John Adams Faced a January 6 Moment
In the spring and summer of 1798, the young United States engaged in a quasi-war with post-Revolutionary France. Although both nations had thrown off monarchies, their friendship, born in liberty, frayed as France’s revolution grew more radical. The U.S. signed a peace agreement with France’s enemy, Great Britain, and a diplomatic entanglement involving American diplomats in Paris grew into what became known as the X, Y, Z affair. John Adams, the second American president and former vice president of George Washington, presided over a nation divided, as many Americans, especially Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans, remained sympathetic to France. At the same time, Adams’s Federalists viewed Republicans as seditious. In May 1798, rival mobs gathered outside the president’s home in Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital. The fraught, violent atmosphere would find echoes in later civil conflicts through the 18th and 19th centuries to the January 6 insurrection in the 21st. We’re delighted to publish this excerpt from Making the President: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic. Copyright © 2024 by Lindsay M. Chervinsky and published by Oxford University Press. All Rights Reserved.
President John Adams issued a proclamation setting aside May 9, 1798, for “Solemn Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer.” Drawing on a New England tradition of fast and repentance to protect against famine and disease, Adams encouraged all citizens to spend the day praying for “the safety and prosperity” of the nation in the looming crisis with France. As the sun rose over the banks of the Delaware River on the intended fast-day morning, Philadelphia was quiet. It would not remain so for long. Before the sun set, the warnings of political violence would prove prescient, provoking aggressive and punitive legislation designed to target citizenship, immigration, and free speech.
A few hours later, the streets began to fill as residents made their way to their various churches and religious institutions to hear sermons and give thanks. After the conclusion of the services, many men and women lingered to chat with friends and neighbors. Though spring was in full bloom, the crowds were adorned in somber tones for the day. Fripperies and adornments were frowned upon for fast days, with one key exception—the cockade.
Many attendees had selected the “American” cockade, a black fabric rosette with a white button at the center pinned to men’s hats and ladies’ dresses. Others boldly chose the red, white, and blue tricolor cockade, which signified an allegiance to France and the Republican Party.
The tricolor cockade had been all the rage in the early 1790s when the French Revolution appeared to be the sister movement to the American Revolution, but as the French Revolution devolved into anarchy and indiscriminate violence during the Reign of Terror, many Americans’ enthusiasm waned. Citizens adopted the black and white cockade to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States and signify their distrust of France. For many, the tri-color cockade became a symbol of disloyalty and betrayal. While churchgoers mingled, they kept a watchful eye on the sartorial choices around them. As the crowds increased, hats with black cockades appeared to be congregating on one side of the city center while a mass of tricolor cockades assembled on the other.
Around 1 p.m., Adams, who had returned to the President’s House after attending a service, heard a noise that sounded like a soft hum. As it grew louder, Adams started to detect marching and voices. He looked out the window from his second-story office and saw thousands of people gathering on Market Street, just a few feet from his front door. They were wearing tri-color cockades.
Adams quickly sent a servant to the Department of War offices two blocks away to obtain guns and ammunition. While they waited for weapons, the servants closed the shutters, barricaded the doors and windows, and gathered buckets of water in the event the mob turned to arson.
Returning down a maze of back alleys and lanes, the servant led a few War Department clerks, their arms full of heavy chests of weapons, to the President’s House. They slipped through the back door and handed out muskets and shot to every man in the house, including the president. They took positions at the doors or windows and prepared to defend the house and their lives.
Adams could hear the jeers and insults hurled from the mob and spotted a distinct change in the tenor. Peeking through the draperies, he noticed a mass of men with black cockades arriving from the opposite direction. They announced that they had come to protect the president and demanded the “Jacobin” rogues disperse at once.
The tricolor mob responded with laughter, abuse, and threats, refusing to leave. The Federalists took a step forward, reached out, tore off the tricolor cockades from their opponents’ hats and coats, threw them to the ground, and stomped them into the mud. Their honor impugned, the Republicans ripped the black cockades from the gathered Federalists and ground them into the dirt as well. Just as the mob, which Adams estimated was 10,000 strong, threatened to burst into a full-scale brawl, the militia and the light horse cavalry arrived. Better armed and on horseback, the troops quickly dispersed the mob and restored order in front of the President’s House. The inhabitants exhaled a sigh of relief but didn’t dare let down their guard or venture outdoors for the rest of the day.
The following morning, Thomas Jefferson, ardent Francophile, leader of the Republican Party, and secret supporter of the tricolor cockade, wrote that the city was “so filled with confusion from about 6 to 10. O’clock last night that it was dangerous going out.”
The next morning, May 10, most Federalists woke expecting to see the city in flames and thousands of people murdered in their beds. Instead, the buildings were intact, few residents were injured, and all was quiet, though tense. Philadelphians had every reason to expect violence and every reason to be relieved that it had not come to pass. Passions had been swirling for months, both in the papers and in the streets.
In the pages of the Aurora, Benjamin Franklin Bache, [who supported Jefferson’s Republicans and not Adams’s Federalists], had encouraged citizens to reject Adams’s fast day, which Bache deemed a bid for absolute power. The only way to defy this tyranny, Bache argued, was to assemble and denounce it.
Taking cues from their political leaders, groups of volatile young men stormed the streets of the city, terrorizing editors and partisans. Bache’s house and the Aurora press were attacked multiple times. The structures, and his wife and children hiding inside, were saved by neighbors who worked to prevent the spread of fire.
The Aurora hinted at a coordinated effort ahead of the May 9 mob, while more explicit warnings were printed in local newspapers and sent directly to the President’s House. One letter, from “An Unfortunate Misled Man,” cautioned, “it is the fix’d resolve of a very numerous party of Frenchmen (in conjunction with a few other unsuspected Characters) to set fire to several different parts of this City on the night of that day (in May next) which is set apart by you as a day of Solemn fasting & prayer.” The conspirators plan to “Massacre man, Woman & Child, save those who are friendly to their interests,” the anonymous letter writer alerted the president.
Abigail [Adams] also observed dark tidings of violence to come. Two weeks before the fast day, Abigail was visited by two young women. One had recently passed down the back alley behind the President’s House and found a letter at “the Edge of a gutter.” Abigail read the anonymous letter, which warned “that the French people who were in this city had formed a conspiracy, with some unsuspected Americans, on the Evening of the day appointed for the fast to set fire to the City in various parts, and to Massacre the inhabitants.”
The president was inclined to ignore the letters as attempts to rile up the people, but Abigail wrote to her sister, “I really have been allarmd for his Personal safety tho I have never before exprest it.” The president had no personal security, and anyone could walk up to the President’s House. Political violence had repeatedly marked the streets of Philadelphia in recent months, and she had no reason to expect it to stop or spare her husband.
Out of an abundance of caution, [Pennsylvania] Governor Thomas Mifflin dispatched armed patrols every night in May, ordered the militia at high alert, and placed guards at the local magazines and arms depots. These preparations had proven necessary on the fast day when roving mobs clashed in front of the President’s House, and militia enforcement prevented further violence. But many Federalists concluded these measures were insufficient to protect the republic over the long term.
The problem, many Americans concluded, is that there were too many immigrants coming to the United States, and they were the wrong sort of immigrants. In just one decade, 80,000 people emigrated from Great Britain, 60,000 from Ireland, and 20,000 from France and French Saint Domingue (now Haiti). Most of the British and Irish immigrants were poor, in search of a better life for their families, and fleeing various rebellions. Most French immigrants, both white and Black, escaped the violence of the French and Haitian Revolutions. With few exceptions, they voted en masse for Republicans. Both parties demonstrated xenophobia but for very different reasons.
Many French refugees came from wealthy, aristocratic families and brought enslaved servants when they fled. Republicans suspected the French refugees were still secret monarchists and were eager to restore their former social hierarchy. They also worried that the influx of enslaved refugees from Saint-Domingue would spark similar slave rebellions in the southern states.
On the other side, Federalists suspected that the Irish, who had recently attempted a failed uprising against the British Empire, would remain in league with conspirators at home. Not only would they funnel funds, ammunition, and information to Ireland to undermine the British, but they also would attempt an overthrow of the federal government on American soil. Federalists saw a similar threat in the French emigre community. Although many had fled the French Revolution, Federalists feared they harbored equally rad-radical tendencies. Once in the United States, they would join forces with the Francophile Republicans and conspire to destroy the union.
They weren’t totally wrong. Many Irish immigrants had participated in the rebellion against the British, remained sympathetic to the cause, and retained connections to the network. They set up United Irishmen clubs with the goal of supporting collaborators back home. They also founded and published newspapers that criticized the Federalists for their British sympathies and assumed an active role in local politics.
On April 17, 1798, Representative Joshua Coit from Connecticut proposed a bill to suspend naturalization indefinitely. This extreme ban didn’t sit well with moderate Federalists and horrified Republicans. Forming a temporary coalition, they forced revisions to the existing 1795 naturalization bill by extending the naturalization period from five years to fourteen years.
Both parties had supported the naturalization bill in 1795. However, three years later, it was clear the legislation targeted one political base. On June 13, this legislation passed with the thinnest of majorities in the House, 41–40, along party lines.
Jefferson confided in Madison that “one of the war-party, in a fit of un- guarded passion declared some time ago they would pass a citizen bill, an alien bill, & a sedition bill.” By mid-June, the citizenship bill had passed; Jefferson braced himself for what might come next.
Fearing the extreme measures that might come out of the Federalist-dominated Senate, Republicans in the House proposed an Alien Enemy Act to preempt more radical legislation. The Republican bill would empower the president, in the event of war, to “apprehend, restrain, secure and remove” citizens of an enemy nation residing in the United States. The legislation exempted naturalized citizens and upheld the trial process by authorizing courts to convene hearings and impose sentences.
While Federalists supported the Alien Enemies Act, it didn’t go far enough to address the troublemakers they saw around every corner.
The Senate toned down some of the more punitive passages and passed the bill on June 8 on a party-line vote, 16 to 7. The bill then went to the House, where Albert Gallatin, a Swiss immigrant who had settled in western Pennsylvania, led the battle against the bill.
The House moderated the text but passed the bill, again along strict party lines, 46 votes to 40. James Madison called the final version “a monster.”
Federalists then realized they hadn’t passed a war measure and returned their attention to the Alien Enemies Act, which languished in committee until early July. It was the only bill crafted by Republicans and adopted with bipartisan support. A version of this bill remains in effect today.
Months earlier, as the Alien and Naturalization bills were introduced, Jefferson had lamented to Madison, “There is now only wanting, to accomplish the whole declaration beforementioned, a sedition bill which we shall certainly soon see proposed. The object of that is the suppression of the whig presses. Bache’s has been particularly named.”
On July 4, while the president and the first lady celebrated the nation’s birthday, the Senate passed a sedition law restricting freedom of speech. The bill had two purported goals: defend the government from insurrections and protect the nation from lies designed to provoke political violence.
The first section made it a crime to “unlawfully combine or conspire” to “oppose” a government measure, impede “the operation of any law,” or “intimidate or prevent” an official from fulfilling his duties.
The second section made it a crime to “write, print, or publish” any seditious libel (in writing) or utter seditious speech. It defined sedition as speech or writing intended to “defame” the government, Congress, or the president, or to “bring them into contempt or disrepute,” to “excite against them the hatred” of the American people, “to stir up sedition,” to encourage others to oppose “a law or presidential act,” to “resist, oppose, or defeat” any law or act, or to “aid, encourage or abet any hostile designs of any foreign nation.”
The legislation allowed truth as a defense, but most observers predicted that it would make little difference in court.
The Sedition Act effectively made campaign speech, political rallies, or partisan opinions illegal, which revealed the third, unspoken goal of the legislation—to crush the Republican Party.
Federalists saw 1798 as a turning point in a great battle between “good and evil on a scale almost without precedent since biblical times.”
They started the year with genuine concerns about national security and offered compelling arguments about the trustworthiness of certain actors in cahoots with the French. They nurtured an understandable dislike of Republican newspaper editors who spewed lies and perhaps libel. And they were operating under a legal framework that didn’t protect against violent or violence-provoking speech.
Federalists became so convinced of the existential nature of the threat and the righteousness of their cause, however, that they persuaded themselves that any and all measures were acceptable, and even required, to secure a victory against France and their domestic partners in the Republican Party. Even banning free speech.
As the Sedition Act made its way through Congress, Jefferson stopped writing about anything political—even to Madison. He couldn’t risk postal workers intercepting his letters and using them as evidence of sedition. Senator Henry Tazewell noted the dark atmosphere when he wrote to Madison and promised to send “an account of whatever may occur that can be interesting . . . if I am not Guillotined.”
The final Sedition Bill, passed on July 10, protected Congress, the federal government, and the president. It did not mention the vice president. It would expire on March 3, 1801—the day before the next inauguration.
President Adams had not asked for any of this legislation. And yet, when presented with these four bills, he signed them. He did not say why, but he wrote to Benjamin Chadbourn, a judge in Maine, “The Fate of our Republick is at hand.” Most republics fail when “the Virtues are gone,” he theorized.
Adams had long feared that the republic would be short-lived, and he refused to oversee its collapse. Protective measures against internal threats seemed like a sound idea, especially because Abigail ardently supported them. In the spring of 1798, Abigail wrote to her sister that if the government did not suppress the radical Republican presses, “we shall come to a civil war.”
Adams never revealed whether Abigail’s advice was the deciding factor, but it often was. The choice would prove to be one of his worst errors of judgment and failures of morality in his lengthy public service career.
Adams’s letters took a positive turn. He received hundreds of petitions and addresses from citizens across the country applauding his actions, condemning French treachery, and pledging their support in the event of war. Over the next twelve months, he received over 300 petitions from civic organizations, state legislatures, college students, and social societies around the nation. Each address represented hundreds, if not thousands, of participants who voted to approve the text. The affection contained in the addresses cut across class, ethnicity, religion, and creed. All sixteen states sent their regards to the president, and no region was disproportionately represented. Western territories were as eager to proclaim their loyalty to the nation and affirm the unity of the American people as the Eastern seaboard. Even the Aurora was forced to admit that “the many addresses from different parts of the union” appeared to be a triumph for the Federalists and Adams in particular.
This tidal wave of support and popularity meant more to Adams than it would have almost anyone else. He had long toiled in Washington’s shadow, often bitter that his hard work and sacrifice didn’t merit the same adoration as military exploits. Thus, when the American people showered him with praise in 1798, he responded to every single letter, petition, and address. He knew many of his responses would be passed among family and neighbors, forwarded to friends, read aloud, or published. He took care with every word. No two responses were the same, and each received its own special treatment.
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