Making the Presidency: How John Adams Created Presidential Customs for the Twenty-First Century

Hello everyone. Thank you so much for being here this morning. I know it's probably a bit of an early start after a busy couple of days, but I'm so delighted to have the opportunity to chat with you all about this work. As you saw on the screen and as you can see in the postcard before you, the book is not coming out until September, which puts an author in a little bit of a weird situation to say I'm talking about this thing that does not yet exist, or is in the process of being existing or coming into existence as it is currently actually at the printer. So what I wanted to do for you all, the postcards in front of you, the two QR codes, one is of course just to Amazon or wherever you would like to buy your books, one on the top is a pre-order offer that I'm doing with a company called Porchlight, and I have designed special John Adams themed book plates. They have them with them at Porchlight. I have signed all of them, and so the copies there are 30% off with this signed book plate, and that's because I don't have them to give to you today. So I hope that that is a fun way to have a bit of a connection. One of my favorite things to do is to sign books for people, and so this is sort of a middle option. I'm very much looking forward to answering your questions. That is always my favorite part of any engagement, because I want to know what you want to know about, and I want to be able to give you that information. So I do plan to save some time at the end, and I hope that you will have lots of things that you would like to discuss. So any conversation about the presidency really has to start at the constitutional convention, and for anyone who has heard me talk about the presidency before, or perhaps engaged with my previous work, I always emphasize that the constitution is really extraordinarily short. If we look at this graph on the left, you can see lengths of written constitutions in comparison to others around the world, and the United States, the number, the 7762, is with amendments. So the original constitution was just over 4,000 words, which was one of the shortest in the world, and if we look at the different branches in comparison to each other, the executive branch is very, very short, which means that much wasn't said, much wasn't written, much was left for future people to try and figure out, and I think they did so for a couple of reasons. One, by the time they got to the executive late in the summer, the delegates at the constitutional convention were hot, they were tired, they were grouchy, they really wanted to go home. They were tired of trying to find ways to compromise. Number two, it must have been fairly awkward to be discussing the executive and the potential limitations or abuses of power with George Washington in the room. Everyone understood that if this constitution was ratified, he was going to be the first president. There was no question in that regard, and it would have been pretty awkward to be discussing, well, what if the president does something badly with him staring at you? The third thing is, I think they genuinely trusted him to figure it out, to fill out what I call the fuzzy bits of the presidency, and that is partly because he had been, he had demonstrated an ability to use power safely in the past and then to give it back when he no longer needed it, so they trusted him to fill out these bits. So, and of course, I always start with this picture because he was present for all of these conversations. He was in the room, he didn't miss a single session, so he had a very clear sense of the expectations of what people wanted him and future presidents to do. So on his inauguration, which was in April of 1789, he had the written text in front of him, but he understood how much had to be figured out and spent the next eight years doing so to the best of his ability. It's really hard to list the precedents that Washington established because there are so many that it's almost impossible to distinguish between things like, of course, the two-term precedent to things like how you, what you call the president, Mr. President, was something that was decided during Washington's administration. So the first eight years of Washington's presidency, he's trying to fill out these fuzzy bits. He figures out what it looks like to be a president, how to have this authority, and then in September of 1796, he announces his retirement. This is, of course, a radical act, is the age of Napoleon. Most people don't willingly give up power twice, but I think what happens next is even more radical. We often end the story with the farewell address, but then we don't always talk about what happens after, and in some ways, what happens after Washington announced his retirement was actually a much more radical act. He wanted to be sure that the first transition, the first time that he was not president happened while he was alive. He knew that it was going to be an incredibly tense moment for the United States because they had never visualized another person in the presidency, and we know from studies that if we don't see someone, you know, for example, that looks like us, it's really hard for us to visualize us being in that place, and so for Washington, he knew that the American people were going to have trouble visualizing someone else as president. They weren't sure if the powers of the executive branch of the enormous trappings and responsibilities would work if he wasn't in office. They weren't sure if foreign nations would actually respect the United States or would seize this opportunity to try and pick off maybe states along the borders or seize trade once he stepped down, and so he wanted to be there. He wanted to be alive. He wanted his name and the symbolic attachment of his support to uphold whoever came next, and it was a very intentional decision and a very radical one. I love sharing these two portraits, not because I think that they're particularly high-quality pieces of art, but because I think they reflect that sense of uncertainty. So first, I mean, the Lansdowne portrait is the one of Washington. I think this is among the worst portraits of Washington because his face looks all wonky, and partly that was because he had just had a new set of dentures, and so his mouth was actually quite swollen, but his face looks all mushed, and that's not really, I think, an accurate reflection, but compared to the one of Adams, it's freaking fantastic. This portrait of Adams is ghastly, and what happened is I think basically the artist, which I believe it's a Gilbert Stewart, so this is no slouch, basically took Adam's head and put it on Washington, and Adam's body didn't look like that. He wasn't that tall, and if you look at the pose, the things on the table, the way the room is designed, the pillars, it demonstrates that they only had one way of thinking of a president. They only had one way of thinking of a presidential portrait. They didn't know how else to visualize it, so these two portraits are a fantastic demonstration of the tensions and the stresses of the moment of that first transition. So as president, we're going to, a little bit of a spoiler, Adams won the election in 1796. He beat Thomas Jefferson, and as president, he did four things, and I think all four of these things have been very much overlooked, but are essential for ensuring that the presidency survived to be on Washington. Washington established all these precedents, but if they weren't continued, then they would have been really interesting historic anomalies that we would have written about, like, oh, isn't that cute? This person did this at this various time, but because they were continued and Adams started to teach Americans how to cherish institutions and practices and norms, they start to become a part of the American political tradition. So the first thing, he showed up. Second thing, he established peace. Third, he defended executive power, and fourth, he went home. So first, he showed up. Whoever came after Washington was going to have a terrible time. They were going to fail. They were going to be, no one was nearly as popular as Washington. They were either going to try and follow Washington's model and then pale in comparison to that stature and reputation, or they were going to diverge from Washington's model, and people were going to say, oh, you think you know better than Washington how to be a president? Either way, it was going to be terrible. Adams knew this, and he did it anyway. So it took someone who was willing to sacrifice their political reputation and take the public hit to ensure that the position continued. On March 4, 1797, which was John Adams' inauguration, he arrived in his carriage, and he found upon his arrival that George Washington was waiting for him, was actually at this transition, and that was a surprise. There had been no precedent of former executives attending any sort of inauguration at the state level. Governors typically didn't do that, but again, Washington was really insistent upon wanting to make sure that his presence demonstrated some sort of approval for this transition process and from the new administration. We often forget about this transition because we know what happened four years later, but they didn't know that yet, and people in the room talked about how miraculous it was to see the rising of one sun and the setting of another, and it was the most sublime thing in human history that they had ever seen. Apparently, everyone in the room was crying, and they were aware that this was a historic anomaly, that peaceful transitions didn't really happen. The most recent transition they had seen was the French Revolution, which of course was characterized by guillotines and blood literally running through the streets. So they were very much aware that they were setting history in a president, and almost immediately it is very clear that one of the biggest challenges is going to be foreign policy because France was really annoyed with a treaty that the United States had signed in 1794 called the Jay Treaty and started a series of depredations against American ships on the high seas, and Adams was very committed to neutrality. He felt that peace was quite essential for the nation, and he established a three-man committee that he was going to send to Paris to try and preserve peace. That three-man committee from left to right was John Marshall. This is the younger John Marshall. We typically think of his Supreme Court justice portrait, but this is probably what he would have looked like at this point. John Marshall, Charles Coatsworth Pinckney, and Elbridge Gehry. Gehry was, his name has been made infamous because he was the first governor to approve gerrymandering, but his name was actually Gehry, so it really should be gerrymandering. We're going to slander him with that term. So Adams sent this three-man commission to France. They had the highest expectations that they would be able to negotiate a new treaty and resolve the challenges between the United States and France. They arrived in Paris and were immediately met with a number of unofficial French envoys, and the unofficial French envoys demanded bribes. They demanded loans. They demanded very embarrassing apologies, to basically apologize for some of the more militaristic rhetoric on behalf of the president, and they said that they wouldn't even recognize the envoys as American ministers until they had those bribes, loans, and apologies. Over the next six months, the envoys tried to find different ways to negotiate. They, of course, refused to pay the bribes and the loans, but they were trying to, in good faith, to have a diplomatic effort, and when news of these insults broke in the United States, there was a public uproar. This became known as the XYZ affair, because in the dispatches that Marshall sent back from Paris, they described the French, the unofficial French envoys as Agent X, Agent Y, and Agent Z. So the XYZ affair was extremely unpopular in the United States. Americans felt that their sovereignty and their independence and their honor as a new nation had been insulted, and they demanded that if the president didn't declare war, he at least prepare for war, if France was going to declare it on his behalf. So Congress responded by creating a new navy, finally. The United States hadn't had a navy for several years, despite the fact that both Washington and Adams had been asking for it. They created a naval department. Adams was finally able to appoint a secretary of his own. It was Benjamin Stoddart on the left, and they greatly expanded the American army. Now, Adams approved of all these defensive measures, because he understood that strong defensive measures improved your ability to negotiate. If you were coming from a position of strength, then you can get a better diplomatic deal. However, he didn't quite understand what France was up to. He understood that war was going to be very tricky. France had been at war with Great Britain at this point for over five years. Where were they going to get the troops to send to the United States? How were they going to get 30,000 troops across the ocean when Great Britain still had the strongest navy? And also, the United States typically supplied the Caribbean colonies, so they were really going to be cutting off their own nose despite their face if they picked a fight with the United States. And finally, if they did declare war, they were going to push the United States into the arms of the British, who were their enemies. So he was sitting there thinking, this doesn't really make sense. I don't know why they're doing this. But he supported the defensive measures and said in his annual address to Congress, which is essentially our state of the union, that he supported all these measures. He would do everything to defend American honor and sovereignty, and he would not send another American diplomat until he received assurances that any American envoy would be treated with the respect and honor that an independent sovereign nation deserves. However, pretty quickly, Adams started to have second thoughts, and they centered around this new expanded army. Americans were very distrusting of standing armies at this point, and armies are very expensive. And in order to pay for said army, they had to raise taxes, which are also very unpopular in the United States. Keep in mind, this is in 1798. Most people that were living had been living during the revolution, so the rhetoric about taxation and standing armies was very much fresh in their minds. And so Adams started to have a bit of a conflict because he distrusted the army. He wasn't sure he liked it. He wasn't sure that he liked the growing politicization of it, and yet he wasn't really sure what to do. And that centered around a problem with his cabinet. One of Adams's worst mistakes, although I think this one was not his fault, was to keep the cabinet from the end of Washington's term. So going clockwise, we have Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott Jr., Secretary of War James McHenry, and Attorney General Charles Lee. Charles Lee was great. He was a really good Attorney General. He was fairly independently minded. He was loyal to the administration. The rest were kind of terrible. The problem is that Washington didn't tell Adams that they were terrible, and Washington knew that they were terrible. He was always complaining about how McHenry could never really live up to the burdens of office, and this was before the war preparations. Timothy Pickering had, I think, a personality that was best suited for the Spanish Inquisition, and so not exactly the characteristics you want for the nation's highest diplomat. Adams later joked that Pickering would never be happy in heaven because he would have to acknowledge a superior. So Pickering was not a very nice man, and he thought he was the smartest person in the room despite spending time with some of the greatest minds, I think, in American history. Oliver Wolcott was competent, but he was highly partisan. So the reason Adams kept this cabinet, there were a couple of reasons. One, he didn't know that they were terrible because Washington didn't tell him. Two, he knew that cabinet positions were actually really hard to fill. They weren't very well paid. They weren't all that prestigious. You had to be away from home for months at a time. Travel was awful. It was dirty and tiring and dangerous, and so getting back and forth between your home and the seat of government was difficult, and so he worried, well, if Washington is having trouble filling these positions, how am I going to fill these positions? And lastly, he worried that if he did replace them, that would be seen somehow as a rebuke of Washington's judgment, of Washington's appointments, and at a time when, again, this transition was so stressful, he wanted to provide some continuity, some institutional knowledge to give people a sense of reassurance, and he hoped that they would genuinely be loyal to the presidency, if not to him personally. Turns out they were not, except for Lee. Charles Lee was fine. They were part of a faction of the Federalist Party called the Archfederalists. This was the most extreme wing of the Federalist Party. They tended to be very pro-Britain, very anti-France, and they loved the army because it was a great way to score political wins, to appoint their cronies to positions, and it tended to benefit them politically. So on the top left, we have George Cabot. On the top right, we have Theodore Sedgwick. Theodore Sedgwick, at this point, was a senator. Later, in Adams's term, he became the Speaker of the House. Bottom left is Alexander Hamilton, and bottom right is Fisher Ames. Alexander Hamilton was sort of the all-around acknowledged leader of the Archfederalists. He was their favorite. They all kind of took directions from him, including sometimes he would tell them what to say and their advice to the president, and they would copy and paste. Well, they didn't have copy and paste at the time, but their version of copy and paste directly into their letters to the president, and he would often take them and use them for his addresses to Congress. So Adams initially didn't really know that all this was going on, but they were calling the shots, and they were really dictating what the cabinet was doing at any given point. So Adams started to have second thoughts about this army, largely because of the makeup of the officer corps and because of these tensions. As soon as Congress created this army, Adams had asked Washington to come out of retirement and be the commander-in-chief, and Washington said, sure, as long as I can stay home until France invades. John Adams said, sure, fine, no problem. Really, he just needed Washington's name attached to it because the symbolic value. This group and the cabinet really wanted Alexander Hamilton to be number two, because they recognized that whoever was number two was actually going to have all of the power, because they were going to be the one with the army while Washington was home. Adams did not want Hamilton in the number two position. He did not trust Hamilton. He referred to him as a puppy, which was the ultimate insult in the 18th century. It was really like slapping someone in their face, essentially. He felt that he was very unpredictable. He was very unreliable, and through a series of backroom maneuvers, they basically convinced Washington that Hamilton had to be number two, and convinced Washington to threaten to resign if Adams didn't give in. Adams, recognizing that he couldn't have Washington resign, because it would absolutely destroy his presidency, caves, but then he started coming up with a way to basically defang the army, to undermine it, to reduce this risk to both the nation, because a army was going to be very dangerous, but also to reassert his own executive power over that process. He did so in a couple of ways. First, he used strategic distance to his benefit. At the time, it took about a week from news to get from Philadelphia to Quincy, Massachusetts, which is where he spent most of his summers. This is his house, Peacefield, which was pictured at the time in Massachusetts, and about a week for it to get back. What he told McHenry was if McHenry wanted to make any decision or appoint any new officer, then he had to write out what appointment he wanted to make, send it to Adams. Adams would either approve or disapprove. Adams would send it back. McHenry would have to then fill out the commission with the name, send it to Adams for his signature, and Adams would send it back. Adams basically ensured that there were four weeks before any commission could be signed. On the other hand, he allowed Benjamin Stoddard, the head of the navy, to send blank commissions. Adams would sign them, send them back, and Stoddard could fill them out and get them going right away. He used a strategic delay to try and slow the development of the army to undermine its growth and its power. He also started pursuing diplomacy in whatever way possible. So we had this commission. When they came back, when they started to come back from France, they were bringing with them information. John Marshall was the first to return, and he reported to Adams that France didn't want war. Adams was right. They were just being bullies, and Talleyrand was just trying to line his pocket. But if Americans acted with strength, then there wasn't going to be a war. Elbridge Gerry then came home and said that once news of the American war preparations had reached France, he saw an immediate change. That Talleyrand started being much more solicitous, was trying to negotiate with him, trying to fix the problems. That indeed they didn't want war, and diplomacy was very possible. Adams also started receiving information from a very important web of basically spies, but we're not going to call them spies. It's a web of intelligence that he had across Europe, starting most importantly with his son John Quincy Adams, who was the minister to Prussia in Berlin. So he was sending reports back, and critically, he was not sending them to the State Department. He was sending them to Peace Field. He was sending reports to the State Department, but it was essential that he sent them to his father directly, so that Pickering could not filter out any information. He was also receiving really important information from William Vans Murray, who was the minister at the Hague, and William Vans Murray was so essential because Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, who was the French foreign minister, had sent a special person to go meet with Murray to give him reassurances that indeed they didn't want war, they did want diplomacy, and Murray was also sending all of that information back to Peace Field, not to the State Department. So Adams was cultivating all this intelligence about a change in France, a change in the diplomatic scene, and the last letter he received that really changed everything was a handwritten letter from Talleyrand using the language that Adams had said in that annual address, that he promised that if they sent an envoy, it would be treated with the honor and respect due to an independent and sovereign nation. He basically quoted the president back to him. So Adams, with this information, nominated William Vans Murray, the guy on the left with the very fabulous hair, to go from the Hague to Paris to come up with a new treaty and to serve as a new minister plenipotentiary to France. He did all of that without telling any of the archfederalists. And they were furious. They started howling. The second this news broke in the Senate, they started howling about it and how it was such a betrayal and how the president hadn't told them and hadn't like gotten their input and gotten their advice, and they tried to find a way to get him to remove the nomination, which he refused to do. Ultimately, they settled on a compromise, and that compromise was that Adams would nominate two additional ministers to go with Murray, two additional federalists, very solid respectable federalists to go with him and help him with these negotiations. The negotiations took place in Paris from the spring of 1800 to the fall of 1800 and ended up producing the Treaty of Mortefontaine, which was signed in October 1800 between Napoleon and the French and the American envoys. It really resolved a lot of the lingering issues. It created a trade and basically a treaty of enmity and commerce, and it is the longest lasting alliance in the world. So the United States has been at peace with France since 1800 because of this treaty. So one of Adams's big contributions was pursuing peace when it was unpopular, when he knew it was going to split his party, and he did it anyway. The conflict in the cabinet did not end there. I sort of gave you a spoiler alert about what happened with the treaty, but the way the envoys ended up going was very tumultuous, and in the fall of 1799, Adams had been at Peacefield. He had instructed Timothy Pickering to write the instructions. Pickering had delayed for six months. He was really trying to undermine the president's foreign policy in any way that he could. Finally, Adams decided he had had enough. He met them in Trenton where they had all fled to escape yellow fever in Philadelphia. They had some cabinet meetings. There was a lot of disagreement, and then the next day Alexander Hamilton arrived. I don't know what Hamilton was thinking. I don't know if he thought that he could convince Adams that he was going to be more persuasive than Pickering or Wolcott. I don't know if he thought that he would have new information or what, but he was the last person that Adams was going to take input from. Hamilton had never served in a diplomatic capacity. He had never been to Europe. He had never done any of the things that Adams had, and he had the audacity to lecture the president on how to conduct foreign policy, and Adams absolutely lost it and told him he was a fool, and he had no idea what he was talking about, and basically to get out of his sight. He then demanded that the envoys sail the next day, which they did, and it led to this treaty, but it also solidified for Adams in his mind that there was this threat to executive power over both diplomacy and also management of the executive branch. So by sending this nomination and securing this treaty, Adams confirmed that the president is the one that makes foreign policy. Secretaries can give advice. Secretaries can share their opinion. They can tell the president they think he is wrong, but it is not a power-sharing arrangement. The president is in charge, and when Congress did end up ratifying this treaty in the end of 1800, right on the cusp of 1801, they basically confirmed that precedent, that presidents are the one that make foreign policy. Adams then had to decide what he was going to do with his executive branch. He had long quarreled with various department secretaries, but he put up with them for a couple of reasons. For a while, they were difficult, but they weren't necessarily directly disobeying orders, and I think he felt like he could kind of live with that. He knew that there would be political costs if he did fire them or remove them, and so maybe he was hoping to avoid splitting the Federalist Party while there was still a threat of war. Lastly, I think he wanted to be re-elected, and I think that he worried that if he removed some of the leaders of the Federalist Party from his cabinet, that he might not receive the nomination for the Federalist Party for re-election. In early May of 1800, they did decide to finally re-nominate him with the nomination in hand. He then decided to make a change. He called James McHenry to his office, and he basically unleashed all of his frustrations on McHenry's head. I don't think he intended to go about doing so in that way, but Adams was a little bit rash from time to time. When he was doing things in writing, he could be very politically savvy. He would write out all of his frustrations, set it aside, write another draft that was a little bit more temperate, set it aside, and then write a third draft that was actually what he should say publicly, and he would send that on to whoever he was talking to. But when he was talking, when he got going, it became harder for him to sort of lock it down, and he unleashed all of his frustrations on McHenry. He accused him of scheming to get him stuck with Hamilton, which was accurate. He had done that. He accused him of trying to undermine the presidency, which I think was also accurate. He said that McHenry was terrible at his job, which was also accurate, that none of them knew anything about diplomacy, which they didn't really, but it was very insulting to McHenry, and so McHenry requested to resign and said that he would resign at the end of the month. Adams accepted his resignation. A couple days later, he decided he also needed to remove Pickering, because while McHenry was totally incompetent, he wasn't necessarily a strategic mastermind, and Pickering was really the source of a lot of the rot in the cabinet. So he sent a letter to Pickering saying, I would like to make a change, want to give you the opportunity to resign. That was the gentleman's way out, and if you choose to resign, can you please name the day so I can nominate a successor before this session of the Senate concludes. Pickering sent back the haughtiest, most disrespectful letter, basically saying, nope, I don't want him. I would like to stay until the end of your presidential term. I need the money, and I don't feel like it. Again, I don't really know what he was thinking. I don't know if he didn't think, I don't know if he was calling Adams bluff, if he thought he was bluffing, and he wouldn't fire him. I don't know if he thought that the Federalists in Congress wouldn't allow the president to fire him. I'm not sure. Needless to say, Adams was not bluffing, and sent this note back. No salutation, no respectfully, no thanks for your service. Basically, you are hereby discharged, and to rub salt into that wound, he then had the chief clerk lock the Secretary of State offices so that Pickering couldn't take any of the papers with him, which turned out to be a very smart choice because Pickering tried. Adams then sent the nomination of John Marshall to be the next Secretary of State. Again, this caught the Federalists in Congress completely off guard. They were very furious, but they decided ultimately to confirm Marshall because if they didn't, they were worried who Adams might nominate next, and that it might be someone they didn't trust, and they did like Marshall, and they trusted Marshall. This was a hugely important precedent because the Constitution doesn't say anything about removal. The Constitution says the department secretaries can provide written advice to the That's it. That's the only mention of department secretaries in the Constitution. The executive departments were actually created by the first Federal Congress in the summer of 1789, and they weren't sure how the secretaries could be removed, and so they basically skirted the issue too. They used passive voice, and they said when secretaries are removed, the chief clerk becomes responsible for the papers because they disagreed on how that removal process should go, and they wanted to basically like punt it down the road. Washington had never encountered this problem, so it was up to Adams to establish precedent, which he did, and every president since has had the right to remove secretaries with two fuzzy exceptions. One, Andrew Johnson's impeachment was over this issue, and then there was also a Supreme Court case under Woodrow Wilson where the Supreme Court did in fact say that the president has the right to unilateral removal. So in the 20th century, the Supreme Court confirmed this precedent that Adams established. The last thing that Adams did was go home. He exhibited extraordinary civic virtue in the last six months of his presidency, and I like to share this quote. I always have to say the disclaimer when he says a religious people, he does not mean established religion like we often think of today. He means sort of a shared code of virtues and values, but his point was that much of the Constitution and much of our small-r Republican institutions require citizens to uphold them, require them to participate in order for them to survive. As many of you I'm sure know, in the election of 1800, there was not a provision for a separate ballot for vice president and president. So both of the Republican, this is the Jeffersonian Republican candidates, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied. They had 73 votes apiece, and per the terms of the Constitution, the election would go to the House of Representatives where each state would receive one vote. Jefferson basically had eight states that voted for him. Burr had six. Two states were split, so they cast basically blank ballots, and you needed nine states to win. Over the next couple of months, between the time when it was clear that there was going to be a tie and the time that they were going to actually make a decision, the Federalists toyed around with how they could get Democratic Republicans to sort of maybe flip states to Burr's column, who they felt like would be easier to control, or could they appoint a different president? Could they stall long enough to have a new election? They were toying around with some of these options, and as word of these options began to filter out, thousands and thousands of citizens came to Washington, D.C. This is what Washington, D.C. from the Capitol would have looked like in 1800. As Congress convened to start their session, and as they got ready to start certifying the votes, thousands of citizens gathered in front of the Capitol, and they promised to execute to anyone who tried to seize the presidency. So there was a mob outside the Capitol threatening to kill anyone who was not the proper president. There were also the militias in Virginia and Pennsylvania on the border of D.C. They had been brought up by the governors, and they were threatening to march into the city if the Federalists tried to do anything and put anyone else in place. So the threat of violence and the threat of anarchy was very real. It was very palpable, and it was so strong that when Albert Gallatin, who was a future Secretary of Treasury for Jefferson, was writing about this election 50 years later, he really genuinely believed it was a near miss. Adams, from the White House, which would have looked something like this in 1800, they called it the Executive Mansion at the time, looked at the Constitution and recognized that he had no role. He didn't have a vote. He didn't have any sort of role to play in the counting process. He worried that if he said anything, it would be seen as inappropriate interference, and so he decided on basically a strict interpretation of the Constitution and practiced something that I don't think we appreciate all that much, restraint. Restraint is much less sexy than winning a civil war or, you know, real feats of military bravery, but he felt like the best thing he could do was refuse to support Federalist schemes, sit back, and practice restraint. He also had Thomas Jefferson to the White House for several private meetings, assuring him that he believed he should be the next president, and he hoped that he would win, and that he was sure that Congress would do the right thing. Starting on February 11th, the Congress gathered at the U.S. Capitol. This was the Senate side at the time. The House side was like this wooden, circular, kind of like an amphitheater thing that they were still in the process of building. They gathered and they started to cast votes. They cast about 25 ballots in the first 24 hours. All of them were deadlocked. In between the ballots, they would kind of try to take naps on the floor or have snacks. One of the congressmen was so ill, he had to be brought in on a stretcher, and he was in the cloakroom next to the fire, and his wife would run his vote back and forth down the hallway because he didn't want his vote to be missed. They decided on a recess, came back the next day, cast a few more ballots, deadlocked. Came back the next day, a few more ballots, deadlocked. Came back the next day, a few more ballots, deadlocked. Finally, some of the more moderate Republicans and Federalists decided that they needed to come up with a compromise, and James Baird, who was the sole representative from Delaware, so he controlled the Delaware vote, said that he would meet with Samuel Smith, who was another moderate, and they proposed that if Jefferson would honor the national debts, support the Navy and the Army, and maintain neutrality with France and Britain, so very reasonable requests, they would swing the election. Jefferson sort of like winked and nodded while maintaining deniability that he hadn't made a deal, and indeed the following day, Baird basically cast a blank ballot, so removing one state from Burr's total. The South Carolina Federalists cast a blank ballot, removing another state from Burr's total. The Federalists from Vermont and Maryland, which had been deadlocked, cast a no vote, allowing their colleagues to put those two states in Jefferson's total. On the 36th ballot, Jefferson was elected with 10 states to Burr's four with two blank, and became the third president of the United States. Once that was decided, they had two weeks until the inauguration, and Jefferson really relied on the Adamses to help with that transition. Abigail had him to the White House to show him the space, to show him what he might need, to give him a list of servants that could be hired. John Adams sent him information about the horses and the carriages in the stables, and told his department secretaries to cooperate with Jefferson, to give him reports, to give him whatever support he needed. All the behind-the-scenes things that are so essential for a transition that now are often mandated by statute, but at the time were not written down. There was nothing guiding it. Lastly, on the morning of the inauguration, John Adams often gets a bad rap for leaving early. There's no doubt he was bitter about losing. There is no doubt that he wanted to win. He also was mourning the loss of one of his sons. But I think he also genuinely believed that his presence could be a real distraction, could take away from the transition, could turn it into a circus. He had not been invited. Jefferson didn't tell him he wanted him there, and the last thing he wanted to do was put any sort of impediment into the transition process to begin the healing of the new administration. He left early that morning, and as he got into the, he went, he took a public coach up to Massachusetts, which was a really incredible symbolic gesture, because he came into the presidency in a private carriage and left in a public coach as an average citizen. As he climbed into the carriage, Theodore Sedgwick, one of the arch federalists who had been his nemesis for the last two years, was sitting across from him, so that must have been a really fun ride home. But nonetheless, he went home. He lost, and he went home. The precedent of a president losing and attending an inauguration was not established until 1845, so it was not something that was on their mind. John Adams spent his first night in the White House, the executive mansion, on November 1st, 1800. The next day, he wrote a letter to Abigail talking about the house, and he closed the letter with this line, which I cannot say without getting choked up, so I'm not going to read it out loud to you. I had to record my audio book last week, and it took me like 10 takes to get this final line of the book, because it always makes my voice a little quivery. I think that he genuinely did everything he could to make the presidency stronger for those that followed him, to ensure that the institution would survive beyond Washington, beyond him. So George Washington created the presidency. John Adams defined it. I look forward to taking your questions. Thank you all so much for your attention.