John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  Adams was, quintessentially, a man of prose; he was too analytical, too dogged, too literal-minded to write with anything like genius in an expressive and emotional vein. He was more suited to delineating the social structure of Silesia, or the chronology of the Old Testament, or the relationship of the verst to the mile. And yet he loved poetry. And he did not simply love to read and recite poetry, as so many educated men of his day did, but to write it. He wrote romantic poetry to girls just young enough that he could not be accused of playing the swain. The artifice of poetry allowed him to express ardent feelings he otherwise kept firmly tamped down. For Adams, an unplayful man, poetry offered a form of play—an outlet, we would say today. He could express feelings he didn’t actually have but might dream of having, as well as those he did. And the fact that he wasn’t so very good at it reassured him; poetry was, after all, a hobby. But at times he wished it were more. “Could I have chosen my own Genius and Condition,” he confided to his journal, “I should have made myself a great Poet. As it is, I have wasted much of my life in writing verses; spell-bound in the circle of mediocrity.” The journal, too, of course, was a place where he could admit his deepest feelings to himself.

  THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD, ADAMS WAS MEETING REGULARLY with Castlereagh and sending frequent dispatches to Secretary Monroe. The secretary authorized Adams to open discussions with London on a new commercial treaty, but in the summer of 1816, Castlereagh informed the American minister that His Majesty’s government had no interest in the idea, and no intention of opening up American trade with the British colonies of the West Indies. Europe remained becalmed, but underneath the glassy surface, Adams felt the ongoing struggle between monarchy and republicanism, which he understood as a fundamental current of history and which he had been speaking of in diplomatic dispatches since the middle of the 1790s. The great event of the day was the insurrection in Spain. Adams reported that while the British public, like the American public, sided with the republicans, the British government would continue to support King Ferdinand. He predicted—very prematurely—that the deeply unpopular Bourbons would not be able to hold onto power and speculated that France might be carved up like Poland.

  In the spring of 1816, Monroe had beaten his only rival for the Republican nomination, Secretary of War William Crawford, and since the Federalists had disappeared as a national party, he was all but assured the presidency. By November, Adams had begun hearing rumors that Monroe would appoint him secretary of state. According to stories being circulated by both friends and opponents of Adams, Monroe was considering either Gallatin or Clay for the post as well, and Clay had responded by loudly arguing that Adams was unsuitable for the post. But Monroe viewed Clay as a serious potential rival in 1820 and was not about to give him the traditional stepping-stone post of secretary of state. In fact, Monroe would later write to Jefferson that he could not appoint another Southerner to the post without appearing to confirm fears of a Virginia dynasty, which would turn Northern Republicans against him. He needed a man of the North, as well as one not known for overweening ambition. On March 6, he wrote to Adams to tell him of the appointment. Adams did not have a particularly high regard for Monroe, who had failed in diplomatic assignments in Paris and London, but for reasons both of patriotism and of personal ambition, it would have been unthinkable to say no.

  As Adams began to contemplate this new and immensely consequential stage of his career, he returned with increasing frequency to the great principle of Union he had inherited from his father, which had animated him throughout his career. He designed a family coat of arms, as his father once had: an American eagle bearing a lyre, surrounded by the thirteen stars. Horace had explained that Orpheus had used his lyre to civilize the savage men of his time and make them submit to law and religion. “The moral application of the emblem,” Adams wrote in his journal, “is, that the same power of harmony which originally produced the institutions of civil government to regulate the Association of individual men, now presides in the federal association of the American States. . . . The Lesson of the emblem is Union.”

  Adams wrote to his father to say that he no longer felt like much of a Massachusetts man. “My system of politics more and more inclines to strengthen the Union and its government.” New England factionalism had reduced the Federalist Party to a disgruntled rump of secessionists. The true American principle, the doctrine of self-government, was threatened by the growth of absolutism in Europe. “The Royalists everywhere detest and despise us as Republicans,” he wrote. Tsar Alexander had formed a Holy Alliance—an alliance of monarchs—with Prussia and Austria. Spain was seeking to crush republican movements in its South American colonies, while France and Britain were coming to the aid of Spain against its own citizen insurgency. “How long it will be possible for us to preserve peace with Europe it is impossible to foresee.” The great responsibility of the secretary of state would be to defend republicanism from autocracy while resisting the provocation to war.

  Adams spent his last months in London going to plays with the boys, attending debates at the House of Commons, and enjoying dinner parties with his friends. On April 28 he took a last walk around the garden, thanked the gardener and his son, and closed the gate behind him. “I have seldom, perhaps never in the course of my life,” Adams wrote, “resided more comfortably than at the house which we now quit, and which I shall probably never see again.” He had had his boys around him, and he and they and Louisa had enjoyed health and contentment; the strife that was sure to await him in Washington was still an ocean away. He was popular, sought-after, admired; he had little to regret. Adams’ soul had perhaps never been so much at rest and never would be again.

  The family moved into the ministerial office on Craven Street, and Adams began to prepare his departure. His final meetings with Castlereagh made it plain that the United States and Great Britain now stood on a far more solid and more equal footing than they had when he had arrived two years earlier. His Majesty, said the viscount, was deeply satisfied with the current state of affairs between the two nations. The United States and Spain were then arguing over the ownership of Florida, which Washington claimed had been included in the Louisiana Purchase but Spain disputed. Castlereagh asked if the United States would welcome an offer by Great Britain to use its good offices to mediate the dispute. Adams politely demurred.

  The only rough patch came when Adams formally took his leave of the prince regent. It was customary throughout Europe for sovereigns to lavish gifts on departing ministers, a form of thanks not very much distinguishable from a bribe. Adams was told to expect five hundred pounds. Adams considered the practice absurd, as well as corrupt, and was mildly shocked to hear that some of his predecessors as American minister had accepted the douceur. In any case, the Constitution explicitly forbade the exchange of such gifts. Adams explained to the courtier in charge of such matters that, “for American ministers to be receiving gifts from foreign Princes, whose diplomatic agents in America never receive any thing in return, would exhibit them rather as beggars receiving alms, from opulent Princes than as the Independent Representatives of a high minded and virtuous Republic.” Castlereagh said that the opinion did him credit.

  In early May, Adams dined with Jeremy Bentham, the great English political philosopher, polymath, and eccentric, an atheist and radical reformer whose lasting contribution to the world is the principle known as utilitarianism. Bentham had been eager to meet Adams because he had been led to believe that they were distantly related. This turned out not to be the case, but it may have only been a pretext to arrange a meeting. Bentham was an inexhaustible talker, and the two men quickly found that they had a great deal to talk about. Bentham was sixty-nine but perfectly spry, and he and Adams often walked together for three hours after breakfast, usually around Hyde Park and Kensington. These two men, both impossibly learned and full of certainties, the one a freethinker and the other a faithful if undoctrinaire Christian, found a match in one another, waving their walking stic
ks and arguing their way across London.

  Bentham was a great admirer of American democracy and of the principle of social equality. He had just written a tract, The Catechism of Reform, which had become a cause célèbre and was debated in the House of Commons before anyone had even had a chance to read it. Adams was no more a friend of revolution than he had been when he railed against Thomas Paine, and on one of their long walks he asked Bentham how he could reconcile his call for social leveling with the British constitution, with its balance between the monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic estates. Bentham rejoined that the crown and the aristocracy had so overborne the popular power vested in the Commons that “the Liberties of the Country were utterly gone.” Why, Bentham asked, should Englishmen not enjoy the same liberties as Americans? Adams rounded on the old sage: “I considered him as having conceded that reform with democratic ascendancy would lead to the abolition of the Crown and the Peerage. But these institutions were too powerful and too deeply rooted to perish without a struggle; and what would be the consequences of that?” Civil war, Bentham acknowledged. Bentham, a genuine radical, could accept the consequences of his principles. Adams, a Burkean conservative, could not.

  Bentham was also a shameless self-promoter, and in early June he sent Adams a box containing twenty-five copies of most of his works, to be distributed to the governor of every American state and a few other important figures. Bentham had high hopes for the cause of reform in the New World, but his efforts do not appear to have sparked a utilitarian cult across the Atlantic. On June 10, Adams left London with Louisa and the boys. He recorded, as always, the exact distance and cost, to the farthing, of the trip from London to Southampton. On June 15, the family boarded the Washington. Adams was right in his premonition that he would never again see Little Boston. He was only a month shy of fifty years old and still had thirty more years to live, but he would never again cross the Atlantic.

  PART III

  TERRITORIAL EXPANSION

  CHAPTER 16

  A Line Straight to the Pacific Ocean

  (1817–1819)

  THE JOHN QUINCY ADAMS WHO DISEMBARKED IN NEW YORK in the summer of 1817, with his wife and three boys and four servants, was no longer thought of as the son of the second president; he was the designee to serve as secretary of state, the traditional stepping-stone to the presidency, and thus the second greatest man in the land. His station was now equal to the immense gravity with which he had always held himself. Adams was portly, with pink cheeks and receding hair; the sharp lines of his face had gone soft, but his dark eyes still pierced the world around him. Adams spoke little but appeared to know everything. His father had cautioned him to be watchful and reserved; he had, if anything, learned the lesson all too well. In Washington, as in London and Moscow and Ghent, he would succeed—when he succeeded—by sheer force of argument rather than by the gentler arts of persuasion.

  Adams had returned to a nation at peace: the United States was no longer menaced by foreign invasion. The questions that faced President Monroe and his secretary of state had less to do with protecting the country than with increasing American influence and expanding American territory. America was what we would call today a “rising power”—indeed, the world’s preeminent rising power. And it was hemmed in by territory controlled by England, by Russia, and above all by Spain, which was very much a declining power. This state of affairs could not, and would not, last. In any case, Spanish colonial control of South America was coming to an abrupt end. The so-called United Provinces of La Plata—today’s Argentina—had defeated Spanish troops, declared independence, and sent an emissary to Washington to agitate for recognition. Republics had arisen in Chile, Venezuela, and Colombia. The world Adams confronted was thus ripe with opportunity for a confident and expansionist United States, though also beset with dangers for a nation inclined to overestimate its powers. He would spend the next seven years enhancing American territory and prestige while warning against what he considered to be reckless adventures.

  Adams had been away from the United States, and his family, for eight years. More than anything, he wanted to see his elderly parents. The Adamses spent only a few days in New York City, took steamships up the coast, and then went straight from Providence to Peacefields. There they were reunited with John and Abigail, both miraculously not just alive but hale, as well as with Tom, his wife, and their five children. As soon as the news of Adams’ arrival spread, the grandees of Boston began making a pilgrimage to the elegant three-story family home. Harvard president Kirkland invited him to commencement. Boston insisted on having a grand dinner of its own, at the Exchange Coffee House; apparently the Federalist apostate had been forgiven the transgressions of 1808. Adams was delighted at the improvements made to the town since he had last seen it, though saddened to see that old Beacon Hill had been flattened to make way for development.

  After so many years away from home, Adams certainly could have tarried in Quincy and Boston. But his hyperactive conscience would not let him do so. He enrolled John and Charles at the Town Grammar School in Boston and put them up with his old friends the Welshes. George was to be tutored for admission to Harvard as a sophomore, but dysentery and typhoid were prevalent in Cambridge, and at the last minute Adams agreed that George could come to Washington. On September 9, the family left for the Capital.

  Adams had been making the trip up and down the Eastern Seaboard for more than thirty years. As a young man he had bounced over rutted roads, waited for shifting winds to permit a packet ship to leave port, swung wide to avoid cities afflicted with yellow fever. No longer: the era of the steamship had fully arrived. Adams, always fascinated by machinery and technological progress, was agog. There were organized lines of steamers that left at scheduled times—no need to buy tickets in advance. The trip from New York to Boston had taken an astonishing forty hours: he had boarded the Connecticut in New York Harbor and stepped off in New Haven, and then immediately transferred to the Fulton to New London, where stage coaches stood waiting to whisk passengers to Providence or Boston. Now the family made the same trip in reverse and then took another steamer and stagecoach to Trenton, where they stayed in an inn operated by the steamship company. Then they boarded yet another ship to Philadelphia, where they mingled with passengers from all over the country as well as old friends from Europe. The last steamer, which chugged down the Chesapeake Bay, had an awning to protect passengers from the sun. The new generation of steamships had separate cabins for women, in which men were not admitted; both the refreshments and the accommodations were of the quality of a fine inn. On the way down the Chesapeake Adams sat in comfort reading a biography of Fulton; when he arrived in Baltimore, he wrote, “We finish here for the present our Steam-Boat Navigation, which for the purpose of travel has surpassed my highest expectations.”

  Adams took the oath of office September 22 and was introduced to the five clerks who constituted the professional staff of the State Department. Adams appointed one of them, Daniel Brent, as his chief clerk and translator. The department’s budget amounted to $19,410, though the government spent another $103,000 to maintain its ministers and consular officials abroad. Adams himself had to accept a severe pay cut, for the secretary’s salary was fixed at $3,500. (It would be raised to $6,000 in 1819.) The old department headquarters had been burned down in the war, along with the president’s house, and had been rebuilt immediately to the west of it. Adams would share the building with the War and Navy Departments. State occupied five rooms on the second floor and four more in the attic. Adams had a new desk and bookcase. For a man whose idea of a foreign ministry was Lord Castlereagh’s vast establishment, or Count Rumiantsev’s, this was a very humble homecoming. But neither in his letters nor in his journals did Adams murmur a word of protest.

  The department’s work had piled up in the six months since Monroe had left to become president, appointing an interim figure in his stead. Letters and dispatches were sitting around unopened. Newspapers came in from
all over the country, only to be thrown out at the end of the day, read or not. The clerks often left town on private business. Adams, a devoted systematizer, began cleaning the Augean stables. He established a filing system for diplomatic correspondence, consular correspondence, and material from foreign ministries. He had the newspapers kept and filed so that he could compile his own record of relevant articles. He pondered a new system of instructions for ministers embarking on missions. Which elements should be uniform, he wondered, and which particular to the mission? He assigned specific responsibilities to each of the clerks. Adams was the first professionalizer of the State Department, just as he had sought to professionalize the diplomatic service while abroad. The effort was costly: within days of arriving Adams was suffering from symptoms of overwork. He woke up in the middle of the night with a toothache. He tried to rise at four or five, but found that he was sleepy all day. Instead he woke at five or six, worked until ten, breakfasted, walked the mile and a quarter to the office (a twenty-two-minute trip, he noted), worked until three or so, and then went to see the president.