Adams, John | The Vice President is summoned to the Senate Chamber to debate the Jay Treaty

Adams, John

Autograph letter signed, as Vice President, responding to a summons

One page, 4to (230 x 200 mm to sight). Autograph letter signed (“John Adams”), to the Secretary of State [Edmund Randolph], Quincy, 16 March 1795; minor browning at edges, old folds, one or two short closed tears. Neatly inlaid, matted and framed with a portrait of Adams. Not examined out of frame. 

Reading in full: 

Dear Sir, 

According to your desire, expressed in your Note of March the 7th, I do myself the Honour to acknowledge the Receipt of it, and will attend my Duty at the Senate Chamber in Philadelphia on the eighth of June next, according to the Summons from the President of the United States, to whom I pray you to present my most affectionate Respects. 

I am, Sir, with greet Esteem, your most obedient and humble Servant, 

John Adams.

The Vice President is summoned to the Senate Chamber to debate the Jay Treaty.

John Jay had signed the Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation with Great Britain in London on 19 November 1794. The signed copy reached Philadelphia in early March 1795, days before Randolph's note of the 7th. President Washington summoned the Senate to convene on 8 June for a special session for the sole purpose of considering the Jay Treaty. 

That session opened the bitterest treaty fight of the early republic. Debate was conducted under an injunction of secrecy. The Senate ratified on 24 June by exactly the two-thirds required (20–10), with the article on West Indian trade struck. When the terms leaked the following month through Benjamin Franklin Bache's Aurora, public reaction was violent, and the Federalist-Republican rupture hardened. Effigies of Jay were burned in several cities, and Hamilton was stoned in New York while defending the treaty.

Randolph had succeeded Jefferson as Secretary of State in January 1794 and was, in March 1795, five months from his own destruction. In late summer, the Royal Navy intercepted dispatches from the French minister Fauchet, which, presented to Washington by his Federalist cabinet on 19 August, appeared to show Randolph soliciting French money in connection with the Whiskey Rebellion. He resigned the same day. For Adams, the 8 June session marked the beginning of his own ascent. He had been calculatingly quiet through two terms as Washington's deputy. Federalist consolidation around the treaty (which Adams supported) was a principal current carrying him to the presidency twenty-one months later.

PROVENANCE

Rt Hon the Third Viscount Astor, the collection largely formed by William Waldorf Astor (1848-1919), First Lord Astor of Hever Castle (Sotheby’s London, 8 April 1968, lot 444)