John Marshall served as President Adams’s secretary of state for most of Adams’s last year in office. Marshall replaced Timothy Pickering, who had been working more for Federalist Party leader Alexander Hamilton than Adams. Part of the problem was that Adams did not appoint many of his own people to serve in his cabinet. Instead, he kept four people from Washington’s cabinet, including Pickering as secretary of state, Oliver Wolcott as secretary of the treasury, James McHenry as secretary of war, and Charles Lee as attorney general.