John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  The background was incredibly tangled. William McIntosh was a scalawag who had fought on Jackson’s side against the Red Sticks and served as sheriff for the agency. He had surrendered various amounts of tribal land to Georgia in subsequent negotiations and had misappropriated and stolen much of the cash settlement the federal government had given to the Creeks. He had then persuaded the tribe to sign yet another treaty surrendering “all the lands lying within the boundaries of Georgia” in exchange for $200,000, with an additional payment to go to McIntosh himself. The Treaty of Indian Springs had been signed on February 12, 1825, ratified by the new Congress as virtually the first order of business on March 5, and signed by Adams. By this time the other Creek chiefs had finally realized they had been swindled. On April 30, a group of 120 to 150 braves advanced on McIntosh’s plantation on the banks of the Chattahoochee, set it aflame, and then, when he emerged, stabbed him to death—and riddled his body with bullets for good measure. Chilly barely escaped with his life. Then he had organized the lobbying trip to Washington.

  Adams knew little of the background, but Secretary Barbour had thoroughly acquainted himself with the sordid history of self-dealing and duplicity. He told Adams that Governor Troup was a “madman” who would stop at nothing unless confronted with superior force. But Adams understood that no force on earth—at least none available to him—could stop the tidal force of western settlement. He ordered Major General Edmund Gaines to Milledgeville, Georgia, there to await further instructions. Gaines arrived with nine companies of infantry. In early June, an unfazed Governor Troup told legislators that “the United States government will be directly responsible to Georgia for every drop of blood shed on this occasion.” Barbour responded by informing the governor of the instructions he had given to Gaines: “You are hereby authorized to employ the military to prevent [the surveyors’] entrance into Indian territory”—and to arrest any found already there.

  Though a feared Indian hunter himself, Gaines was deeply impressed with the Creeks’ quiet resolve. He wrote to Barbour that the Creek confederacy was prepared “to die without resistance; that the world shall know, that the Miscogee Nation so loved their country, they were willing to die rather than sell or leave it.” They would not honor the terms of the fraudulent treaty. Gaines was prepared to defend their rights. The president, however, was not.. He instructed Gaines to offer the Creek leadership a new version of the treaty in which they would surrender all their land in Georgia in exchange for equivalent acreage in Arkansas, west of the Mississippi, and $400,000. Adams got his answer on November 26, when a group of twelve Creek leaders, dressed in a fantastic mixture of buckskin and pantaloons, came to the White House to meet with the man they referred to as their Great Father. With no translator available, no words were spoken, but Adams was deeply impressed by the “dark and settled gloom” of their countenances. The Creeks understood that they were about to be uprooted from the lands to which they had been immemorially attached; they would be sent to a place none of them had ever seen. In a subsequent meeting, they asked Adams if they could at least keep the Chattahoochee River, at the western edge of Georgia; the actual territory of the state had never been explicitly defined. Adams wished to do right by them, but he didn’t know if he could.

  In the week before Christmas 1825, the cabinet met almost daily in order to resolve the issue. In one session, Barbour suggested that the government should assimilate Indians into the national population, thus freeing up their ancestral land for white settlement without banishing the Indians to a western wasteland. This provoked an outburst from Henry Clay, the great champion of oppressed peoples abroad. The Indians, Clay said, could not be civilized. “He believed they were destined to extinction,” Adams wrote, “and though he would never use or countenance inhumanity towards them, he did not think them, as a race, worth preserving. . . . They were not an improveable breed, and their disappearance from the human family will be no great loss to the world.” Barbour was shocked, Adams recorded, while he himself wondered if Clay was not in fact right. At Ghent, after all, Adams had spoken of the Indians as if they should be subject to game law, and he wholly shared Madison’s view that nomadic peoples had no right to waste good farmland.

  Nevertheless, the United States treated with Indians as a sovereign people, thus incurring obligations Adams was not about to void. He told Barbour to write to Troup saying that the Creeks would cede up to the Chattahoochee and no farther. Troup disdainfully refused. Adams persuaded the Creeks to sign one treaty after another, each reducing the tiny sliver of Georgia in which they could remain. Troup rejected everything. Once again the governor sent surveyors to map the new territory; this time the Creeks arrested them. Settlers, in turn, began to make incursions on Creek territory, at times stealing Indian livestock. War had never looked likelier.

  What had begun as a question of the federal role in negotiations between Indians and state authorities had now escalated into an early test of the doctrine of nullification—the alleged right of states to supersede federal authority. It was no coincidence that Georgia was a slave state, for the Deep South had come to fear and resent federal authority since the fight over Missouri’s admissions to the Union as a slave state. Slavery thus lurked in the background of the standoff over the Creeks, as it did in so many of the issues of Adams’ tenure. This was a test Adams did not welcome but could not shirk. He had no doubt about the supremacy of the federal government, but he was reluctant to force a confrontation with the Southern forces of states’ rights. Once again he attempted a half measure, instructing federal marshals, but not military troops, to arrest surveyors who had returned from illegal forays into Creek territory. Troup responded with one of his truculent letters, threatening to mobilize two divisions of state militia. The Georgia governor calculated that he held the high cards—and he was right. The Creeks understood that Adams would not go to war with one of his own states in order to defend their right to remain on tribal land until the date stipulated by the new treaty of Indian Springs. They signed one final pact in late 1827 agreeing to immediately vacate all lands claimed by Georgia. But thousands of Creeks had already picked up their belongings and traveled, mostly by foot, into Alabama; many arrived in a pitiful, sometimes skeletal, condition.

  Adams loved nothing more than a politically despised cause, and if he had believed that the Creeks or the Cherokees or Choctaws had a right to their ancestral land equal to or greater than that of American pioneers, he might have risked a confrontation with the Georgia “madman.” But the thought never crossed his mind. That is an idea of our own time, which we can entertain with no fear that it will ever be enacted; in Adams’ day, Indians were deemed an obstacle to progress, to be handled roughly or decently, depending on one’s principles.

  ADAMS LOOKED FORWARD TO HIS FIRST MESSAGE TO CONGRESS AS the great opportunity to lay out his vision for the nation’s future. He cut short his vacation, leaving Quincy for Washington in the middle of October. The new Congress would assemble on December 5, and Adams needed the intervening period to write his address. Adams’ predecessors had used their initial message largely to descant upon the admirable state of the Union. In 1809, President Madison had reassured the Congress that “the blessing of health has never been more universal,” while “the fruits of the seasons . . . are more than sufficient for our wants and our customs.” Eight years later, Monroe had celebrated the immense expansion of national territory incident to the treaties recently signed with Indian tribes and the growing value of the lands then being populated. Monroe also squarely confronted the question of internal improvements: after much deliberation, he announced, he had concluded that Congress did not possess the right to authorize such projects, though he added that he favored an amendment to the Constitution that would explicitly grant Congress that right.

  Adams, of course, was quite certain that Congress had that right, and he hoped to use his first address to make the case for an active program of federally sponsored construction in more detail
than he had in his inaugural address. But that was only the beginning of Adams’ immensely ambitious program. On November 23 his cabinet officers listened in mounting amazement and alarm as Adams read them the draft of his address. They spent the next week trying to argue him down. Barbour said that Adams should mute his constitutional argument for internal improvement. Barbour knew how that would sound in his native Virginia. But even Clay, the author of the American System, agreed. Adams noted in his journal that “Mr. Clay was for recommending nothing, which from its unpopularity, would be unlikely to succeed.” That certainly included the national university Adams planned to propose, as well as the new Home Department and the revamped Patent Office. Clay said that no one knew better than he how desperately a new executive department needed to be carved out of State, but there weren’t twenty votes for it in Congress—maybe not five. Only Rush, the arch-Federalist, approved of everything. Southard said little. Wirt said that the president’s plans were admirable, but he had just been traveling around Virginia, where Adams’ stock had been rising; the message would wreck the administration’s popularity.

  One can imagine a president reacting in two different ways to the discovery that a politician as acute as Henry Clay considered his proposed policy hopelessly unattainable. He could agree to hold fire until he had gained more support from the Congress and the public, or he could plow ahead, determined to make every possible effort to cajole, bully, or persuade the skeptics that the nation simply could not afford to do otherwise. John Quincy Adams did neither. He listened carefully and made a great many changes to his first draft. But he insisted on including the most far-reaching proposals—without actually expecting them to be passed. He blithely informed Clay that while he understood that this Congress, filled with Jeffersonian and Jacksonian rivals, would never endorse a national university, “I would look to a practicability of a longer range than a simple session of Congress.” Adams would make the strongest possible case for the program he believed the nation needed and then would wait for public and political opinion to catch up. Clay had already become Adams’ chief political advisor and vote counter. His heart must have sank.

  By 1825, messages to Congress proceeded according to a canonical pattern, and Adams, a stickler for tradition, hewed to convention. He began by noting that the state of the union, and indeed of the world, was a happy one, for “the general conditions of the Christian nations” had rarely if ever “been marked so extensively by peace and prosperity.” Adams reviewed America’s relations with each of those nations, not omitting the new states of South America; delineated “the flourishing state” of national finances, with revenues expected to reach $24 million, much of which would be devoted to retiring the federal debt; listed the treaties he had signed with Indian tribes, and discussed the current state of naval deployments and military fortifications. So, more or less, President Monroe had written the year before. That final address marked, in effect, the terminal point of the Era of Good Feelings. Adams’ message would mark the beginning of an interval of bitter conflict.

  The president now proceeded to chart out the bold policy Clay had begged him to soft-pedal. “The great object of the institution of civil government,” Adams stated, “is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact.” By “improvement,” Adams went on, he was thinking not simply of roads and canals, indispensable though they were, but “moral, political, intellectual” reforms as well. To the fulfillment of these goals, Adams declared, “the exercise of delegated powers is as sacred and indispensable as the usurpation of powers not granted is criminal and odious.” Here was a direct blow at the Jeffersonian preoccupation with alleged abuses of power by the federal government.

  Adams now proposed a series of great public works. President Washington, he noted, had repeatedly called for the establishment of a national university and a military academy. The latter had come to pass in the form of West Point, but not the former. The great nations of Europe had seen fit to actively promote knowledge. Should not the United States do likewise? Adams even suggested that this new institution specialize not in arts and letters as Harvard or Yale did, but in the advanced scientific fields of geography and astronomy. Adams then proposed the federal funding of global expeditions, as European monarchs had long done. One hundred such projects would cost less than a single war and provide inestimable benefit to citizens. Separately, Adams suggested expeditions within American territory, such as Lewis and Clark had made, both to map borders and to discover resources, especially in the trackless northwest now shared with England.

  Adams could not resist riding his beloved hobbyhorse: the establishment of a uniform standard of weights and measures. Great Britain and France had made ceaseless inquiries into such topics as “the figure of the earth” and “the comparative length of the pendulum vibrating seconds in various latitudes from the equator to the Pole.” Ought not the United States? And what about an astronomical observatory? Adams had been fascinated by telescopes since his days at Harvard. Europe had more than 130 of these “lighthouses of the skies,” while the United States had none. Here his eloquence reached its highest peak: while Europe makes exciting discoveries almost every year, “are we not cutting ourselves off from the means of returning light for light while we have neither observatory nor observor upon our half of the globe and the earth revolves in perpetual darkness to our unsearching eyes?”

  Adams now turned to government reform. He proposed the creation of a new federal department to administer home affairs, a reform of the judiciary, and the enactment of new laws protecting patents. And then, in conclusion, he recurred to his distinctly Federalist vision of a benevolent activist government. “The spirit of improvement is abroad upon the earth,” Adams grandly declared. “While dwelling with pleasing satisfaction upon the superior excellence of our political institutions, let us not be unmindful that liberty is power; that the nation blessed with the largest portion of liberty must in proportion to its numbers be the most powerful nation upon earth.” The promise of national greatness was there to be seized—unless, Adams admonished, timid legislators proved to be “palsied by the will of our constituents.”

  Adams had spent long years developing his view of foreign affairs and had given it full voice both in his correspondence and in his speeches. Though he had advocated internal improvements during his time in the Senate, he had never chosen to fully express his vision of domestic affairs. Only now was it clear that he had a coherent and self-consistent view of America’s destiny. He had often said that the United States must steer clear of European entanglements in order to give itself the chance to attain national greatness. So Washington or Jefferson would have said as well. But for Adams, that future would not simply unfurl as the inevitable expression of American energies acting on bounteous nature. When he said that “liberty is power,” he meant that democratic freedom was not limited to the right of each citizen to cultivate his own garden—what we now call “negative liberty”—but also included the collective power to forge greatness. The instrument of that power was the state.

  Adams was an unsentimental realist on foreign policy and a Burkean skeptic of democratic romanticism at home. But as soon as he had gained the power he had long sought, he had revealed that his skepticism about the individual was joined to a passionate faith in the organized capacities of society. Few men of his day entertained so bold a vision of state activism. Years later, Adams explained in a letter that he had hoped to spend all the government’s surplus revenue on internal improvements, which “would have afforded high wages and constant employment to thousands of laborers, and in which every dollar expended would have repaid itself fourfold in the enhanced value of the public lands.” Americans would not be ready for a federal government remotely this energetic until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, a great admirer of Adams.

  For that reason, Adams’ message to Congress was, as Clay had all too clearly foreseen, dead on arrival. Jeffersonians did not agree that the obj
ect of government, and especially of the federal government, was to improve the lives of citizens; that was the work of the citizens themselves. Jefferson himself rumbled from Monticello that a new generation of Federalists, scornful of the spirit of ’76, “now look to a single and splendid government of an aristocracy.” Thomas Ritchie, powerful editor of the Richmond Enquirer, said that the speech put him in mind of “a school boy’s Thesis.” The Jacksonian newspapers ridiculed Adams’ “lighthouses of the skies” as the folly of a man lost to reason. But Adams’ greatest inadvertent gift to the opposition was that unfortunate phrase “palsied by the will of our constituents.” Here was Federalism in its rankest form: the political leader does not represent the will of the voter but rather guides it from above and ignores it when need be. Perhaps John Adams could claim to rule on behalf of the citizenry; his son, in the far more democratic atmosphere of 1825, could not.

  Still, Adams commanded a solid majority in the House, though not the Senate, and he could have lobbied for his agenda. But he did not. He had no close friends in the Congress, and in any case he viewed legislative lobbying as unseemly. Adams simply allowed the Congress to act—or not. Bills for the establishment of a naval academy were introduced in both houses but failed. (Annapolis would be founded in 1845.) President Madison, regarded as a supreme authority on the meaning of the Constitution, stated his opposition to a national university on constitutional grounds. That doomed the proposal. The observatories never had a chance, nor did the weights and measures.

  The one partial exception was Adams’ call for internal improvements. The completion of the Erie Canal in 1824 had set off a craze for public works; even Monroe, who had vetoed a bill to repair the Cumberland Road, had felt compelled before leaving office to authorize a national survey of needed work. By the time Adams took office, army engineers were surveying routes for roads and canals and making plans to enlarge and improve ports. A Scot, John Loudon McAdam, had just developed the road-building technique of the “macadamized” roadway, built from crushed gravel, and legislators were as eager then as they are now to bring new roads to their constituents.