by James Traub
John Quincy Adams had never stopped enjoying Jefferson’s company. As a young man in Paris, he had hero-worshipped this tall, elegant, impossibly erudite and clever gentleman, who had in turn doted on him like a favored nephew. Jefferson had the charm of the not-Adams, for he was self-indulgent and pleasure-loving and at times irresponsible; he couldn’t seem to recall his own transgressions, but neither did he hold a grudge, which the Adams men could do for decades on end. Both John and Abigail Adams felt betrayed by Jefferson; the lively correspondence among them had ceased once Jefferson became president. All attempts at brokering a rapprochement had failed.
Senator Adams shared his parents’ view of Jefferson’s perfidy; still, Thomas Jefferson was the president, and John Quincy was not going to refuse his invitations. And he was still Thomas Jefferson—extravagant, improbable, wonderfully digressive. Adams delighted in his conversation, though now he had enough perspective to mock his excesses as well. “Mr. Jefferson tells large stories,” he wrote after his first dinner. “You can never be an hour in this man’s company without something of the marvellous.” He returned from another evening to write, “Speaking of the cold he said he had seen Fahrenheit’s thermometer in Paris, at 20 degrees below 0, and that, not for a single day, but that for six weeks together it stood thereabouts. Never once in the whole time, said he, so high as 0, ‘which is fifty degrees below the freezing point.’ He knows better than all this; but he loves to excite wonder.”
You never knew what you would hear at a White House dinner; but you would never be bored, at least if you had a range of interests like Adams’. One night the president talked about wine, one of his great obsessions, and then about Epicureanism. “The President said that the Epicurean philosophy came nearest to the truth, in his opinion, of any of the antient systems of philosophy. But that it had been misunderstood and misrepresented.” Adams himself, of course, was more Stoic than Epicurean. Senator Samuel Mitchell of New York spoke at great length. “Dr. Mitchill’s conversation was very various, of chemistry, of Geography, and of natural philosophy, of oils, grasses, beasts, birds, petrifactions and incrustations, Pike and Humboldt, Lewis and Barlow; and a long train of et cetera.” Jefferson turned the conversation to agriculture, saying that Madison knew more of the subject “than any other man of science.” All in all, said Adams, it had been a delightful evening.
Adams was also one of the very few men in the Senate who could not reliably be counted to vote with one party or the other. Almost alone among the Federalists, he did not despise the Republicans. Throughout New England, the last, shrinking redoubt of Federalism, Jefferson was viewed as a monster, a bogeyman to frighten children. The clergy denounced him as a licentious atheist, the Anglophiles as a slave to France, the chauvinists of Massachusetts and Connecticut as a Southern loyalist prepared to divide the nation in half. (The fact that Jefferson was a slave owner barely entered into the picture.) Theophilus Parsons Jr., the son of Adams’ gifted law tutor, recalled that he never saw a Jeffersonian, “to know him,” until he was ten, and then was shocked to find one at the family dinner table, speaking just like a respectable citizen.
The firebrands of the Essex Junto spoke of republicanism the way fervent Cold Warriors would speak of Communism in the depths of the 1950s. In an 1801 oration, Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale and one of America’s leading men of letters, said, “The great object of Jacobinism . . . is to destroy every trace of civilization in the world, and to force mankind back into the savage state. . . . The ties of marriage with all its felicities are severed and destroyed; our wives and daughters are thrown into the stews; and children are cast out into the world from the breast and forgotten.” Timothy Pickering, who bunked at a Federalist-only boarding house, insisted that Jefferson was prepared to abrogate the Constitution and declare himself president for life, like Napoleon crowning himself emperor.
The Federalists had dwindled to a mere remnant in a few short years and could count on only eight of the thirty-two votes in the Senate. They had begun as America’s national party—the party that saw the Constitution as the defining document of a federal state rather than a mere “confederation” of autonomous states—and had over time become the narrow domain of an old elite of New England and Mid-Atlantic merchants. The Federalists were, increasingly, a party of nostalgia; their dominant mood was cantankerous opposition, whether to John Adams or Thomas Jefferson. And in the fall of 1803, just as John Quincy Adams was arriving in Washington, the Federalist ire at Jefferson was kindled into flame by the astonishing windfall known as the Louisiana Purchase.
Jefferson’s acquisition of the Louisiana Territory was a lucky break of cosmic proportions. Napoleon had regained Louisiana from Spain through the secret Treaty of Ildefonso in 1800. He planned to land troops at New Orleans and move up the Mississippi, gaining control over the Gulf of Mexico and pushing America’s border back to the east, perhaps as far as the Alleghenies. This was precisely the threat Adams and others had warned about during the quasi-war. But Napoleon’s ambitions for the New World collapsed when a forty-thousand-strong army he sent to quell the slave revolt of Toussaint L’Ouverture in its West Indian colony of Santo Domingo, soon to be known as Haiti, was all but wiped out by yellow fever and then finished off by the insurgents.
While the battle for Santo Domingo was still raging, Jefferson had sent James Monroe to Europe in the hopes of purchasing West Florida from Spain and New Orleans from France. By the time Monroe arrived, Napoleon had abandoned the entire scheme of conquest and, in one of his lightning-fast shifts, had determined to sell the entire territory to the Americans in order to replenish his coffers and turn his armies toward Austria, a far more familiar foe. After much frantic dickering, the United States bought 828,000 square miles of territory, effectively doubling its size, for $15 million, or 3 cents an acre. At that moment, America began to become the continental nation Jefferson, Adams, and, indeed, most of the Founding Fathers had always imagined it would be—though only after a far greater lapse of time. For the previous decade, American foreign policy had focused on preventing European rivalries from spilling over to the United States. Now foreign policy would also become a matter of incorporating territory to the west and south, sometimes violently, and dealing with the consequences of new land and new people.
The Republicans saw the Louisiana Purchase as a colossal political triumph; slaveholding states hoped to legalize slavery in the new states that would join the Union, thus decisively tipping the balance of power in their favor. The Federalists saw it as a catastrophe. The union they had joined had consisted of thirteen states, most of them coastal and mercantile. Now the country was expanding to include vast inland territory, which would not share their interests or outlook. The Boston nobs viewed the West with undisguised horror. “Should this precious treaty go into operation,” cried the celebrated lawyer Fisher Ames, “I doubt not thick-skinned beasts will crowd Congress Hall,” not to mention “Buffaloes from the head of the Missouri and Alligators from the Red River.”
The Federalists grounded their opposition to the Louisiana Purchase on the Constitution, which had, they pointed out, no provision for the incorporation and government of new territories. Indeed, some of them claimed that the Constitution applied only to the territory existing at the time of its adoption and that the founders did not foresee any further expansion of the nation. The United States could have colonies but could not, as the treaty foresaw it would, absorb foreign lands into its own territory with the ultimate goal of incorporating them as states. The Federalists chose to overlook the fact that with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 the United States had claimed a vast tract of territory from Great Britain—and then admitted the territorial governments as American states.
Adams agreed with neither side. On November 9, barely a week after he had reached Washington, he made his position clear in the Senate: “I am in favor of the treaty,” he said, “although it is made in direct violation of the Constitution.” Adams favored the purchase bec
ause he believed that it was America’s destiny to expand across the continent and surpass even the greatest nations of Europe. Though he accepted the Federalist claim that the Constitution did not foresee the assimilation of new territory, he felt the problem could be circumvented.
But Adams foresaw an entirely different dilemma, and in this he was remarkably foresighted. The legislation putting the treaty into effect would establish the equivalent of a colonial government in the new territory, in which federal officials and judges would govern the acquired peoples prior to statehood. Some Republicans explicitly accepted the prospect of colonial rule, but Adams insisted that it would be monstrous for the United States to impose taxation without representation, as the British had done to them. He suggested that the Senate appoint a committee to amend the Constitution so that it would conform to the terms of the treaty. The idea went nowhere. Then he proposed a resolution explicitly stating that the Senate lacked the power to impose taxes on the people of Louisiana and, still later, a constitutional amendment that would “extend to the said inhabitants all the rights, privileges and immunities which are enjoyed by native citizens of the United States under the Constitution.” The efforts were quixotic.
Adams’ views seemed perverse to his highly partisan colleagues. He favored the Louisiana Purchase but found that it violated the Constitution; he deplored slavery but would not vote to prohibit it there because “as connected with Commerse it has important uses,” and in any case Congress had no right to legislate for the territory without its consent. He may have made his position more complicated than he needed to, and yet he approached the Louisiana Purchase as a matter of principle rather than politics. He wrote to Tom that he was shocked at his colleagues’ complete indifference to the welfare of the people whose territory they had just annexed. The final bill authorizing the Louisiana Purchase came up for vote February 18. Adams was alone in arguing against it. “All power in a republican government is derived from the people,” he reminded his colleagues, some of whom may have felt that they needed no reminding. “The people of that country have given no power or authority for us to legislate for them. The people of the United States could give us none, because they had none themselves. The treaty has given us none, for they were not parties to it—it was made without their knowledge.” The legislation passed easily.
History would ultimately judge Adams wrong on the Constitution, for America would continue to annex adjacent territory, but right on the treatment of the people thus incorporated. A century later, Secretary of State Elihu Root would conclude that the United States had an obligation to extend to the people of the Philippines, which it had annexed as a colony, the fundamental rights contained in the Constitution. A commission appointed by President William McKinley argued that “it will be safe and desirable . . . to extend to the Filipinos larger liberties of self-government than Jefferson approved of for the inhabitants of Louisiana.”
Within months of arriving in the US Senate, Adams had become its most iconoclastic member. He would not barter votes or join coalitions or make small sacrifices of principle in order to win larger victories—that is, he would not legislate. He sometimes carried principle to the point of eccentricity. Though the “Barbary pirates” were seizing American ships and imprisoning American sailors in North Africa, he registered the sole opposing vote on a resolution to declare war on Morocco, on the grounds that it was too precipitate. Adams began to worry that he was making a fool of himself. He spent a long night in painful self-examination. “Of the errors, impudences, and follies which reflection discovers in my own conduct,” he wrote, “I do not correct myself by the discovery. Pride, and self-conceit and presumption lie so deep in my natural character that when their deformity betrays them, they run through all the changes of Proteus, to disguise themselves to my own heart.”
Adams had good reason to worry; even his friends and party allies found him unreasonable. William Plumer, a senator from New Hampshire who often voted with Adams and considered him a good friend, wrote in his notes on Senate proceedings, “He is a man of much information—but too formal—his manners are too stiff & unyielding—he is too tenacious of his opinions.” For all of his self-doubt, Adams felt that his faith in the Constitution, and in principles of justice and the law, demanded that he pursue his course, no matter how futile. The Federalists who had sent Adams to Washington began to regret the choice. “Curse on the stripling, how he apes his sire,” wrote Theodore Lyman Jr., an old Bostonian, to Thomas Pickering.
At the same time, Adams was perfectly prepared to join the Federalist minority when he felt that the Republican majority was seeking to aggrandize itself. Republican radicals in the House initiated a series of impeachment trials against Federalist judges, which Adams viewed as a transparent attempt to abridge the independence of the judiciary and purge the government of Federalist officeholders. Their first target was John Pickering, a federal district judge in New Hampshire and an alcoholic who had earlier been judged insane. Adams agreed that he was unfit for the bench but was outraged that the supreme engine of impeachment proceedings, which had never before been used against a judge, would be turned on one plainly innocent of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The real issue, he believed, was the constitutional balance of powers, and he raged—in his journal more than on the floor—at the Republicans’ unwillingness to hear testimony from the accused, at the collusion of House and Senate Republicans, at the nonchalance with which the charges against Pickering had been framed. Was it enough for Pickering to be found “guilty” of the acts alleged, no matter how trivial? If so, as he wrote in his journal, “insanity, sickness, any trivial error of conduct in a judge, must be construed into misdemenours, punishable by impeachment.” Once again, Adams was plainly in the right: the impeachment process was wholly untried, and it would soon be rectified along lines he suggested. But he was, again, far ahead of his time. On March 17, 1804, Pickering was found guilty on a party-line vote, 21 to 7.
ON APRIL 2, THE FIVE-MONTH LEGISLATIVE TERM HAVING ENDED, Adams went home. And he went home alone. This was the product of the kind of misunderstanding that he and Louisa often seemed to have. Adams had concluded that he could not afford to maintain two households and suggested that Louisa and the children spend the year at Quincy. Very few congressmen, after all, had brought their families to Washington. Louisa apparently surprised him by saying that, in that case, she would stay in Washington with her own family. Adams had not considered that Louisa might not look forward to a long winter under the same small roof as Abigail. He wrote her to point out that keeping her and the children in Washington would be more costly than keeping them in Quincy—though of course he accepted her choice. Louisa could not let this pass. She wrote back, “My life ever has been and ever must remain a life of painful obligation. Cease then to talk of expence on my account.” Send me the money for the trip, she said, and I will come, so long as I can bring one of my sisters with me. Adams didn’t take her up on the suggestion.
Adams returned to his own family, which now included Tom, who had moved back home from Philadelphia after conclusively proving to himself that he was unfit for the law. He edited the Portfolio, a high-minded Federalist publication full of literary criticism, essays, and translations, some of them, like the Silesian letters, from his brother’s pen. John Quincy planted one hundred fruit trees, tramped across the property with his father, and went “gunning” for birds with Tom. But Adams had no gift for relaxation, even on his summer vacation. He set himself tasks: in order to make him a more effective representative of the people of Massachusetts, he reviewed the complete chronological annals of the laws of the United States. He compared Pope and Cowper’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey to one another and to the Greek original, scrutinizing the notes and studying maps for geographical accuracy.
Adams had an extremely fine feel for poetry and a gift for literary exegesis. After he had finally finished with Homer, he wrote, “One remark I made in comparing the Translations wit
h the original is that Pope in his departures from it almost always generalizes ideas which there are special. It gives a moral and sententious turn to the work, which does not belong to it. I have noted many such passages.” This is a remarkably self-aware observation from a man who himself lived very much with Pope’s Augustan ether, which sought to reconstitute the messy world in coherent moral terms. Adams also made the striking observation that Homer had his heroes participate in Olympic games only days after a major battle. Didn’t any of them, he wondered, need time to recover from their wounds?
At times Adams wrote to Louisa in a romantic spirit; he sent her a quatrain from one of John Donne’s love sonnets. When more time than usual passed between letters, he wrote that he was terrified that she had fallen ill—as she, by coincidence, had just written to him. The misunderstandings that separated John Quincy and Louisa would never cease to cause pain and confusion and even anger, and yet they were deeply, irrevocably bound to one another.
In early August, Adams heard the shocking news that Mary Frazier had died of consumption at the age of thirty, leaving an infant behind. When Louisa sent him a consolatory note, he wrote back stiffly to say that he “lamented her loss as I should have done that of any other young woman the wife of my friend.” Adams sincerely believed that his moral sensibilities trumped even his most ardent desires. Perhaps, though, he was more troubled in the depths of his soul than he let on. Many years later, as an old man of seventy-one, he took a walk in the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge on a Sunday in November. There, by chance, he saw a headstone with the name “Maria Osborne Sargent”—the daughter of Daniel Sargent and Mary Frazier. She had died young, as her mother had. And his mind immediately reeled back to Mary—“to me the most beautiful and the most beloved of her sex.” The ancient, long-suppressed feelings welled up inside him, and this old man, long married, cried out in the privacy of his journal, “Dearly!—how dearly did the sacrifice of her cost me, voluntary as it was. . . . Four years of exquisite wretchedness followed this separation.” And then, finally, he had formed “other and more propitious ties.”