439 (“The navigation”).
35. Alan Taylor, “John Adams,” in Alan Brinkley and Davis Dyer, eds., The Reader’s
Companion to the American Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000), 25-35; Ralph
Adams Brown, The Presidency of John Adams (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1975).
36. Adams to Jefferson, May 11, 1794, in Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, I, 255
(“Another war”); Charles R. Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution: British Policy Toward the
United States, 1783-1795 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1969), 331-52.
37. Bradford Perkins, The First Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1795-1805
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1955), 92-98, 106-110; Alexander DeConde,
The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France, 1797-1801
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966), 117-21; Stephen G. Kurtz, The Presidency of John
31

Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004
Adams: The Collapse of Federalism, 1795-1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1957), 319; Douglas R. Egerton, “The Empire of Liberty Reconsidered,” in James Horn, Jan
Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf, in The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New
Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 310- 22; Adams to Timothy
Pickering, July 2, 1799, in C. F. Adams, ed., Works of John Adams, VIII, 661 (“Harmony”).
38. Perkins, First Rapprochement, 101-03, 113; Stuart, United States Expansionism, 39-40;
Gerard H. Clarfield, Timothy Pickering and American Diplomacy, 1795-1800 (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1969), 122. For the McLane prosecution and execution, see F.
Murray Greenwood, Legacies of Fear: Law and Politics in Quebec in the Era of the French
Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 139-66.
39. Adams to the Cabinet, Jan. 24, 1798, in C. F. Adams, ed., Works of John Adams, 561-62
(“In case”); Perkins, First Rapprochement, 112-15.
40. Adams to Abigail Adams, June 19, 1795, and Apr. 9, 1796, in Charles Francis Adams, ed.,
Letters of John Adams Addressed to His Wife (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown,
1841), 185 (“I wish”), and 217 (“I know”); DeConde, The Quasi-War, 120, 199-205.
41. Brown, Presidency of John Adams, 114-29 (Hamilton quoted on 118); DeConde, The Quasi-
War, 187-199; Ellis, Passionate Sage, 32-37..
42. DeConde, The Quasi-War, 215-22, 253-88; Brown, Presidency of John Adams, 374-408;
Adams to Benjamin Rush, Sep. 30, 1805, in John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805-1813 (San Marino: Huntington
Library, 1966), 38-39 (“the principle”); Adams to Waterhouse, Sep. 15, 1812, and Mar. 16,
1813, in Ford, ed., Statesman and Friend, 88, and 92-93 (“a War”); Ferling, John Adams, 424-
25.
43. Adams to Benjamin Rush, July 25, 1808, in Schutz and Adair, eds., Spur of Fame, 113-14
(“our beloved country”), 136-37; Adams to Benjamin Waterhouse, Mar. 11, 1812, in Ford, ed.,
Statesman and Friend, 76-79 (“Rock of Safety” on 76); Adams to Jefferson, Feb. 3, and May 3,
1812, in Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, II, 295 (“The Union”), and 303; Howe, Changing
Political Thought of John Adams, 223-24; Ferling, John Adams, 424.
44. Adams to Benjamin Rush, July 25, 1808, in Schutz and Adair, eds., Spur of Fame, 112-14
(“The Embargo”); Adams to Jefferson, May 3, 1812, in Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters,
II, 303-04; Howe, Changing Political Thought of John Adams, 224, 234-35.
45. Adams to Benjamin Rush, Mar. 23, 1809, in Schutz and Adair, eds., Spur of Fame, 137;
Adams to James Madison, Nov. 28, 1814, in C. F. Adams, ed., Works of John Adams, X, 106
(“decree of Providence”); Howe, Changing Political Thought of John Adams, 236-38; Ferling,
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Alan Taylor “Adams and Empire” March 2004
John Adams, 425; Ellis, Passionate Sage, 108; Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the
Making of Liberal America, 1790-1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 28-
42.
46. Adams to Jefferson, June 28, 1812, in Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, II, 311 (“I believe”); Adams to Benjamin Rush, Aug. 17, Sep. 4, and Dec. 29, 1812, in Schutz and Adair, eds., Spur of Fame, 241-42, 245, and 268 (“I would”).
47. Adams to Thomas Truxton, Nov. 30, 1802, in C. F. Adams, ed., Works of John Adams, X,
586 (“Neptune’s trident”); Adams to Benjamin Waterhouse, Mar. 11, 1812, in Ford, ed.,
Statesman and Friend, 77 (“only Arm”); Adams to Rush, Apr. 18, 1813, in Schutz and Adair, eds., Spur of Fame, 279-80 (“destroy” and “establish”); Ellis, Passionate Sage, 107.
48. Adams to Jefferson, June 28, 1812, in Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, II, 311; Adams to Benjamin Waterhouse, Mar. 23, 1813, in Ford, ed., Statesman and Friend, 94-95 (“will ferment”); Adams to Benjamin Rush, Dec. 8, 1812, in Schutz and Adair, eds., Spur of Fame,
258-60 (“Did we”).
49. Adams to James Lloyd, Mar. 29, 1815, in C. F. Adams, ed., Works of John Adams, X, 147-
48; Adams to Jefferson, Dec. 16, 1816, in Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, II, 502
(“Britain”).
50. Adams to Jefferson, Dec. 21, 1819, in Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, II, 551
(“Cassandra”); Ellis, Passionate Sage, 171.
33