John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  And now Adams’ summers had a purpose beyond gunning and rambling and writing letters and comparing translations of Homer. He memorized Greek roots every morning at dawn and then read the New Testament in Greek. He read Aristotle, Plato, and Ovid. Above all, he read Cicero on oration—Cicero, whose elegantly balanced measures offered the image not only of perfect oratory but of perfected thought, of measure itself. Rhetoric, in Adams’ day, meant classical rhetoric—the study of the means by which the classic authors deployed the arts of persuasion. Oratory was spoken rhetoric. Here Adams undertook a study of his contemporaries—above all, those in the pulpit. He wondered, for example, why a Reverend Flint, though quite eloquent, seemed to repel his congregants. “His defect,” Adams concluded, “is mere monotony, from two causes. 1. The want of proper inflexions in the voice, and 2. a pronunciation given to almost every syllable the same quantity of time. He must have formed this habit, by too much anxiety to speak distinctly.” He noticed that another preacher, Mr. Richardson, dropped the r after a vowel in longer words, “as Tabenacle, Constenation, Govenor, Propety.”

  Adams often belabored himself for his deficiencies as an orator. He believed that he suffered from an incurable problem: “slowness of comprehension.” It is unlikely that anyone who ever met Adams agreed with this diagnosis, but he could find no other source for his shortcomings. “Sometimes,” he wrote, “from inability to find the words to finish a thought commenced, I begin a sentence with propriety, and end it with nonsense.” But Adams always believed that effort, especially heroically disciplined effort, could be brought to bear on every defect. He hoped that “by continual exertions, application and self-censure part of the ill-effects of these infirmities may be remedied.” Adams’ conscientious study of oratory was designed both to improve his understanding of the art and to remedy his flaws as a public speaker. The plan must have worked, for he would become, over time, one of the most celebrated orators of America’s greatest age of oratory.

  THE INTERVAL OF INTERNATIONAL PEACE THAT COINCIDED WITH Thomas Jefferson’s first term began to fray in 1805, when English seizures of American ships became intolerable. The British navy had responded to a problem for which Americans did not feel responsible—ill-paid and ill-treated British sailors deserting in order to sign up with American captains—by boarding American ships in order to seize suspected British turncoats and “impressing” American sailors while they were at it. The numbers of Americans taken at sea was always tiny compared to the number of Englishmen who deserted for American ships, but Americans were outraged at the high-handedness of British captains who lurked off the American coast and boarded American ships. And as hostilities with France resumed, England began to crack down on American shipping. In 1805 the British Admiralty further outraged American merchants by placing onerous restrictions on the long-standing trade between the French West Indies and Europe. By the end of the year, with the public aroused against a foreign nation as it had not been since the XYZ affair, a naval war with England was looking increasingly possible. In January 1806, James Madison, Jefferson’s secretary of state, published an essay, which he had placed on the seat of every legislator, arguing that Britain had violated American neutrality and international law.

  Adams was not only immune to Federalist Anglophilia but, unlike many of the wealthy merchants now serving in Congress, had no personal economic ties to the Atlantic trade; nor, for that matter, did many of his yeomen constituents. Adams shared the Jefferson administration’s view that the United States must show England that it was not to be trifled with. In February 1806, Senate leaders introduced a series of resolutions condemning the new British ruling on trade, calling on the president to demand the restoration of American goods and the return of sailors, and proposing “nonimportation” of British goods—a one-way embargo. A committee was drawn up to consider the measures, and Adams was then appointed to a three-man subcommittee tasked with finding language that could gain wide acceptance. Adams himself was asked to do the drafting.

  Ever since Adams had staked out his lonely position on the Louisiana Purchase, the Republicans had come to see him as an important asset. When Adams had stopped in Philadelphia the previous November on his way to Washington, his friend Dr. Benjamin Rush had told him that Jefferson and Madison held him in high esteem and were thinking of him for a diplomatic mission. In his usual way, Adams had waved off the suggestion as an improbability, while taking care to convey that he “would not refuse it merely because the nomination should come from” the Republican president. This was not a coded message that he wished to switch parties so much as an expression of Adams’ belief that he must stand outside of any party.

  Adams began to see himself as something other than a principled loner. He had never, he acknowledged to himself, “taken the lead.” But he felt that the nation needed him to do so. It was crucial for Congress to present a united front to the former colonial master, which still harbored ambitions of restoring its dominion. He fretted that he lacked the gift of geniality, which he saw in some of his other colleagues. That wasn’t all. “I feel,” he wrote, “a distressing consciousness of my own weakness of capacity, together with a profound and anxious wish for more powerful means. I lament the want of genius, for I want a mighty Agent for the service of my country.” In fact it wasn’t genius Adams lacked but the gift of leadership, and yet he needed to find a way to lead. “I see that the advancement or declension of my influence will depend on my conduct throughout this affair more than on any other single subject. But the occasion calls for every exertion of my faculties to serve the public.”

  But how could he conciliate men divided by party spirit? Adams was disgusted by the pusillanimity of his fellow Federalists, unwilling to adopt any serious measure to check Britain and fully prepared to excuse British depredations. Even Uriah Tracy, “with his all talents, which are very great, and all his virtues, which are many, cannot divest himself of party feelings,” he wrote. The Federalists were prepared to vote for the measures condemning English trade restrictions and demanding the restoration of American goods, but not for nonimportation, which would wreck the transatlantic trade on which New England’s economy depended.

  Over a weekend, Adams sequestered himself with books of maritime law and produced a new version of the three bills. When the committee convened on Monday, the Federalists objected to Adams’ harsh language; among other things, he had accused the British of committing “wanton” violations. Adams, forgetting all his fine resolutions, rejoined “with warmth” that “wanton” was a perfectly apt characterization of those violations. He could control neither his temper nor his intellectual vanity, as he admitted to himself in his journal that night. He did, however, agree to excise the epithets. Ultimately, the committee, and then the full Senate, adopted all three resolutions, though the Senate accepted President Jefferson’s request that nonimportation be delayed until November, in the hopes that a resolution could be found in the meantime. Such was the public mood that Adams’ Federalist colleagues voted in favor of condemning England and demanding restoration, yet he was the only member of the party to vote for nonimportation. It was a fateful choice that would lead before long to the end of his career as a Federalist politician.

  ADAMS HAD NOW BECOME THE CHIEF FOCUS OF THE FAMILY’S attention and hopes—and its chief source of support. His father had retired to Peacefields, his brother Charles had died, Tom had no income of his own, and Nabby’s husband, William Stephens Smith, had turned out to be a shiftless charmer with a flair for ruinous schemes. In the spring of 1806, Smith, deeply in debt, had been jailed for joining a plot to overthrow Spanish rule in Venezuela. Though soon released, Smith was stripped of the job as surveyor of the Port of New York that John Quincy Adams had arranged for him. Senator Adams was now the sole family breadwinner.

  Adams was formally installed as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric—the title exists to this day—on June 12, 1806. At the time Harvard had only about half a dozen professors, so Adams was addi
ng materially to the stock, and the prestige, of the faculty. The ceremony was terribly solemn, and Adams was sufficiently flattered that he recorded it in his journal in great detail: “From the philosophy chamber”—in Massachusetts Hall—“we went in procession to the meeting-house” beyond the campus. “The president began by an introductory prayer. Next followed an Anthem. Then an Address by the President in Latin. Mr. Ware read the regulations of the Professorship. I read and subscribed the declaration, and delivered it to the Governor as Chairman of the Overseers.” He then gave a speech—“it was well received; but the company was very small.”

  In that speech Adams introduced the main themes that would animate his course of lectures. Adams knew very well that for many of his students “rhetoric” described a set of hurdles and obstacles and obscure regulations designed to limit the torrent of writing and speech to an orderly stream. Adams intended to rescue this ancient art from its modern slumber. In Adams’ richly stocked mind, now fortified with months of study, rhetoric and oratory constituted a point of convergence of the classical, the Christian, and the republican—the three orienting points of his life. Had not God given Aaron to the tongue-tied Moses in order to speak his law to the Israelites? For the ancients, of course, “the talent of public speaking was the key to the highest dignities.” That was no longer true, not because eloquence was a form of decoration with which moderns could dispense, but because moderns, unlike the citizens of Rome and Athens, no longer governed themselves through the kinds of “deliberative assembles” in which the gifted orator could shape the destiny of a nation. Since America was the one nation in which a vestige of those republics survived, it needed eloquent men as no other, lesser nation did. Men of the cloth, of course, still swayed their congregation through oratory; so did men of the bar.

  Adams closed with a peroration meant to demonstrate the power and urgency of the art and science he planned to delineate. “Sons of Harvard!” he cried. “It cannot be necessary to urge upon You the importance of the art, concerning which I am speaking. Is it the purpose of your future life to minister in the temples of Almighty God”? Or “to defend the persons, the property, and the fame of your fellow citizens from the open assaults of violence, and the secret encroachments of fraud?” Or are you one “whose bosom burns with the fires of honorable ambition; who aspires to immortalize his name by the extent and importance of his services to his country”? If so, he concluded to his modest audience, “let him catch from the relics of ancient oratory those unresisted powers, which mould the mind of man to the will of the speaker, and yield the guidance of a nation to the dominion of the voice.”

  In his ensuing lectures, Adams offered crisp definitions of his subject, observing that oratory was the art, and rhetoric, the science, of “speaking well.” Laboriously he cleared the ground of accumulated misconceptions about this art and science—that they were frivolous or pedantic or even, as Socrates had alleged, pernicious to the life of a republic. The opposite was true: “Eloquence is the child of liberty.” Adams traced the history of rhetoric and oratory. He spoke of Demosthenes and of Cicero, the greatest orator of all, who dedicated his powers and his life to Rome’s republic at the moment it was sinking into tyranny. He sketched out a scheme of classification, including the oratory of the assembly, the courtroom, and the pulpit, and described the methods peculiar to each.

  Adams’ lectures were popular. One of his students, Edward Everett, who would become governor of Massachusetts and president of Harvard, later said that visitors—what we would now call auditors—typically filled the classroom. The lectures would provide one of the absorbing preoccupations of Adams’ life for the next three years; even while sitting at his desk in the Senate he would ponder and write and revise while the endless speechifying faded into a dim background hum.

  During this summer Adams was bunking in Cambridge with his old friend Benjamin Waterhouse. Louisa had stayed in Washington once again, this time because she was pregnant, and had long since learned that her only chance to carry a pregnancy to term was to immobilize herself. The bitterness of the previous summer had subsided or perhaps sunk into the deep deposit of unexpressed feelings between them. A lonely Adams wrote Louisa letters full of affection. “I send you les plus tendre baisers de l’Amour,”—the sweetest kisses of love—he wrote in one. In another he sent her a lyrical description of a solar eclipse he had just witnessed. Then, in late June, Louisa wrote with devastating news—the child, a boy, had been stillborn. Calling on the stoicism that was second nature to him, Adams passed through the ensuing day without betraying his feelings and then went back to his room “and there yielded to the weakness, which I had so long struggled to conceal and restrain.” That is, he wept. But he was also overwhelmed with gratitude that his wife had survived the misfortune. Louisa’s letter, he wrote, “affected me deeply by its tenderness, its resignation, and its fortitude.”

  John Quincy and Louisa were often separated during the latter years of Adams’ tenure in Washington, either because she was in Washington during the summer or because she remained in Quincy with the children over the winter when he returned to the capital. (She had gone north with the children after her miscarriage.) Louisa would send news of George’s health, to which her husband would react with alarm, forcing her to reassure him that a cough was not a mortal blow. Once he wrote a letter to little George in French, for he worried that George’s French might not be up to snuff. After Adams left Quincy for Washington in November 1806, and Louisa stayed behind with the children, they wrote to one another every few days. He had promised George a rocking horse if he kept up with his French, and he wrote sternly to say, “No French—no horse.” Little brother John decided that he would win the horse and walked around reciting a little poem in French he had memorized. On New Year’s Day 1807, Adams wrote to Louisa to say, in his formal but deeply heartfelt way, “To offer you, the kindest wishes of the season, my best friend, is almost unnecessary; my happiness, and felicity, in this world, is so interwoven with yours, that I fondly believe, the one cannot be sensible of a joy, or a pain, which is not sincerely participated by the other.”

  It was not easy for Adams to express himself as people ordinarily did. In late 1806, Nancy Hellen’s two-year-old son died, and Louisa wrote to implore her husband to offer Nancy simple words of consolation. He responded defensively. “For your sake and for that of your Sisters I have often wished that I had been that man of elegant and accomplished manners, who can recommend himself to the regard of others, by little attentions.” This transparently condescending gibe stung Louisa, and she responded with a mixture of fondness and mockery that no one else could muster in the face of Adams’ massive solemnity. “I was a little surprized at your appearing so angry at the observations made in my letter,” she wrote back. “I merely meant to insinuate that by now and then addressing her particularly in conversation, and leading her to partake of it, she would feel herself highly flatter’d. This my testy friend was all I required, and you must really think me mad, if you supposed that by little attentions, I could possibly think of Chesterfieldian graces. Any one really possessing them, would laugh at the Idea.”

  In fact, Adams knew that he was in the wrong, even if it was not quite in his nature to admit it. He sat down to write something to Nancy, for this was his way. He later admitted to Louisa that the lines “were instigated by your remarks; and with a view to shew some of that attention which I am sensible is too often neglected by me.” His condolence took the form of a poem of seventy-odd lines:

  Oh! Nancy! be that solace thine:

  Let Hope her healing charm impart;

  And soothe, with melodies divine,

  The Anguish of a Mother’s Heart.

  Oh! think, the darlings of thy love,

  Divested of this earthly clod,

  Amid unnumber’d Saints above,

  Bask in the bosom of their God.

  Adams’ verses were suffused with deep feeling, not with Chesterfieldian graces. He was so ac
customed to holding his feelings in check that he needed the artifice, the high convention, of poetry in order to express emotions that would otherwise have felt unseemly. Louisa wrote back as soon as she had received a copy:

  How shall I express my gratitude, my thanks, my admiration, of your very beautiful lines, my best beloved friend you have more than answer’d my every wish and evidently proved how little trouble it costs you to gain the hearts of all those you wish to please. . . . My tears flow every time I peruse them and my heart is filled with sensations utterly impossible to express, but your heart will understand what I cannot describe.

  Adams’ reticence was extreme even for his time and place, and at times it frustrated the people closest to him. Louisa knew his heart as no one else did and understood that he felt far more than he would permit himself to say—which perhaps explains why she continued to admire him, and perhaps also to love him, despite his harshness and occasional cruelty. He had always written poems to her and about her; a kind of alter-ego Adams peeked through his rhymes. That Adams was as likely to be playful as mournful. He was, in fact, in a poeticizing mood during that winter of 1806–1807. Loneliness may have awakened his muse—as well as his desire. After returning from a party where he had ogled what passed for a scantily clad young woman, he sent Louisa a piece of doggerel “To Miss _____ in Full Un-Dress at a Ball.” After recounting how in the Garden of Eden nakedness had been a sign of innocence but had since become a mark of the jade, he proceeded to his subject: