John Quincy Adams
William Lee Miller
[A profile taken from Arguing About Slavery
by William Lee Miller,
published by Albert A. Knopf, 1996, pp.153-178]
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS was not just another congressman. He had been,
among many other distinctions, president of the United States, the
sixth president, and the second of his family to serve in that
office. But beyond that he was a living link to the nation's
founders.
Washington had no children; Jefferson had no sons who survived;
Madison had no children of his own, although by marrying Dolley he
acquired stepchildren. Hamilton was survived by seven children, none
of whom reflected the brilliance of their father; Franklin's only
son went over to the other side in the Revolution. Were there no
politically active, able, republican direct male descendants of the
great founders of the late eighteenth century? There was John Quincy
Adams.
Very few human beings can have had an upbringing in a nation's
ideal comparable to his. He had spent his boyhood imbibing the
meaning of the American Revolution from his extraordinary parents,
at the center of the action. He had spent his adult career defining
the role of the new American republic on the world scene.
He had been born in July of 1767, not too long after the repeal of
the Stamp Act Surely in his parents' homes in Boston and in
Braintree he heard from his first breath discussions about the
contest with Great Britain, and about the republican ideals of the
United States, even before there was a United States.
His father had set out for Philadelphia in September of 1774, in
John Hancock's coach, with the others in the Massachusetts
delegation, to attend what would come to be called the First
Continental Congress -- the older Adams's first trip outside New
England. Johnny, the oldest son, who stayed home with his mama, was
then seven years old. For the remainder of his youth he would rarely
be with both parents at the same time, because they were kept apart
by the events of the nation's founding. Much of John Quincy's
childhood was spent with his mother, often in some danger, in Boston
and Braintree, surrounded by key events of the American Revolution.
Much of his later youth he would spend with his father, who was
representing the fledgling republic in the capitals of Europe.
Always he would be the object of the intense desire of both his
energetic, intelligent, virtuous, republican parents that he be
educated to the full extent of his considerable talents to carry on
what they had begun.
In one of the first of her famous letters to her husband in
Philadelphia, Abigail Adams wrote: "I have taken a very great
fondness to reading Rollin's ancient History since you left me ...
and I have persuaded Johnny to read me a page or two every day, and
hope he will from his desire to oblige me entertain a fondness for
it." (Her spelling, like everything else about her, had a
vigorous individuality.) So there was the mother and her
seven-year-old son, with Papa out of town, during the British threat
to Boston, curled up on the eighteenth-century equivalent of a sofa,
reading about the heroes of the Roman Republic to whom they would
all soon be endlessly comparing themselves.
John Quincy's father was a major figure at that Continental
Congress for two months in the fall of 1774, and at the Second
Congress that began the following May -- one "theater of
action," as Abigail, writing to her husband, said. But she and
her children were meanwhile living in another theater of action.
Massachusetts was the most radical of colonies; Boston was the most
radical part of Massachusetts. The "Intolerable Acts," as
the American patriots called them, enacted in angry response to the
episode of the tea, had been directed primarily at Boston: the
Boston Port Bill had closed the port, and two other acts had
effectively taken government and the administration of justice out
of local hands. British power occupied the city. "Suffering
Boston" was the focus of patriots' anger in all of the
colonies, and the primary occasion for the coming together of the
Congress. As John Quincy's father traveled by coach to Philadelphia
in the fall of 1774 he reported by letter to John Quincy's mother
the heartwarming support for beleaguered Massachusetts that he
encountered along his route.
In the spring of 1775, at just the moment when John Adams was to
return for what came to be called the Second Continental Congress
there occurred in the family's own neighborhood events that would
electrify the colonies and serve forever after as national myths. A
lifetime later, John Quincy would write a letter; or a draft of a
letter, according to a footnote in The Adams Family
Correspondence, "in a faltering hand to an English Quaker"
that told from the perspective of many years about the happenings
back in the famous month of April 1775.
The year 1775 was the eighth year of my age. Among
the first fruits of the War, was the expulsion of my father's family
from their peaceful abode in Boston, to take refuge in his and my
native town of Braintree. ...For the space of twelve months my
mother with her infant children dwelt, liable every hour of the day
and of the night to be butchered in cold blood, or taken and carried
into Boston as hostages, by any foraging or marauding detachment of
men, like that actually sent forth on the 19th. of April to capture
John Hancock and Samuel Adams on their way to attend the continental
Congress at Philadelphia.
This marauding detachment of British power had been sent forth by
the usually somewhat lethargic but now exasperated general
commanding the forces around Boston, Thomas Gage, under pressure
from London, to try, as John Quincy in his old age recalled and as
every American used to know, to snatch two of the ringleaders of the
seditionists, Sam Adams and John Hancock, and while they were at it
to destroy rebel military supplies they thought were stored in
Concord. Gage was rewarded for his pains by "a hurry of hoofs
in a village street, a shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark";
by a sleepy gathering of local militia lined up on Lexington Green
in the early morning, into which, after a confused beginning, the
British regulars fired their muskets, killing eight; by an aroused
collection of "embattled farmers" who then after Gage's
troops had made a futile visit to Concord met them at the "rude
bridge that arched the flood" and fired "the shot heard
'round the world"; by Middlesex farmers who "gave them
ball for ball, from behind each fence and farmyard wall, chasing the
redcoats down the lane, then crossing the fields to emerge again,
under the trees at the turn of the road, and only pausing to fire
and load"; by a disorder in the ranks of his own frustrated
troops, as they pillaged and looted and attacked civilians on their
way back to Cambridge and Charleston; by a disproportionate loss in
this curious battle or sequence of battles of 273 casualties to only
95 for the Americans; and, eventually, by not one but two of the
best-known poems in the American language, one by Ralph Waldo
Emerson and one by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. All in all, it was
not one of the better days for General Gage, or for the glory of
Britain.
***
JOHN QUINCY had not one but two extraordinary parents, and the
relationship between the two of was extraordinary as well, as the
world has learned from their John Adams and the others among the
greatest American founders -- Jefferson, Madison, Washington,
Hamilton, Franklin -- would each reveal on paper a mind of
distinction, and a worthy devotion to the republican cause, as the
lengthening shelves of the volumes of the papers of each of them
attest. But Adams, uniquely, had a moral companion and intellectual
equal at home, a dearest friend who shared to the full those
characteristics -- intellectual distinction and moral commitment to
republicanism -- with some added sparks of her own. There is no
equivalent to Abigail Adams in the households of the other great
American founders. And fortunately for the country and the world,
she revealed her distinction and her devotion to republican
government, all unself-consciously, in "papers" of her
own. ...
In response to requests from several states, John Adams wrote an
influential document (a letter originally, which when published came
to be titled "Thoughts on Government") that anticipated
much of the form of the state and federal governments of the United
States. His wife, John Quincy's mother, wrote her famous plea on
behalf of "the ladies," at this time when her husband was
discussing the "new modelling" of the states. "I
desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and
favorable to them than your ancestors," she wrote in March of
1776, in a letter that would be widely circulated two hundred years
later in the time of a renewed feminist movement. She was thinking
about the enormous but particular matter of the treatment of women
as a part of a still larger matter: the overall shape of new
governments -- the new societies -- that would be brought into being
in this new world, and the principles upon which they would rest.
Her husband would write, in words that would acquire their own
modest fame, in his letter ("Thoughts on Government") to a
fellow scate maker: "You and I my dear friend, have been sent
into life at a time when the greatest lawgivers of antiquity would
have wished to live. How few of the human race have ever enjoyed an
opportunity of making an election of government for themselves or
their children! When ... had three millions of people full power and
a fair opportunity to form and establish the wisest and happiest
government that human wisdom can contrive?"
The world would forget, but the Adamses would not, that John Adams
then played an important role in the making of the document that, as
fortune would have it, came to be more famous than any of his, or
her, own words or deed. As he had nominated George Washington, so as
a member of the five-man committee to write a Declaration of
Independence he nominated another Virginian, his new young friend
Thomas Jefferson, to draft that document, admitting, among the
reasons Jefferson should do it, that Jefferson wrote better than he
did; another reason was that Jefferson had not been a part of the
fights over independence in the Continental Congress and so had not
made the enemies that Adams had made.
When the draft produced by Jefferson (and amended by the
committee, including Adams) was presented to the Congress on July
2-4, 1776, it was John Quincy's father who defended it on the floor
of Congress for two and a half days. Jefferson was generally
disinclined to speak in such meetings, and would write many years
later that as the principal drafter he "thought it his duty to
be a passive auditor of the opinions of other," some of which
opinions, he said, "made him writhe a little." Congress
went through the document line by line, and Adams, as Jefferson
later gratefully wrote, defended it line by line, "fighting
fearlessly for every word of it."
When Adams sent a copy of the new Declaradon to Abigail, probably
copied in his own hand, she may have mistakenly thought for a time
that he was the drafter. In any case, when interpreting John Quincy
Adams one should remind oneself that when he was nine years old his
mother had, there on the table in their rooms, one of the original
copies of the Declaration of Independence, handwritten by his
father, who had fought for it on the floor of Congress.
It is significant to note, for the purposes of the story to be
told in these pages, that opposition to slavery was one of the
larger topics that John Quincy's mother brought up in her letters,
including her response to the Declaration. On July 14 she wrote that
she regretted that "some of the most Manly Sentiments in the
Declaration are expunged from the printed copy." It may surely
be inferred that among these "Manly Sentiments" the
expunging of which she regretted, the most important was the biggest
cut that the Congress made, the long passage attacking slavery ("cruel
war against human nature"), and blaming it, of course, on King
George, that Jefferson had drafted, and that the committee including
John Adams had retained, and that Adams presumably had defended in
the Continental Congress.
That was not Abigail Adams's first reference to race and slavery.
Very early, in one of her first letters to her husband after he had
gone to Philadelphia, writing from "Boston Garrison" (as
she herself signed her dateline), she reported a rumor that a "conspiracy
of the negroes" had been quietly suppressed -- we know nothing
about this event if it was one, except her report -- and then added
the remark: "I wish most sincerely that there was not a slave
in the province. It always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me --
to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from
those who have as good a right to freedom as we have. You know my
mind on this subject."
Later, in 1776, raising questions about the effect of tile social
system of Virginia on the mind of Massachusetts's Virginia allies,
she linked her apprehensions to the slave system, and her rejection
of that system to elementary Christian ethics:
"I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for
liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have
been accustomed to deprive their fellow-creatures of theirs. Of this
I am certain, that it is not founded upon that generous and
Christian principle of doing to others as we would that others
should do unto us."
***
THE ADAMS FAMILY was intimately linked not only to the making of
the constitutional forms of the new nation and to the expression of
its ideals, but also to the grim realities of the actual fighting in
the Revolution itself. If the American Revolution is a pageant to
us, centuries later, it was not a pageant but a genuine war to many
then, much including the Adamses. As we have seen, they lost already
in 1775, at Bunker Hill, their doctor, Joseph Warren, and John
Quincy and his mother had seen Charleston in ashes (Abigail's father
came from Charleston). They lost Abigail's mother and John's brother
to the debilitating diseases caused in part by the British
occupation, and they suffered in other ways.
But in addition, in June of 1776 John Adams was appointed the head
of another committee -- more important in his mind probably than the
committee to produce the Declaration -- on the conduct of the war.
This committee was given the formidable name Board of War and
Ordnance, and Adams was called its "president." He was
thus the equivalent, while continuing to serve as delegate to
Congress, of what later generations would call secretary of war, and
still later; secretary of defense.
Adams served as "president" of this board, an enormous
chore, from its inception on June 12, 1776, until he left Congress
late in 1777, throughout the early stages of the Revolutionary War.
Its work included all that a war department would do: raising,
fitting, dispatching, and keeping track of the troops and their
officers and all weaponry, and the Care of all prisoners of war, and
the carrying on of all official correspondence about the war. So
John Quincy's father had knowledge not only of his own war
experiences in a Congress being chased about the countryside by
British forces (Philadelphia to Baltimore to Philadelphia to
Yorktown and back once again to Philadelphia) and the experiences of
his wife and children in the hotbed of eastern Massachusetts, and
the experiences of friends and of the common knowledge in those two
centers, but also the special knowledge that came to him in this
official post.
He served in that role, agonizing about the miseries of war, and
excoriating the British, through the defeat of Washington's new
troops on the fine battles on Long Island; the retreat of the
Americans across the Delaware River; Washington's famous crossing
and the victories at Princeton and Trenton; General Burgoyne's
incursion from Canada through the Hudson Valley, which might have
cut off New England from the rest of the colonies and therefore
divided Abigail and the children from John; General Howe's baffling
strategy of heading not up from New York to meet Burgoyne but out
across the farms of Pennsylvania (making patriots along the way,
Adams would say, out of Germans and Quakers through whose property
his troops passed) to march triumphantly into Philadelphia, and to
cause the Congress (including Adams, of course) to, scurry to
Yorktown. All of those events and more can be followed in the
letters of John Quincy's parents, and as a modern reader follows
them that reader might picture the intelligent boy of eight, nine,
ten years old who surely is living through all those events as
intensely as his parents. Abigail -- generally speaking, a fiercer
partisan than her husband -- contributed her own reports of events
and her own condemnations of the British and the Tories.
The formal surrender of Burgoyne on October 17, 1777, celebrated
fiercely in Abigail's letters, satisfied European powers,
particularly France, that the American cause had the possibility of
victory, and brought a new chapter in the lives of the Adams family.
John Adams was chosen by Congress to be one of the three American
ministers to cross the water and negotiate with the French. He came
home to Braintree in late December of 1777 to get ready to sail to
France, and to provide yet another phase in the education of John
Quincy.
***
HIS PARENTS DECIDED THAT, dangerous though it was, nevertheless
Johnny, now eleven years of age, could accompany his father on the
latter's very first trip abroad to perform this diplomatic service
for the embattled, newly independent country -- independent, that
is, if it won. John Adams wrote to his wife as they set out, by
sail, on the hazardous wartime voyage "Johnny sends his duty to
his mama and his love to his sister and brothers. He behaves like a
man."
Johnny had further occasion to "behave like a man" when
their ship, six days out to sea, was chased by a British man-of-war.
John Adams recounted this event, and the storm that followed, twice:
once in the journal he kept, or tried to keep, at the time ("I
was constantly so wett, and every Place and thing was so wett, and
every Table and Chair so wrecked, that it was impossible to touch a
Pen or Paper") and then twenty-eight years later; when he was
presumably dry, in an effort to write his autobiography. For this
part of it he consulted his journal taking over much of it word for
word, so the two accounts are very much alike. And yet the old man's
memory expands on the journal entry and adds some touches. He left
his native shore in a sailing ship (the Boston) and went out onto
the dangerous Atlantic, and his son went with him. It was dangerous
not only because of storms and the frailty of the craft but also
because the nation or colonies that Adams was commissioned to
represent were at war with the mightiest naval power in the world.
John Adams and his papers would have been a considerable prize for
the British.
On February 19, 1778, the Boston sighted three large ships, At
first the crew wanted to sail toward them, thinking they might be
British merchant vessels that could be captured for profit. But the
captain was fairly sure that they were frigates, and he proved
correct: "We were near enough to see they were Frigates and
count their Guns, to the Full Satisfaction of every man on Board. No
man had an Appetite for fighting three Frigates at once in our
feeble state" So they sailed away as fast as the wind allowed,
losing two of the British men-of-war, but not the third, which gave
chase throughout that day and the next.
"When night approached" -- this is from John Adams's
autobiography -- "The Wind died away and We were left rolling
and pitching in a Calm, with our Guns all out ... all drawn up and
every Way prepared for battle." Adams, the primary passenger,
offered his opinion about what they should do. "I said and did
all in my power to encourage the Officers and men to fight them to
the last Extremity. My motives were more urgent than theirs, for it
will easily be believed that it would have been more eligible for me
to be killed on board the Boston or sunk to the bottom in her, than
to be taken prisoner." And if he had been killed on board or
sunk to the bottom or taken prisoner, something like these fates
would, presumably, have been shared by his young son.
***
Safely landed on the opposite shore, John Quincy was placed by his
father in one of the best Parisian schools, took French lessons, met
diplomats; he returned to Europe with his father again in 1779, this
time with his younger brother, and attended good schools again, both
in Paris and in Amsterdam and Leyden. He became proficient in French
and knowledgeable in other languages, and was a good student. A
Massachusetts friend of the Adamses, Francis Dana, chosen by
Congress as the new republic's minister to Russia, then invited
young John Quincy to accompany him to St Petersburg as his
secretary.
What was John Quincy Adams doing when he was fifteen years old? He
was not practicing his jump shot every afternoon in the junior high
school gym, or hanging around the drive-in hamburger joint every
evening; he was not going out to the barn every morning to milk the
cows and do the chores; he was not practicing the hup-hup drill with
the militia on the village common; he was not covering himself with
ink as an apprentice in a print shop; he was not reading college
catalogs, wondering which he wanted to attend, or which he could get
into; he was not attending his first proms. Lives differ. What John
Quincy Adams was doing at age fifteen, in the prime of his
adolescence, was translating diplomatic conversations between the
American minister to Russia, who had no French, and the French
minister to Russia, who had no English, in service of their joint
endeavor (not successful) to obtain support from Empress Catherine
for the newly independent United States.
While he was a teenager in Europe, John Quincy started his
journal. He was an Adams, so he kept a journal. He really kept a
journal. At the end of his life he observed that had he been a great
writer or thinker it would have been a great work. As it stands it
is not insignificant. He kept it up for well over half a century. By
the end of his life it would fill a long, long shelf of volumes.
The conscientious John Quincy was given an angle of vision on the
United States that no one else has ever had. He spent his childhood
imbibing the ideals of the American Revolution -- not secondhand,
superficially, and afterward, but from principal participants,
directly, and at the time those ideals were being shaped and tested.
Then he was taken to the Old World, and had an education in European
politics and diplomacy at the highest level, in Paris, Amsterdam,
Leyden, St Petersburg, The Hague, London, and other places before he
was twenty-one, that very few Americans have had in a lifetime.
DUTY. DUTY? DUTY.
John QUINCY ADAMS'S long life story, after that beginning, was a
story of Duty, multiplied. Again and again, Duty called. Duty was
always calling, and if Duty didn't call, Adams called her, and
reversed the charges. It was a quite specific duty, a duty to
republicanism and to this republic. When after many years he died,
in the Capitol itself, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, for most of their
careers an adversary, said in his eulogy: "Death found him at
the post of duty; and where else could it have found him?"
Because of his father's appointments abroad, John Quincy spent
most of his teen years in Europe, but he returned to the United
Shates, by himself, and by his own decision, in 1785, to attend
Harvard, and was graduated from Harvard in the important Summer of
1787. He received his degree on July 16, which happened to be quite
a memorable day at the Federal Convention down in Philadelphia --
the day the Convention almost fell apart in the dispute between the
small and the large states.
John Quincy had come home from Europe in part for this revealing
reason: to avoid becoming too completely European. To recover his
New England self toward serving his New England destiny. While on
July 16 James Madison in Philadelphia was almost despairing of
forming a lasting union, the twenty-year-old John Quincy was
delivering the senior oration in Cambridge on the subject "The
Importance and Necessity of Public Faith to the Well being of a
Nation."
At the time when the conventions in the states were considering
the ratification of the proposed Constitution, in the following
winter, 1787-88, John Quincy Adams was studying law in Newburyport,
Massachusetts, in the law offices of a family friend and
distinguished lawyer, Theophilus Parsons. But no one with the load
of Duty that John Quincy was carrying would be content being just
another lawyer. He started out in American politics the way his
father had done, by writing political pamphlets; among these was one
defending President George Washington's neutral foreign policy with
respect to France and England. A grateful President Washington
thereupon gave him his first appointment, as minister to the
Netherlands. Later he was to be sent to Portugal but when his father
succeeded Washington as president, the father shifted the son's
appointment from Portugal to Berlin. Both Adams men, father and son,
of course were careful to justify these appointments on merit, not
connections. When Jefferson defeated Adams in the presidential
election of 1800, Adams, before leaving office, recalled his son,
and in the tense atmosphere between the Adams family and Jefferson
following that election, John Quincy declined the appointment the
family's former friend Jefferson would have offered him.
Before too long the Massachusetts Federalists chose him to serve
in the Massachusetts Senate, although they knew that like his father
he marched to the sound of Duty's different drummer, which meant he
was very far from being a party man. Within forty-eight hours of his
taking his seat he justified their fears, outraging his own party
leaders by proposing that the Jeffersonian minority be given seats
in proportional representation in the council or upper house. It was
not long thereafter that those same party leaders chose him for the
United States Senate -- in part just to get him out of the state and
out of their hair.
During his term in the United States Senate, his most important
service to Public Faith rather than party or home constituency was
the support he offered to President Jefferson's side in the matter
of the Louisiana Purchase As a Massachusetts Federalist he was
supposed to oppose the infidel Jefferson and all his works, and
specifically to oppose this New England-diluting addition of an
unimaginably huge new continent of land. But despite his own
personal and family disillusionment with Jefferson, and despite the
strong objection by his party and his region, he supported it. When
many years and many changes later another young U.S. senator from
Massachusetts would write a book called Profiles in Courage,
featuring independent "courageous" decisions by U.S.
senators, the very first chapter would be on John Quincy Adams in
the Senate defying Massachusetts Federalists and supporting
President Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase.
Senator Adams further offended his fellow Federalists toward the
end of his term by supporting a vigorous response to the aggressive
acts on the seas by the belligerents in the Napoleonic Wars --
particularly the British. The British stopped and searched American
ships at sea, and even "impressed" -- forced into service
on their ships -- American sailors. After a particularly outrageous
example of this British conduct, the Chesapeake affair, President
Jefferson proposed an embargo that prohibited American ships from
sailing to foreign ports and foreign ships from taking on cargo in
American ports, an action that essentially shut down foreign trade.
The Federalists of New England were outraged, because they had
commercial interests that would suffer, because they were
pro-British (and anti-French and because they were opposed to
Jefferson. And what did their man the Massachusetts senator do? He
stood by the president both in committee and on the floor.
With Adams's support of Jefferson and of aggressive measures
against the British, the Massachusetts Federalist leaders in 1808-09
had had about all the service to Higher Duty from their senator that
they could take. The Massachusetts legislature, dominated by
Federalists, took the extraordinary step of electing a successor to
Adams nine months before his term was up. Adams thereupon dutifully,
and perhaps haughtily as well, resigned his Senate seat.
Jefferson's successor as president, James Madison, appointed John
Quincy Adams minister to Russia, lifting him out of range of the
revenge of the New England Federalists and setting in motion again
his diplomatic career, which would take him to a string of major
European capitals. He subsequently supported president Madison, even
though Madison came from that other party -- the Adamses never
believed much in parties, and this was a period when the nation's
first set of parties were fading -- and he supported president
Monroe, whom he served as secretary of state. Later, nearer the time
of our story he would on some matters even support President
Jackson, who had defeated him in a bitter contest for reelection and
whom by that time he did not like and who certainly came from what
would prove in the new dispensation to be another party from that of
the Adamses. And he supported subsequent presidents, none of whom he
respected, on union-preserving issues, as well. He did so in part
because he was an early believer that politics stops at the water's
edge and partly because he was an experienced and well-read diplomat
with a knowledge of European politics vastly superior to that of his
colleagues. And, of course, from Duty. He would be a main figure in
the early development of America's understanding of her place in the
world; some would say even yet that he is the nation's greatest
diplomatist.
After he had served, with great distinction, for eight years as
secretary of state under President Monroe, there lay before him the
prospect of the great office his father once had held, and that his
parents had trained him from his earliest years to expect that he
would one day hold. He was by far the most qualified aspirant; no
one could match the positions he had held or the training in world
politics he had undergone. Virginia had held the presidency year
after year after year -- all of the years since the beginning except
for his father's four; surely it was time for Massachusetts (and the
North) again. Nevertheless, unfortunately, the office did not come
begging to his door, eagerly seeking him. There was a spate of
candidates. So he had to make some choices. What was Duty's message
now?
THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1824 was unique in our history. In
the aftermath of president Monroe's "Era of Good Feeling,"
there were, effectively, no political parties; the contest for the
presidency was highly personal and somewhat sectional, with no
sharply defined issues. When the states had finished selecting their
presidential electors late in 1824, the electoral votes were spread
across several candidates, with none having a majority. Secretary of
State John Quincy Adams was not first but second. He got all of the
electoral votes of New England and a large majority of those from
New York, which were split, but in the South, the border states, and
the West, he received only a very light sprinkling (one of three
from Delaware, two of five from Louisiana, three of eleven from
Maryland, one of three from Illinois, none from any other state).
General Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, by
contrast, did well in all the states to the West and South, and in
Pennsylvania and New Jersey as well, and had the largest number of
electoral votes. But not a majority, as the Constitution requires.
The candidate of much of the deep South was a man named William
Crawford, the secretary of the treasury, whose constant maneuvering
for advantage in the coming presidential contest had provoked Adams
to many disgusted outbursts in his journal. Three of the original
candidates sat together in President Monroe's cabinet: Crawford;
Adams; and John C. Calhoun, the secretary of war, who settled in the
end for the vice-presidency, in the separated balloting for that
office. In addition, "Prince Hal" the able and popular
rogue Henry Clay, then Speaker of the House, made one of his many
attempts at the presidency.
When the tallies had rolled in from all the states the electoral
vote was Jackson 99, Adams 84, Crawford 41, Clay 37. Because no one
had a majority, the election was, as the Constitution provides, "thrown
into the House," where the vote is to be taken among the top
three candidates. Clay, who finished fourth, was thus eliminated,
and the votes that would have gone to him were available for
redistribution. The Constitution also specifies -- a very important
provision, cleverly inserted in 1787 by the small states led by
Roger Sherman of Connecticut -- that the voting in the House shall
be by states; thus Delaware and the new states of Mississippi,
Missouri, and Illinois, with only one congressman apiece, had a vote
equal to that of New York, with its thirty-four, and Pennsylvania
with its
********
John Quincy's destiny was fulfilled. Or was it? Life, or history,
or duty, or perhaps human ambition, always adds to any
accomplishment something more, not yet achieved. One would want not
only to be president, but also a president who served the "Well
being of a Nation" with outstanding accomplishment. Did Adams
do that?
He presented in his messages to Congress, particularly tile first
one, which became a rather notable state paper, an unusually
ambitious "National" program (he capitalized the N in that
way) for which a reader 170 years later might be surprised to have,
except for the endorsement of the protective tariff, a certain
amount of belated enthusiasm. Adams recommended a National program
of "internal improvement" (a key term, and a better one
than "infrastructure"), which meant roads and canals and
bridges, but more than that; a National university; government
support for science and for learning as well as for commerce and
industry (Adams would later be the key figure in realizing the
possibilities of the bequest that became the Smithsonian
Institution); a particular personal goal of Adams, a national
observatory; federally supported exploration of the West; a uniform
standard of weights and measures (Adams as secretary of state had
written an important paper on this matter); a patent law to
encourage invention; a naval academy; and the use of the great
bounty of the public lands to help, along with the tariff, to
support these undertakings. In sum, Adams had a vision of a
qualitatively "improved" nation -- "improvement"
was a theme -- using the federal government as the "National"
instrument.
The attack on this ambitious program was severe, and often had a
Southern accent. The "strict construction" of the
Constitution was the argument: Adams was said to have proposed a
raft of federal actions for which the Constitution provided no
authority. He got very little passed. The midterm congressional
elections of 1826 returned a heavy majority of Adams's opponents,
creating American politics' first experience of "gridlock."
The deep South strict constructionists who had supported Crawford
were joining the Jackson forces in opposing Adams, and the
construction of a new political party was under way.
Adams did not do much to help his program along. That was a
different time, with different expectations. It was not yet expected
that the president would be a legislative leader, sending up to "the
hill" truckloads of "administration" proposals which
he would then twist congressional arms to get passed. Adams, in
particular, with his antiparty outlook, was not going to do that. He
refused, as president, to remove from office officials who had
opposed his candidacy for president, or to appoint those who had
supported him -- admirable, perhaps, by some antique standard, but
the despair of real politicians like his chief cabinet member
Secretary of State Henry Clay. And made anachronistic on his defeat
by the Jacksonian spoils system.
Hanging over Adams's other limitations and difficulties as
president there was the charge that he and Clay had entered into a "corrupt
bargain." That charge did not die down or fade away. Supporters
of Jackson had said there would be a fierce opposition, especially
in the West and South, if Adams inveigled the presidency away from
their hero, and they proved to be right. In the presidential
election of 1828 they had their revenge. Two Southern slaveholders
-- Jackson and, again, Calhoun -- defeated the two nonslaveholding
Northerners -- Adams and his Pennsylvania friend Richard Rush -- by
178 electoral votes to 83. As Adams had followed his father into the
presidential office, so he followed him also in staying there only
one term.
Three points about the Adams presidency bear on the story in these
pages. First, the latent issue of slavery ran silently -- usually
silently -- underneath almost everything about it. It is very
important that Adams himself was, from a slaveholder's perspective,
not sound on that question; he was only the second president in
American history not to be personally a slaveholder, the other one
being his father. The "National" program that he proposed
would have enlarged federal power in a way that might one day
threaten slavery. The "strict construction" of the
Constitution and states' rights that his opponents insisted upon
were, in addition to what ever other foundations in sentiment and
philosophy they had, barriers of protection against interference
with slavery. Both sides felt that his energetic program of
federally aided "improvement," commercial, intellectual
industrial, scientific, moral, implied a culture at odds with the
culture of a slave society (which Adams and his supporters did not
believe to be "the highest toned, the purest, best organization
of society that has ever existed on the face of the earth").
President Adams's policy toward the Creek nation in Georgia, and
other Indians, more nearly just than that of his successor (which
was brutal in the extreme), implied a dangerous touch of humanity
that might apply to blacks as well. And when, early in his
presidential term, he proposed sending U.S. delegates to a Panama
conference of newly independent Latin American republics, a
conference that might very well discuss such forbidden topics as
slavery and the slave trade, and -- worst -- relations with the
newly independent black nation of "Hayti," Southern
leaders exploded.
His defeat in 1828 had a sharp regional cast.
... Richards wrote in summary: "... the election returns
clearly indicated that Jackson was far more popular in
'aristocratic' Virginia than he was in 'democratic' Vermont and that
he ran much better in the slave states of the South than the free
states of the North."
Which leads to the second point: the historical placement of his
presidency accidentally cast Adams as an opponent of "democracy"
in a way that is overdone. The election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 by
new men from the West and South, and by a new alliance of Southern
planters with Northern common folk, is a convenient point to make
one of the pivots of American history, and "Jacksonian" is
a convenient modifier for the broader, more popular democracy
developing in the period. Adams was twice the opponent of Andrew
Jackson, so Adams must be placed on the other side as the symbol of
an opposition that, of course, is supposed to be defeated, ...
But isn't this contrast much too sharply drawn! Is there not some
element of historical accident, not only on Adams's side but
Jackson's as well! Some new developments -- the ending of property
requirements for voting and the broadening of the suffrage -- took
place to an extent before, and independent of, Jackson's
administration, and others -- the "reform," including the
public school movement -- came at least as much from Adams's
constituency as from Jackson's. Adams, like his father, did have a
complex view of the ingredients of republican government that did
not reduce it simply to popular majorities. But was he therefore so
much less in tune with the norms for American democracy, which is
institutionally complex, after all, than Jackson? At least the
contrast between them should not be made as sweeping as has been
done.
.... WHEN ADAMS LEFT THE President's House in 1829 he had already
served in about as many high public offices as any other person
before or since. He had a resume that no American has ever been able
to match. He had not only been president of the United States; he
had also been secretary of state, a Massachusetts senator, a United
States senator, ambassador to Great Britain, and minister to the
courts of Russia, Prussia, Holland, Sweden, Portugal and France, and
he had negotiated the Treaty of Ghent after the War of 1812. He was
named (by President Madison), and confirmed, as a justice of the
United States Supreme Court, but he declined the position. He had
been appointed to high office by every one of the presidents,
starting with George Washington, until he himself was elected
president -- every one, that is, except one, and Jefferson would
have appointed him if the Adamses had been in a mood to accept. He
served in more of his nation's highest positions than any other
American has ever done, more even than Jefferson if you count it
right, and more than any other American is ever likely to do. He had
also been the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard, and
the author of important pamphlets on public issues in the earliest
days of the republic. He was the architect, as secretary of state,
of the Monroe Doctrine, and a major shaper of the world role of the
new United States.
After he had served in all of those positions, and done all those
deeds, and been president of the United States, he might have been
expected to subside into retirement All of his predecessors -- four
Virginians and his own father -- on leaving the president's office
had retired to their big (or medium-sized) houses to be sages and
exemplars outside and above the battle, with at most occasional
forays into current affairs. But John Quincy Adams, at age
sixty-three (much older then than now), battered by the fierce
attacks of his presidential years apparently swept aside by the
currents of the new politics represented by Andrew Jackson.
apparently a rejected relic of a departed past, on being offered a
chance to go back into current politics at a lowly level --
accepted!
***
In a post-presidential role unique in American history,
ex-president John Quincy Adams ran for and was elected to Congress,
in fitting symbolism, from the Plymouth district in Massachusetts.
He proceeded to serve in the House of Representatives, arguing
energetically all the while, for seventeen years. ...