John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  ADAMS RETURNED TO WASHINGTON FROM HIS GENEALOGICAL researches in Quincy in the middle of October. Fortunately for posterity, he resumed writing full diary entries on November 7, when Monroe convened the first of a series of almost nonstop cabinet meetings that would lead to the drafting of the Monroe Doctrine. The first order of business was to respond to a startling offer from George Canning, Stratford’s brother and England’s bold and brilliant new foreign secretary. That summer, Canning had asked Richard Rush, the American minister in London, to issue a joint statement with Great Britain opposing French ambitions to invade South America and restore colonial control. Rush prudently asked Canning if his government had decided to recognize the new nations, as the United States, alone so far, had done. Canning conceded that it had not. In a subsequent conversation, Canning asked Rush to sign a statement declaring that Spain could not expect to recover the former colonies and that the United States and England would not permit them to be “transferred to any other power” and “aim not at the possession of any portion of them ourselves.” A less cautious diplomat might have jumped at the offer. However, Canning continued to leave recognition of the republics to “time and circumstances.” One again, Rush demurred. His letter to Adams describing the negotiations had arrived two days before the cabinet meeting.

  The Monroe administration had another important document to consider as well: on October 16 Baron de Tuyll had delivered to Adams a formal note stating unequivocally that the tsar would not receive any ambassador from the South American republics and thus would not acknowledge their legitimacy. This sounded very much like a shot across the bow from the Holy Alliance, perhaps even a token of its willingness to retake the colonies by force. Of course this increased the attractiveness of Canning’s offer.

  The cabinet meeting of November 7, and the meetings that followed, revolved around these two missives. What we know about them today comes largely from Adams’ contemporaneous record, which means that inevitably we see the debates through his eyes. Calhoun, Adams wrote, immediately embraced Canning’s suggestion; Adams did not. He was not prepared to forego the possibility that Cuba could choose to voluntarily accede to the United States. He considered the proposal unnecessary as well as unseemly. He couldn’t tolerate the implicit show of deference to Great Britain. Why not, he asked, respond to both letters with a single statement? “It would be more candid as well as more dignified,” he said, “to avow our principles explicitly to Russia and France, than to come in as a Cock-boat in the wake of the British man of War.”

  The convergence of events inspired a thought in Adams, and he expressed it to Monroe after the cabinet meeting broke up. The response to Tuyll and to Rush, as well as the instructions to be sent to Middleton in Russia for territorial negotiations, “must all,” he suggested, “be part of a combined system of policy and adapted to each other.” Monroe had been considering doing just that; both he and Jefferson had written in the past of the need for a coherent doctrine of American interests. Clay, of course, had articulated his “American system.” The idea was in the air: America needed a new public statement of principle to supersede the Farewell Address.

  Over the following week, Adams worked up a draft of remarks to be made to Tuyll, which the president read and edited. On November 12, Monroe came to Adams’ office to ask for notes for his annual message to Congress, which he had begun preparing. Monroe had been alarmed to learn that the French army had taken Cadiz, the last bastion of the Spanish republicans. This had redoubled his fears over the Alliance’s designs on South America and thus made Canning’s proposal yet more appealing. He had sent Rush’s letter to Jefferson and Madison and received unequivocal responses from them. Jefferson wrote that “the question presented by your letter is the most momentous which has ever been offered to my contemplation since that of Independence.”

  Beneath this typical Jeffersonian hyperbole was the recognition that the British offer constituted the kind of “entangling alliance” both he and George Washington had warned against. If anything, Jefferson went on, the interests that separated the new world from the old had grown yet more distinct as Europe had largely surrendered to despotism. Nevertheless, he wrote, the United States had more to fear from Great Britain, the world’s great naval and trading power, than from any other nation, and with that country on its side the United States really could bid defiance to the world. The former president added, in an expression either Adams or Clay could have written themselves, that the United States must insist on an “American system” that excluded “all foreign powers” from “our land.”

  The cabinet convened again at 1 pm on the fifteenth. Adams found that the president had been ginned up to a state of high anxiety over the fall of Cadiz by Calhoun, who had been “perfectly Moon-struck” by the report and was already envisioning an army of the Holy Alliance crossing the ocean to reconquer the former colonies. Once again Adams tried to bring the collective temperature down with a reminder that, having successfully won their independence, the colonies were scarcely as helpless as some might think. Calhoun strongly favored giving at least a qualified assent to Canning’s proposal; Monroe appeared to be taking his side, though the president, as was so often the case, hovered between competing views.

  On the seventeenth Adams received another visit from Baron de Tuyll, who had several official documents from his foreign minister he needed to read to the secretary of state. In one of them, the tsar celebrated the Alliance’s success in restoring King Ferdinand to the Spanish throne and putting down republicanism in Naples and elsewhere. Alexander reaffirmed his policy of “guaranteeing the tranquility of all the states of which the civilized world is composed.” Adams had no trouble decoding the message and immediately asked the baron if Russia was supporting Spain’s continued sovereignty over the colonies. It did, said the Russian minister. Adams interpreted the tsar’s proclamation as an “‘Io Triomphe’ over the fallen cause of revolution, with sturdy promises to keep it down.”

  The following day Adams brought the dispatches from Tuyll to the White House. Calhoun was there, more certain than ever that the Alliance posed a mortal threat and the United States needed to ally with England in case of attack. Adams remained just as certain that it need do no such thing. The president still couldn’t make up his mind. The cabinet met once again on the twenty-first without reaching a conclusion. Adams now told the others of the tsar’s aggressive policy. The secretary suggested that the administration respond with a verbal declaration of its own. The message, he said, should assert the principles “upon which our own Government is founded; and while disclaiming all intention of attempting to propagate them by force and all interference with the political affairs of Europe, to declare our expectation and hope that the European powers will equally abstain from the attempt to spread their principles in the American Hemispheres or to subjugate by force any part of these Continents to their will.” Even as he was helping Monroe draft his address to Congress, Adams was seeking to formulate a statement of principles that would respond all at once to England, France, and Russia. He wanted policy to proceed from principle, and those principles, of course, should be his. Monroe endorsed the idea.

  The president then read a rough version of his message to Congress. Adams found that Monroe was largely hewing to the notes he had prepared—until he came to the French invasion of Spain, which he proposed to sharply rebuke. He also affirmed America’s support for Greek independence and proposed sending a minister there. Calhoun agreed on both counts. Adams differed, embarking on a lengthy monologue in which he warned his colleagues that such a message would be heard abroad as “a summons to arms . . . against all Europe; and for objects of policy exclusively European.” The secretary said that he would not be surprised if Spain, France, and even Russia would respond by breaking off diplomatic relations with the United States. Adams may well have been exaggerating for effect; he was plainly trying to craft a statement by the president that would bluntly avow America’s ambitions on its own conti
nent while forswearing any abroad, just as he wished to do in his own statement to Tuyll.

  The argument continued to rage. Monroe and Calhoun insisted that French aggression against Spain was of a sort unprecedented in recent history and could not go unmentioned. Monroe pulled out what he must have felt was a trump card: a letter from George W. Erving, the minister to Spain, warning that the Alliance would support Spain, by arms if necessary, in the campaign to retake the former colonies. Adams did not blink: Erving, he said, knew no more than the rest of them did and was simply airing his prejudices. Finally, the president said that he would draw up two different messages and submit them to the cabinet. (These drafts, alas, seem to have disappeared.)

  Adams was leaving nothing to chance. The following day he pressed his case with Monroe in private, openly addressing the president’s own legacy and thus perhaps appealing to his vanity. The era now concluding, he said—the Era of Good Feelings—would be “looked back to as the golden age of this Republic”; it must end in peace, as it began. Adams repeated his formula: no interference by Europe in South America in exchange for no interference by the United States in exclusively European affairs. The president, he said, could mention Greece and Spain, but not in a way which the Alliance would deem hostile. And he shrewdly offered the president a secure exit: let Congress declare its adherence to the Greek cause. Foreign governments could shrug off such a resolution, as they could not do with a statement from the executive. That course would also still the endless clamor from Henry Clay. Two days later, Monroe read Adams the proposed passages from his message on all the sensitive subjects. “I was highly gratified, at the change,” Adams wrote, “and only hope the President will adhere to his present views.”

  The cabinet convened again on the twenty-fifth, and Adams explained his proposed statement to Tuyll. Calhoun objected, and suggested that Adams just read Tuyll the relevant paragraph from the president’s address. Adams would have none of it; in the face of explicit anti-republicanism America must plead its cause “before the world of Mankind.” In any case, he said, he knew Alexander well enough to predict that his good will toward America would survive any such declaration. The following day the president sent Adams an edited version of the verbal note with the entire paragraph enunciating general principles struck out. Usually Adams placidly accepted the president’s cautionary editorial handiwork even when he disagreed with the substance. In this case, he could not, and he went to Monroe to say that the whole response to Tuyll rested on the foundation of republicanism and thus on the difference between the American and European systems. Adams apologized for his stubbornness by saying that he considered the note “the most important paper that ever went from my hands.” Monroe, who could hardly have been surprised by this show of obstinacy, asked Adams for his original draft.

  At three o’clock on the twenty-seventh, when the baron came by appointment to his office, Adams still hadn’t received an answer from Monroe. A messenger from the White House arrived with a note from the president saying that while he still found the paragraph unduly harsh, he did not want to stand in Adams’ way. The secretary, duly mollified, delivered the verbal note without the offending passage. Adams told Tuyll that the United States accepted the right of states to establish and modify their own governments as they wish, whether in monarchical or republican form. Washington had recognized the South American states not as an act of republican or anti-colonial sympathy but as the simple acknowledgment of their independence from Spain. The United States continued to observe neutrality among nations and had no intention to meddle in the affairs of Europe. It trusted other states would observe like principles. In the recent Russian declaration, Adams blandly asserted, “the President wishes to perceive sentiments, the application of which is limited . . . to the affairs of Europe.” Leave the rest to us. Even without his grandiose statement of principles, Adams had largely codified his own principles as fundamental US policy.

  In his address to Congress, Monroe adopted Adams’ positions on all the questions on which the two had differed or where Adams held more decisive views. In the course of the tour d’horizon of foreign relations with which the document began, Monroe noted that the United States had asserted a new principle in its boundary negotiations with Russia: “that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” Monroe then turned to the domestic state of affairs. After that, rather than concluding the address, he turned back to foreign relations in order to explicitly delineate the new “system” he and his cabinet had been brewing.

  Monroe began by speaking of Greece in just the manner Adams had advised, asserting that the cause of its independence “is the object of our most ardent wishes” without making any commitment to help bring that about. Similarly, the president lamented the overthrow of republican governments in Spain and Portugal without mentioning France or the Alliance. “Of events in that quarter of the globe,” he went on in a phrase that echoed Adams’ July 4 speech, “we have always been anxious and interested spectators.” Monroe then made the distinction between Europe and South America that Adams had adduced in his note to Tuyll and that Monroe, Jefferson, and others had long considered essential: “In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never take any part, nor does it comport with our policy to do so. . . . With the movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected.”

  The president then proceeded to the heart of the doctrine he and his colleagues had decided to state before the world. “The political system of the allied powers is essentially different in this respect from that of America. . . . We owe it therefore to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.” Monroe was not simply asserting the United States’ special protective relationship with other nations in its hemisphere; he was stating that in the clash of world systems, the new world was inviolably committed to republicanism, and the United States would not permit that commitment to be jeopardized. The Holy Alliance had flung down an ideological gauntlet; the United States had picked it up. The United States would express its views about the Alliance’s absolutist project in Europe but remain only a “spectator”; in the Americas, however, it would insist on its own republican project. It was an extraordinarily brash declaration for a young nation with little navy, no army, a modest population, and a still infant economy.

  The United States was now prepared to defend not only itself but “America”—that is, the Americas—from foreign interference. Monroe went on to say that while the United States would respect existing colonies in the hemisphere, it had recognized the independence of the South American republics; therefore, “we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any light other than the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United States.” The last debate the cabinet had held over the address had been over this very question: Should the United States commit to enforcing its prohibition with arms? William Wirt had taken the negative, on the grounds that the American people had no appetite for war to defend remote nations. Adams had argued otherwise, though he said that any such resolution should come from Congress. Monroe had come to the very edge of declaring intervention a casus belli but had not used the words.

  WHO DESERVES CREDIT FOR THE MONROE DOCTRINE? ADAMS’ biographers tend to give much of the credit to Adams, while Monroe’s give it to Monroe. Dexter Perkins, a leading historian of the period, has argued that it was Monroe who decided to include the South American question in his annual message and wrote the actual words, while Adams played the lesser role of the president’s “effective counselor and co-worker.” But the doctrine’s power, he
concludes, “lies in the fact that it expressed what many men, great and humble, had thought, were thinking then, and were to think in the future.” Monroe, that is, formalized a growing national consensus, as Washington had before him.

  And yet that consensus operated only at a high level of generality. The noncolonization principle had not been in general circulation; that was Adams’ handiwork. The idea of the reciprocal bargain—no interference in Europe in exchange for none in South America—was not Adams’ alone, but it was one he had advanced for years. Jefferson, Monroe, and many others had envisioned a global clash of republicanism and absolutism, and the president would have spoken of it even without his secretary of state’s contribution.

  What Adams may have contributed most of all to the Monroe Doctrine was its astringency. Left to his own devices, Monroe would have offered a more idealistic vision of the American role as a force for the global advancement of republicanism. Adams blunted that with his dogged insistence that American policy serve American interests. Monroe’s view, or Calhoun’s—or, for that matter, Clay’s—would have been more thoroughly in the American grain, more gratifying to the American self-image. Adams stirred his brand of vinegar into the mix.

  Like Washington’s Farewell Address, Monroe’s message to Congress was not intended to alter existing American policy. It was, rather, a statement to the American people, and to others abroad, about America’s understanding of its place in the world. It marked an end to the fundamental defensiveness of Washington’s message. Most obviously, Monroe had asserted that the United States now had a “sphere of interest” that included all of South America. But Monroe also gave a new political meaning to that interest, which henceforward would include the protection and propagation of the great experiment in republican government that had begun on American shores half a century earlier. The Monroe Doctrine offered a warning to the world about the growing ambitions of a rapidly rising power wrapped around an ideological conviction about the sanctity of its system. This distinctive combination of raw assertion of power with a missionary sense of global purpose was to become the animating spirit of American foreign policy—to the world’s eternal fascination and, often, dismay.