Chapter 12: The Arithmetic of the Republic

Scene I

The study smelled of wet plaster and something beneath it—green timber sweating in the cold, the whole edifice exhaling its own incompleteness. Adams had been in the President's House four days and had not yet found a chimney that drew without complaint. The one before him now drew not at all. He had fed it tinder, then wood, then his patience, and it had rewarded each offering with a billow of grey smoke that hung at eye level and refused to rise.

He opened the window. November came through it at once—not the brisk November of Quincy, which was at least honest, but the raw, swamping cold of this river-bottom city, a cold that carried mud in it, and the smell of the Potomac at low tide.

He returned to his desk. The letter to Abigail lay before him, three lines complete and already inadequate. My dear friend—I have at last taken up residence in the house intended for the presidents of this republic, and I find it a dwelling of considerable dignity and considerable inconvenience, the two qualities being not unrelated. He had crossed out considerable inconvenience and written unfinished grandeur, then crossed that out also. He crossed out unfinished grandeur and wrote nothing in its place. The house was neither grand nor finished. It was a shell through which the wind moved at will, and the plasterers had left a fine white dust on every horizontal surface, including, he now noticed, his writing desk.

He set down the quill. He found a cloth—there was no servant immediately to hand, and he did not propose to ring for one over a matter of dust—and wiped the surface clean with several deliberate strokes. The cloth came away grey.

Jefferson will inherit a cleaner house than I received. He did not write this. He thought it, set it aside, and reached for the quill again.

The knock came before he had written a word more.

A servant—young, unfamiliar, one of the temporary staff the new household had not yet sorted into order—brought the packet without ceremony, placed it on the newly cleaned desk, and withdrew. The paper was fresh, the printing recent; he could smell the ink before he broke the string. Someone had gone to the trouble of sending him a clean copy, which meant someone had gone to the trouble of knowing he had not yet seen one.

Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Inspector General of the United States Army, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esquire, President of the United States.

He held it at arm's length, the pages extended between thumb and forefinger as though the thing had been retrieved from somewhere he did not wish to have touched. Fifty-four pages. He had heard the count from Marshall, who had heard it from someone else, the number having preceded the document through every parlour in the republic.

He sat down and read.

Hamilton wrote with the fluency of a man who had never once doubted his own conclusions, the sentences arriving in perfect formation, each subordinate clause buttressing the next. Adams read without expression, or believed he did. He read of his vanity. He read of his ungovernable temper. He read the passage—he had known it was coming, had been told of it, had thought himself prepared—in which Hamilton declared that the public good required the admission that Adams did not possess the talents adapted to the administration of government, that there were great and intrinsic defects in his character which unfitted him for the office he held.

Adams set the pamphlet on the desk.

He picked it up again. He found the passage. He read it aloud to the empty room, to the guttering candles, to the smell of wet plaster and tidal mud.

'There are great and intrinsic defects in his character which unfit him for the office of Chief Magistrate.'

His voice was quite level.

Then he rose, carried the pamphlet to the grate, and fed it in page by page, watching each sheet catch and curl and blacken at the edges before the centre surrendered. He remained until the last page had gone to ash. The smoke from the burning paper rose without difficulty, the chimney performing its function now, as though the house had required something worthy of consuming before it would consent to work.

He returned to the desk. He picked up the quill.

I pray Heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.

The window was still open. He wrote the rest of the letter in his coat, the cold coming in off the river and settling against his knuckles, and he did not stop writing until it was done.

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Scene II

The ground floor room pressed into service as a receiving chamber held, at its best, the borrowed dignity of necessity: a single Turkey carpet of indeterminate age, four chairs retrieved from a Georgetown tavern and still faintly redolent of pipe smoke and spilled porter, and two windows whose frames had been fitted but not yet caulked, so that the November air worked steadily through the gaps and made the candles on the mantelpiece burn at a permanent lean.

Samuel Dexter stood near the door with his hat in both hands. Benjamin Stoddert had taken a chair and sat forward in it, his coat still bearing the dust of the road. Somewhere above them, a plasterer's hammer struck—once, twice, a third time—and a fine powder descended onto the carpet between the chairs, whitening the wool in a neat oval. All three men regarded it. They brushed their coats without speaking and resumed.

'The Convention is signed,' Stoddert said. 'That much is not in question. The French ratification is complete and the instrument properly executed. What I must tell you—'

'Tell me plainly,' Adams said.

He had not sat. He stood at the near window, his back half-turned, fingers resting on the frame where the putty had not yet set.

Stoddert set his papers on the arm of the chair. 'Senator Morris is coordinating the Federalist faction in the Senate. His object is to defer ratification until after the electoral count is complete. He argues that certain conditions attached by the Senate require further negotiation with Paris—conditions he himself helped insert—and that the Convention therefore cannot be ratified in its present form.'

Adams did not move.

'He argues further,' Stoddert continued, with the careful air of a physician delivering his verdict, 'that a new administration may negotiate more advantageously. That the present moment is not propitious.'

The wind found the window gap and the nearest candle bent sideways, throwing the shadow of the mantelpiece across the wall at a steep angle.

'Not propitious,' Adams said.

'Those were the words reported to me.'

'And who stands behind Senator Morris in this endeavour?'

Dexter cleared his throat. 'The intelligence, Mr. President, suggests the coordination originates—' He paused. 'It originates in New York.'

The room held the silence for a moment. From somewhere in the upper floors came the sound of a saw working through timber, the teeth catching and releasing in a slow, uneven rhythm.

Adams turned from the window. His face showed nothing—nothing beyond the precision of a deliberation already concluded.

'The General,' he said, 'having failed to prevent the peace, now proposes to deny it a name. He will allow the Convention to stand—he cannot prevent it—but he will see to it that no administration may claim the credit before the next administration arrives to claim it for themselves.' He looked at Dexter. 'Or repudiate it entirely. Which would he prefer?'

Dexter said nothing, which was answer enough.

'Very well.' Adams crossed to the writing table in the corner—a folding affair, brought from Philadelphia and not yet replaced—and pulled a sheet of foolscap from beneath a stack of correspondence. He uncapped the inkwell, the stopper set down with a deliberate click. 'I will send a message to the Senate tomorrow morning. You will carry it yourself, Mr. Dexter. Not a clerk. You.'

'Yes, sir.'

'The message will urge immediate ratification. It will note that every day of delay constitutes a practical service to those powers in Europe who prefer American division to American peace. It will not name Senator Morris. It will not require him to.'

'Mr. President.' Stoddert rose. 'There is the question of the conditions. If the Senate holds to its February amendments—'

'Sit down, Mr. Stoddert.'

Stoddert sat.

'The conditions are negotiable. The peace is not.' Adams looked up from the page. 'You will call upon Senators Tracy and Goodhue before the session. Not to threaten. To inform them that the Convention, if left unratified at the change of administration, becomes the property of whoever follows—to modify, to repudiate, or to credit to themselves as original achievement. If they wish their party to hold any portion of this peace, they will ratify it while their party still governs. That is not a threat, Mr. Stoddert. It is a plain statement of what will occur.'

He began to write.

Stoddert and Dexter exchanged a glance above his bent head—the swift, calibrated look of two men calculating whether the orders they had received would survive contact with the institution they were to be delivered to. Neither spoke. The saw worked on above them, and the candles burned steadily now that Adams had moved from the window, and the white powder lay undisturbed on the carpet between the chairs.

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Scene III

The returns had been arriving by post for three weeks. He had sorted them himself.

The letters lay before him arranged by state, and the foolscap on the desk bore his own figures, each number set down in the careful hand of someone who has decided that the reckoning must be conducted in his own writing, not another's. He had been at it since supper—or since what passed for supper in this house, bread and cold meat carried up by a boy who left without speaking. The fire had gone low. He did not build it up.

Virginia: Jefferson. New York: Jefferson. The Carolinas divided, but not divided enough. Pennsylvania a wound that had not closed.

He dipped the quill and added the last figure from a letter out of Georgia, the ink catching slightly where the cold had thickened it, and set the quill in its tray.

Sixty-five.

He had not yet opened the letter from Senator Sedgwick that had arrived with the afternoon post, though he had read the direction three times and understood from the handwriting alone—hurried, the capitals leaning forward—that it contained nothing he did not already know. He broke the seal now. He read the single page. He turned it face-down on the desk.

Sedgwick had written: I grieve to inform you, Mr. President, that I can no longer answer for the votes of the Massachusetts delegation in the House, should the matter of the electoral tie be brought before them for resolution. Certain members have received communications from New York which I am not at liberty to disclose but whose effect I cannot prevent. The General's reach, I find, extends further than I had credited.

He read the letter again. Then he placed it with the others.

Seventy-three for Jefferson. Seventy-three for Burr—that particular absurdity still before him, the republic's machinery producing a tie with the precision of a clock wound too tight. Sixty-five for Adams. The House would sort Jefferson and Burr between them—that deliberation was not his to conduct—but his own portion of the reckoning admitted no further revision. The column was complete. The column had been complete for some time, and Sedgwick's letter was not a revelation but a confirmation, which was in some respects worse: it meant there had been no moment of surprise, no sudden reversal, only the slow accumulation of what he had already known.

He had known it in February 1799, when he sent Murray's nomination to the Senate and heard the silence from his own party—not silence at all, but the sound of men deciding he had gone too far. He had known it in May 1800, when he dismissed Pickering and understood in the same hour that he had purchased the peace at the price of the only political coalition that might have saved him. He had known it all summer, reading the dispatches from his party's managers, each more careful than the last, the language of men who have decided a cause is lost but cannot yet bring themselves to say so.

He had known. And he had acted anyway.

He picked up the stack of letters and aligned their edges, pressing each one square against its neighbour until the corners were flush. He set the stack to the left of the foolscap, corner to corner, and looked at what he had made.

Seventy-three, seventy-three, sixty-five.

The numbers did not lie, nor did they speak. They simply were, as the distance between two points simply is, without apology or consolation.

He reached across the desk and pulled the foolscap toward him. The motion made his hand cramp—a sudden seizing along the tendons of his right palm, the fingers curling against his will—and he held the pen without moving until it passed. He flexed the fingers once, slowly.

Then he said, to no one—to the cold study, to the unfinished walls, to the republic that had rendered its verdict in columns of figures—I have done what was required.

He did not say it again.

He folded the foolscap in thirds, the creases sharp, and opened the top drawer of the desk. He placed it inside, beneath the sealing wax and the letter from Abigail he had read that morning and meant to answer and had not answered. He closed the drawer. He took up Sedgwick's letter and placed it in the drawer also—not with the foolscap but beside it, the two documents touching at their edges in the dark.

There was a letter from John Marshall he had not yet opened, arrived in the afternoon post. It lay on the corner of the desk. He reached for it now, broke the seal, and read.

The Convention of Mortefontaine had been ratified by the Senate. The peace was the law of the land.

He set Marshall's letter down. He sat with it for a long moment—the cold of the room, the low fire, the smell of tallow and old paper—and then he rose and built up the fire himself, adding two logs from the basket beside the grate, kneeling on the hearthstone to arrange them until they caught. The warmth came slowly. He remained where he was, his forearm resting on the mantelpiece, watching the flames establish themselves against the new wood.

He had observed, across forty years of public life, that men who perform the largest services are frequently the last to receive their accounting. He had observed it in others with something approaching equanimity. He found, kneeling here in the cold and the slow warmth, that the observation held rather less comfort when applied to himself. This did not surprise him. He had never supposed that wisdom, however honestly arrived at, was proof against the particular sting of one's own case.

The fire caught. He remained where he was a moment longer than was necessary, his eyes on the flame.

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Scene IV

The trunks had been brought down the night before. He had seen to it himself, standing in the entrance hall in his nightcap while the hired man wrestled the larger chest sideways through the doorframe, and he had said nothing, and the man had said nothing, and the house absorbed the sound of departure as it absorbed everything—indifferently, its bare plaster walls giving back only the hollow knock of wood against stone.

Now it was four o'clock, and the city of Washington was as dark as a city could be that had not yet decided to exist.

He dressed without a candle. He had laid his things out the previous evening—coat, waistcoat, stock, the good wool breeches he had worn to Quincy and back across thirty years of public life—and his hands found them in the darkness without difficulty, the fabric cold from the room's chill, the buttons requiring two attempts because his fingers had not yet warmed to their task. He did not summon anyone. There was no one he wished to see him in this hour, no ceremony he intended to provide.

Marshall's letter lay on the desk, already read four times. He did not read it again. He folded it into his breast pocket, where it would remain until Quincy.

He descended the unfinished staircase by feel, his boots finding each tread with the caution of someone who has learned not to trust what has been only recently constructed. The entrance hall smelled of sawdust and the faint animal warmth of the draught horse already standing in the drive. Through the tall windows the sky was not yet grey. It was the absolute dark that precedes even the suggestion of dawn, the dark that belongs to no day in particular.

His trunks stood by the door. The hired coachman—a heavyset man, Pennsylvanian by his accent, who had asked no questions the night before and asked none now—stood beside them with the patience of long practice.

Adams pressed his fingers against the raw doorframe—pine, green-cut, not yet planed to any surface that might be called smooth. He stood there for a moment. Then he withdrew his hand and walked to the coach.

The cold of the pre-dawn air struck his lungs as he stepped outside, and he coughed sharply—a small, undignified sound in the vast silence of the unfinished capital.

'Sir,' said the coachman, 'shall I wait for the light?'

'Drive on.'

The coachman climbed to his box. The horse shifted its weight and the traces went taut and the coach lurched forward over the uneven ground, its iron wheels finding every stone in the drive before they reached the road.

Adams settled against the seat. The leather was cold through his coat.

Behind him, the house receded—its unfinished east wing, its borrowed furnishings, its East Room where Abigail's washing had hung on lines strung between the columns because there was nowhere else to put it, the whole edifice standing in the dark like a proposition not yet argued to its conclusion. Somewhere in the city, in rooms he did not know and would not visit, a man was preparing to take an oath that Adams had taken four years before, in a different city, before the same republic at a different moment in its becoming.

The road north was frozen mud. The coach found its rhythm on the harder ground beyond the city's edge, and the darkness began, almost imperceptibly, to thin. Not light yet. The absence of absolute dark, which was not the same thing.

He did not look back.

The peace held. The ships would come home. The sailors would come home. Somewhere in the Caribbean, American frigates were standing down from engagements they would not now be required to complete, and the men aboard them did not yet know that the man who had made this possible was riding north through the last dark of a March morning, his breath making small clouds above his collar, the road unfolding before him toward Quincy.

He put his hands together in his lap—the right still faintly stiff from the previous night's cramp—and felt the cold of the leather seat through the wool of his breeches, and the sway of the coach on the rutted ground, and the hard particular fact of Marshall's letter against his chest.

Posterity would require no monument from him. He understood this not as consolation but as the plain condition of the work he had done—that the labour of keeping a thing intact left fewer traces than the labour of founding it, and was therefore less legible to those who came after. He had made his peace with this proposition in the abstract, across years of study and reflection. He was making his peace with it now in the particular, on a frozen road in the dark, and he suspected the operation would occupy him some considerable while yet.

The coachman urged the horse to a faster pace on the firmer ground. The coach lurched, steadied, and drove on. Somewhere ahead, beyond the last of the river-bottom mud and the unfinished capital and the long miles of post road, Quincy waited—and with it, whatever portion of the reckoning he had not yet completed, the letters unanswered, the history not yet written, the republic still in motion and entirely indifferent to whether he approved of its direction.

He had not finished. He was sensible of that with a certainty that required no argument.

The darkness thinned another degree. Not dawn. Not yet.