Review: "Making the Presidency," Lindsay M. Chervinsky

By Paul Carrier

We think we live in an age of unprecedented partisanship and skulduggery, and it’s true. Except for the “unprecedented” part.

America was awash in viciously unscrupulous political antics as far back as the early years of the republic, as historian Lindsay M. Chervinsky shows in Making the Presidency, as examination of John Adams’ single, underappreciated term as the country’s second president.

But that is only one facet of Chervinsky’s book, whose central theme is this: Adams, who succeeded George Washington as president in 1797, completed a seemingly impossible task during his four years in office. He shaped the ill-defined presidency and assured its stability for years to come, even without the unifying presence of Washington to show the way.

“John Adams was an experienced diplomat and a thoughtful constitutional thinker. He was also irascible, stubborn, quixotic, and certain that he knew best most of the time. He proved the right man for the moment,” Chervinsky writes.

And what a trying moment it was. Adams’ Federalist Party and the Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson (not to be confused with the Republican Party founded in 1854) despised one another. Moreover, the newspapers of the day were blindly partisan and routinely attacked the opposition, with or without a factual basis for doing so.

Exacerbating the problem, the nascent electoral system in effect in 1796, when Adams was elected, resulted in Jefferson’s selection as Adams’ vice president, guaranteeing bad blood within the administration. (Jefferson later succeeded Adams as president following the disputed 1800 election, which was decided by the House of Representatives on the 36th ballot.)

In one sense, Adams was ill-prepared for the job. Despite his many prior accomplishments, Adams, who had served as Washington’s vice president, assumed the presidency with no executive experience. While Washington was in office he never confided in Adams, did not consult him and excluded him from Cabinet meetings. Effectively, then, Adams came into office as a managerial rookie.

Adams had more to contend with than personal inexperience and Republican hostility. The Cabinet that he inherited from Washington was anything but loyal to the new president. Some of its members went behind his back to seek political advice from, and conspire with, the likes of Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist who was at odds with Adams.

Many members of Adams’ own party, including Hamilton, tried to usurp his authority, dictate his decisions and eliminate his jurisdiction over foreign policy. At various times, Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and Secretary of War James McHenry clearly were insubordinate, and they were not alone. 

So when the prospect of all-out war with France loomed, and partisan mob violence broke out in the streets of Philadelphia, the nation’s capital at the time, Adams’ political and diplomatic skills were sorely tested.

While much of the nation, including leading Federalists, clamored for war, it was Adams who kept a cool head and managed to avert a full-blown military confrontation by relying on diplomacy, even as Hamilton pushed for war in a bid for military glory. In fact, Hamilton emerges from these pages as such a vain, power-hungry schemer that it’s hard to understand the Broadway treatment he received a few years ago.

Adams effectively forced his secretary of war to resign and fired his secretary of state when their disloyalty became too much for him to bear. Initially, it was unclear if the president had the power to unilaterally dismiss a Cabinet member without Senate approval — until Adams did just that. 

With faith in his own judgment, Adams used the president’s pardon power to free repentant participants in an armed tax revolt. He successfully resubmitted to the Senate a peace treaty with France after the Senate initially rejected it. And he stood firm when fellow Federalists tried to block his selection of John Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Marshall’s appointment “was one of Adams’ longest lasting contributions to the nation,” Chervinsky writes.

Adams was no more infallible than the rest of us, of course. His grudging support for the now-infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 is a case in point. The Alien Acts penalized immigrants, while the Sedition Act effectively made it a crime to criticize the government. Adams signed the bills into law, but Chervinsky notes that he did not propose them or lobby for them and he expressed “deep ambivalence” about the Sedition Act.

Chervinsky persuasively argues that Adams was anything but vengeful, petty, egomaniacal, and untrustworthy, as Hamilton, Jefferson and other contemporary critics claimed. And she laments the fact that most books about Adams have given his presidency “short shrift,” unfairly treating it as the low point of his career.

As president, Adams “refused to meddle in Congress, he rejected Federalist schemes, he steadfastly adhered to the text of the Constitution, and he walked away after losing with no fuss,” the author writes. “These invaluable contributions ensured the survival of the presidency.”