ABSTRACT
John Adams on February 18,1799, did a notable and, to the Hamiltonians, a shocking thing. Without consulting his cabinet or anyone else, without a warning to anybody, he nominated William Vans Murray, minister to Holland, as commissioner to negotiate a new peace with France. Even so, when Adams arrived in Philadelphia toward the end of November, 1798, he was met by a cabinet in a mood for war. Thomas Boylston Adams now arrived home from Europe with direct copies of the letter for his father, reinforcing Murray's assurances that Talleyrand had changed his mind. The panic-stricken, power-mad party of the high Federalists was not the party of Adams, if, indeed, Adams could be called a party man at all. He who had always cherished his independence, who had made a lifelong study of government, whose chief credo was balance of rivalries, could not easily become a man of party.
