John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  Some of Adams’ friends had approached friends of Jackson to propose an Adams-Jackson alliance, with Calhoun as secretary of state or treasury (assuming that a President Adams sacked Crawford, the incumbent). In early April, Adams asked William Plumer Jr., the son and successor of the former New Hampshire senator, to approach Representative John W. Taylor of New York and Senator Horatio Seymour of Vermont, and together sound out Jackson’s friends on the question. But a week later Adams told Taylor that Jackson’s star was rising so rapidly that Taylor should hold off and “let the thing take its course.”

  Adams increasingly found that he needed to offer reassurances not only about his views, which was second nature to him, but about his willingness to find a place for men whose support he needed, which was precisely what his “Macbeth Policy” had sworn him not to do. He did not, he told visitors, favor Calhoun for vice president, but he could easily see him in his cabinet. What of DeWitt Clinton, the former governor of New York and a pivotal figure in that state? Adams reminded Representative Taylor that he had been sounded out on the subject before and had said that he could imagine Clinton in his cabinet, though he had forbidden his friends to convey such tidings to Clinton himself, and in any case he was “not disposed to sell the skin before the animal was taken.” He authorized Taylor to tell Clinton’s friend, a “Mr. Moore” of New York, that Adams had “more than once named him to the President, for nomination to important missions abroad.” Indeed, he could say of Clinton that “there was no mission for which I did not consider him qualified.” And when Moore himself paid a visit several weeks later and asked after his “sentiments with regard to Mr. Clinton,” Adams allowed that while “there had been some things in his public career I had not approved,” he “entertained a high opinion of his talents, his services, and his public spirit.”

  Adams was prepared to threaten as well as propitiate. On May 1, Joseph Reed, a Massachusetts Federalist, paid a visit. Reed said that many Federalists planned to support Crawford—no friend to their cause—out of a fear that Adams entertained such bitter feelings against them that he would appoint none of them to office. Adams rejoined that he found it ironic that the chief obstacle to his election was that Americans outside of New England viewed him as too much the Federalist, while New Englanders considered him too lukewarm in their behalf. Adams said, as he always did, that he would not be a “sectional” president. But he added pointedly that the opposition of the Federalists might actually strengthen his prospects; should he be elected, the Federalists “must be aware how much the difficulty would be increased of favoring them with appointments without disgusting those of the opposing party claiming the merit of friendly support against them.”

  Adams was divided against himself, as men like Clay and Crawford were not. He played the game of politics because he wanted to be president far more than he could ever admit to himself. He wanted it, but he did not want to want it. His internal struggle was robbing him of the sense of self-mastery he always sought but rarely found. In early May, he confided his inmost feelings to his journal, the one place where he felt safe:

  Were it possible to look with philosophical indifference to the event,

  that is the temper of mind for which I should aspire; but

  “Who can hold a fire in his hand

  By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?”

  To so suffer without feeling is not in human nature; and when I consider that to me alone, of all the candidates before the nation, failure of success would be equivalent to a vote of censure by the nation upon my past service, I cannot dissemble to myself that I have more at stake upon the result than any other individual in the Union.

  Was this even true? Crawford, who had run for president once before, could certainly say the same. But Adams felt it to be so. His parents had raised him to believe not that he could be the nation’s chief magistrate but that he should be—that he would otherwise be a failure. He had once counseled “philosophy” to Louisa. But philosophy could not cool off the red-hot coals of ambition.

  ADAMS WAS STILL SECRETARY OF STATE, THOUGH AT TIMES HE despaired of getting back to his work. In early 1824, he was still conducting negotiations, personally or through his ministers, with England, Russia, and France (this last on commercial duties). Stratford Canning had never stopped pressing Adams to join with England in stamping out the horror of the slave trade, and Adams had never stopped citing America’s resolute resistance to search and seizure on the high seas. But abolitionist sentiment was growing in the United States; in early 1823 the House had overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on the president to negotiate a treaty “for the effectual abolition of the African slave trade, and its ultimate denunciation, as piracy, under the law of nations, by the consent of the civilized world.” Suddenly the Monroe administration was standing in opposition not to America’s old colonial master but to progressive American opinion. Adams may also have recognized that the political benefit of standing up to the British was trumped by the benefit of joining the campaign against the slave trade.

  Adams ingeniously took a hint from the word “piracy.” He reasoned that states had long insisted on the right to search and seize pirate ships. If slavery was understood as a form of piracy, then boarding on the high seas need no longer carry the taint of impressment. Adams wrote out a draft of such a treaty and submitted it to the cabinet, where it promptly ran into objections from William Crawford, who may well have seen it as the thin edge of an abolitionist wedge. Adams and Monroe did a great deal of redrafting and finally came up with a document that all agreed to send to London. Further negotiations ultimately led to a treaty, signed on March 13, 1824, which largely incorporated Adams’ own language. The pact stipulated that both sides would agree to brand their citizens who engaged in the slave trade as pirates and that each would grant a reciprocal right of boarding. The captured ship was to be returned to its host nation for trial, thus correcting a feature of the original English proposal to which Adams had objected, and no crew member was to be taken—that is, impressed. Here was a tremendous diplomatic victory Adams had not at first sought or arguably deserved, as well as a signal advance in international and maritime law. In addition, the treaty would remove one of the chief remaining obstacles to harmonious relations with Great Britain.

  In early May a copy of the convention, and of a law passed in Parliament declaring slavery to be piracy, reached Washington—and caused an uproar. It was a matter both of policy and of politics, though mostly the latter, one suspects. Editorialists accused Adams and Monroe of conceding the right of search, which had so long been resisted as a fundamental issue of sovereignty. And the slaveholding faction in the Senate, and above all the Crawfordites, cried down the measure. Crawford had no intention of supplying his chief rival with a political triumph. Adams later wrote to his Massachusetts friend and confidante Timothy Fuller that Crawford had turned on him when he had spurned the Georgian’s advances to serve as his running mate, and then Crawford’s captive press—that was how Adams thought of it—had rounded on him as well.

  The Slavery Convention was the first missile. When it came to a vote, the Senate passed the treaty but struck out Article I, which allowed for the right of seizure off the American as well as the African coast. This allowed the Crawfordites to claim that they had accepted the treaty while preserving American sovereignty. But since from the British point of view the United States had just effectively exempted itself from the terms of the treaty, George Canning deemed the new version unacceptable. Adams’ work, over the better part of two years, had come to naught.

  Adams also continued with his effort to secure America’s toehold on the Pacific Coast. He had to settle existing territorial claims with both England and Russia. In the summer of 1823, he had written to Richard Rush and Henry Middleton, his ministers in London and St. Petersburg, suggesting a coordinated effort. Rush would secure from England American control of the coast up to 51 degrees of latitude, in what is now southern Canada, while Middleton
would grant Russia’s claim to the territory north of the fifty-fifth parallel but not the demand Tuyll had conveyed for exclusive Russian control of the seas and trading rights. He was happy to grant England sovereignty over the space in between; what mattered was that US merchant ships and fur traders be allowed to operate unhindered. Adams was no more willing to surrender American commercial rights on the Pacific than he or his father had on the Grand Banks of the North Atlantic coast.

  In the event, Adams did not have to fight that hard. The tsar was still well disposed to the United States and was prepared to override the interests of the Russia-America Company in order to settle the border question and preserve ownership of the portion of the continent closest to the Russian landmass. Russia’s foreign minister, Count Nesselrode, promptly agreed to Adams’ terms. He insisted only that the boundary line be marked slightly below 55 degrees. The United States would have undisputed access to the seas beyond Russian territory as well as the right to trade in unclaimed areas to the north. The convention was signed in April 1824 and easily passed the Senate. Adams’ great project of making America a continental nation had advanced another step forward.

  Negotiations with Great Britain proved rockier. George Canning had failed in his bid to bring the United States into an alliance on behalf of the South American republics and then watched as the Senate put impossible conditions on the piracy treaty, which had been the single most important issue his cousin Stratford had pursued in the United States. He may not have been in a compromising mood. Canning was vexed to find that the United States wished to claim territory north of Oregon, which Great Britain had explored and considered very much its own, and he was astonished that Adams had tried to finesse negotiations with Russia by asking England to agree that it would claim no land north of 55 degrees—a question to be adjudicated between the British and the Russians, after all. This may have been too clever by half on Adams’ part. In early 1825 England and Russia concluded a treaty that settled the boundary between themselves. At this point, neither the United States nor England felt an overwhelming need to rewrite their earlier agreement to treat the Oregon Territory as shared and unclaimed space over the course of a decade.

  AS THE SUMMER OF 1824 APPROACHED, THE ELECTION REMAINED wide open. Since no candidate enjoyed broad enough appeal to win an outright majority, the race would go to the House. With Calhoun eliminated, four men were now competing to finish in the top three. One candidate or another had already locked down most of the states with the most electoral votes, including Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Massachusetts (Jackson, Crawford, Adams). The great remaining prize was New York, where the election was left up to the state legislature. But this undemocratic and archaic method of choosing a president had provoked many of the same feelings that Crawford’s national caucus had. And Crawford was once again the beneficiary of this closed system. Since there was no earthly reason that New Yorkers would vote for a Southern slaveholder and an avowed enemy of an active federal government, Crawford would have no chance in a public ballot. But inside Albany, Martin Van Buren could see to the outcome.

  Statewide elections the previous November had brought to Albany many new legislators who favored direct elections. Thurlow Weed, a young state legislator and rival of Van Buren for the role of state kingpin, had thrown his support to Adams. Weed had never met the secretary of state and had little discernible interest in his views, but he saw Adams as a plausible rival to Crawford. Though a lad of twenty-seven, Weed was rapidly becoming Van Buren’s equal as a political engineer. In the spring, with pressure mounting on Governor Joseph C. Yates to convene a special session of the legislature to consider a change in electoral law, Weed told Yates that he had overheard a man in a barroom saying that the governor didn’t have the guts to stand up to Van Buren. Yates leapt to his feet in outrage, or so Weed delightedly recorded in an autobiography written decades later.

  Yates called for the special session, which was to convene in July. A popular ballot would doom Crawford’s hopes, though no one could be sure which of the other three it would most help. When the legislature convened, the state assembly, full of newcomers committed to reform, clamored for a vote. But Van Buren still controlled the state senate, and the senate voted to adjourn. On August 8 the legislature adjourned without taking action. Van Buren had won, and Weed had lost. But it was only the first round of a long and brutal prizefight.

  Adams traveled up to Boston in the first days of September. His father had now reached the age of ninety. “His sight is so dim that he can neither write nor read,” Adams found. Mentally, however, this remarkable old man was unimpaired. “His memory yet remains strong, his judgment is sound, and his interest in conversation considerable.” John Adams continued to dictate letters, especially to his grandchildren. The two men rode around the neighborhood, visiting the modest houses, across the street from one another, in which each had been born, a setting that evoked for both of them an eighteenth-century world purer and more noble than the one in which they now lived. General Henry Dearborn, an important political ally, came out from Boston to announce that the secretary of state was to be honored at a great dinner at Faneuil Hall. Adams politely declined, on the grounds that such an event would look like electioneering—which of course was the whole idea.

  At the end of September, Adams left Boston for Philadelphia in order to meet up with General Lafayette, the great French hero of the American Revolution and a friend of Adams for almost forty years. Lafayette was making a farewell tour of the nation he had done so much to help bring into being. Adams stayed by Lafayette’s side as he took in the local sights and attended festivities in his honor, and traveled with this revered figure through Maryland and Delaware on their way to the nation’s capital. Adams did not think that he was campaigning, but his close association with Lafayette served to remind voters of Adams’ own patriotic lineage, his unique status as a son of the founding fathers. Adams reached Washington in mid-October. The twenty-four states of the Union were poised to begin choosing a president.

  CHAPTER 22

  I Tread on Coals

  (1824–1825)

  THE MOST IMPORTANT JOBS JOHN QUINCY ADAMS HAD EVER held were ones to which he had been appointed by a president—minister to the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia, and England; chief negotiator at Ghent; secretary of state. Of course he had sought electoral positions, but he had not shown much of a gift for attracting voters. He had lost his very first contest, for state assemblyman, and had been recalled as a US senator by a state legislature outraged at his stubborn independence. He did not like appealing to voters, did not believe he should have to, and was not good at it. And now he was living with the consequences. As a son of the Founding Fathers, a diplomat who had brought a successful conclusion to the War of 1812, a secretary of state who had negotiated treaties that had immensely expanded American territory, and a supremely seasoned figure with a firm grasp on every issue that faced the nation, Adams should have enjoyed a powerful claim on the presidency. But as the states began voting, by their own system and according to their own calendar, Adams could say nothing more than that he and Andrew Jackson would make it into the final round in the House.

  The New York legislature convened in Albany on November 2. Everyone understood that the senate would choose Crawford, but the assembly was up for grabs. If the lower house chose a different candidate, both would have to convene for a joint selection—a kind of miniature version of the chaos lurking ahead in the House of Representatives. Thurlow Weed had been crisscrossing the state keeping tabs on his assembly colleagues on Adams’ behalf. By the time the assembly convened, Weed knew exactly how many supporters each candidate could count on. He had, he believed, sniffed out a plot by his archrival, Van Buren, to bribe Adams supporters to cross over to Crawford. He had grown suspicious of one Adamsite, followed him to New York City, concluded that he was a traitor to the cause, and had him threatened with exposure.

  Weed was a cheerful rapscallion. He had grown up on a small
farm in upstate New York, begun supporting himself at age eight, joined the army as a teenager during the War of 1812, and then started working as a newspaper apprentice. He had his own newspaper by the time he was twenty-one. He ran for the state assembly in 1823 and won. New York state politics was already intensely factionalized and both nurtured and attracted a new kind of man—“the placatory professional politician,” as the historian Richard Hofstadter put it, “whose leadership comes in large part out of his taste for political association, his liking for people, and his sportsman-like ability to experience political conflict without taking it as grounds for political rancor.” That was Van Buren, and Thurlow Weed, to a fare-thee-well. Weed was everything John Quincy Adams was not and could not abide. But Adams depended on this upstart’s ingenious machinations.

  Crawford quickly won a majority in the state senate, but the assembly was divided among Crawford, Clay, and Adams supporters. Every night the Crawfordites adjourned for a secret meeting. Since they couldn’t win in the lower house, they could resolve the issue only by switching their votes to one of the other candidates and then prevailing in joint session. “The air was full of rumor of bargains, plots and counterplots,” a Crawford man recalled decades later. Van Buren finally decided that it was safer to go with Adams, and on November 13, eleven days into the balloting process, the Crawford men swung to him.

  One of those counterplots, meanwhile, was hatching in the calculating mind of Thurlow Weed. Van Buren had promised to produce a ticket with a number of Clay’s supporters, so that New York would divide its electoral vote between the two. But Clay’s boosters were convinced that the Crawfordites in the assembly had gone with Adams. On Saturday night, the fourteenth, Weed brought Adams and Clay supporters together to propose an audacious move: rather than let the legislature fight over the two competing tickets, he would secretly print up a single joint ticket with thirty Adams electors and six men formally committed to Crawford but known to be Clay supporters. He promised the Clay faction that they would emerge with seven of New York’s votes, then thought to be enough to put Clay into the final three in the House.