In the first Presidential election of that year he was elected Vice-President on the ticket with Washington; and began a feud with Alexander Hamilton, the mighty leader of the Federalist party and chief organizer of our governmental machine, which ended in the overthrow of the party years before its time, and had momentous personal and literary results as well.  He was as good a Federalist as Hamilton, and felt as much right to be leader if he could; Hamilton would not surrender his leadership, and the rivalry never ended till Hamilton’s murder.  In 1796 he was elected President against Jefferson.  His Presidency is recognized as one of the ablest and most useful on the roll; but its personal memoirs are most painful and scandalous.  The cabinet were nearly all Hamiltonians, regularly laid all the official secrets before Hamilton, and took advice from him to thwart the President.  They disliked Mr. Adams’s overbearing ways and obtrusive vanity, considered his policy destructive to the party and injurious to the country, and felt that loyalty to these involved and justified disloyalty to him.  Finally his best act brought on an explosion.  The French Directory had provoked a war with this country, which the Hamiltonian section of the leaders and much of the party hailed with delight; but showing signs of a better spirit, Mr. Adams, without consulting his Cabinet, who he knew would oppose it almost or quite unanimously, nominated a commission to frame a treaty with France.  The storm of fury that broke on him from his party has rarely been surpassed, even in the case of traitors outright, and he was charged with being little better.  He was renominated for President in 1800, but beaten by Jefferson, owing to the defections in his own party, largely of Hamilton’s producing.  The Federalist party never won another election; the Hamilton section laid its death to Mr. Adams, and American history is hot with the fires of this battle even yet.

Mr. Adams’s later years were spent at home, where he was always interested in public affairs and sometimes much too free in comments on them; where he read immensely and wrote somewhat.  He heartily approved his son’s break with the Federalists on the Embargo.  He died on the same day as Jefferson, both on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

As a writer, Mr. Adams’s powers show best in the work which can hardly be classed as literature,—­his forcible and bitter political letters, diatribes, and polemics.  As in his life, his merits and defects not only lie side by side, but spring from the same source,—­his vehemence, self-confidence, and impatience of obstruction.  He writes impetuously because he feels impetuously.  With little literary grace, he possesses the charm that belongs to clear and energetic thought and sense transfused with hot emotion.  John Fiske goes so far as to say that “as a writer of English, John Adams in many respects surpassed all his American contemporaries.”  He was by no means without humor,—­a characteristic which shows in some of his portraits,—­and sometimes realized the humorous aspects of his own intense and exaggerative temperament.  His remark about Timothy Pickering, that “under the simple appearance of a bald head and straight hair, he conceals the most ambitious designs,” is perfectly self-conscious in its quaint naivete.