by James Traub
Adams canceled his stay in Boston and returned to Quincy. Nancy begged him for help—she and her children had been abandoned to destitution. Adams felt that the poor woman had been driven almost out of her mind with fear about her future. With his mother dead and his father enfeebled, the whole weight of the Adams family was settling on John Quincy’s shoulders. He felt himself tottering, and he walked to his mother’s grave to commune with her spirit and ask for guidance. Perhaps Abigail interceded, for the following evening, Louisa reported that Tom had returned but was too unwell to speak until the following morning. Perhaps he was sleeping off a bender; Adams would have veiled such a squalid truth even from his own diary.
The next day, Adams promised Tom that he would take care of his family if Tom would reconcile with their father. When Tom quickly agreed, Adams unfolded the plan he had devised. In order to make restitution to their father, he would purchase the deed to Wollaston, the Quincy ancestral home, for $1,000 a year, just as he had purchased much of the estate years earlier when his father’s investments had been vaporized in the fall of Bird, Savage and Bird. He then agreed with Tom to take the mortgage of a house in Medford Abigail had given to him, in exchange for a regular allowance for the family. The prodigal son returned to the family, and his father accepted him. The dutiful son was left with a towering pile of obligations and debts.
Tom’s slow downward spiral, and his ultimate humiliation, offers a pointed reminder of how very hard it was to be an Adams. The family lacked the wealth that served as a safety net for the less lucky or gifted or driven members of other prominent families. At the same time, a merely ordinary disposition, much less a tender one, could not survive the pressure of family expectations. John Quincy had been forged in the fires and emerged whole and hard; neither Charles nor Tom had proved so fortunate. John Quincy Adams had put his own children through the same thresher, and that generation, too, would see a terrible winnowing.
FOR THE FIRST FEW YEARS OF THE MONROE ADMINISTRATION, THE great issues that had roiled the newspapers and the Congress had concerned America’s relations with the European powers who had established themselves on the continent: Spain, England, and even Russia, which had built a colony on the northwest coast. But America’s expansion produced internal contradictions that finally became too acute to be ignored, for the incorporation of each new state from annexed territory forced the dreaded question of slavery. Would the new state be slave or free? Kentucky had been admitted as a slave state in 1791, and then Tennessee. Much of the opposition to the Louisiana Purchase came from Federalists who feared that it would tip the balance forever between the free and slave states. The Northwest Ordinance of 1797 stipulated that states hewn from the Northwest Territory would be free; that covered Ohio and later Indiana. But Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama were all admitted as slave states.
In 1820, Missouri applied for admission to the Union as a slave state. At that point, half the twenty-two states were slave, and half free. Missouri would upset that balance. Much of the territory also lay above the northernmost point where slavery had been permitted up until that time. The Missouri application thus forced the questions of what kind of nation America would be and whether the uneasy compromise with which the Union itself had been forged would be permitted, or even could be permitted, to continue. The debate over the terms on which Missouri would be admitted to the Union brought out in bold relief the irreconcilable conflict that would tear the country in half forty years later. No one doubted that the question at issue was a momentous one. On January 21 Louisa went to the House of Representatives to hear the celebrated South Carolina orator Charles Pinckney speak on the subject. The gallery was thronged with ladies. Many in the audience, she was later told, had their eyes fixed on her in the hopes of discerning the views of her husband.
What were his views? Until that time, Adams had held two contradictory ideas in his mind—that slavery was an unmitigated evil and that the wishes of slave owners ought to be accommodated in the name of more pressing matters. The two principles appeared to exist in separate compartments of his mind. He did not doubt, for example, that England should be forced to make restitution for the slaves British officers had spirited away during the war of 1812; they were property, after all. In 1818, Castlereagh had sought to enlist maritime nations in a series of pacts to outlaw the international slave trade. The British foreign minister proposed that ship captains be permitted to board the ships of other signatories if they suspected slaves were being transported and then to seize the slaves and place them before a sort of international tribunal. So far as Adams was concerned, this was impressment by another name. In November, he had instructed Richard Rush and Albert Gallatin, ministers to England and France, to remind the British foreign minister that the United States had outlawed the slave trade in 1807, to point out that such mixed tribunals had no force under the US Constitution, and to explain that impressment was so repugnant to the American people that no such treaty could ever win confirmation in the Senate. Adams later told John Hay, President Monroe’s son-in-law, that “the right to board vessels in peace time is more destructive of human liberty than slavery”—a sentiment that even at the time would have sounded to an enemy of slavery like gross sophistry.
Adams’ constitutional view, as he freely told legislators who came to him for advice, was that Congress did not have the power to prohibit a territory in which slavery was already practiced from entering the Union as a slave state. He was prepared to live with a proposed compromise that would permit Missouri to enter as a slave state but would prohibit slavery north of 36° 30’ latitude (the southern border of Missouri). And yet Adams despised slavery and the hypocrisy that surrounded it. A few months after the letter to his ministers, Adams was approached by the Committee of the American Colonization Society to help purchase African territory that free blacks could colonize. Adams refused, for he believed that the society’s goal was not to assist free blacks but to rid America of them. (He also abhorred colonies.) He wrote bluntly that “the mass of coloured people who may be removed to Africa, by the Colonization Society, will suffer more and enjoy less than they would if they should remain in their actual Condition in the United States.”
The debate over Missouri forced Adams for the first time to acknowledge slavery as a calamitous evil that could not simply be placed in balance with other wrongs. Listening to the great Southern orators dominate the debate over Missouri, he was seized with a romantic wish to step forward and smite them with his words:
If but one man could arise with a Genius capable of comprehending, a heart capable of supporting and an utterance capable of communicating those eternal truths that belong to this question, to lay bare in all its nakedness that outrage upon the goodness of God, human Slavery, now is the time, and this is the occasion upon which such a man would perform the duties of an Angel upon Earth.
John Quincy Adams would eventually become that man, but at this moment he was still dreaming of some other champion, not himself. He was, after all, the secretary of state, not a private citizen or a member of Congress.
The debate over the admission of Missouri forced slavery out of the shadows. Southerners who until now had simply insisted that slavery was part of their distinctive way of life now felt called upon it to defend it as a positive good. Nathaniel Macon, a senator from North Carolina, spoke of the supposedly deep sentimental bond between master and servant. Others found biblical justification for the practice. Southerners invoked the principle of “states’ rights” to proclaim slavery off-limits to federal intervention. The crisis over Missouri drew together the disparate slave states and showed them their common cause. Because the issue ultimately would be papered over, the Monroe presidency continued to feel like an interval of consensus and has continued to be seen that way in the national imagination, but in fact it was an era when men began to feel that their interests clashed irreconcilably. The era of good feelings was also the seedbed of conflict.
Adams privately raged t
hat all the best speakers lay on the Southern side of the question. He felt outnumbered. The president and all the most important cabinet members save Adams—that is, Crawford, Calhoun, and Wirt—were all Southern slaveholders. This had not been a particularly salient fact; now, suddenly, it was. On March 3, Monroe called a cabinet meeting to work out the administration’s position on the admission of Missouri. All agreed that the Constitution gave the federal government the power to prohibit slavery in a territory. The state emerging from such a territory would thus enter the Union as free. But Crawford maintained that the legislature of that state could later vote to adopt slavery. Adams, who may have been looking for the opportunity to state the full measure of his views, jumped down Crawford’s throat:
I said, that whatever a State Legislature might do in point of fact, they could not by any rightful exercise of power establish Slavery. The Declaration of Independence, not only asserts the natural equality of all men, and their unalienable right to Liberty; but that the only just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed. A power for one part of the people to make Slaves of the other can never be derived from the consent, and is therefore not a just power.
Crawford accused Adams of holding the abolitionist view that slavery violated natural human rights. Adams answered that this was precisely his view. “I did not want to make a public display of it, where it might excite irritation, but if called upon officially for it, I should not withhold it.” Adams had stepped forward, before his colleagues, though not before the public, as many other opponents of slavery had.
As they left the White House, Adams and Calhoun fell into conversation. Calhoun may have been the one advocate of slavery whose intellectual integrity Adams would not think to question. The two had begun speaking of slavery the week before; now they resumed the discussion. Calhoun remarked that Adams’ principles were “just and noble,” but “in the Southern country, whenever they were mentioned, they were always understood as applying only to white men.” Calhoun continued in this vein as they walked down Pennsylvania Avenue. That evening, or perhaps the next morning, Adams mused on the fact that a man as gifted as Calhoun could sincerely hold such repellent and, to Adams at least, self-evidently false convictions. There was a larger truth in all this, one that had not presented itself to Adams until now. Transcribing his train of thought as it came to him, Adams wrote that the practice of slavery “taints the very sources of moral principle. . . . It perverts human reason, and reduces men endowed with logical powers to maintain that Slavery is sanctioned by the Christian religion. . . . The impression produced upon my mind by the progress of this discussion is that the bargain between Freedom and Slavery contained in the Constitution of the United States is morally and politically vicious.”
He had said it. Adams had long comforted himself with the fact that slavery, whatever its evils, had been enshrined in the Constitution, which he revered as the secular equivalent of Holy Writ. But now he saw that he had no right to that comfort. The constitutional bargain was morally intolerable. Henry Clay had brokered a deal in which Maine would be admitted as a free state at the same time as Missouri came in as a slave state; henceforth Clay would be known as the Great Compromiser. Adams began to wonder if this jerry-built solution was a futile effort to postpone the inevitable. With the intellectual honesty that was second nature to him, Adams followed the thought where it led him. Perhaps the era of compromise should have ended with Missouri, producing instead “a new Union of thirteen or fourteen States, unpolluted with Slavery, with a great and glorious object to effect: namely that of rallying to their Standard, the other states, by the universal emancipation of their Slaves.”
This was an astonishing conclusion for a man who had been raised from the earliest moments of consciousness to regard Union as the supreme good, who had devoted his career as a diplomat and a politician to defending the integrity of the United States against foreign and domestic threats. Adams was a Burkean conservative who feared and abhorred revolutionary upheaval. Yet he had reasoned himself into a position that was too honest to reason himself out of. And perhaps he had also glimpsed in the abolition of slavery the great cause that he, who had been born too late to fight and had once accepted that his generation should resign itself to placing the laurel on the heads of those who had come before, could embrace with the will to heroism and self-sacrifice that had always lain so deep in his soul.
Adams could not get this gorgeous nightmare vision out of his head. In November 1820, the Missouri question rose again when the state legislature voted to ban free men of color from the state. The measure outraged Adams; he saw it as a provocation not only to the free states but to the very cause of human freedom. On November 29, Henry Baldwin, a member of Congress from Pennsylvania, paid Adams a visit at home, and when he asked about the new measure, all the thoughts, the feelings, and the immense premonitions brewing inside Adams came boiling out in a great torrent. And now, for the first time, Adams seemed to actually feel the injustice of slavery—and more remarkably, of racism—from the point of view of its victims. Speaking of the new clause of the Missouri constitution, he wrote in his diary:
If acquiesced in, it would change the terms of the federal compact. Change its terms by robbing thousands of Citizens of their rights. And what Citizens—the poor the unfortunate—the helpless. Already cursed by the mere colour of their skin—already doomed by their complection to drudge in the lowest offices of Society, excluded by their colour from all the refined enjoyments of life, accessible to others, excluded from the benefits of a liberal education; from the bed, from the table, and from all the social comforts of domestic life, this barbarous Article deprives them of the little remnant of right yet left them—their rights as citizens and as men. Weak and defenceless as they are, so much the more sacred is the obligation of the Legislatures of the States to which they belong to defend their lawful rights. And I would defend them should the dissolution of the Union be the consequence. For it would not be the defence, it would be the violation of their rights to which all the consequences would be imputable; and if the dissolution of the Union must come, let it come from no other cause but this. If Slavery be the destined Sword in the hand of the destroying angel, which is to sever the ties of this Union, the same sword will cut in sunder the bonds of Slavery itself. A dissolution of the Union for the cause of Slavery would be followed by a servile war in the Slave-holding States, combined with a War between the two severed portions of the Union. It seems to me that its result must be the extirpation of Slavery from this whole Continent, and calamitous and desolating as this course of Events in its progress must be, so glorious would be its final issue that as God shall judge me I dare not say that it is not to be desired.
It would be fifteen years before Adams would return to this elemental tragedy, to the worm of corruption in the American foundation. Thereafter, it would guide his life to the very end.
CHAPTER 18
She Goes Not Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy
(1820–1822)
IN THE FALL OF 1819, JOHN QUINCY ADAMS GOT A NEW OFFICE. The year before, Congress had authorized funds for the construction of two new government buildings flanking the White House. Both were 157 feet long, built of brick, with two stories and an attic with dormer windows. The neoclassical façade of the Northeast Executive Building, where the State Department was lodged, featured a portico with six columns leading down to a broad staircase. The department occupied eleven of the fifteen rooms on the second floor and six more in the attic. Adams had an office in the southeast corner of the building. Down the hall, looking out over the portico, was a fine library three times the size of the other offices. Adams and his staff were far more comfortably housed than they had been in the cramped quarters on Seventeenth Street, which they had shared with the Departments of War and the Navy. At the same time, the State Department still consisted of six clerks and two messengers, which made it a modest institution compared to the foreign ministry of any of th
e major European states.
Such a scale of operations, though vexing to Adams, was properly proportioned to the nation’s ambitions. The diplomacy of Europe was a diplomacy of war and the defense against war; this had been the reality of European life for centuries. The United States was protected from the other great world powers by an ocean; England and Spain, the colonial powers that hemmed in the United States to the north, the west, and the south, posed no threat. The goal of American statesmen from the time of Washington was to maintain peaceable relations with Europe while expanding America’s borders at home in order to accommodate a growing and restless population. It was the formula for national greatness. And over the course of his tenure as secretary of state, through policy and public speech, Adams would chart a path of aggressive expansion at home and cautious restraint abroad. He and Monroe were broadly in agreement. Nevertheless, Adams had to fight on both fronts. In the end, American foreign policy came to look very much like Adams’ own worldview.
Adams believed that he had resolved America’s greatest outstanding territorial dispute to the singular advantage of his own country. But his celebration had been premature. Onis had returned to Madrid with the signed treaty and discovered, just as he had feared, that the king’s counselors in the Cortes Generale (the parliament) could find nothing in the treaty to preserve Spain’s sacred honor. They advised the king not to sign, and Ferdinand, despite having pledged his “faith and word” to ratify the treaty, gave in to his counselors. Instead, he dispatched a new minister to replace Onis and to seek “clarifications”—that is, revisions—in the text. Monroe must have felt that he should have reined in his remorseless secretary of state when he had the chance.