John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  Louisa suffered yet another miscarriage in early 1813; she was so gravely ill, and so despondent, that Adams worried for her life. She began to stir as winter finally ebbed. She resumed her diary on April 4, though she wrote that she was torn between the wish to leave Russia and the horror of abandoning the spot where her daughter was buried. That same day she wrote to Abigail. Louisa usually dispensed with commas, but here the lack of punctuation lent her letter a breathlessness that seemed to border on hysteria: “my heart is almost broken my health is gone and my peace of mind is I fear for ever destroy’d.” She could not, she said, bring herself to write to her boys, and she asked her mother-in-law to assure them of her love lest she never see them again. Louisa admitted that she was desperate to leave St. Petersburg, “but Mr. A wont hear of it, and I am condemned to wear out my existence, in this horrid place, without a friend, or a single human being who can participate in my feelings.”

  That summer, the Adams family suffered a terrible tragedy: on August 14, 1813, Nabby died of breast cancer. She died at home, with great dignity and little complaint despite unbearable pain. She had known very little serenity since marrying William Smith but had never complained of him either. Within the family Nabby was regarded as an angel, and her death was far more devastating to Abigail than Charles’ had been. It was, in fact, the worst thing that had ever happened to Abigail, and her letters, even many months later, are shot through with pain. After receiving one of Louisa’s doleful letters, she wrote back to say, “I was grieved to find how deeply you had been wounded.” But, she added, with an unmistakable air of reproof, even though Nabby’s death was a yet greater loss, she still reminded herself of her blessings. And then, having made her point, she offered gentle little sketches of Louisa’s boys: John the fiery one, called “Hotspur” by his friends, and George the quiet scholar who went to his books when school was over. Adamses did not indulge in despair. Creatures of oak, they bent with the years and withered, but they did not break.

  BY THE TIME SECRETARY GALLATIN AND SENATOR BAYARD REACHED St. Petersburg in July 1813, Adams had learned that Lord Liverpool, who had become the British prime minister a year earlier, had rejected the emperor’s offer of mediation. The English had, however, offered to speak directly to the American team. For the Americans, the war was a question of national survival, but for Great Britain it was a distraction from the great contest for Europe provoked by Napoleon. And Napoleon kept rising from the ashes like a demigod. By the fall of 1813 his generals were facing five hundred thousand men. He suffered a series of devastating defeats in Austria, raised yet another army, gained several improbable victories, and finally provoked England into joining the coalition led by Alexander. On March 31, 1814, the allied forces, led by the tsar himself, entered Paris at the old Saint-Martin gate and marched down the rue Royale. The quarter century of European convulsion that had begun with the French Revolution had largely, though not quite, come to an end.

  In January 1814, Bayard and Gallatin left for England in the hopes of pursuing negotiations. Adams, still minister to St. Petersburg, remained behind, though he no longer had anything to do. He wrote his father to say that Napoleon’s demise meant that the British navy would no longer need to impress sailors in order to fight him, thus ending the one remaining outstanding cause for war with America. Since Great Britain would never agree to end the practice, the United States could make peace by remaining silent on impressment. This turned out to be a remarkably prescient observation.

  Adams was at last rescued by events. In late 1813, after American forces had blunted a number of British attacks, Lord Castlereagh, the foreign minister, offered to open negotiations for peace. Madison immediately accepted and nominated Adams, Bayard, and Speaker of the House Henry Clay to serve as the American team. He later added Gallatin and Jonathan Russell, the minister to Sweden. Adams received the news on March 20; he was instructed to join the negotiations in Gothenburg, Sweden. He wrote no more of lassitude. On April 28, the same day he learned that Napoleon had abdicated, Adams boarded a coach headed for Estonia, leaving Louisa and Charles Francis behind. From there he sailed for Sweden.

  When the minister reached Stockholm at the end of May, he learned that the English had switched the venue to Ghent, the capital of Belgium; it looked very much as if they were stalling in the hope of gaining more military victories. Adams felt quite sure that he was wasting his time, but he pushed onward. On June 22 he reached the Hague, a city he had known as a boy of thirteen, a romantically minded young man of seventeen, and a novice diplomat of twenty-seven. Now, not quite forty-seven, balding, and increasingly portly, he felt old to himself—and to most people who met him—but deep, strong feelings still flickered inside him like a fire in an underground mine. Now, in the Hague, they burned through that thick crust he had built over his soul. In his journal he wrote:

  It was here that the social Passion first disclosed itself with all its impetuosity in my breast. It was here, that ten years later, I made my entrance on the political Theatre as a public man. It is not in my command of language to express what I felt on passing through the Yard of the House in the wood, and thence through the town, along the road between the Canal and Ruswick to Delft. It was a confusion of Recollections so various, so melancholy, so delicious, so painful, a mixture so heterogeneous and yet altogether so sweet, that if I had been alone I am sure I should have melted into tears.

  Adams reached Ghent three days later. Bayard and Clay had already arrived; Gallatin was soon to come. Rarely, if ever, has the United States been represented at negotiations by so distinguished a group of men. Gallatin had been born in republican Switzerland to a wealthy and refined Swiss family. In 1780, at age nineteen, he had left Geneva to join the American Revolution. He had been elected to the Pennsylvania state legislature and then the US Senate and House, before Thomas Jefferson had asked him to serve as secretary of the treasury. A financial and administrative wizard, Gallatin had overseen a system of taxation and revenue that had helped Jefferson leave a sizeable surplus behind. He had become President Madison’s most trusted confidante, and the president had appointed him to the peace negotiations with the understanding that he would remain in his post. Gallatin, who was six years Adams’ senior, had deeply impressed the younger man during their time together in St. Petersburg. That spring Adams had written to Abigail, “I had several opportunities of observing his quickness of understanding, his sagacity and penetration, and his soundness of judgment.”

  As House Speaker, Henry Clay was one of the most powerful men in Washington; indeed, by making himself the master of Congress, Clay transformed that job into something like what it is today. Clay was every inch a self-made man. Though raised in a backwoods town in Virginia and schooled in a log-cabin schoolhouse with a dirt floor, Clay showed such precocious gifts that at fourteen he was apprenticed to study law to George Wythe, one of the most learned members of the Virginia bar. At age twenty he had moved out to frontier Kentucky and quickly made a name for himself as a crackerjack lawyer—fast on his feet, witty, charming, theatrical. Tall and lanky, blonde and blue-eyed, Clay had something of the cultivated backwoods charm Abe Lincoln would later ride to the presidency. He could play the fiddle, curse, and drink as well as any man. A prodigiously gifted politician, Clay had become Speaker at age thirty-five and quickly made himself leader of the war hawks, relentlessly pushing a reluctant President Madison into war. He was moralistic, imperious, utterly self-assured. Madison had appointed him to reassure the hawks that Adams, the former federalist, and Gallatin, the European, would not surrender America’s interests to England, and to balance the interests of the East with those of the West, which looked to Clay as its most forceful advocate. It was all but inevitable that he and Adams, a very different man with very different views, would clash at Ghent. The two would find their fates entangled, and their ambitions coming into conflict, throughout the next generation.

  In mid-July, the delegation moved out of their hotel and into an elegant neo
classical villa, the Hotel Alcantara, on the rue des Champs. They found a man to supply food and wine, though Adams, suspicious as always, demanded the right to buy their own wine as well for a corkage fee of one franc per bottle. Adams was a man of settled habits, not at all accustomed to adjusting his daily routine to suit others. He often ate by himself and took long solitary walks to the gates of the city and beyond, since no one else would come with him. The others would dine later, smoke cigars and drink their bad wine, and eventually go out to coffee houses and then come back for cards and billiards. Clay had the room next to Adams, and at times Adams would find himself waking just as Clay was going to sleep. The two men quickly began to get on each other’s nerves. In mid-July, James Gallatin, Albert Gallatin’s seventeen-year-old son and secretary, wrote in his diary, “Mr. Adams in a very bad temper. Mr. Clay annoys him. Father pours oil on the troubled water.” James made several such notations.

  There was very little to do at first, because the English had not gotten around to appointing their own negotiators. They were obviously in no hurry to reach an agreement. Over the summer, the war cabinet had dispatched additional forces across the Atlantic in the hopes of taking the major cities of the Eastern Seaboard and threatening American territory to the west. By the end of the year, the British hoped, the Americans would be suing for peace. The British negotiators finally reached Ghent in mid-August.

  Lord Golbourn, the leader of the British team, promptly laid down the British terms: no relaxation of impressment, as-yet-unspecified territory to be yielded up, and the establishment of a buffer zone to protect England’s Indian allies from American aggression. This last was an entirely new claim. The British were insisting that the tribes be given control over an area equal to the entire extent of the United States. In addition, England would put an end to the right of New England fishermen to catch and dry fish on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland—a right John Adams had fought for and won in the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War. To this utterly unacceptable, and in fact grossly insulting, set of terms the British quickly added another: that the United States demilitarize the Great Lakes by removing its fortifications and ships, though the British would remain free to patrol the waters from their own bases.

  These were the kind of extortionate terms a victor expects to impose on the vanquished. But the British had won nothing. The American ministers, each of them patriots and strong nationalists, believed that the British were suffering from an unearned sense of superiority. Their adversaries apparently had not reconciled themselves to the fact that the United States was a nation among nations and not a refractory ex-colony. To yield ground in the face of these peremptory demands would be to jeopardize the independence for which their fathers had fought and for which their own generation was fighting still. (The War of 1812 was often described in the United States as “the second war of independence.”) The American experiment was still less than forty years old. Adams and his colleagues were acutely conscious that the experiment itself was now at stake. They would stand firm, come what may.

  In fact, neither side was prepared to compromise in order to bring the fighting to an end, and neither trusted the other. The Americans believed that the British were playing for time, waiting for the war to turn decisively their way. On the other hand, Lord Golbourn wrote to the Earl of Bathurst in London that the Americans were plainly negotiating in bad faith, “with the sole view of deriving from the negotiations some means of reconciling the people of America to the continuance of war.” Golbourn told Adams in a private conversation that the British needed the buffer zone to prevent the United States from attacking Canada. Adams replied indignantly that the United States had no such designs, though the truth was that the Madison administration had always viewed Canada as potential war booty.

  Adams was especially incensed by the British insistence on granting Indians permanent territorial rights. “To condemn vast regions of territory to perpetual barrenness and solitude,” Adams shot back, “that a few hundred savages might find wild beasts to hunt upon it, was a species of game law that a nation descended from Britons would never endure. And was impossible. It was opposing a feather to a torrent.” Adams was actually comparing the relationship between America’s settlers and its indigenous population to that between British gentry and poachers on their land. This was ingenious, preposterous, and grotesque—though Clay, Bayard, and Gallatin would have said no less. In any case, Adams never doubted that Providence intended the European settlers of America to spread across, and dominate, the continent—a principle that would later be called Manifest Destiny.

  A negotiation Adams had been certain would collapse after a few weeks now began to stretch into months. He still expected the English to walk away from the talks at any minute, releasing him to return to St. Petersburg; he advised an increasingly impatient Louisa to wait. By September, a pattern had set in: the British would present a set of demands, the Americans would produce an extensive response reiterating their position, and the British team would then send the American document to London. The English negotiators, Adams sneered, were little more than a “Post Office.” Indeed, the Americans were both more adroit and more independent than their British interlocutors. Adams was deeply impressed with his colleagues. In a letter to Louisa, he confided, “They are certainly not mean men who have been opposed to us; but for extent and copiousness of information, for sagacity and shrewdness of comprehension, for vivacity of intellect, and fertility of resource, there is certainly not among them a man equal to Mr Gallatin—I doubt whether there is among them a man of the powers of the Chevalier.” (Bayard was known as “the Chevalier.”)

  Adams was selling himself short on information and intellect, but perhaps not on temperament. He reported ruefully to Louisa that his colleagues had shredded a draft of a letter he had written to Secretary Monroe, while keeping far more of an alternate version written by Gallatin. The reason? “He is always perfectly cool, and I, in the judgment of my colleagues, am often more than temperately warm.” He couldn’t help himself—the English tone was “wormwood,” and his fury crept into his prose. He envied the Chevalier’s hard-earned self-mastery and his equanimity, his gift for derailing arguments with a well-timed joke, but at moments of high dudgeon, Adams could not swallow his righteous anger. It was ironic, to say the least, that this great diplomat was the least diplomatic of the group. And it was striking that this New England Federalist was the most unremittingly hostile of the group toward their English counterparts. He was, after all, the same John Quincy Adams who had been raised on the glories, and the horrors, of Bunker Hill.

  Adams’ draft notes resounded with phrases about “the moral and religious duty of the American Nation to cultivate their territory.” This heroic vocabulary, second nature to the Adamses, did not sit well with his more pragmatic colleagues. At one point Adams admitted, “the terms God, and Providence and Heaven, Mr. Clay thought were canting, and Russell laughed at them.” Adams wrote more than anyone else, save Gallatin, and encountered more opposition, in a fashion which he found humiliating. “Almost every thing written by any of the rest is rejected or agreed to with very little criticism verbal or substantial,” he noted. “But every line that I write passes a gauntlet of objections by every one of my Colleagues, which finally issues for the most part in the rejection of it all.”

  Over time, both sides began to shed their nonnegotiable positions. President Madison had authorized his negotiating team to abandon the demand to end impressment. The British eliminated the giant buffer zone, but insisted instead on uti posseditis—the current state of possession, which would make permanent the English conquests in New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, and possibly in the South as well. The Americans held fast on all territorial issues; they would accept only the status quo ante bellum—the prewar boundaries. The gap between the two sides was closing, but so slowly and grudgingly that it was reasonable to think they would never reach agreement.

  The American sus
picion that London was playing for time, counting on the superior numbers and professionalism of their troops, was fully justified. In the first days of October, Adams and his colleagues received the ghastly intelligence of the burning of Washington. This was, or at least felt like, the greatest national catastrophe since the early setbacks of the Revolutionary War. British troops were now poised to march north to Baltimore and beyond. Even the ever-optimistic Clay began to despair of American prospects. On October 21, Liverpool wrote to Castlereagh to predict that President Madison would soon be forced to sue for peace. “His government must be a weak one, and feeling that it has not the confidence of a great part of the nation, will perhaps be ready to make peace for the purpose of getting out of its difficulties.” The British used Alexander Baring, the Americans’ British banker, as a back channel to Albert Gallatin, whom they viewed, rightly, as the member of the team most open to compromise. Baring wrote sympathetic letters to Gallatin reminding him how very precarious was America’s financial position.

  Adams was, as always, terribly vulnerable to reports of misfortune. He wrote a friend to say that the British troops dispatched over the summer were so numerous and talented that “they must in the first instance make powerful impressions and achieve brilliant successes.” The war would drag on for years; he worried that a peace-loving people would lose the will to fight. His fears precisely matched British hopes. “Never, since the national existence of my Country,” he wrote to Louisa, “has it been in a situation of so much peril, and with prospects so terrible before it—No resource, but our own energies, no reliance, but upon ourselves and upon Heaven.”