Lindsay M Chervinsky's book explores how John Adams shaped US presidency

By Ted Widmer

MAKING THE PRESIDENCY: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic

Author: Lindsay M Chervinsky

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Pages: 426

Price: $34.99

Given the excitement around Tim Walz and J D Vance, it is a useful corrective to remember how dismal the vice presidency has long felt to those saddled with the task. As John Adams, the very first veep, wrote to his wife, Abigail, in 1793, “My Country has in its wisdom contrived for me, the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”

Still, it mattered to be V-P, especially as George Washington’s presidency was winding down. By then, Adams had already done a great deal to will the United States into existence, helping Thomas Jefferson draft the Declaration of Independence and arranging a loan from Europe to sustain the new republic.

 

But Adams seemed to shrink during his vice presidency. Washington paid him little mind and excluded him from cabinet meetings. Except for rare moments when he might break a tie in the senate, he mostly languished on the periphery, unnoticed except by those who made fun of his pudgy frame. It was not a great time for “His Rotundity.”

All of that changed one night in March 1796, when Washington informed Adams that he would soon step down. It was their first real conversation in seven years. Sud­d­e­nly, everything was up in the air, and Adams realised, as Kamala Harris recent­ly did, that destiny had taken a hand.

The historian Lindsay M Chervinsky revisits this moment in  Making the Presidency, her timely account of how Adams ascended to the highest office in the land and transformed it. She does not offer a full biography of Adams — for that, David McCullough and Joseph J Ellis remain essential — but she deftly probes the way the second American president wielded power in the final four years of the 18th century.

Chervinsky, the director of Washington’s library at Mount Vernon, is a capable guide to the vertiginous highs and lows of a brief, turbulent presidency. She argues that Adams did a great deal to steer the balky ship of state toward a safe harbour. It is healthy to be reminded, in another precarious moment, just how fragile democracy felt during the twilight of Washington’s presidency. The transition to Adams was far from guaranteed, and from the moment he took office, the vultures were circling.

Washington had run unopposed, twice, but his departure released pent-up energies. With very little time to plan, Adams and Jefferson entered the field in the first competitive presidential election. It quickly turned vicious. There was skulduggery on both sides, and foreign interference as well (the French tried to help Jefferson). Adams prevailed, but the system had many kinks to be worked out, including the awkward fact that Jefferson became vice-president (or as Adams called him, “Daddy Vice”).

If the campaign was hard, the presidency itself was brutal. The problems came fast and furious — a “Quasi-War” with France, wandering militias, a febrile press and recurrent yellow fever epidemics that made Philadelphia, the second capital of the United States, even more toxic than it already was. Small wonder that Adams went on extended vacations back to Massachusetts. One trip lasted so long that his supporters were unsure if he was coming back — an observer complained that the invisible president was giving off an “air of abdication.”

We tend to glorify the founders, with good reason, but Chervinsky reminds us how badly behaved they could be. Jefferson came “remarkably close to treason,” undermining Adams at every turn and calling the administration (in which he served) a “reign of witches.”

The members of Adams’s own Federalist Party were not much better. Alexander Hamilton constantly intrigued against Adams, hoping to run a foreign policy all his own, and perhaps to create a standing army that would report to him. Happily, the leaders of the early republic survived all of the back-stabbing and mudslinging to build a better, more coherent nation.

Adams was at the centre of that success. Chervinsky gives him credit for beating back the threats and enlarging the office. Toward the end of his term, he found the authority that was implied, but not entirely understood, inside the presidency. He fired disloyal Cabinet members and developed a principled, forceful diplomacy. Impressively, he had few of the racial anxieties that made life so complicated for his successor. He supported the formerly enslaved in what would become Haiti, then in the throes of a revolution against European powers. (Jefferson reversed this policy, and no US President would acknowledge Haiti’s independence until Lincoln.)

Chervinsky reminds us that Adams set important precedents in his failures as well as his triumphs. Specifically, he sho­w­e­d great character when it became clear that he had lost the election of 1800 to his own V-P. That was a bitter pill to swallow, but he accepted his defeat — another precedent — and quietly went home on the day Jefferson was sworn in. Once aga­in, he valued his country above himself.

As recent events have proved, that is not always the case. Adams may have served only a single term, but it was a term of consequence, marked by a peaceful exit from the office he had fought so hard to win. He survived a humiliating vice presidency and four years of slings and arrows (from friends as well as enemies) to leave his country in a stronger place. It is hard not to be reminded of another single term of consequence — the one we are in.

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The reviewer is a distinguished lecturer at Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York and the author of  Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington 

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