John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  WITHIN WEEKS OF ARRIVING IN WASHINGTON, THE ADAMSES HAD rented a house at the corner of C and Four and a Half Street, northwest of the Capitol. The White House was no longer the hub of Washington’s social life, for President Monroe’s wife, Elizabeth, was often unwell, and Monroe was averse to entertaining without her. What’s more, reversing Jefferson’s republican informality, the president announced that he would receive foreign diplomats only at specified times. Adams himself had little interest in entertaining, but Louisa was a polished hostess, attentive to her guests and reveling in good conversation. She saw as well that she could best advance her husband’s career by opening their home to Washington’s leading citizens. The Adamses held regular dinners for twenty or so guests, most of them drawn from the diplomatic community, the Supreme Court, Congress, and the cabinet. Later Louisa would hold fortnightly “sociables” or “teas”—evening events with drinks and dancing to which she typically invited up to a hundred people.

  Had her husband any gift at all for small talk or bonhomie, he might have quickly improved on his bearish reputation and made friends who could prove useful to him. But in this regard, he was incurable. Adams recorded the following strange observation in his journal: “I went out this Evening in search of conversation,” he recorded, “an art of which I never had an adequate idea. Long as I have lived in the world I never have thought of conversation as a school, in which something was to be learned. I never knew how to make, to controul or to change it. I am by Nature a silent animal, and my dear mother’s constant lesson in childhood, that children in company should be seen and not heard confirmed me irrevocably in what I now deem a bad habit.”

  Adams was in fact one of the celebrated talkers of the age. The diarist Philip Hone recalled a breakfast at Adams’ home in which the latter expatiated for an hour “on the subject of dancing girls; from those who danced before the ark and the daughter of Jairus [a reference to one of Jesus’ miracles] . . . through the fascinating exhibition of the odalisques of the harem down to the present times of Fanny Ellsler and Taliogni [celebrated ballerinas].” Disquisition is not, of course, the same thing as conversation, which depends on mutually pleasurable exchange. Conversation with Jeremy Bentham was worthwhile, but the same could not be said for the drawing room. If Adams wasn’t actually learning something, he felt that he was wasting his time. “I am scarcely ever satisfied with myself, after going into company, and always have the impression that my time at home is more usefully spent.” One imagines Adams sitting silently at one of Louisa’s dinners, all too obviously revolving his own thoughts in his own mind while the prattle twirled around him—just as he had in the court of St. Petersburg. Louisa admitted that her husband’s “habits of study have unquestionably given a sort of coldness to his manners which to those who do not seek his acquaintance and only see him in public make him seem severe and repellent.”

  Adams spent a good deal of his time worrying about his sons, who he feared would disappoint him. John, the willful, ungovernable “Hotspur” of years past, wrote his father a series of letters complaining of harsh treatment from his uncle Tom, who apparently was forcing the boy’s nose to the grindstone. Adams responded with almost shocking brutality: “You boast of your studying hard, and pray for whose benefit do you study? Is it for mine, or for your uncle’s? Or are you so much of a baby that you must be taxed to spell your letters by sugar plums? Or are you such an independent gentleman that you can brook no control, and must have everything you ask for? If so, I desire you not to write for anything to me.” George, who had returned to Cambridge to continue his studies, fared little better. George’s tutor had written to Adams with a discouraging report on the boy’s progress, and Adams wrote to his eldest son accusing him of “a propensity to skulk from real study.” Rather than prepare an essay for the Bowdoin Prize, Adams advised George to write a dissertation on the adage “Mind your business.”

  In his own mind, Adams was raising his boys with the same unforgiving rigor with which he himself had been brought up. He did not wish, and perhaps could not wish, that his parents had treated him any other way. He expected his sons to excel just as it had been expected of him. He was not given pause by the fact that the parental techniques had self-evidently failed with Charles and had scarcely spurred Tom to high achievement. And Adams brought to the task of child rearing a grim and humorless determination that made him a harsher taskmaster than even his own parents had been. Louisa preferred to raise the boys with honey rather than vinegar, but, she reflected, “he ruled his children, and I quietly acquiesced to his right of controul.”

  Adams could not relax. If he wasn’t meeting with the cabinet or writing diplomatic dispatches, he was working on his study of weights and measures, keeping up his journal, writing letters. But he had never endured a Washington summer, and by June, when the temperature hit 94 degrees, he was coming unstrung. He could barely sleep even with the doors and windows thrown wide open. One night he lay awake with what he thought was prickly heat but found that his body was covered with “tiny spiders” that tickled “like a thousand feathers passing over your body.” By the end of August he was ready to take a vacation in Quincy.

  ADAMS SPENT MUCH OF SEPTEMBER SITTING IN HIS FATHER’S LIBRARY in Quincy and picking up whatever book he had a mind to read. He received daily dispatches from the State Department. Every few days he sat for Gilbert Stuart, who had asked to paint his portrait. And he subjected the boys to private exams, George in Algebra and Plato, John and Charles in Greek and Latin. He was not particularly impressed, though he acknowledged to himself that his worrying over them was inveterate. “None of them will probably ever answer to my hopes,” he wrote sourly. “May none of them ever realize my fears!”

  Adams returned to Washington in mid-October. Soon he began receiving worrying letters about his mother’s health from his old friends Harriet Welsh and Benjamin Waterhouse. It was all too clear that Abigail was dying. By November 1 he was quite certain that she was dead. His anguish mounting, Adams took to his journal to record his private feelings. “My mother was an Angel upon Earth,” he wrote. “Yet she has been to me more than a Mother. She has been a Spirit from above watching over me for good, and contributing by my mere consciousness of her existence, to the comfort of my life. That consciousness is gone; and without her the world feels to me like a solitude.”

  Perhaps, had Adams been a more modern man, his love for his mother might have been tinged with resentment for her exacting standards and her ceaseless and sometimes killjoy moralizing, which as a young man had chilled his soul and left him grave and gray. But Adams could not imagine blaming his mother or his father for defects of which he was all too aware. He blamed himself only. On November 2, he received a letter from John saying that Abigail had died October 28. He immediately left his office and would not return for several days. He did not receive visitors and went on a solitary two-hour walk, thinking of his mother’s unremitting goodness, worrying about how his father would survive the blow. Indeed, as he was writing to his father November 2 to convey his grief and his condolence, his father was writing to him.

  DON LUIS DE ONIS HAD BEEN MAKING HEADWAY DURING THE summer and fall of 1818; the circle of reactionary aristocrats around King Ferdinand VII had begun to accept the reality of their situation, which explains the instructions sent to Onis to make the best deal possible while retaining Texas and the Southwest. Nevertheless, Onis continued to insist on a line just west of the Mississippi. President Monroe, running out of patience, directed Adams to bring the negotiations to a conclusion or break them off—an ultimatum the secretary was delighted to convey. Adams wrote to Onis with the administration’s final offer. The secretary of state was prepared to sacrifice Texas, which he knew that Onis had been charged to preserve, in order to push America’s boundary westwards and win the line to the Pacific, which would run along the forty-first parallel to a spot just below the border with Oregon. The “line” was quite literally just that, since Great Britain owned the territ
ory to the north and Spain that to the south. It was less an acquisition than a placeholder, a statement of future purposes. The line, by itself, scarcely seemed worth the cession of Texas, and both men would be blamed by Westerners for giving up this vast property. But Monroe feared that the addition of Texas, where slavery would be sure to spread, as it already had elsewhere in the Southwest, could outrage Northerners and thus destabilize the union. He was perfectly content to postpone the problem, and Adams apparently agreed.

  Onis was not yet ready to yield, and he rejected Adams’ offer. At that point the secretary of state did something very much in character: he sent diplomatic instructions to George Erving, the American minister in Spain, which were intended to be made public and serve notice on Spain and its European allies that the United States was not prepared to budge. The letter included a highly colored narration of the Seminole War, which began, Adams claimed, when a force of “runaway negroes,” “savage Indians,” pirates, and traitors waged “an exterminating war” across the Florida border. Adams vigorously defended every action of General Jackson, including the execution of the two British agents. The real blame, Adams concluded, fell on Spain, which lacked the force to prevent these “banditti” from violating American sovereignty. Spain must thus decide either to fortify Florida—which of course it could not do—or surrender to the United States “a province of which she retains nothing but the nominal possession.”

  Adams was not trying to win the argument on the merits—or maybe, since he couldn’t help himself in such matters, he was—but rather to demonstrate a national resolve it would be foolhardy to resist. His ten-thousand-word essay was considered a polemical tour de force. Jefferson wrote to Monroe that the letter, as well as another Adams had written to Onis making much the same case, “are the most important and are among the ablest compositions I have ever seen,” and suggested they be translated into French and sent to all American ministers and consular officials to be presented at capitals. Indeed, Lord Castlereagh was so impressed by the force of Adams’ argument, or perhaps by the unyielding American position, that he conceded that the two British citizens Jackson had court-martialed had deserved their fate. He chose to let the issue subside—a startling decision that virtually ratified America’s forceful seizure of Spanish territory.

  Florida was just about to drop from the Spanish colonial tree like an overripe peach. But Onis continued to resist, and now a new question arose, for in July the president’s commission had returned from its fact-finding mission to Latin America. Adams was vexed to find that one member favored granting independence to all the new republics, while another considered all of them save the United Provinces hopelessly unprepared for self-rule. Adams viewed recognition as a practical matter rather than an avowal of republican kinship. At the moment, he thought, it would do more harm than good, but he was not averse to using recognition as a bargaining chip with Onis. As the boundary negotiations drew to a close in the last days of 1818, Adams informed the French minister, Baron Hyde de Neuville, who had been serving as an intermediary with Onis, that the United States planned to recognize Buenos Aires. In fact the administration had no such plans; Adams was probably hoping to panic Onis into acquiescence, for he knew very well that Onis would be blamed for such a calamitous outcome. Here, as elsewhere, one is struck by Adams’ complacent willingness to use means both ruthless and wily in pursuit of ends whose rightness he never doubted.

  On January 3, 1819, Onis received new instructions ordering him to settle the dispute on American terms if need be. That very day, while Adams was walking up Pennsylvania Avenue to the office, Hyde rushed over, asked him to climb into his carriage, and then laid out for the secretary of state the new Spanish offer. Adams had a deal, Hyde said, if he would move the proposed line to the Pacific northwards from 41 to 43 degrees latitude and promise that the United States would not recognize the breakaway republics. Hyde was a charming and obliging statesman of whom both Adams and Louisa were very fond. Nevertheless, Adams was curt. The second term, he said, was of course out of the question. As for the first, “if Mr. Onis was not prepared to agree to our ultimatum, I hoped he would intreat him not to write me a word about it, for I could not express the disgust with which I was forced to carry on a correspondence with him, upon subjects which it was ascertained that we could not adjust.”

  When Onis made further concessions on a westward boundary, Monroe felt that the time had come for the United States to pocket its winnings. Adams disagreed; he felt sure that he could squeeze Onis harder and get still more. He won the backing of the cabinet. Onis and Adams continued to pore over maps. Back and forth they went, day after day in the first three weeks of February 1819, with the great continental expanse of North America at stake. Onis agreed to cede everything above the forty-first parallel. He was trying to win some face-saving concessions—not for his own professional pride but rather, as he told Adams, because Ferdinand’s counselors “were always setting up the honor and dignity of Spain, the glory of the Monarchy, and talking as in the time of Charles the Fifth.” They had to feel that “the interest and honour of Spain” had been preserved. Would America accept boundaries in the middle of the rivers rather than on the banks? No. Would America grant Spain a right of navigation? No. Adams was merciless. On February 16, Hyde came to Adams’ office to say that Onis had accepted everything.

  On the eighteenth, Onis came with a copy of the treaty stipulating borders in the middle of the rivers. A cabinet meeting the next day authorized Adams to refuse the terms. Adams called on Hyde to explain that the president was prepared to inform Congress that the negotiations had failed; he would not stop legislators from unilaterally annexing the Floridas. Hyde pleaded with Adams to desist; Onis might have to break off the negotiations himself rather than accept a treaty his own compatriots would deem extortionate. That, Adams said, is up to him. The following day, Onis assayed a few last quibbles, Adams gave no quarter, and Onis agreed to sign the treaty as it was. On the twenty-second, he and Onis signed copies of the Transcontinental Treaty, as it came to be called, in Spanish and English.

  Adams never gave Onis credit for the treaty. He was much more generous with Hyde. “He is a man of singularly compounded character,” Adams wrote. “A mixture of ultra-royalism and republican liberality. Frank, candid, honourable, generous, benevolent, humane, devoted to and adoring his Country.” Adams gave Hyde great credit for bringing Onis around. He would later write to Richard Rush, the US minister in London, that no foreign diplomat in American history had rendered “a service so transcendently important to this country.”

  Adams had yielded Texas, which he had never expected to gain, and in exchange won Florida—the great prize—and gained unimpeded title to all the land ceded by the French in 1803. The line to the Pacific was a coup none of Adams’ predecessors had had the boldness to seek, much less win. The Louisiana Purchase had been a windfall; the Transcontinental Treaty, by contrast, was a diplomatic coup Adams had won by a combination of patience, guile, mastery of detail, and an unyielding commitment to American national interest. That night Adams came home late from a dinner and confessed in his journal that he had experienced “perhaps the most important day of my life.” He continued: “The acquisition of the Florida’s has long been an object of earnest desire in this Country. The acknowledgment of a definite line of boundary to the South Sea”—the Pacific—“forms a great Epoch in our History. The first proposal of it in this Negotiation was my own; and I trust it is now secured beyond the reach of revocation.”

  CHAPTER 17

  The Bargain Between Freedom and Slavery Is Morally and Politically Vicious

  (1819–1820)

  ADAMS HAD BECOME SECRETARY OF STATE AT A MOMENT when Americans could afford to be less preoccupied with Europe, and more focused on domestic well-being, than they ever had been before. The eight years of James Monroe’s presidency constituted an interval of relief from the partisan strife between Republican and Federalist and then, later, between Republican
and Democrat. In June 1817, soon after taking office, Monroe traveled up the Atlantic seaboard to New England—the first of the Virginia presidents since George Washington to make such a trip. The president came with a healing message for the Federalists who had opposed his candidacy and, more importantly, the War of 1812. “Discord does not belong to our system,” he proclaimed in Boston, and Boston responded in kind. “We are now all republicans,” emphatically declared Henry Lee, a local merchant, “even the Essex Junto.” It was a local newspaperman who coined the term “era of good feelings” to describe Monroe’s warm welcome.

  Even Adams, a man inclined to see conflict and treachery lurking beneath the dulcet tones of peace, was impressed by the new spirit. In October 1817, days after he had arrived in Washington, he wrote of Monroe’s tour to his nephew John Adams Smith, noting that “party spirit has indeed subsided throughout the union to a degree that I should have thought scarcely possible.” No doubt the United States would become tangled again before long in Europe’s inveterate conflicts, but “in the mean time the general prosperity of our country, and the contentment which pervades every part of it, are delightful to the patriotic feelings of an American, and most especially of an American arriving from Europe.” What neither Adams nor any of the leading men in Washington could foresee was that the issue of slavery, artfully avoided by the framers of the constitution, would begin to vex the mood of national satisfaction.