be in danger if the United States took sides with either party in the European wars. Hence he advised his countrymen to keep out of "permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world."

As Washington announced that he intended to retire to private life, the two political parties each tried to elect his successor in the presidential election of 1796; and by the close electoral vote of 71 to 68 Vice-President Adams was elected President. The Federalists did not unite on any one candidate for Vice President; and by a defect in the Constitution as it then read, the rival candidate for President, Thomas Jefferson, was thus elected to the lower office.

John Adams of Massachusetts was one of the two or three men most responsible for the Revolution. He served in the two Continental Con

209. Ad

ministra

tion of John

Adams

(1797-1801)

Adams,
Works,

minister to France

and to Holland, and was one of the commissioners of the peace of Paris. In 1785 he was sent as first minister to Great Britain, and when the king laughingly hinted that Adams was no friend to France, he replied aptly,

VIII. 258

"That opinion, sir, is not mistaken; I must avow to your Majesty, I have no attachment but to my own country." After eight years' service as Vice President, Adams became President in 1797, and he made the fundamental mistake of adopting his predecessor's Cabinet, which felt itself superior to

In court dress; from the portrait by Copley.

its chief and which took counsel with his personal enemy, Hamilton. Adams finally dismissed Timothy Pickering, Secretary of State, and forced another Cabinet officer to resign, after which he had some peace and comfort in Cabinet meetings.

210. X. Y.

In getting out of trouble with Great Britain, the United States was plunged a second time into difficulty with the French, who felt the bitterest resentment over the Jay treaty, because it gave to Great Britain privileges denied to France. In retaliation, the French in 1796 again began (1796-1798) to seize American vessels; and when Charles C. Pinckney arrived in Paris with a commission as minister, he was not

&

ABIGAIL ADAMS, ABOUT 1790.
Wife of John Adams; from
Copley's portrait.

Z. controversy

received by the Directory which
was then the French government,
and later he was warned to leave
France. In a message on this insult
(May 16, 1797) Adams said, "Such
attempts ought to be repelled with

a decision which shall convince
France and the world that we are
not a degraded people, humiliated
under a colonial spirit of fear and
sense of inferiority."

Still Adams could not bear to see his country drawn into war if he could help it, and he therefore commissioned Pinckney, John Marshall of Virginia (two Federalists), and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts (a Democratic Republican) to make a last effort to come to an understanding with France. After some months, dispatches arrived, stating that the French government, incensed at Adams's message, refused officially to receive the commissioners; and that three men, called in the dispatches "X., Y., and Z.," came unofficially to inform them that if they wanted a treaty, they must furnish a quarter of a million dollars "for the pocket of the Directory

Am. State

Papers,
Foreign,
II. 157

and ministers." When Mr. X. said plainly to the envoys, "Gentlemen, you do not speak to the point; it is money: it is expected that you will offer money," they responded firmly, "No, no, no; not a sixpence." And the Presi dent thereupon notified Congress (June 27, 1798), “I will never send another minister to France without assurances that he will be received, respected, and honored as becomes the representative of a great, free, powerful, and independent nation." Adams's protest at the shameful attempt to exact bribes from American ministers raised him to the highest popularity of

211. Alien

and Sedition Acts (1798)

his whole life. Songs were written in his honor, among them Hopkinson's Hail Columbia. The Republicans were so stunned by the behavior of France that they could not stop four sweeping pieces of anti-French legislation by Congress in 1798: (1) a Naturalization Act raising the required term of residence to fourteen years; (2) the Alien Friends' Act, authorizing the President to expel aliens in time of peace; (3) the Alien Enemies' Act, for the expulsion of aliens (by which was meant Frenchmen) in time of war; (4) the Sedition Act, making it a crime to publish libels against the government, or Congress, or the President. The Sedition Act was passed because the Republican pro-French newspaper press Annals of was violent and abusive; as an example the Federalists Congress, quoted from the Aurora, a Jeffersonian newspaper, which 1797-1799, p. 2097 called Adams "a person without patriotism, without philosophy, without a taste for the fine arts a mock monarch." Late in 1798 the legislatures of Kentucky and Virginia each passed a series of resolutions, drawn up by Jefferson and Madi212. Virson respectively, in which they attacked the Alien and ginia and Sedition Acts, declared that they were contrary to the Kentucky resolutions Constitution and hence were "not law, but utterly void, (1798-1800) and of no force," and called upon the other states to join them in remonstrance. A second and stronger series of Kentucky resolutions was passed in 1799, containing the dangerous

declaration that "nullification by the states of all acts of Congress that are unauthorized by the Constitution, is the rightful remedy." These resolutions, which were really a kind of political platform, attracted great attention throughout the country, and the Alien and Sedition Acts in the end caused the downfall of the Federalist party.

213. The

French naval war

After the X. Y. Z. affair, there seemed nothing for it but war with France. In 1798 Congress declared the treaties of 1778 at an end, and began to build a fleet; and the Navy Department was organized, with a Secretary. Congress could not quite bring itself to declare war; but (1798–1800) it did authorize the capture of French cruisers and, under some circumstances, of merchantmen, by warships and by American privateers, of which 365 were commissioned in a single year. The American frigate Constellation captured the French frigate Vengeance; and the federal ship Boston took the French corvette Berceau.

Just at this time, Napoleon Bonaparte rose to supreme power in France; and he saw no object in fighting America. Indirectly he sent word that he was willing to make peace, and Adams, against the advice of his party friends and his Cabinet, in 1799 directed negotiations resulting in a treaty of peace (September 30, 1800), which for a time safeguarded. American neutral trade.

214. Election of Jef

fersor.

The death of Washington, in 1799, took away the balance. wheel of American politics, for Adams offended his party associates and never had any hold on the Republicans. Though Adams would not apply the Alien Act, several prosecutions of Republican journalists under the Sedi- (1800-1801) tion Act were unfairly pressed; and such a protest was made that the Federalists were startled at their own work. Meanwhile the Federalist journals were allowed to indulge in publications which were at least as scurrilous as those of their opponents.

As the time drew on for the presidential election of 1800, a long-standing feud between Hamilton and Adams came to the surface. Hamilton had twice already tried by some trick to set Adams off the track that led to the presidency; but he could not prevent his rival from again receiving the party nomination. Jefferson, the candidate of the Republicans, was supported by Aaron Burr, of New York, who was nominated for Vice President; and that state changed over from the Federalist column. The result was that the Republican candidates got 73 electoral votes and Adams got only 65. John Adams and his party were defeated.

Every Republican elector voted both for Jefferson and for Burr, so that there was a technical tie. As the Constitution then stood, the House had the power to select between these two men, each state delegation casting one vote. The Federalists had the majority by states, and, in the face of the intention of the Republican voters to make. Jefferson President, many of the Federalists voted for Burr, and came near electing him. Jefferson and his friends were furious, and even Hamilton advised his friends to vote for Jefferson, who in the end was chosen (February 17, 1801) by 10 states to 4. The Federalists looked on the success of Jefferson as the undoing of the work of twenty years of effort to establish a firm government; and their conduct left in Jefferson's mind a strong feeling of injury and distrust. This dangerous crisis, in which the will of the people was almost set aside through an imperfection in the Constitution, led to the proposal of the