by James Traub
CHAPTER 11
The Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory
(1804–1807)
DEMOGRAPHICALLY AND GEOGRAPHICALLY, THE AMERICA OF 1800 was very much the America of the Revolution: a coastal nation, hemmed in by “western” mountain ranges like the Alleghenies, with only a few thousand miles of rutted post road linking cities and states to one another. As the historian Henry Adams, John Quincy’s grandson, wrote, “The same bad roads and difficult rivers, connecting the same small towns, stretched into the same forests in 1800 as when the armies of Braddock and Amherst”—in the time of the French and Indian War—“pierced the northern and western wilderness, except that those roads extended a few miles farther from the seacoast.”
But America was changing economically, politically, and psychologically. The West had already begun to exert its magnetic force; visitors from Europe were astonished at the geographic mobility of Americans, picking up from the cities and moving into the hinterland. A new class of entrepreneurs harnessed steam power and water power, while merchants grew rich trading with the new colonies on the West Coast. And new habits made new men, who valued risk and self-reliance. Americans were becoming less European and more American.
Thomas Jefferson was the tribune of this emerging nation. Jefferson once wrote, “The revolution of 1800”—the change, that is, brought about by his election—“was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as the revolution of 1776 was in its form.” Many historians accept that this was so. Although we tend to think that it was Andrew Jackson who ushered in the democratic transformation of America, the process really began with the election of Jefferson. As much an aristocrat in his own way as John Adams, Jefferson nevertheless put an end to rule by a New England elite that had deeply identified with England and with aristocratic principles of government. Jefferson’s simple clothing and offhand manner in the White House, so different from his predecessor’s more pompous style, offered a new image of a defiantly homespun America. He ruled in the name of the ordinary American, sweeping the Federalists out of government and replacing them with citizens of humbler background. His election ushered in a new era of citizen participation in government that ordinary Americans, and especially the new Americans of the West, found deeply appealing.
By securing the unfathomably large territory of Louisiana, Jefferson cemented the support he already enjoyed in the South and the West and indeed across the country. In the election of 1804, Jefferson and the Republicans won a smashing victory, taking 162 of 176 electoral votes, 27 of 34 Senate seats, 116 of 141 House seats. Jefferson won Massachusetts and Connecticut, the opposition heartland. The Federalist Party was finished as a national rival to the Republicans. Indeed, it had been finished for some while. By the time of the 1802 by-election, Henry Adams remarked, “Federalism was already an old-fashioned thing; a subject of ridicule to people who had no faith in forms; a halfway house between the European past and the American future.”
The New England old guard viewed themselves as the repository of American values and virtues; they could not accept the unfamiliar America they saw taking shape before them. In a kind of decorous dress rehearsal for the bitter arguments over territorial expansion that would soon divide the country and help usher in the Civil War, senior Federalists began calling for a New England secession. Timothy Pickering declared, “The people of the East can not reconcile their habits, views and interests with those of the South and the West. The latter are beginning to rule with a rod of iron.” Fisher Ames said flatly, “Our country is too big for union.” Even William Plumer, a moderate who shared Adams’ views of the Louisiana Purchase, favored disunion. “We feel that we are Virginia slaves now,” he wrote to a correspondent, “and that we are to be delivered over to Kentucky and the other Western states, when our Virginia masters are tired of us.”
John Quincy Adams felt as primordially attached to New England as any of these men despite his long years in Europe. He shared their fear of eclipse. In the late summer and early fall of 1804, with the national election approaching, he wrote a series of broadsides meant to discredit the “Virginia faction,” as he called it, of the Massachusetts state legislature, as well as the national Republican Party. Writing under the pen name Publius Valerius, he warned of “the singular phenomenon” of a party “who build all their hopes of success upon the basis of unlimited devotion to a system, the first feature of which is annihilation of New England’s weight and influence in the Union.” Among other proofs of this sulfurous claim Adams cited was the opposition by Massachusetts Republicans to an effort, which Adams himself had strongly supported, to put an end to the so-called three-fifths compromise enshrined in the Constitution, which had inflated the political power of the slave-owning states by counting each slave as three-fifths of a citizen for the purpose of apportioning seats in Congress.
Adams also, intriguingly, cited the Louisiana Purchase, which of course he had supported. The new states formed from the territory, he noted, would be “thrown into the scale of southern and western influence.” Adams went on to assert that “in the relative situation of the United States, New England and the maritime states have been constantly declining in power and consequence; they must continue to decline in proportion as the growth of the southern and western parts shall be more rapid than theirs.” But, Adams added, this change, “being founded in nature . . . cannot be resisted”—a recognition that set him apart from Federalist zealots like Pickering. Adams accepted the painful reality that he lived in a contracting sphere. As he would be a man of no party, so he would be a man of no region. He considered regional chauvinism an even greater threat to the union than was partisanship. Adams’ colleagues understood that he was not to be approached on the question of separation, though he was still party to the rumors and the whispered conversations by the Senate fireside.
Adams did not refer to the secession plot either in his journal or in his letters of the time, but in 1828, when he was serving as president, he publicly alleged that plans for secession had been formed in late 1803, “immediately after, and as a consequence of, the acquisition of Louisiana.” The conspirators, Adams said, were led by “a distinguished citizen of Connecticut” and had chosen a “military leader.” The old men who had once hatched this plot angrily denied the claim, and indeed some of the most prominent Federalists had told Pickering that they would never join his plot. But William Plumer publicly admitted that a group of Federalists had planned to “establish a separate government in New England,” perhaps including Pennsylvania as well.
In an open letter to Adams, Plumer wrote that Uriah Tracey, a senator from Connecticut, informed him in early 1804 that Alexander Hamilton had agreed to meet with the secessionists in Boston that fall. The meeting never happened because on July 11, 1804, Aaron Burr killed Hamilton in a duel. There is no reason to believe that Hamilton would have approved a plan for secession. Burr himself was probably the “military leader” of whom Adams was thinking, for Pickering and others had approached him, as well as Hamilton, about joining their ranks. Though then serving as Jefferson’s vice president, Burr, a supreme opportunist and protean figure, knew that he was to be dropped in the 1804 election and was prepared to serve as the cat’s-paw of the secessionists. Hamilton, according to virtually all evidence, was not; one of the provocations for the duel was that Hamilton had denounced Burr as a “Catiline”—a traitor. Burr went on to prove Hamilton right, for in 1805 he embarked on a tour of the West apparently designed to raise an insurrection against the government. He was arrested and tried for treason (and acquitted).
The United States in 1804 still felt improbable. The states had been separate colonies for generations before they had bound themselves together in a federation a quarter of a century earlier. The Constitution had been in force for fifteen years. Travel between north and south was almost unheard of. Thomas Jefferson never stirred more than a few miles north of Washington, nor did John Adams ever venture below it. A citizen of Massachusett
s might feel more at home in England than in Virginia or certainly than in Kentucky. The forces that drove these men apart were strong, and the habit of accepting adverse political outcomes—even of believing in legitimate difference of opinion—was very new. The power of Virginia would only grow over the ensuing years, and New England’s leaders would seriously contemplate separation again in 1810 and yet again in 1814. The doctrine of secession was born not in South Carolina, but in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Adams would resist Northern threats to the union as fiercely as he later would the threat from the South.
ADAMS’ SELF-ASSIGNED ROLE AS MINORITY OF THE MINORITY WAS wearing on him. John and Abigail almost seemed to regret the paces they had put him through as a boy. In late 1804, John wrote from the farm, “Virtuous and studious from your youth, beyond any other Instance I know, I have great confidence in your success in the Service of your Country, however dark your prospects may be at present.” A few months later, John wrote again to try to rally his son’s spirits: “For fifteen years, i.e. from the year 1760 to 1775 I was in the Valley, the dark Valley of Grief, Gloom and disappointment; Unalterably devoted to Principles whose Advocates were for a great portion of that time a Smaller Minority than yours is now.”
I would never seek to compare my tribulations to yours, the ever-dutiful son responded. But, he added, “you had a great consolation—the honor and profit which you never failed to derive from your profession.” That consolation, said the younger Adams, he would never enjoy. His father, in turn, rejoined that John Quincy had all the gifts required to be a great lawyer, if only he cared to use them. “But you are too much disposed to gloom and despondency.” That was so, though hearing it wouldn’t make him otherwise.
The elder Adamses were still adjusting themselves to the difference between the energetic young man who had left Boston in 1794 and the altogether more solemn, even joyless husband, father, and officeholder he had become. Abigail tried to make light of the change she saw in him, though it plainly worried her. She said that she had smiled when she read a letter to his father in which he admitted to a certain “stiffness of temper.” She thought that might be an encouraging sign of self-awareness. In fact, she wrote to him, he had “contracted a reserve and a coldness of address which was not natural to you.”
A few years earlier, Abigail had blamed her son’s solemnity on the cares Louisa had heaped on him; having already exhausted that explanation, she now attributed his manner to the fact that “your having resided abroad during such critical periods as you witnessed both in Holland and England, you were obliged in your public capacity to be constantly upon your guard, that nothing improper escaped you either in words or looks.” She was suggesting that John Quincy had increasingly come to wear his diplomatic mask as his own face—a piercing insight. Or perhaps, she added, he had grown too accustomed to the company of books rather than of men and women. “I am anxious,” she wrote, “that you should have what Lord Chatham calls, Benevolence in trifles”—that he should smile on his friends, that he should not take everything so seriously. “I know it to be in the Heart; to the outward Man only it is wanting.” Yet Adams’ exterior had become so impenetrable that only those closest to him, and not always they, knew what was in his heart.
Abigail was receiving intelligence about her son’s habits in Washington from her friend Elizabeth Susan Quincy, Josiah Quincy’s wife. She was hardly surprised to learn that he was paying too little attention to his health and his appearance. In late 1805 and early 1806, Abigail sent a volley of letters to Washington that were arguably more suitable to a fourteen-year-old boy than a US senator and former minister to Prussia. She warned John Quincy against taking walks on an empty stomach. Soon afterwards, she wrote again to say, “Your dijestion is defective, your food does not nourish you, you do not derive spirits or strength from it. I would recommend to you to eat a hard Bisquit, and 3 figs daily, between meals, Make the experiment, add a Glass of wine, and tell me after one month if you do not feel the benifit of it.” A few months later she had a new complaint: “Now I hope you never appear in Senate with a Beard two days old, or otherways make, what is called a shabby appearence. Seriously I think a mans usefulness depends much upon his personal appearence.” Adams took no more note of this advice than he had of his mother’s suggestion that he show benevolence in trifles. He was a man of settled habits, and he recoiled before almost any counsel that did not originate with himself.
AT THE END OF THE 1805 CONGRESSIONAL SESSION, ADAMS LEFT for Quincy, as he always did; this time, however, Louisa came with him. Perhaps she felt that she had won the battle over residence but had lost the war. Life in Quincy, under the eyes of her mother-in-law, turned out to be very much the mixed blessing Louisa had feared. She and her husband and the two boys now lived on their own in one of the family homes at the foot of Penn’s Hill. There was never a shortage of reminders that Louisa was no Adams. She was mortified to discover that she could not get the hang of milking a cow. She and her sister Kitty, whom she had brought with her, were expected to do the cooking and the household chores, like all Adams women, but tottered around in a state of clumsy confusion. By this time Tom, who had seemed to be on the edge of inveterate bachelorhood, had married Nancy Harrow, a Haverhill girl he had courted for years, and moved in with his parents. Abigail and Nancy understood one another, and got along with one another, as Abigail and Louisa never managed to do.
Louisa and John Quincy could not settle on a system of living that satisfied them both. When they were preparing to return to Washington that fall, Adams announced to his wife that their children would be staying behind—baby John to live with his grandparents, George to stay down the road with the Cranches, his great aunt and uncle. This was the way things had been done in the Adams household, though very much not, of course, in the Johnson household. Louisa was devastated to be deprived of her boys and repented of her decision to leave Washington. She found the situation so intolerable that the following year she gave in altogether, moving up to Quincy and staying there.
Adams himself seemed rather lost in Quincy. On May 29, 1805, he wrote, “I was again quite unwell all this afternoon. I find it yet impossible to reverse the doom of idleness and mental imbecility to which I have been condemned.” And then, a few weeks later, came a bolt of good news that offered the possibility of a different and far less vexatious life: Josiah Quincy called to say that the Harvard Corporation had chosen Adams to serve as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Nicholas Boylston, a relation on his mother’s side, had left a bequest thirty years earlier to establish such a position, but sufficient funds had only accumulated in recent years. The donor’s nephew, Ward Nicholas Boylston, had insisted that his good friend John Quincy Adams should get the post.
A year earlier, Quincy had approached Adams with the news that Harvard was thinking about choosing him to succeed President Willard, who had just died. Other friends with important Harvard connections had urged him to make himself available. Grumbling that he was not formally qualified, he had spurned the offer. But Adams loved Harvard, and he was eager to perform great works of scholarship. Not only had he studied the classic works on the subject, as many educated men had, but he had heard the great masters in Congress, in Parliament, and in the pulpit. He had tried—and failed, he would have said—to form himself into a great orator. The subject mattered deeply to him. Beyond all that, the professorship would give a purpose to his vast but aimless reading.
In early August, Adams sent an unusual letter to Samuel Dexter, chairman of the Committee of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers. Rather than simply accept the offer, Adams pointed out that he already had a job that would keep him away from Cambridge half the year. He proposed that rather than give one lecture a week for forty weeks, he give two per week for twenty weeks. And since, as any professor knows, he would have to do a great deal of preparatory work before teaching a new course, he proposed to give only twenty lectures each of the first two years. Also, he hoped that
students could give their declamations on the same day he taught, so he could accomplish all his work in a single day.
Most remarkably, Adams asked to be excused from a religious test to be required of the holder of the chair. “With the most perfect deference and respect for the legislature of the college,” Adams wrote, “I must question their authority to require my subscription to a creed not recognized by the Constitution or the laws of the state.” Perhaps Adams was thinking of his father, who had chosen not to enroll him in Oxford in order to avoid a formal subscription to the Trinitarian creed. Harvard, on the other hand, wasn’t asking Adams to profess any beliefs he did not in fact hold. He objected on principle to making a formal declaration of his faith, especially on behalf of a position for which religious principles were plainly irrelevant. He concluded the letter by expressing the wish that the Corporation “altogether discard every consideration of personal accommodation to me.” Dexter and his colleagues may have choked on the disingenuousness of this last sentiment.
Harvard tried, within reason, to satisfy Adams’ extraordinary demands. The pledge of religious faith was waived. The Corporation proposed to use a substitute to carry out whatever duties Adams proved unable to satisfy. Adams wrote back at length to explain how such a stipulation would be inconsistent “with the manifest intention of the Boylston foundation itself.” In short, no. Coming from someone else, such relentless pettifogging would have amounted to egotism. In Adams’ case, it is probably best to take his objections at face value. He would not bend on anything he considered a matter of principle, no matter what the possible cost to his own happiness. And with Adams, practically everything was a matter of principle. Harvard capitulated.