The curious situation which ensued from the efforts made by Adams to deal with this emergency cannot be understood without reference to his personal peculiarities.  He was vain, learned, and self-sufficient, and he had the characteristic defect of pedantry:  he overrated intelligence and he underrated character.  Hence he was inclined to resent Washington’s eminence as being due more to fortune than to merit, and he had for Hamilton an active hatred compounded of wounded vanity and a sense of positive injury.  He knew that Hamilton thought slightingly of his political capacity and had worked against his political advancement, and he was too lacking in magnanimity to do justice to Hamilton’s motives.  His state of mind was well known to the Republican leaders, who hoped to be able to use him.  Jefferson wrote to Madison suggesting that “it would be worthy of consideration whether it would not be for the public good to come to a good understanding with him as to his future elections.”  Jefferson himself called on Adams and showed himself desirous of cordial relations.  Mrs. Adams responded by expressions of pleasure at the success of Jefferson, between whom and her husband, she said, there had never been “any public or private animosity.”  Such rejoicing over the defeat of the Federalist candidate for Vice-President did not promote good feeling between the President and the Federalist leaders.

The morning before the inauguration, Adams called on Jefferson and discussed with him the policy to be pursued toward France.  The idea had occurred to Adams that a good impression might be made by sending out a mission of extraordinary weight and dignity, and he wanted to know whether Jefferson himself would not be willing to head such a mission.  Without checking Adams’s friendly overtures, Jefferson soon brought him to agree that it would not be proper for the Vice-President to accept such a post.  Adams then proposed that Madison should go.  On March 6, Jefferson reported to Adams that Madison would not accept.  Then for the first time, according to Adams’s own account, he consulted a member of his Cabinet, supposed to be Wolcott although the name is not mentioned.

Adams took over Washington’s Cabinet as it was finally constituted after the retirement of Jefferson and Hamilton and the virtual expulsion of Randolph.  The process of change had made it entirely Federalist in its political complexion, and entirely devoted to Washington and Hamilton in its personal sympathies.  That Adams should have adopted it as his own Cabinet has been generally regarded as a blunder, but it was a natural step for him to take.  To get as capable men to accept the portfolios as those then holding them would have been difficult, so averse had prominent men become to putting themselves in a position to be harried by Congress, with no effective means of explaining and justifying their conduct.  Congress then had a prestige which it does not now possess, and its utterances then received consideration not now accorded.  Whenever presidential electors were voted for directly by the people, the poll was small compared with the vote for members of Congress.  Moreover, there was then a feeling that the Cabinet should be regarded as a bureaucracy, and for a long period this conception tended to give remarkable permanence to its composition.