John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  In the days before the scheduled vote, half the states seemed to be in flux—New York, Virginia, Maryland, Connecticut. Adams’ life was a whirlwind, though he did find time to take in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s School for Scandal—“Cooper as Charles Surface, Mr. and Mrs. Barnes as Sir Peter and Lady Teazle.” He attended a cabinet meeting at which he found that Crawford was so disabled that he could neither read nor write. Louisa’s regular Tuesday party on the night of the eighth was more crowded than ever—at least four hundred people, and many congressmen. It is unlikely that John Quincy Adams, always a troubled sleeper, got much sleep that night.

  Political enthusiasts began pouring into the nation’s capital. The runoff was expected to be political theatre of the highest order. Expert opinion held that no candidate would win on the first ballot; this was likely to be a two-day or perhaps even three-day affair, the likes of which had never been seen before. By Wednesday, February 9, the day of the vote, not a bed was to be had in the city’s lodgings. It was a cold and snowy day, and the session would not begin until noon, but spectators began lining up outside the House doors early that morning. Both chambers convened in the House. The electoral votes were formally unsealed, and the results announced: John Calhoun had been elected vice president with 182 votes, while Jackson, Adams, and Crawford would contest for the presidency. The senators now returned to their own chamber, while members of the House seated themselves according to the order in which the states would be polled—north to south down the Eastern Seaboard, then south back up to north in the interior. Each state had its own ballot box, with its own teller to confirm the result.

  That morning, old Stephen Van Rensselaer, a member of the New York delegation and a patroon of ancient vintage, had been struggling mightily with his conscience. He had been pledged to Adams, but he preferred Crawford. Van Rensselaer realized that he might well represent the tying vote—a terrifying thought for this genteel soul. As he reached the Capitol, shifting back and forth inside his own not particularly forceful mind, the patroon was waylaid by Henry Clay, who bade him pass a few moments in the Speaker’s chambers. There they were joined by Webster. The two made it clear that a vote for Crawford was a vote for Jackson, and a vote for Jackson was a vote for mad populism and social tumult—a calamity for a man of property like him.

  By the time Van Rensselaer had staggered away from Webster and Clay, he had plunged into a state of miserable confusion. Louis McLane, a Delaware congressman and Crawfordite, found the old gentleman “in tears literally.” Van Buren received a message from one of his managers, William S. Archer of Virginia, that he was needed urgently on the floor to speak to Van Rensselaer. The Sage of Kinderhook hurried down and found Van Rensselaer, who promised that, come what may, he would not vote for Adams on the first round. This was all Van Buren could ask. His plan was to secure a deadlock in New York and thus force a second round of voting, at which point, he had reason to believe, Maryland would switch to Jackson, and then other states would give way as well. Van Buren understood perfectly well that Crawford could neither win nor serve as president, and he had already shifted his loyalties to Jackson.

  The states then began balloting among themselves. According to Van Buren’s autobiography, when the vote came around to the patroon, he dropped his head on his desk to summon his Maker, as was his wont. Looking down, he spied a ballot with Adams’ name on it. A sign! Van Rensselaer picked up the ticket and quickly dropped it in the ballot box. New York went for Adams.

  With the voting complete, the ballot boxes were carried forward to two tables, one of which was overseen by Daniel Webster, the other by John Randolph, the eccentric and vitriolic Old Radical (as Jeffersonian purists called themselves). Tellers at each table tallied the votes. The Massachusetts Federalist spoke first: “The tellers of the votes at this table have proceeded to count the ballots contained in the box set before them. The results they find to be, that there are, For John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, thirteen votes; for Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, seven votes; for William H. Crawford of Georgia, four votes.” Clay’s three states, as expected, had gone to the secretary of state. Crawford’s stayed with Crawford, despite Adams’ fears of a Crawford-Jackson entente. But of Jackson’s states, Louisiana had gone to Adams, as had Maryland—perhaps thanks to Daniel Webster—and Illinois, where Jackson’s blandishments and threats had failed to move Daniel P. Cook. Adams had added six states to the seven he already had.

  At the moment that Webster said “thirteen,” the gallery, a thousand strong, burst into huzzahs; a smaller group responded with hisses. Clay ordered the gallery cleared. Then he announced that John Quincy Adams had been elected president. Adams’ friend Alexander H. Everett raced to the Adams home on F Street to bring the news. Then came a whole rush of friends. The great, fearful moment had arrived. Adams uttered a prayer—“May the blessing of God rest upon the event of this day!” It was, he said in a note to his father, “the most important day of my life.”

  That night, President Monroe held one of his rare social evenings. All of Washington was there—Calhoun and Clay and Webster, General Lafayette, and of course Adams and Jackson. People pressed through the dense throng to get a view of the winner and loser of this unprecedented, and increasingly ugly, contest. The crowd parted, and General Jackson, with a lady on his arm, approached the president-elect. Always the master of the situation, Jackson said graciously, “I give you my left hand, for the right, as you see, is devoted to the fair. I hope you are very well, Sir.”

  “Very well, Sir,” said Adams stonily. “I hope General Jackson is well.”

  This courteous encounter would be one of the very last between the two men. It constituted the terminal point of the Era of Good Feelings—not so much because rancor supplanted a largely mythical period of consensus but because Jackson’s embitterment propelled the rise of a new political party and thus new forms of political contest. From that moment forward, Jackson went into opposition; the 1828 campaign began before Adams even took office. Adams had finally won the prize he had long sought, but he had won it under circumstances that would turn the next four years of his life into a terrible struggle.

  PART IV

  INTERNAL IMPROVEMENT

  CHAPTER 23

  The Spirit of Improvement

  (1825)

  ON THE LATE MORNING OF MARCH 4, 1825, CAVALRY DETACHMENTS from the Washington and Georgetown volunteer militias arrived at John Quincy Adams’ F Street home. Trumpets blared and drums boomed. The president-elect and Mrs. Adams emerged, along with their sons John and Charles Francis; settling into a carriage, they took their place at the head of a caravan directly in front of President and Mrs. Monroe, and rode off to the Capitol between rows of cheering citizens. At the Capitol Adams was greeted by the Marine Corps, drawn up in order. A crowd had been surging into the great dome since the moment the doors had opened at 9; by 10, not a place was to be found. The diplomatic corps had been seated in the first row of the House, then military officers and their wives, and other dignitaries. The crowd in the House gallery had maintained a dignified silence. At 12:20 marshals in their blue scarves appeared at the front door of the great hall; they were followed by officers of both houses of Congress, then Adams, then Monroe. Adams, dressed in black—all of domestic manufacture—ascended to the Speaker’s chair. By tradition, the president delivered his Inaugural Address before being sworn in.

  Adams had been thinking about the speech for weeks; perhaps he had been thinking about it his whole life. Whatever he might once have wished to say, he knew now that he had to address the deep fissures his election had exposed and perhaps exacerbated. “Of the two great political parties which have divided the opinions and feelings of our country,” he said, “the candid and the just will now admit that both have contributed splendid talents, spotless integrity, ardent patriotism, and disinterested sacrifice, to the formation and administration of our Country.” European wars had sown “the baneful weed of party strife.” But “ten years of peace,
at home and abroad, have assuaged the animosities of political contention, and blended into harmony the most discordant elements of public opinion.”

  Adams was very nervous. Justice Joseph Story would later write to his wife that the president-elect “trembled so as barely to hold his papers,” though at the same time “he spoke with prodigious force, and his sensibility had an electrical effect.” What Adams hoped was not to wish away difference but to acknowledge and accommodate it. Party feeling is transitory, he went on, but divisions based on “climate, soil and modes of domestic life”—the intrinsic differences of coast and interior, agriculture and manufacturing—are lasting. The genius of America’s federal system allowed states to govern themselves within their own sphere, while at the same time sending eminent men to the nation’s capital to learn to respect one another’s views.

  Adams reviewed Monroe’s great achievements and then turned to the one field he hoped to make his own—internal improvements. “It is that from which I am convinced that the unborn millions of our posterity . . . will derive their most fervent gratitude to the founders of the Union.” That was an extraordinary claim and a controversial one. Adams acknowledged “some diversity of opinion” in Congress on the subject, but almost twenty years had passed since the Jefferson administration had authorized construction of the Cumberland Road, which reached from Maryland inland to the Ohio River. “To how many thousands of our countrymen has it proved a benefit? To what single individual has it ever proved an injury?” Adams expressed hope that all constitutional objections “will ultimately be removed” and “every speculative scruple” overcome.

  Adams had spent most of his career as a diplomat and statesman, but with the nation now at peace, he yearned to be the leader who would mobilize the country’s energies in the great project of domestic improvement. Despite the language of conciliation, he had, perhaps rashly, revealed the full measure of his ambitions. Jeffersonians and Jacksonians bridled at hearing their convictions reduced to a “speculative scruple.” The address, as Joseph Story put it, “is everywhere very direct and unequivocal, and will produce a great deal of approbation and disapprobation.”

  Adams was certainly not oblivious to the forces he had provoked. He hoped to further mollify his rivals by governing as a consensus figure. He invited Crawford to remain at Treasury, though he viewed his erstwhile rival as a shameless schemer and Crawford was physically unfit for the job. Crawford declined, and Adams instead chose the Federalist Richard Rush. He asked Andrew Jackson to serve at the War Department, but Jackson was not about to serve the man who had defeated him—by trickery, he thought. Instead, Adams offered the post to James Barbour, a Crawford man from Virginia. He retained Samuel Southard, a Calhounite, at the Navy. And of course he replaced himself at the State Department with Clay.

  That, of course, was a fresh provocation, and the worst of all. Clay’s appointment was taken as proof of the “corrupt bargain.” Congress had mounted an investigation of the charge, though it had ended in anticlimax when the anonymous author, revealed as a gadfly Pennsylvania congressman, George Kremer, refused to testify. But feelings ran high, and Clay was confirmed by a vote of only 17 to 10. And Andrew Jackson himself made sure to keep the story alive. Returning home to Tennessee, he assured outraged listeners that, as Kremer had alleged, he had personally been approached to make the same deal with Clay that Adams had, and had steadfastly refused. He encouraged Kremer to keep the story alive, and he wrote to a sympathetic editor suggesting he pursue the allegations. Jackson wrote that he himself would keep a dignified silence—in fact he had done no such thing—since “Clay has fallen below anything but contempt.” Jackson and his allies would spend the next four years keeping this tail pinned to the presidential donkey.

  Adams was faced right away with the question of how he would use his power to appoint federal officials. Crawford had pushed through a law prescribing a term of four years for federal employees. Adams viewed the statute as a device to enhance patronage powers—which it was—and refused to deploy it. He reappointed any official not obviously corrupt or incompetent; he would not move against figures who used their office to promote his rivals. Both Clay and Daniel Brent, still chief clerk at the State Department and a member of Washington’s tiny permanent establishment, urged him to remove James Sterrett, a naval officer in New Orleans and “a noisy and clamorous reviler of the Administration.” Adams replied that removing him would only provoke attacks from the opposition press. And, more importantly, it would be inconsistent with his principles. Once he began removing opponents, “an invidious and inquisitorial scrutiny will creep through the whole Union, and the most selfish and sordid passions will be kindled into activity to distort the conduct and misrepresent the feelings of men whose places may become the prize of slander against them.”

  The postmaster general, John McLean, was a notorious partisan of Andrew Jackson. But he was also exceptionally good at his job, and Adams would not replace him. The Post Office was then larger than the rest of the federal government put together, and postal carriers constituted a national civilian force with control over the sole means of communication across distances. McLean was said to have appointed a network of Calhoun-Jacksonites, among them Major Henry Lee, who on the side wrote diatribes against the administration for the Washington Gazette. In Lexington, Kentucky, McLean appointed Robert Ficklin, a bankrupt newspaper publisher who, it was said, refused to distribute pro-administration literature. Adams declined to remove any of them.

  Adams’ high-minded intransigence left Henry Clay in despair. Friends wrote to Clay constantly complaining that the president had passed over party loyalists when a federal post had become available. The president, Clay explained grimly to one, “intended to neglect or abandon his friends in order to woo his enemies.” Yet his enemies could not be wooed. Political men were left baffled and fuming. Thurlow Weed betook himself to Washington for the first time in order to secure a diplomatic post for General James Tallmadge, who had done a great deal to put Adams over the top in New York, and also to win a contract to print the federal laws for his own Rochester newspaper. Weed had a delightful conversation with Clay, a man of his own kidney, but an “embarrassing and constrained” one with Adams. When Weed observed delicately that it would be well to recognize New York with a major post—Adams could scarcely win reelection without the state—Adams first noted that he had already appointed Rufus King, the old New York Federalist, as the minister to England and then added that he would “appoint men of character, capacity, and integrity.”

  Weed must have rolled his eyes. The president, he wrote decades later in his autobiography, “was able, enlightened, patriotic and honest; discharging his public duty with conscientious fidelity, he disregarded, or overlooked, what Monroe, Madison and Jefferson had deemed essential namely, political organization and personal popularity.” The situation was arguably worse than that. Adams’ election had roused a degree of opposition none of his predecessors had faced. He aspired to change policy in a way that was bound to accentuate that opposition. Adams thus needed to shore up his base of support as his predecessors had not. But his arch-Federalist principles, and his Puritan commitment to a righteous path, absolutely precluded him from doing so.

  In our own time, a president who laid out a bold agenda in his inaugural speech would introduce legislation in order to realize his goals. In Adams’ day, the tradition still held that Congress both germinated and produced the nation’s laws. Adams might have sought to change that habit, but instead he waited to make specific proposals in his year-end message to Congress, as his predecessors had. Until then, he would deal with whatever came across his desk—federal appointments, court-martial proceedings, the promotion of military officers. He met with his cabinet officers, as well as with virtually any stranger who wandered in the door. He spent countless hours signing grants for the sale of federal lands—sometimes hundreds in a single day.

  By the spring of 1825 the federal government had become entang
led in a very ugly and dangerous territorial dispute between the Creek Indians and the state of Georgia. The Creeks had long hunted the southwestern lands into which pioneers from Kentucky and Tennessee had begun to spread in the first years of the new century. Conflict between the two groups led to the so-called Creek Wars in which Andrew Jackson earned his reputation as a feared Indian fighter. Jackson had decisively crushed Creek resistance at the battle of Horseshoe Bend on March 27, 1814, when he had killed eight hundred Red Stick Warriors. Later that year, the Creeks had been forced to sign the Treaty of Fort Jackson, in which they ceded twenty-three million acres, which made up much of Alabama.

  On May 15, Adams met with a group of Creeks led by Chilly McIntosh. Chilly recounted the dreadful narrative of the murder of his father, William, by a rival group of Creeks. Chilly came bearing a fire-breathing letter from George Troup, the governor of Georgia, vowing to lead a militia party against the rival Creeks and any federal authorities who sought to intervene on their behalf. Adams did not want to get involved in an intratribal dispute, but Troup’s challenge threatened the fundamental principal of the supremacy of federal authority. That was an issue the president could not ignore.