by James Traub
Clay returned to Kentucky in the spring of 1821 and continued his attacks on the Monroe administration and on Adams. He called for America to support the South American patriots “by all means short of war.” And then he made the remarkable suggestion that the United States join with the new republics in “a sort of counterpoise to the Holy Alliance.” The alliance was a pact Tsar Alexander had signed with the kings of Prussia and Austria to defend the principle of absolute monarchy against the rising tide of republicanism. Clay was proposing a Republican Alliance, which would, presumably, commit the United States to the defense of independent South America—quite possibly from the forces of the Holy Alliance.
Adams was eager to answer Clay, as well as all the others he felt had been carping at the Monroe administration and at him personally. The British press had recently been filled with articles jeering at America’s second-class status in the arts and sciences. And for all his own inveterate hostility to England, Adams himself was regularly attacked as an English lapdog and closet monarchist—just like his father, or so the claim went. As secretary of state, however, he felt that he could not personally respond to public criticism, much less from a potential political rival. Then the perfect opportunity presented itself when he was asked to deliver the annual July 4 oration in Washington, at the Capitol, a ritual event every diplomat, senior government official, and journalist in Washington felt obliged to attend.
In order to satisfy his own conscience as to the proprieties, Adams hit on the rather bizarre expedient of delivering the address in his Harvard gown. He would be speaking as a private citizen—or at least he could claim that he was. Independence Day addresses tended to be formulaic: the speaker spoke reverently of the Declaration of Independence, paid tribute to the sacrifices of the founders, predicted a glorious future for this mighty stripling of a nation. As an aspiring public figure of twenty-five, Adams had delivered in Boston precisely such a talk, replete with the purple prose considered obligatory for the occasion: “Seventeen times has the sun, in the progress of his annual revolutions, diffused his prolific radiance over the plains of Independent America.” The address had received no more attention than it deserved. But this time Adams would use the address as a pretext to deliver a major statement of personal philosophy as well as a high-minded demonstration of his suitability to serve as America’s next president.
Adams began with what appeared to be a gratuitous attack on England—red meat for his American audience. King George III, he said, had done everything in his power to trample the spirit of liberty that had arisen among the colonists, above all through the “public robbery” of taxation without representation. He compared the revolution to the story of David and Goliath. Adams insisted that he was speaking of years long past and sought “to rekindle no angry passion from its embers.” But that wasn’t what his listeners heard. Pierre de Poletica, the Russian minister, who had stayed away from a premonition of the speech’s likely contents, described it to his foreign minister as “from one end to another . . . a violent diatribe against England.” This was so widely remarked on that in the ensuing weeks Adams weakly explained to his correspondents that he could hardly have described England’s behavior toward the Colonies in any other fashion.
Adams then moved on to a topic that may never before have been broached in an Independence Day oration. Standing before Congress in his Harvard robes, Adams observed, “How absurd and impracticable is that form of polity in which the dispenser of justice is in one quarter of the globe, and to whom justice is to be dispensed is in another.” Colonialism, that is, was intrinsically unsustainable. Adams went on to explain why this was so. Each individual is bound to his country by a “chain of sympathy” arising from his domestic life, his community, and his friendships, but also from “the instinctive and mysterious connection between man and physical nature,” so that all our emotions and memories are linked with “the spot of our nativity.” This being so, no self-respecting individual will accept the legitimacy of a remote sovereign; nor could such a sovereign begin to understand the people over whom he ruled. Adams mentioned neither Spain nor South America, but no one could mistake his meaning. He was aligning himself with Clay and the other champions of the South American cause, though with none of their romanticism about the kinship between the United States and the republicans of the South.
In the typical July 4 oration, the speaker read the Declaration of Independence and then appended some remarks of his own. Everything Adams had said up to this point constituted a kind of preface, for only now did he read the Declaration. And then, in a Shakespearean apostrophe, he summoned Jefferson’s great work as “a beacon on the summit of the mountain, to which all the inhabitants of the earth may turn their eyes for a genial and saving light, till time shall be lost in eternity, and this globe itself dissolve, nor leave a wreck behind.” The British press, he observed, had recently taken to running articles on the theme, “What has America done for mankind?” Adams provided the answer to this impertinent question: it had “proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government,” which was of course popular sovereignty. The Declaration had thus “demolished at a stroke the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest.” All governments—the Declaration was a universal doctrine that had completed the evolution of human disenthrallment, begun with the Magna Carta and left only “partially” achieved in England. That was what America had done for mankind.
And now, in his peroration, Adams turned—figuratively—to face Henry Clay and all the others thumping the tub for intervention on behalf of those same principles Adams had just delineated. America, he observed, “has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. . . . She goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Should she involve herself in foreign wars and intrigue, Adams warned, “the fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. . . . She might become the dictatress of the world; she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.”
Adams was, in effect, reclaiming patriotism from the passionate advocates of the South American cause. By placing his call for a policy of noninterference at the very end of a long speech celebrating America’s commitment to liberty and human rights, he was rebutting the claim that America could only fulfill its destiny by promoting liberty abroad as it had established it at home. Adams did not disagree with Clay and others about the universal applicability of the principles on which America had been founded. But he cared far more about the effect of American policy on Americans than on the people of Colombia or Mexico, and he believed that America would only harm itself by actively promoting republican principles abroad. Clay had bid America form a Holy Alliance of its own to advance republicanism; Adams believed that in the very act of doing so America would become a different kind of country—more like one of the states that made up the Alliance itself. Adams had laid out a program whose supreme goal was to preserve American values and extend American power.
Clay had a better feel for the American people than Adams did, and his idealistic views almost certainly had more political appeal than did Adams’ austere doctrine of restraint. Americans felt a deep sympathy for republican insurgents abroad, whether in South America or in Greece. Americans resonated then, as they do now, to appeals to rally to the cause of freedom. Perhaps this is why Adams had gone to such lengths to make his call for prudence feel like the fulfillment, rather than the denial, of the deepest American ideals. But he believed that a true statesman was obliged to ignore, even to defy, public opinion, as he had so many times in the past.
These were the most famous words John Quincy Adams every spoke. George Kennan, the diplomat-scholar who shaped the Cold War policy known as “containment,” was fond of citing Adams�
� dictum about foreign monsters in the face of calls for American intervention. Advocates of foreign policy “realism,” who call for a policy based on America’s national security interests rather than its moral principles, often point to this passage as a kind of founding text. They acknowledge that Americans prefer leaders like Woodrow Wilson or John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan who summon them to great global commitments; “realism” is too chastened a doctrine—perhaps too selfish a doctrine—for a nation of idealists. Adams is the fountainhead of realism not only because he distinguished so sharply between American interests and universal goods, but because he expressed such deep skepticism about America’s capacity to do good abroad. Those who now caution against “humanitarian intervention” or regime change or even democracy promotion have good reason to cite his words. He was, after all, the same man who had warned in his address at Plymouth against founding government upon “too advantageous an estimate of the human character.”
All true; and yet Adams does not quite belong in their company. Today’s realists often remind us that America has no monopoly on truth, that all nations claim to be exceptional, that we are all too prone to hubris. It is thus not only prudent but seemly that we keep our values to ourselves, however much we cherish them, and focus instead on the play of interests that bind states and pit them against one another. Adams would have considered this view a travesty: not for a moment did he doubt the moral superiority of America and of its republican system. The intellectual core of his Independence Day address was not the words we remember today, which came at the very end, but rather—as he insisted later to one of his correspondents—the crucial distinction he made between freedom as a donation or grant from a sovereign and freedom as an act of mutual acknowledgment among equals. This was America’s great gift to mankind—a gift the American well-wisher hoped to see spread across the globe. Adams closed his address by invoking the “Spirit” of the Declaration. If it could come down to us from its “habitation in the skies,” Adams cried, it would “address each one of us, here assembled, Britannia ruler of the waves, and every individual among the sceptred lords of humankind; his words would be, ‘Go thou and do likewise!’”
WHEN ADAMS RETURNED TO WASHINGTON IN THE EARLY FALL OF 1821, he was confronted with a familiar problem: Andrew Jackson. President Monroe had appointed Jackson as governor of Florida despite the latter’s record of ignoring instructions from Washington and demolishing every obstacle in his path. Jackson had immediately begun doing what he seemed almost genetically programmed to do—take control. He gave orders to the military commander (though he himself no longer held military rank), threw one of the remaining Spanish officials in jail, and then defied a writ of habeas corpus issued by the territory’s chief judge. Jackson thus managed in short order to precipitate a constitutional crisis that the Monroe cabinet had to resolve. What is instructive about those deliberations, given the enmity that later grew up between the sixth and seventh presidents, is that Adams sprang to Jackson’s defense, as he had four years earlier. Monroe ultimately decided to relieve Jackson of his position but at the same time to publicly thank him for his service in the most laudatory possible terms. Adams heartily approved. “Gen. Jackson has rendered such services to this nation,” he wrote in his journal, “that it was impossible for me to contemplate his character or conduct without veneration.”
The issue of South America resolved itself as well. By early 1822, the United States no longer had to worry about Spanish reaction to American recognition of the republics. Mutinying troops had seized power from the autocratic King Ferdinand VII, establishing a republican government while he remained formally on the throne. In March the president sent a message to Congress recognizing the United Provinces, Colombia, Chile, and Mexico. Monroe appointed ministers, and in the spring of 1823 Adams wrote instructions to them. Adams always viewed the writing of diplomatic instructions as the most important aspect of his job, and these documents are rich with political insight, detailed historical background, curious digression. Adams’ letter to Richard C. Anderson, the minister to Colombia, opened with a passionate denunciation of Spanish colonial practices, which Monroe struck out, as he did also a passage in which Adams explained that the South American revolutions bore no comparison to those of the United States, since “there was no spirit of freedom pervading any portion of that population, no common principle of reason to form an union of mind.” Unlike many of his colleagues, Adams made a sharp distinction in his mind between a people’s right to self-government and their capacity to govern themselves democratically. In this respect, too, he was a “realist” long before the term gained currency.
The documents also show that Adams was as preoccupied with economic as with political diplomacy. The vision of national greatness he entertained depended on promoting free trade among nations, for with its merchant fleet, raw materials, and nascent manufacturing capacity, America was bound to be a great exporting nation. Adams had sought to lower tariffs with both England and France. He reminded Anderson that the United States had always cherished the principle of perfect reciprocity between nations, but he added that “a still more expansive liberality” allowed the foreigner to trade on the exact same footing as the citizen. “It is the nature of commerce, when unobstructed by the interference of authority,” Adams added in the spirit of instruction, “to find its own channels and to make its own way. Let us not undertake to regulate that which will best regulate itself.”
The attack on Great Britain with which Adams had begun his July 4 oration was hardly out of character; he was quick to see signs of British bullying and to show that the United States would not be cowed even by the world’s greatest power. The new British minister, Stratford Canning, a gifted diplomat a full generation younger than the secretary of state, came often to speak with Adams and sought to cultivate a special relationship with him. The two men had much to agree on: Great Britain had refused to join the Holy Alliance and sympathized with republican aspirations in South America and in Europe. Canning came with a brief to get the Americans to sign up for the treaty abolishing the slave trade, a profoundly liberal project no other great power would have thought to originate. But every time Canning brought the subject up—which he did constantly—Adams dismissively swatted it away.
In January 1821, Canning came to Adams in a state of great agitation: a congressmen had just spoken of plans for a new settlement on the Columbia River, which Canning claimed would violate the 1818 treaty between the United States and England. Rather than simply tell the minister that congressmen didn’t make policy, Adams delivered a long, and no doubt condescending, lecture on the terms of the treaty. Canning, his deference wearing very thin, cried out, or so Adams recorded, “I am treated like a schoolboy!” The bulldog seemed intent on putting the spaniel in his place.
Canning returned the following day, and the argument resumed. Adams recapitulated it in his diary. He asked Canning if England had a claim to the mouth of the Columbia, and Canning, his temper growing, said, “Do you not know that we have a claim?
“I do not know what you claim,” Adams shot back, “nor what you do not claim. You claim India—you claim Africa—you claim—
“Perhaps a piece of the Moon,” Canning said irritably.
“No,” Adams said. “I have not heard that you claim exclusively any part of the Moon; but there is not a spot on this habitable globe, that I could affirm you do not claim.”
When Canning asked sarcastically if the United States also claimed the territory to the north, Adams said it did not. “There the boundary is marked, and we have no disposition to encroach upon it. Keep what is your’s, but leave the rest of this Continent to us.” This last was a gibe made in the heat of the moment but summed up very well Adams’ own views: the continent belonged to America save for the increasingly marginal bits where it accepted the claims of European powers.
Adams and Canning would fight over the next two years, neither making much headway with the other. Adams set down in his jo
urnal his final judgment of the British minister: “He is of all the foreign Ministers with whom I have had occasion to treat, the man who has most severely tried my temper. . . . He has however a great respect for his word; and there is nothing false about him. . . . As a diplomatic man his great want is suppleness, and his great virtue is sincerity.” It is not hard to imagine a fellow diplomat summing up Adams in similar terms. In fact, Canning’s view of Adams was equally mixed: “more commanding than attractive in personal appearance, much above par in general ability, but having the air of a scholar rather than a statesman, a very uneven temper, a disposition at times well-meaning, a manner somewhat too often domineering, and an ambition causing unsteadiness in his political career.”
CHAPTER 19
If He Wishes for Peace with Me, He Must Hold Out the White Flag
(1822–1823)
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS CAME FROM A TRADITION IN WHICH ONE “stood for” rather than “ran for” office. To actively seek an elective office was to demonstrate your unfitness for it. It was widely assumed that Adams wanted to be president, just as it was widely assumed that William Crawford and Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun wanted to be president. But Adams never said so, either to the public or even to his close friends. Would-be supporters began to approach Adams about his plans even before Monroe won reelection in 1820, and he gave them all the same answer: “The principle of my life had never been to ask the suffrage of my country, and never to shrink from its call.” He would, that is, accept a call to the highest office in the land, just as he had done with more modest offices. This doctrine was admirably suited to the era of George Washington and, in fact, to the person of George Washington.