Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky on "Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic"

 

Dr. Jane Kamensky: Good evening everyone, and welcome. I'm Jane Kamensky. I'm the president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and delighted to have you all here tonight at the third installment of our Pursuits of Knowledge series this fall. As you know, this series features hospitality and feasts of ideas as well as feasts from Jefferson Vineyard and our cafe. There is one more session this fall after tonight on December 17th with Allen Guelzo talking about Lincoln's Jefferson.

And a couple preliminaries to share with you for spring, Kerri Greenidge will be here in February talking about her work on William Monroe Trotter and others. And then in March for Women's History Month, two Smithsonian Museum directors, the head of the National Museum of American History and her brand new colleague in the head of the Smithsonian Women's History Museum in development to talk about women's history in the United States. So more details on all of those soon to come.

But tonight we dive into an extraordinary and timely new work from Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, The Making of the Presidency. The book might well have been called John Adams and the Case of the Big Shoes for it is substantially a Work about what it meant to follow George Washington, the indispensable man who had come quite literally to personify the American Revolution and its aftermath for the electorates of separate states who were only beginning to understand themselves as we, the American people. The United States was to be a nation of laws, not a nation of men, but that was easy to say when under the government of America's Moses, its deliverer and lawgiver.

As a symbol of national unity, Chervinsky explains, Washington at the time his presidency ended in 1797 was far more powerful than the American flag. After Washington was an essential question, not just about who would follow, but what could an infant republic which demanded virtue of its citizens endure? This is still our question.

In sparkling prose, resting on deep research, Chervinsky patiently unpacks the novelty of the moment, the first competitive election in 1796, waged by the first proto-parties, the first transition of power, the country's first understanding of the presidency as an office rather than just the civilian continuation of George Washington's leadership. The man to whom that unenviable task fell was of course John Adams, the irascible New England stepchild of the father of the country. Adams was a brilliant man with by all accounts, including his own, an absolutely disastrous personality, irascible, stubborn, quixotic, and certain that he knew best as Chervinsky writes.

Adams had many foils in his administration as he struggled to steer the United States between the North and the South, commerce and agriculture, Britain and France. But the greatest of these foils, and I'm not just saying this because we're at Monticello, was his second in command from the opposite party, his quote, "daddy vice," as Adams put it, none other than Thomas Jefferson. Quote, "Are we forever to be overawed and directed by party passions?" Adams fumed soon after taking the oath of office in Philadelphia. The question lingers now as much as in 1797. And tonight's conversation promises to do a great deal to answer it.

And so to our speakers. Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky is a historian of the presidency of political culture and of US government institutions. Early this fall, she became the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. Previously, she was a senior fellow at the Center for Presidential history at Southern Methodist University, a historian at the White House Historical Association and a fellow at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress.

Making the Presidency is her second book. She's also the author of the award-winning The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, and the co-editor of Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American culture. A public intellectual and the rare young woman in a sea of talking male heads, she writes regularly for major newspapers and magazines and appears often on a variety of outlets on both television and radio.

In conversation with Dr. Chervinsky is Dr. Lauren Duval, an assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. Duval is a historian of early North America and the Atlantic world specializing in women's and gender history and the era of the American Revolution. She earned her PhD just to the north at American University and her first book, The Home Front: Revolutionary Households Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence will be published in 2025.

Her research has been supported by fellowships from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at Penn, from the New York Public Library, the New York Historical Society, the David Library of the American Revolution, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. For the next two years, she's in residence here as a Gibson Fellow at the Karsh Institute of Democracy at UVA with an office over at the International Center for Jefferson Studies on Monticello's Kenwood campus. So welcome Lauren and Lindsay, Making the Presidency.

Dr. Lauren Duval: All right, well thank you so much for that kind introduction and thanks to all of you for coming out tonight. We're going to have a fabulous discussion about this great book. So to start us off, I'm wondering, can you just set the scene for us a little bit? So what is the country like when Adams assumes the presidency in 1797? Who is John Adams in this moment? Can you draw a picture for us? What's going on here?

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: Well, first thank you all so much for being here, and thank you, Jane, for that very kind introduction. I'm terrible at book titles. This one really was not finalized until I actually had the manuscript. So next time I'm going to call on you because The Very Big Shoes would've certainly simplified my efforts. And you did such a lovely job of laying out the big question, which is does this country, does the presidency work with anyone else in it? And that was, I think the fundamental question in 1797 as Adams was coming into the presidency.

It was complicated by the fact that the first two political parties, which were really baby political parties, they shouldn't be understood as the sort of institutions we have today, but rather factions that had started to develop to have some sort of robust communication infrastructure, if not yet the full thing. They were coming into their own. They had set up newspaper networks. They had solidified their ideas. They had started to learn how to campaign both at a local level and a national level.

And then of course the international scene was further complicated by the fact that France and Great Britain, off and on again foes were very much on foes and war was ongoing. And the United States was tasked with trying to figure out how to stay out of it, which had been a problem that Washington had tackled, but had not really fully come to have a solution because France had started to seize American ships, imprison American sailors and sell off the goods, none of which was particularly popular with Americans who wanted their stuff back and wanted their family members returned home.

So those were just some of the challenges that faced Adams on the eve of his inauguration. There were a number of other firsts like how does it work when you have a vice president who's from the other party and should you keep the cabinet of your predecessor if you don't really have an objection to them? Those were just a couple of the first that Adams had to tackle.

And then the last thing that I think is worth noting, because he had such big shoes to fill, everyone understood that whoever came second was going to have a terrible time. It was going to be horrible. They were going to fall short in comparison to Washington. They were not going to be able to live up to his lofty model. And so it took someone who was okay with being unpopular, who was okay with doing something that most people didn't agree with, if he felt like it was right, sort of a righteous stubbornness to embrace that very difficult second position. And so in a lot of ways, while he had his flaws, which we will discuss, Adams, I think was very much the right person for that role at that moment.

Dr. Lauren Duval: So I think, oops, sorry, as you point out in the book, historians have typically given Adams's presidency short shrift, right? And they even see it often as the low point in his long and distinguished career, but your book is really telling us something different. And so can you tell us a bit more about where this misconception comes from or how your research is helping us see John Adams and his presidency in a new light?

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: I think there are three reasons we generally don't give a whole lot of credit to the Adams presidency. The first is that so many of the things that he did that are worth acknowledging are not the type of things that we typically build monuments to. He practiced restraint in moments of constitutional crisis. He was willing to show up when it was going to be really hard. Those aren't as sexy as winning a civil war or winning World War II, and they're much harder to define, but that doesn't mean that they're not really essential to the survival of institutions and to the republic.

The second reason is he had the very poor fortune to be living at the same time as two of the all-time greatest propagandists in American history, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, which I don't say with any disrespect. It was incredible skill and ability to turn a phrase that was so compelling that it persuaded people to hold on to this story for centuries. But Hamilton and Jefferson's descriptions of Adams have been adopted verbatim by historians for two centuries. And they were writing in the election of 1800 competing against Adams.

And my guess is if you turned on your television up until last week, you would have saw some election rhetoric that maybe was not perfectly accurate. And so it's a reminder that there certainly can be a grain of truth in what Jefferson and Hamilton were saying, but they were writing with very intense passion and with very intense bias and motivation, and so we do have to try and take some of that into account.

The last piece, and this really gets at, I think what separates hopefully my book from some of the other phenomenal works on John Adams is that most of the biographies were written before January 6th. And so the people who were writing them had not witnessed a contested transition, which meant that like I had as well, they were taking the peaceful transfer of power for granted because they just assumed that it was always going to be there and it was very much stuck in our institutions and it was much less fragile than it turned out to be.

And history, the way we write history is very much a product of the questions we ask and the questions we ask often depends on what we have seen and what we have experienced. And so all of these biographies of Adams were written prior to a contested transition. And so they just didn't think to ask the question of what did Adams do to help create the peaceful transfer of power? And they were very small things, they were very subtle things, things that were easy to miss or to gloss over. So I don't really see my book as a corrective to the previous biographies, but rather an addition to say this period is actually really worth understanding and in some cases celebrating.

Dr. Lauren Duval: Can you say a bit more about what some of the subtle things are that he did to help ease that transition?

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: So Adams was really the common denominator in the first two transitions. Today, there are a lot of laws and statutes that govern how transitions are supposed to work. So the Presidential Transition Act was first passed in 1963. It's been amended several times since. It establishes when the transition officially begins, when funding kicks in, who provides office space, when briefings are to take place, all that kind of stuff. None of that was written down in 1796 or in 1800. None of it was specified or required by statute or mandate. And instead, it was up to George Washington and John Adams and then John Adams and Thomas Jefferson to figure out how that was supposed to work.

The Constitution doesn't say, it doesn't specify really how people are supposed to act, how they're supposed to talk to one another, if they are supposed to share information. And so I think we're probably going to talk a little bit more about the election of 1800 as we go forward. But especially in that election when John Adams had lost, rather than being obstructionist or refusing to participate, he instructed his cabinet secretaries to work with Jefferson, to give him information, to be as helpful as possible, basically give him briefings on the state of foreign policy and domestic affairs long before it was required.

Dr. Lauren Duval: That's actually a wonderful transition since we're at Monticello. It seems like it makes sense to bring Thomas Jefferson into this conversation. And as Jane mentioned, Jefferson is from the opposite party. He serves as Adams' vice president, which is obviously something that wouldn't happen today. So can you first off just explain how that even happens, and then tell us a bit about the relationship between these two men.

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: So under the terms of the Constitution, as it was originally drafted, each elector cast two votes, and the idea was the top two candidates would become president and vice president. Now, when that language was drafted, there was not an expectation that there would be a two-party system. Instead, many of the drafters or the delegates who were at the Constitutional Convention instead expected that there would be a lot of different factions that would maybe come together on particular issues to form governing coalitions. So it made more sense that the top two people could maybe come together to form what we would think of as a coalition government.

So what that meant was in 1789, '88, when the first election took place, the first person of course was George Washington. He received all of the votes unanimously, and the second most vote-getter, it's a terrible way to say it, the person who got the second most votes was John Adams. They were not really of the same party, although they were both pro-Constitution. They eventually sort of both became Federalists, but neither really embraced that label in the same way that some other partisan figures did.

By the time 1796 rolled around, these first two parties had grown up a little bit, and they had both put forward two candidates. There was John Adams and Thomas Pinckney as the Federalists, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr as the Democratic Republicans. And because the electors didn't specify that one vote was for the president and one vote was for the vice president, that meant that the top two vote-getters were John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

So interestingly, I was doing a conversation with someone the other day, with a bunch of students, and they asked me, because they're interested in bipartisanship. They believe that this is a concept that is valuable and important, and they asked, "Why don't we have a vice president from the other party? Wouldn't that be like a good thing?" I was like, "No, it would be terrible. We actually have done this. It went very, very badly."

And initially, the quote that Jane shared about the lack of bipartisan spirit was John Adams hoping at the beginning of his presidency that it could be a bipartisan administration. He wanted it to be a bipartisan administration. And I think Jefferson initially shared those feelings, but very quickly their diverging views of the world, particularly about France, caused them to turn away from one another. And this is, I think perhaps one of the lowest moments of Jefferson's public service career.

At the beginning of Adams' presidency, he met several times with the French minister in the United States and suggested that they hold off on signing a treaty with the Adams administration and wait three years because they would get a better deal once he was in the presidency, which comes remarkably close to treason if we're being honest. We've seen other candidates do it. I don't know that there's ever been another vice president to do that.

But needless to say, their relationship for those four years was quite fraught. Although they did see each other a lot. They were often at the same social engagements. But they did come together at the very end for a peaceful transition and I think that's what counts.

Dr. Lauren Duval: And so aside from their political differences, another big difference between Adams and Jefferson is that they have these really different relationships to slavery, which I know is something you did think about with the book because it's this deeply contested political issue in the early republic. It's manifesting in foreign and domestic policy, something that Adams is having to think about as president. And so can you just talk a bit about Adams's views on slavery, how he's navigating these questions during his presidency?

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: Adams' relationship to the institution of slavery is, I think a really good way to understand how complicated the issue was in the early republic because it was not necessarily all that much a topic of political conversation. In the early years of Washington's administration, there had been a number of petitions from local Quaker communities. Those had pretty much been quashed. So Congress was not discussing slavery as an institution all that much with a couple of key exceptions.

When the Haitian Revolution broke out and they sent representatives to the United States, John Adams and the John Adams administration was actually the first to sign a trade agreement with Toussaint Louverture. And so it was the first time the United States had signed an agreement with a Black-led nation. And slavery was very much a part of that conversation because there were concerns in certain circles that people fleeing the violence in Haiti would bring their enslaved people with them, and that would spark enslaved rebellions in the South in particular. And Gabriel's Rebellion in the fall of 1800 in Virginia was seen as evidence that that was happening.

But on a more personal level, John Adams never enslaved any individual. He was ideologically opposed to the institution. He felt that it both corrupted the enslaved and the enslaver. It made people prone to laziness because there was no incentive for either party to work. There were no wages to earn. There was no profit to be had. He resented the power that the South had in its inflated status due to the Three-Fifths Clause in Congress and the Electoral College.

But personally, his ideas about race were much murkier. When he lived in Philadelphia at the president's house, he and Abigail had a mix of white, free Black and enslaved labor that they hired out from local families, meaning they paid the enslavers and then the enslaved people came and did the work. And that was a rotating door of the people in that home. When he went to the president's house when Washington was president, a enslaved person would've taken his coat, an enslaved person would've brought him dinner. And so he was benefiting on a daily basis from that labor.

And yet, while all that was happening in 17, I think 1798, when Abigail was back in Quincy, Massachusetts, they had a 13-year-old boy named James, who was a Black young man, worked in their home, he was free, paid wages, and Abigail wanted to send him to the local school to be educated because she believed that everyone needed to be educated. And the local schoolmaster wrote back and said, "I can't have him in this classroom because the other white families won't have him." And she went to war and she won, and she forced the community to have a integrated classroom so that James could have the same education.

So that is a very, very complex description of their views of race and slavery. But I think it's helpful because their lives, especially in Philadelphia and then in DC, were so interwoven in a daily way with slavery and enslaved labor that it's hard to distinguish.

Dr. Lauren Duval: I think it's really clear throughout your book that Abigail is this force as well. And I think one of the things that really comes through is just how integral Abigail is to John Adams's presidency. So can you talk a bit about their partnership and her role in navigating all those politics?

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: Abigail is by far the most fun part of this book, and she was the most fun part to write. Partly that was because my first book was on Washington, and when he died, he asked Martha to burn their correspondence, and she did. And so we don't have their letters, whereas Abigail asked John to burn their correspondence and he was disobedient, thank heavens. So just having that material was such a joy because that's where all the snark and the grudges and the humor and the fun, all of that is located in those private conversations. And there are so many of them because Abigail and John spent so much time apart, and so we have this incredible, rich resource.

But what makes it amazing is that they were partners and they both saw each other as partners. The Revolution was a family project. The nation was a family project. And John was, while not what we would think of necessarily as a modern man, and we wouldn't think of Abigail as a modern feminist, they come the closest to what we might think of as a modern intellectual partnership. And his critics referred to her as a cabinet of one, which was probably the most accurate criticism of a president that has ever existed because she read every single document that came into the president's house. She knew everything. There were no secrets.

And he treasured her, he valued her. One of my favorite moments came early on in the presidency when he had just moved into the president's house and she was planning to spend that summer in Quincy, Massachusetts and then to join him that following fall. And he immediately realizes he cannot do it without her. He needs her to come immediately. And he writes these pleading, begging letters, there is no pride, begging letters asking her to come.

And she says, "We had this plan. I'm taking care of the home. Your mother is dying. I'm taking care of your dying mother." And he's like, "No, no, no, I need you to come here." And she's like, "I really can't." And he writes, and I quote, "But what about my feelings? What about my needs? Why don't you care about me?" And then at the end he writes, "Don't laugh," because he knows he's being utterly ridiculous. But that closeness, and that was after 30 years of marriage, so it was such a joy.

But she was a first-rate intellect. She was so savvy about the people around her and often offered the most cutting and sometimes incisive insights about them. No one could do sarcastic like Abigail could do sarcastic. But what was great about it is that everyone knew it. So everyone around her understood that this was her role.

Dr. Lauren Duval: Yeah, her letters are really wonderful.

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: They're so fun. Everyone knows the Remember the Ladies letter, but that is really just the start. I mean, there are so many phenomenal letters in which she either cuts people down to size or has the perfect thing to say, and they're a real treasure.

Dr. Lauren Duval: So I want to pivot a little bit to, I think one of the things you spend a lot of time discussing in the book is one of the more Controversial aspects of Adams's presidency, which is the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. And so these are laws that tighten restrictions on foreign-born Americans. They increased requirements of residency for citizenship, and they also limit critical speech of the government. So this becomes a really big part of the Adams' presidency. How should we think about these acts, both historically, their legacy now? Did they shape the way we think about Adams and his presidency? How do we wrap our head around the Alien and Sedition Acts?

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: So because they've been in the news a little bit of a primer about what they were, the Alien and Sedition Acts, there are actually four of them. So the first made it take much longer to become a citizen. It was the Naturalization Act, and it increased the amount of time from 5 to 14 years. And this was because immigrants tended to vote for Democratic Republicans. So Federalists passed this law to undercut their political support.

The second act was called the Alien Enemies Act, and it was bipartisan. It was actually initially proposed by a Democratic Republican, and it was viewed as a very moderate act because it required first a declaration of war by Congress. It only went into effect if there was a declaration. And it permitted the president to start deportation proceedings against foreign nationals of the country, which they had declared war against with appropriate due process.

So there was rule of law, there was a jury proceeding. It was considered to be a moderate law. And a version of this bill has been on the books ever since. So it was used in World War I, It was used in World War II. It was mentioned in the news recently. What's important to know, at the time, and I think when there have been moments of war, there is an understanding that sometimes you do have to deport people who are hostile to the nation as long as you are using appropriate due process.

The second bill, the Alien Friends Act, gave the president almost unilateral authority to deport foreign nationals at will without due process, and no declaration of war was required. This was the bill that the Federalists stuffed through Congress. The last bill was the Sedition Act. And the Sedition Act, as Lauren said, made it a crime to criticize the president and Congress, notably left off the vice president off that list and the bill would expire on the final day of Adams' presidency.

Now a couple of pieces of context that are really important to know here. First, at this point, Congress was responsible for passing legislation. The president did not propose it, and then Congress went along with it. So Adams did not ask for any of these bills. He did not whip votes. He did not curry favor for them, but he did sign them. Second, he never used the Alien Friends Act, the power that gave him unilateral authority to deport people, never used it. It also expired.

The Sedition Act is a little bit more complicated because today we have, well, reasonably understood restrictions on our First Amendment rights. You are not allowed to shout fire in a crowded theater. Your speech that is intended to incite or provoke violence is not protected. That type of understanding had not yet been fleshed out by the Supreme Court. And so newspapers were calling for violence and there was violence in the streets, and people genuinely did fear that it was going to lead to the type of anarchy and destruction that they were seeing in France during the French Revolution.

So there was a good base fear that this speech was dangerous, but it was then used for partisan purposes by Federalists in Congress to pass this bill. And I think that context is really essential because there've been a lot of moments in our nation's history where people genuinely have reason to be afraid, but it is then perverted for political purposes and that's what happened here.

Now, Adams signed that bill. He did occasionally cheer certain prosecutions when they were against editors that were particularly nasty to him. It is absolutely the dark mark on his presidency, no doubt about it, although I think the context is important. And I do believe that he later came to regret it. He didn't talk about it a whole lot, but at the very end of his presidency, he appointed people who had been very critical of the Alien and Sedition Acts to positions of high authority, including John Marshall as the chief justice of the Supreme Court. And I don't think that was an accident.

Dr. Lauren Duval: So I think you mentioned France and fears of the revolution happening in France, but it also seems that France really seems to hang over a lot of the Adams presidency in various ways. And so can you just give us the lay of the land, what's going on with France? What kind of questions is Adams engaging in during his administration?

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: Okay, so in 1789, technically the French Revolution began. Initially there were high hopes that it would be the sister revolution and it would bring the same sort of ideals forward as the American Revolution. Very quickly, it became clear that it was not going in the same direction, and the French Revolution really turned into the Reign of Terror, which of course was characterized by guillotines and blood running through the streets. This is worst-case scenario of if you have a revolution what happens. This is not the model you want to follow.

After the Reign of Terror subsided, however, there were a series of what they described as constitutional coups where basically one faction in the Directory, which was their ruling government, would throw out other factions, throw some newspaper editors in jail, maybe revise certain things in the constitution and keep going. It led to a lot of constitutional instability and that was also something that Americans were very wary of reoccurring in the United States.

France was at war with Great Britain, and after the United States had signed the Jay Treaty in 1794, which solved some of the lingering tensions between the United States and Britain, France started to seize American ships. And this is what is known as the Quasi-War. Adams pursued a number of diplomatic efforts to try and avoid real war, to try and end the Quasi-War and come up with a diplomatic solution.

The first serious effort was rebuffed in what was known as the XYZ Affair, where the three American officials were met by three unofficial French representatives, agent X, agent Y, agent Z, And they were met with demands for bribes and loans and very embarrassing demands for apologies. This behavior was considered to be a huge insult to American honor and sovereignty. And when Americans learned about it, they were horrified and outraged.

This was one of the things that led Congress to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts, but it also led them to greatly increase the size of the Army, to increase the Navy, to create a naval department for the first time and to boost coastal defenses. And over the next couple of years, Adams tried to figure out how to avoid fully a war because he didn't think that was in the nation's interests, but also how to achieve an honorable and just peace, which he ultimately did do with the Treaty of Mortefontaine, which was signed in October of 1800, establishing peace with France, which has lasted ever since.

It's one of the longest lasting peaces we have with a foreign nation, one of the longest lasting alliances. I think we don't remember it. Branding was not great. Treaty of Mortefontaine does not really ring like the Treaty of Paris or the Treaty of Versailles, but also, news of it arrived after the election of 1800. And so I think it did not have impact on the election, but also was one of the reasons we don't remember it quite so well.

Dr. Lauren Duval: And it seems like France was this very catalyst for a lot of partisan division, but that Adams also faced quite a bit of pushback from members of his own party as well. Is that right?

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: Yes, absolutely. Americans today, most Americans don't really pay attention to what happens beyond our shores. I think 4% of voters in this most recent election ranked foreign policy as one of their top issues. Americans in the 1790s cared a great deal because we were a little baby nation and we did not have a whole lot of power. And what happened across the Atlantic very much influenced what happened with our economy, what happened with our trade, and what happened in our day-to-day existence. And so Americans paid very close attention.

Generally, the Democratic Republicans were a little bit more pro-French and the Federalists were more pro-British as the biggest trade partner, whereas the Republicans were interested in the ideological sister leanings of France. When Adams decided to pursue diplomacy, he fractured the Federalist Party because the extreme wing, which I call the arch-Federalists, were much more interested in pursuing war.

The buildup to war had been very good for Federalist election prospects. A lot of Federalist candidates had come into office. They were using the new Army as basically a spoils system for the Federalist Party, and they did not want to let up on those opportunities. And so they were furious with Adams for pursuing peace and started to refer to him as an evil to be endured for pursuing compromise and diplomacy, which is remarkable and a good reminder that there have been moments in the past where our intense partisan rhetoric is not just between parties but also within parties.

Dr. Lauren Duval: So I want to give you a chance to speak more fully on there's this quote you had in your introduction that really stuck with me, and it's that George Washington created the presidency, but John Adams defined it. And can you just tell us a bit more what you mean by that in parsing that relationship between Washington and Adams?

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: When the Constitution was originally drafted, it was just over 4,000 words. It is now just over 10,000, including all of the amendments. And Article II was very, very short, is very, very short. It says very little about what the president is supposed to do on a day-to-day basis and how the president is supposed to do it. So when Washington came into office, he established not countless, but nearly countless precedents about presidential authority, presidential jurisdiction over domestic affairs, over foreign policy, and also how those things were to be done, how a president was supposed to comport himself and someday herself.

However, precedents are not made the first time they happen. They're made when they're repeated. And so Adams had to figure out what to repeat, what to change, risk a lot of backlash if you change too much, but then also how to be a president while not being Washington. And it's hard to overstate that and it sounds kind of ridiculous to our ears today because we don't have a figure like Washington. I think maybe the closest is Dolly Parton. Everyone loves Dolly Parton.

But imagine someone that is pretty universally, at least if not adored, because not everyone adored him, respected. Even Jefferson wanted Washington to run for a third term, which is nuts. And so his use of power was mostly unchecked. It was mostly unchallenged. Very few people questioned his actions. Adams was not going to have that luxury. And so he spent four years basically fighting to preserve the executive in the same character that Washington had established, but to prove that someone else should have that usage.

So for example, one specific fight was whether or not the president could fire cabinet secretaries. Washington never fired anyone. When he was disappointed with people, they were so horrified that they just quit. And so there was a real question about how is a secretary to be removed? The Constitution doesn't say. The legislation that creates the executive departments didn't say because Congress couldn't agree, so they just didn't write it down. And so when the first time it actually happened, it was a theoretical question of does the president have the right to do this?

In May of 1800, Adams fired a secretary for the first time. And when the Senate a couple days later approved the new nominee, it tacitly agreed that the president does in fact have the right to fire a secretary. Now, the Supreme Court affirmed in 1926 that a president does have that right, but it was Adams using that power, testing the abilities of it, that established a really important part of the executive because if a secretary has the right to pursue their own policy, you don't have an executive of one, you have an executive by committee.

You basically have the British cabinet where you have a prime minister who might be slightly elevated above the others, but they all have a political base of power. Instead, if you have a president that can fire someone, what they're saying is my policy is the policy we will be pursuing. And so Adams really defined what it meant to be a president if you're not Washington.

Dr. Lauren Duval: So I think one of the things I'd be curious to hear you talk more about, and we were talking about this a little bit in our conversation before we came in here, is if you have just a favorite source or a favorite story or something you found in the archives that you just really love to talk about or something that really sticks with you from the book?

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: I'm going to choose two. So one is a question I could not answer because I think it's really important to acknowledge that there are often questions we cannot answer. I cannot find John Adams' dress sword. I don't know where it is. At the time there was a custom that if you were presented at court, so Adams, when he went to France in 1778, he bought a dress sword for his presentation at Versailles. He wore it at The Hague and at the court of St. James. He then wore it as vice president and president as Washington had done.

This was usually the type of thing that was specified in a will who it was supposed to go to. It was given as a very treasured gift. You did not throw these away, and unless you were a military man, you were not buried with them. The Adams family are hoarders. They did not throw anything out. I cannot find the sword. So if anyone has it in their closet, I don't need to see it, I just want to know where it is. So that's the question I could not answer.

I generally had a pretty productive writing relationship with my editor, but there was one thing that she kept trying to get me to cut and I refused to cut because it was my favorite totally irrelevant piece of evidence and one of my favorite sources, which was a letter that Rebecca Stoddert, who was the wife of Benjamin Stoddert, who was the first secretary of the Navy, wrote to her sister from Trenton, New Jersey. The government had fled because of yellow fever. She went with her husband and she was writing about their life in Trenton saying, the house is a little small. It's mostly clean except for there are all of these tiny ants, but the city is lovely because she can buy very fat chickens and there were no fat chickens to be had in Philadelphia.

Something about that I just find so endearing because it brings their life into 3D color for me. And imagine her being so excited at finding this fat chicken to have for dinner. It has nothing to do with the presidency really. It has nothing to do with the cabinet, but I loved it and I saved it from the cutting room floor probably five times.

Dr. Lauren Duval: And I think that's one of the things that's so wonderful about your book is you are able to give us these very detailed analysis of political maneuvering and diplomacy and then also really bring us into this world and like here's what these houses look like, here's what these rooms look like, and here's glimpses of the texture of daily life.

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: Thank you.

Dr. Lauren Duval: And so that's a really wonderful part of it and you shall buy it. So before we turn over to audience questions, I want to zoom out and give you a moment to reflect on some key takeaways. What are the lessons or examples that we should take from John Adams's presidency?

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: So I think the election of 1800 is a valuable one. It was a deeply contested election, took weeks to resolve after several months of machinations, threats of violence. The Virginia and Pennsylvania militias were stationed on the borders of their states ready to march into DC, if someone other than Jefferson became president. There was a mob outside the Capitol threatening to kill anyone who took the presidency that was not Jefferson. And it was a very near miss. I think that if there had not been resolution by March 4th, I genuinely don't know what would've happened. And they came to resolution two weeks before then. So they had about two weeks in which they saved the constitutional structure.

The thing that saved the constitutional structure was not military bravery or incredible acts of genius, it is what I define as civic virtue, which is putting the constitution above one's own political or personal interests. And the people who did so, some of them are names we know. Alexander Hamilton actually I think did the right thing in this election. John Adams did the right thing in this election. But some of the names are names that we generally don't remember.

James Bayard, who was the sole congressman or sole representative from Delaware, and he was 36. Congressman Smith from Maryland, Samuel Smith from Maryland, he was 42. They were both moderate members of opposing parties, and they came together to come up with a compromise that would allow both sides to move forward. And so that is the lesson I take away from this election, which is that it can get very, very bad. We often don't remember how bad it got. It can come very, very close to being a near miss. And yet in moments of constitutional crisis, it is civic virtue that gets the nation through. And that is true of 1800, it was true of other moments of constitutional crisis, and I think will be true in the future.

Dr. Lauren Duval: Great. Thank you.

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: Thank you.

Dr. Lauren Duval: So I think we have a microphone going around. Please just raise your hand if you have questions for Dr. Chervinsky.

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: The question and answer portion is always my favorite because I want to know more of what you want to know more about and to give you that information. So please do not be shy. I also know I'm not that thorough.

Speaker 4: Hi. I'm always curious about-

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: Can you wait one second so the people online can hear? Thank you.

Speaker 4: I'm always curious about Abigail's relationship with Jefferson and Adams and how she tried to bridge that gap.

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: So early on when they were all in Europe, they were very close. They were almost sort of like a family. And John Quincy Adams saw Jefferson as sort of a younger uncle and someone who was very cool that he was going to go to the opera with and all of that. When they came back, they were still initially quite close. And then once criticism started to come forward of Adams by Jefferson's allies in particular, and Jefferson didn't do anything about it, Abigail never forgave him.

So if anything, she was an obstacle to them coming back together because just like today, we are more willing to forgive those that trespass against us than those who trespass against our loved ones. And so she never forgave some of his backstabbing, nor did John Quincy Adams. They were both very protective of John Adams. And so when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson did start to correspond again in 1812, she knew about it, but she was not the hearty participant that she had been prior to their split. She could hold a grudge.

Speaker 5: What were the ships being seized?

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: Could you just say it again into the microphone?

Speaker 5: What were the ships being seized? Were they just random? I mean, France didn't want to start the war with us.

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: They were willing to go as far as ... Well, so one of the main sources of our economic power at the time was trade. So almost all of the trade was done internationally over the high seas. So everything that was sold to France, everything that was sold to Britain, everything that was sold to their colonies, it was via ship. And so to the colonies, we were generally one of the main suppliers of food because most of the arable land in the Caribbean was used to produce things like sugar and other very high income trade. And so in order to feed the people that were on those colonies, they were buying food from us. We would sell timber to places like Britain where most of their forestry had been depleted. We would sell materials that could be turned into armaments to France.

And so France and Britain at various times would seize materials, seize American ships carrying materials that they wanted to use in their war against each other. Obviously this is not neutral behavior, but what France was arguing was that we were technically carrying armaments to Britain. And so they, under the right of international law, had the right to seize it.

Now, we probably were not, well, most ships were probably not carrying armaments. Some surely were because most people from time to time would flout the laws. But most ships were neutral ships. They were carrying neutral goods. Yet, French privateers were very happy to disregard those rules, which is why it was called the Quasi-War. And once the United States acted with some firmness to push back, to build up a Navy, to create an Army, then France changed those policies and instructed privateers to no longer seize ships. So they knew that what they were doing was going to cause objections. They just didn't think the United States would do anything about it. Over here. A couple over here.

Speaker 6: What did you learn interesting about communication and travel during that time? Did John Adams have a cell phone, for instance?

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: Oh, well, thank you so much for this question. So one of the most interesting things about travel at the time is it was very uncomfortable. It was quite miserable. The roads were in very poor condition, and that didn't matter if you were the president because there was no Air Force One. You might have had the nicest of carriages, but you still had to travel on really bad roads that were really dusty and had a lot of potholes. And when he stopped unexpectedly at the night at an inn, if they were full, they were full.

And so there was a time where there was one night where John and Abigail slept on the floor while they were president and first lady, because that was the only space left at an inn. And so travel was not glamorous. It was quite unpleasant. It could be dangerous. If the weather was bad, you would have to delay a river crossing. Or if a carriage broke down, that could be dangerous as well.

Communication is so interesting because of the delays in communication. So it took on average about a week for news to get from Philadelphia to Quincy, Massachusetts, where the president would spend some of his free time. Best case scenario, it took about three and a half weeks for a letter to get from Philadelphia to France. Worst case scenario, it took three months. And that would depend on the weather and then what route you would take.

So typically, diplomats abroad would send up to six copies, six different routes to try and ensure that one of them got to where it was supposed to go and that it wouldn't have been seized by French or British ships depending on who was doing the seizing at any given moment. So that would lead to some very interesting situations where the president was waiting to hear news of his diplomatic mission and at times would have to wait up to eight months to hear from them because they would have to travel to France, engage in conversations, and then as they started to send information back, could take up to four months to get back.

So that gave diplomats incredible agency to make their own decisions once they were abroad and must have been infuriating to someone like Adams who was not particularly patient. I'm not patient, I would die. I would die, it'd be horrible. I think there was a question in the back, gentleman in the orange sweater.

Speaker 7: How involved directly and indirectly was Adams in the 1800 stalemate when the Electoral College was locked?

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: Great question. So not very by design. He said that he would have nothing to do with the Federalist schemes to try and put someone else into the presidency. He would not run again if they managed to delay the outcome and call another election. And other than that, he practiced restraint, which I mentioned, and stayed out of it, which, if Hamilton had been president, there would've been no staying out of it. And so he did not have much of a role. And I think that in moments of crisis, we want a president to be reluctant to take action when the Constitution, when people are trying to sort out what that language is. So I think his relative inactivity ...

The one other thing I should mention is during that time he had Jefferson over to the White House for dinner, and he told him that he believed that he would be the president and he was the people's choice and that he would support that. We have a question in the back.

Speaker 8: Kind of a related question, you mentioned earlier that Adams always was uncomfortable with the label of Federalist. Do you think at the time that his reputation suffered from trying to be a non-partisan president in an age of increasing partisanship?

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: So Adams really did not see himself as a party man. He saw himself as trying to be above that, to trying to be a president for all people, which was what I think Washington had tried to do too with a little bit more success. I think Adams was in some ways doomed if you do, doomed if you don't, because by trying to be bipartisan or trying to avoid an intensely partisan spirit, he drove a wedge through the Federalist Party and he did not get any credit really among the Democratic Republicans. On occasion, they would note, "Huh, we didn't expect him to do that. That's great." But they were not going to vote for him.

If he had been super partisan, the Democratic Republicans would've hated him and the Federalists would've been happy, but that wouldn't have really changed his political position at all. So I think the structure of politics at the time, there were very weak parties, which actually led to increased partisanship because weak parties cannot protect moderates. They cannot protect compromise. They cannot encourage bipartisan activity. They cannot prevent the more extreme voices from primarying or challenging the more moderate voices. And so ironically, if Adams had been president in a time when the parties had been stronger, I think he would've been more successful.

Speaker 9: So what do you think the biggest reason for Adams's loss in the 1800 election? Was it the slow boat from Europe with the treaty? Was it Alexander Hamilton's efforts to oppose him? What do you think?

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: So the first and most important reason is a structural one, which is the Three-Fifths Clause. He would have won if not for the Three-Fifths Clause, which is important to note because it did inflate Southern votes and Southern votes tended to go for Democratic Republicans.

Structural issues aside, he obviously won in 1796, so that was not always an impediment. But I think the main reason was most voters saw the Alien and Sedition Acts, the increased standing Army and the tax that was passed that was required to pay for the standing Army as one big Federalist agenda because the bills were passed to crush their civil liberties. The Army was then going to be used to suppress those rights and to enforce those laws, and they were being taxed to pay for that Army. So they did not distinguish those three things as separate bills and instead they saw this big Federalist agenda as something that they really disliked.

Now, I don't think that they actually really blamed Adams for it. They tended to blame people like Alexander Hamilton and the more extreme Federalists for it. But it meant that they did not vote in Federalists to the state legislatures. And a lot of the state legislatures were responsible for picking the electors in the Electoral College. So it had sort of a two-step effect on the presidential election.

In terms of Alexander Hamilton's pamphlet or the lack of treaty news, I think that led to what we would think of as a voter enthusiasm problem amongst the Federalist voters. But I don't think it necessarily caused him to lose. Last question here.

Speaker 10: I thought your book did an excellent job of showing how Pinckney was working opposed to Adams and how the arch-Federalists divided.

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: Thank you.

Speaker 10: Didn't really give Adams much of a choice, I think. So along those lines, so being more of a national man, you talked about, and I know JQA definitely had his national plan, when Pinckney wrote to Adams before that election, he asked, "How did this man, Jefferson, the youngest delegate, get to write the Declaration of Independence? Shouldn't others have gotten more credit, like yourself, that were on that committee?"

What do you think Adams was saying when he said, "I'm going to give you a hint," and he called it the Frankfort Advice, which is to let Virginia lead in everything as he and the other delegates from Massachusetts headed into the Constitutional Convention. What do you think he was hinting at there?

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: So my best guess is that Massachusetts at the time had a bit of reputation for being rabble-rousers. They may or may not have deserved such a reputation, I say lovingly. And there was an understanding that if you're going to have an independence movement that's successful, it cannot be state by state, it has to be national. And so Massachusetts, because they had been the first to actually engage in war. By the time independence is declared, the war had been going on for over a year.

So if they're going to have a national Army, if they're going to have a national movement, if they're going to have a national government, it can't just be Massachusetts taking the lead. It has to have the biggest state at the time, which was Virginia involved and stepping forward. So Adams was instrumental in securing both the commander-in-chief position for George Washington and engineering Jefferson as the primary or first author of the draft of the declaration.

In a lot of ways, he was like the chief of staff of the independence movement, trying to put people in the right positions, recognizing that in doing so, it would make the cause more successful in the long term. I think that when we think of the Adams family, as I said, certainly the couple Abigail and John, but also the entire family, their family project was the republic, it was the union, and it had been so for generations. And so he was willing to do things that didn't give him as much credit if in the long-term would make it more successful.

Dr. Jane Kamensky: I want to thank you all for excellent questions, and thank you both for a sparkling conversation. Let our family project be the republic, that's a beautiful place to end. Lindsay will be signing books across the way in the shop. If you don't have yours inscribed already, please get it. And see you next month for Allen Guelzo. Thanks.

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: Thank you. Thank you.