Econlib

The Library

Other Sites

 Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow TO TIMOTHY PICKERING. - The Works of John Adams, vol. 9 (Letters and State Papers 1799-1811)

Return to Title Page for The Works of John Adams, vol. 9 (Letters and State Papers 1799-1811)

Search this Title:

Also in the Library:

Subject Area: Political Theory
Topic: The American Revolution and Constitution

TO TIMOTHY PICKERING. - John Adams, The Works of John Adams, vol. 9 (Letters and State Papers 1799-1811) [1854]

Edition used:

The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: with a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, by his Grandson Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856). 10 volumes. Vol. 9.

Part of: The Works of John Adams, 10 vols.

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


TO TIMOTHY PICKERING.

Philadelphia, 12 May, 1800.

Sir,—

Divers causes and considerations, essential to the administration of the government, in my judgment, requiring a change in the department of State, you are hereby discharged from any further service as Secretary of State.1

John Adams,
President of the United States.

[1 ]This letter closes the official relations of Mr. Pickering to the President. Construing his duty as a cabinet officer as consistent with a singular latitude in secretly counteracting the policy and betraying the purposes of his chief, he seems at the same time, by his refusal to resign, and his complaints afterwards, to have overlooked the doctrine which he himself laid down less than three years before. In his letter to Mr. Monroe, of the 24th July, 1797, he says, among many other things quite applicable to his own case;—

“Again, the want of confidence, from whatever cause it may arise, is a good reason for changing a diplomatic agent. If he is found on experience to be deficient in judgment, skill, or diligence, or if circumstances inspire a reasonable doubt of the sincerity of his views, he cannot with prudence be continued, for it is essential that there should be full confidence in him.”

Much was said in many of the writings of the time, and Mr. Jefferson alludes to it often in his letters, of the want of system of Mr. Adams’s administration. The cause of much of this difficulty is now clearly to be traced to these cabinet officers, who were never really disposed to coöperate with the chief, but were constantly acting under an opposite influence from without. The accession of Messrs. Marshall and Dexter to the cabinet marks a restoration of system and harmonious action.

Many years after this removal of Mr. Pickering, that gentleman, in undertaking to account for the act, labored to prove the existence of unworthy motives for it in Mr. Adams. And Mr. Gibbs, in his late partisan work, though manifestly betraying his own disbelief of them, has not abstained from recording them. “As charges,” he says, “they are at any rate matter of history.” What sort of history that would be, which is made up of unfounded charges against public men anywhere, and especially in America, it is easy to comprehend. In the present instance, the whole of them are swept away by the letter of Mr. Stoddert, 27th October, 1811, giving many particulars respecting the causes assigned for the removal, and by those of Robert and of Samuel Smith, the parties implicated by Mr. Pickering, 30th November, 1st December, 1811, which are inserted in their places in the tenth volume. Gibbs’s Federal Administrations, vol. ii. p. 353.