John Quincy Adams
Page 32
America’s Founding Fathers had been united in the belief that political parties were inimical to republican government, on the grounds that they served as vehicles for selfish or sectional interests as opposed to national and collective ones. Party spirit had nevertheless arisen in the struggle between Federalists and Republicans, but once the Federalists shrank into insignificance, the nation had returned to one-party, or in effect no-party, rule. The great divisive issue of activist versus limited government had also lost something of its salience, for the ruling Virginia Republicans had grown increasingly comfortable with the Federalist vision. Madison had agreed to charter the Second Bank of the United States, argued for federally financed “internal improvements,” built up the peacetime navy, and signed a tariff bill protecting Northern manufactures. Monroe had also preserved the Madisonian consensus. In 1820 he would run uncontested for reelection; had one New England elector not selected John Quincy Adams on his ballot, Monroe would have been elected unanimously.
And yet the absence of party temporarily prevented recognition of rising internal conflict. As the nation rapidly expanded and diversified, the Founding Fathers’ ideal of a single patriotic national interest became increasingly untenable. Sectional interests had long pitted the manufacturers and traders of New England against the agriculturists of the South. But now the nation’s center of gravity was shifting as settlers poured into the west. Between 1810 and 1820 the number of Americans living beyond the Appalachians doubled from one to two million. Between 1816 and 1821, five new Western states were admitted to the union—Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, and Missouri. (Maine was also admitted in 1820.) The absence of organized parties meant that interests gathered around individuals and thus that the inevitable clash of interest and ideology would be intensely, and often brutally, personal. It was not, of course, in John Quincy Adams’ nature to minimize conflict. The seven years he would spend in President Monroe’s cabinet would be a period of fierce rivalry, rising suspicion, and, finally, open political warfare.
At the White House, Adams found that he was moving in a world more portentous, more personal, and more intensely dramatic than any he had known before. After one cabinet meeting, he wrote, “These Cabinet Councils open upon me a new Scene and new views of the political world. Here is a play of Passions, Opinions and characters different in many respects from those in which I have been accustomed heretofore to move.” Adams got on well with Attorney General William Wirt, a big, shambling figure, warm and bookish, who had no ambitions beyond his current job and was inclined, so far as Adams could tell, to give way to Monroe on almost everything.
On the other hand, Adams took an instant dislike to the treasury secretary, William H. Crawford, a Georgian who had served as minister to France and secretary of war under Madison before running against Monroe in 1816. Crawford was a big, fleshy, pink-cheeked man, a natural politician who took little interest in the large intellectual questions that preoccupied the secretary of state. A man of action, Crawford had killed a rival in a duel. Adams found him petty-minded, self-aggrandizing, interested only in politics rather than policy. On the other hand, no less an authority than Albert Gallatin, his much-admired colleague in Ghent, wrote that Crawford “united to a powerful mind a most correct judgment and an inflexible integrity.”
The one figure Adams accepted as an intellectual equal was the youngest of them, John Calhoun, the thirty-five-year-old secretary of war. After Calhoun had the good sense to agree with Adams on the disposition of Amelia Island, the latter wrote, “Calhoun thinks for himself, independently of all the rest, with sound judgment, quick discrimination and keen observation. He supports his opinions too with powerful eloquence.” Calhoun had been raised in South Carolina, studied law at Yale, and won a seat in Congress at age twenty-eight. He had been, along with Henry Clay, one of the leading war hawks in the House. Calhoun was a deeply serious man who did not smoke or play cards and drank little; his dark and deep-set eyes were often described as “blazing” or “burning,” for he seemed to barely restrain intense passions. George Waterston, a Washington observer of the day, compared Calhoun to Burke or William Pitt the Younger. “On all subjects,” he wrote, “whether abstract or ordinary, whether political or moral, he thinks with a rapidity that no difficulties can resist, and with a novelty that never fails to delight.” Calhoun would later become the intellectual fountainhead of the states’ rights movement that would justify secession. But at this time he was, like Adams, a proponent of a strong central government and a strong executive. On many, though hardly all, questions they agreed.
Monroe himself was even more a throwback, or remnant, than was his secretary of state. The president was the last, and the least, of the great Tidewater aristocracy to serve as chief executive. He was tall and thin and dressed in the archaic republican fashion—knee breeches rather than trousers, long hose, buckled shoes. He often wore a dark beaver hat and on solemn occasions donned his old uniform from the Continental Army. Monroe came from a humbler background than Jefferson and Madison, received a less thorough education, climbed the ladder of success more arduously. He had not been chosen as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, a failure that rankled. He had served as a diplomat but not a very successful one: George Washington had recalled him from Paris for excessively pro-French sympathies, and Jefferson had ignored the treaty he had signed with Great Britain in 1807. He later served as Madison’s secretary of state and, briefly, war; though some blamed him for the reverses the United States suffered during the War of 1812, he never lost the support of either Jefferson or Madison.
Monroe was an extraordinarily good man, but he was not a brilliant man. His mind was “neither rapid nor rich,” wrote William Wirt, and thus he moved slowly and warily in the face of new information. Monroe made few important decisions without consulting Madison and Jefferson; the latter, especially, felt free to offer his advice on almost everything, though always with disclaimers about his remoteness from men and events, and so forth. The president laid out all issues before his cabinet and was prepared to wait patiently for consensus to form among them. This habit did not sit well with his decisive secretary of state. In his journal he noted, “There is slowness, want of decision and a Spirit of procrastination in the President which perhaps arises more from his situation than his personal character.”
Monroe would not have chosen Adams as his secretary of state had he not felt that politics compelled him to do so. He had first encountered Adams as the author of the Publicola essays, which he considered an apologia for monarchy and an overt endorsement for reactionary Great Britain over revolutionary France. The two would never become close friends, but they worked well as a team. Jefferson remarked that they were well suited to one another: “Adams has a pointed pen; Monroe has judgment enough for both and firmness to have his judgment controul.” Monroe found that he could rely on Adams’ nonpartisan judgment and deep knowledge of foreign affairs, as well as his gift for foreseeing even remote consequences of present actions. The president made it clear to Adams that he could visit him privately at any time, and on his way to the State Department Adams often stopped at the White House, as many Washingtonians had come to call the president’s house after the damaged walls had been replastered and painted white.
The structure, in fact, was still being rebuilt when Monroe was inaugurated, and painters and carpenters would be hard at work for years to come. Chunks of masonry lay in the dirt at the sides of the structure. The north and south porticos still lay open to the sky. At the same time, the Francophile first family had imported masses of Louis XVI furnishings for the downstairs public rooms of the White House—mahogany escritoires with gilded brass finish, bronze clocks, silver and fine porcelain, chandeliers and candelabra. The White House had begun—just barely—to look like the dwelling of the nation’s chief magistrate. Adams would typically walk upstairs to meet with Monroe in the less pretentious Treaty Room, which the president had furnished like a library or study.
Clay, meanwhile, had been waiting for the opportunity to turn his oratorical guns on the administration. He had been furious when Monroe had offered State to his rival Adams, and he had refused to consider the second-tier slot of secretary of war. Beginning in the spring of 1818, he lambasted the administration’s cautious policies toward the Spanish republics, which Adams himself had done much to shape. Working with Manuel Aguirre, the minister from the United Provinces of La Plata, which had declared its independence from Spain two years earlier, Clay demanded recognition of the new nation, though doing so would have required overturning the Neutrality Act.
Clay was what we could call today a foreign policy idealist, demanding that America act abroad according to its values at home, rather than according to a strict calculus of its interests. He had the bully pulpit of the Speakership and a gift for swelling oratory. On the floor of the House Clay majestically evoked a new world, an American world, in which the southern republics hoped to form an alliance with their elder brother to the north. “At the present moment,” he cried, “the patriots of the South are fighting for liberty and independence—for precisely what we fought for. . . . The moral influence of such a recognition, on the patriots of the south, will be irresistable.” The longer Clay talked, the more impassioned he became on behalf of America’s brethren to the south, famed for their “great quickness, genius, and particular aptitude for the exact sciences.” Who could deny that such men were fitted for self-government? That, pronounced Clay, was “the doctrine of thrones.”
Clay had opposed the taking of Amelia Island as an impediment to Spanish revolutionaries, and he had opposed Andrew Jackson’s campaign in Florida, discovering in himself a regard for the rights of Indians that flabbergasted even some of his allies. Clay used his iron control over the House to call for the Monroe administration to furnish documents on the decision over Amelia and the question of recognition, and he impaneled hearings on the subjects that ran for four days. When it became clear that he lacked the votes to demand recognition, Clay attached to the administration bill establishing the South American commission a rider authorizing funds for a minister to Argentina. He was roundly defeated.
Adams’ friends began to warn him that Clay and Crawford were scheming to destroy his reputation and political prospects, and urged him to fight back, if not in the same way. Alexander H. Everett, a Boston lawyer and diplomat who had served as Adams’ secretary in St. Petersburg and now looked to him as a mentor as well as a source of employment, often came to dinner at the Adams home. One evening in March 1818 he asked Adams what he was planning to do to advance his own future candidacy. “I told him I should do absolutely nothing,” Adams rejoined. “He said that as others would not be so scrupulous, I should not stand upon equal footing with them. I told him that was not my fault.” This would set the pattern for Adams’ interactions with even his most zealous boosters in the years to come.
The growing power of the West and of Clay, its great advocate, lent a new political dimension to President Monroe’s calculations. In April, the president called Adams to his office to look for suitable candidates for foreign postings. He needed to satisfy every region—if possible, every state. Ever since he had denied the State Department to Clay, Monroe admitted, he had been trying to mollify the West through appointments. Indeed, Adams himself privately complained of “backstairs influences” on the president’s appointment decisions, which he would learn of only after the fact. Adams spied the hands of Clay and Crawford everywhere. Their allied newspapers—the Kentucky Reporter and the Richmond Enquirer, respectively—criticized the administration’s conduct in Florida and toward the South America republics. Adams worried that Monroe was giving way under the pressure. He fretted constantly about the president’s spine.
And then, with the Florida campaign, Andrew Jackson muddied the picture yet further. Even if Jackson harbored no political ambitions of his own, he was a rival for the sympathies of the West and thus a possible impediment to Clay’s presidential ambitions. And, like many other leading figures of the time, Clay viewed Jackson as a genuinely dangerous man, a Caesar in waiting. As Congress convened in November 1818, the long knives came out for Jackson. After Adams received a visit from one of the general’s enemies, he reflected, “This Government is indeed assuming daily more and more a character of Cabal, and preparation not for the next Presidential election but for the one after that is working and counterworking.”
At the end of the year, Clay called for a full-dress congressional investigation of Jackson’s seizure of Pensacola. The hearings, which began in early January 1819, lasted almost a month—the longest debate on a single subject the House had ever staged. With the galleries jam-packed, Clay delivered a stinging, sardonic, wildly hyperbolic assault on the hero of New Orleans, accusing him of insubordination against civil authority and against the Constitution itself. Jackson’s friends waited their turn and then launched a counterattack. And when the dust had settled, the general had been cleared on every count. Clay’s immense self-confidence often made him rash; now his direct assault had strengthened Jackson and made him suddenly plausible as presidential timber.
The fates of Clay, Jackson, and Adams would remain entangled for the next generation. Jackson now conceived an abiding hatred for Clay and a deep sense of gratitude toward Adams. To a friend of the secretary he wrote, with mangled syntax, “I think him a man of the first-rate mind of any in America as a civilian or scholar, and I have never doubted of his attachment to our republican Government.” The two men had almost nothing in common as a matter of temperament, and over time each would come to regard the other with the deepest suspicion. But for the moment, Jackson served as the military wing of Adams’ statecraft, which gave them a strong interest in defending one another. And Adams, who took a dim view of most of his contemporaries, felt something like veneration for Jackson.
Adams had viewed himself as the secondary target of the Florida inquiry. Clay’s allies blamed Adams for defending Jackson’s behavior in the letter to George Erving, which had gained wide circulation. Adams waited, in vain, for his friends to rally, as Jackson’s had. “There is not in either house of Congress an individual member who would open his lips to defend me, or move a finger to defeat any combination to injure me,” he fumed. Adams often gloried in his principled solitude, but this Federalist-turned-Republican had few natural allies on either side. And he lacked the social gifts that are usually second nature to a politician.
When he wasn’t working, Adams wanted to be alone in his study. He treasured the little time he had to work on the papers of the 1787 federal Constitutional Convention, which seemed hopelessly snarled, or the report on weights and measures, or a solitary effort to bring the books of the State Department up to date. (Adams had taught himself double-entry bookkeeping, which he also deployed in order to make sense of his own finances.) Sometimes he daydreamed of a life of study. After meeting a man who had invented a means of efficiently converting steam to power, he thought how very fine it would be to devote one’s life to the study and classification of metals or perhaps to write a history of inventors and their characters. Ought not the secretary of state devote himself
to improving the Patent Office? Yes, but there was no time, and it was all he could do to keep up with the press of business.
Once again Adams was unable to leave for Quincy until late August. The family house was teeming with Adamses, but he felt the chill—the desolation—of his mother’s absence. His father had reached the venerable age of eighty-four with his mind intact, but he now moved slowly and felt that he was coming unstrung. It could not be long, Adams thought, before he lost his father as well. After a few days, he moved to Boston, where he rented a fine house that had once belonged to John Hancock. He and Louisa and the boys took fishing expeditions to Dorchester and Nahant, coming back with baskets full of cod and haddock and perch. His anger at John seemed to have cooled. And he recognized that George, who had always loved literature as much as he had, was in fact “a student of great assiduity.”
In the midst of this brief period of recuperation, Adams received a terrible shock: his brother Tom vanished from the family house. The kind and gently ironical young man who had accompanied his imperious older brother to Holland and Prussia, taken care of Louisa, and kept up her flagging spirits had returned home and never gained a firm footing. He had washed out first as a lawyer and then as a publisher. He had married late in life and produced six children, and he and they had become a collective burden on the family. They lived with John and Abigail in Quincy. Tom felt humiliated by his failure; he had begun drinking heavily and quarreling with his wife, Nancy, and his children. John Adams had lost all patience with him. And now Tom had fled in disgrace, no one knew where. Adams hurried to see Josiah Quincy, a lawyer and former congressman (and later president of Harvard) who served, along with Adams himself, as coexecutor of John Adams’ estate. Quincy said flatly that Tom’s return home would kill the old man. It was up to John Quincy Adams to prevent that, presumably by supporting Tom and his family.