Adams’s Cabinet consisted mainly of men hand-picked by Hamilton, and the second President found himself surrounded by pro-British New England merchants and bankers. No doubt remembering Jefferson’s championship of Citizen Genêt, Adams shut his Vice President out of nearly every aspect of the government. By November of that year, with Bonaparte preparing, it was said, to conquer Switzerland and then invade England, anti-French hysteria had reached dangerous proportions.

By January of ’98 feelings in Congress were running so high that the Honorable Representative of Vermont (Republican) crossed the floor of the House chamber to spit in the face of the Honorable Representative of Connecticut (Federalist). This in turn led to a brawl on the floor with a cane and some fire-tongs as weapons. (“Not,” wrote Sophie, who’d been in the gallery, “the Congress’s finest hour.”)

By the following April, when word came to Philadelphia that French Foreign Minister Tallyrand had refused to receive the American envoys unless they lent France twelve million dollars and gave the Foreign Minister himself a further quarter million as a “sweetener,” anti-French mobs were storming the streets of Philadelphia, and the country was clamoring for war.

In June, a Naturalization Act was passed. Effectively blocking the citizenship of émigrés from both France and Ireland, it was followed, a week later, by the Aliens Act, which permitted the President to summarily banish any foreigner he personally deemed a threat (for instance, Jefferson’s staunch supporter Albert Gallatin).

And in the blazing heat of July, the Sedition Act was passed, forbidding any newspaper to print attacks on the President—in direct disregard of the Constitution.



“It is a reign of witches,” declared Jefferson softly, as he paced the darkness of Montpelier’s pillared porch in the heat of a July night in 1798. He’d arrived after a day of blistering sun; Dolley, sitting at Jemmy’s side, had heard in the throb of the cicadas, smelled in the damp thick air, the coming of storm. “Because one Frenchman is dishonest, and another is greedy, they seek to go to war with the only nation strong enough to counterbalance England’s desire to swallow us up, to transform us back into her colonies again. To hold us not in chains of iron this time but of gold. It is enough to give you a fever.”