less
taste for either the amusements or the dangers thus offered to him; he
preferred to go to bed in good season, to get up often long before
daybreak, and to labor assiduously the livelong day. His favorite
exercise was swimming in the Potomac, where he accomplished feats
which would have been extraordinary for a young and athletic man.

The most important, perplexing, and time-consuming duties then called
for by the condition of public affairs happened to fall within Mr.
Adams's department. Monroe's administration has been christened the
"era of good feeling;" and, so far as political divisions among the
people at large were concerned, this description is correct enough.
There were no great questions of public policy dividing the nation.
There could hardly be said to be two political parties. With the close
of the war the malcontent Federalists had lost the only substantial
principle upon which they had been able vigorously to oppose the
administration, and as a natural consequence the party rapidly shrank
to insignificant proportions, and became of hardly more importance
than were the Jacobites in England after their last hopes had (p. 105)
been quenched by the failure of the Rebellion of '45. The Federalist
faith, like Jacobitism, lingered in a few neighborhoods, and was
maintained by a few old families, who managed to associate it with a
sense of their own pride and dignity; but as an effective opposition
or influential party organization it was effete, and no successor was
rising out of its ruins. In a broad way, therefore, there was
political harmony to a very remarkable degree.

But among individuals there was by no means a prevailing good feeling.
Not held together by the pressure exerted by the antagonism of a
strong hostile force, the prominent men of the Cabinet and in Congress
were busily employed in promoting their own individual interests.
Having no great issues with which to identify themselves, and upon
which they could openly and honorably contend for the approval of the
nation, their only means for securing their respective private ends
lay in secretly overreaching and supplanting each other. Infinite
skill was exerted by each to inveigle his rival into an unpopular
position or a compromising light. By a series of precedents Mr. Adams,
as Secretary of State, appeared most prominent as a candidate for the
succession to the Presidency. But Mr. Crawford, in the Treasury
Department, had been very