by James Traub
Louisa had always had a gift for satire. But years of misfortune and ill health, and her marriage to a paragon whose harsh judgments cut her to the quick, had, as she said, soured her temper. The crack about Lord Sharply’s ambition seems too harsh, but no one had caught Adams’ distinctive combination of chilliness and inner fire as Louisa had. And she had captured, perhaps inadvertently, her own mood at that very low moment. Louisa’s portrait of her husband contains a great deal of respect but no love at all.
By this time, in fact, Louisa was spending as much time as she could on her own. She had spent most of the summer of 1826 in New Hampshire, while her husband and the boys remained in Quincy. The following summer she refused to go to Quincy at all, instead pressing Charles to join her in Saratoga Springs, New York. The few letters she exchanged with her husband are frigidly correct. She addressed hers, almost mockingly, to “the President.” Adams reciprocated with “Mrs. Louisa Catherine Adams.” When they all gathered briefly at the City Hotel in New York in August, Charles wrote in his diary, “My own feelings incline to great melancholy on seeing what I think to be the future prospects of our family.” The White House years would constitute a low point for both the president and his wife.
ON JULY 4, THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DECLARATION OF Independence, President Adams led a solemn procession from the White House to the Capitol, where Secretary of War James Barbour delivered an oration that included a special plea for donations for Thomas Jefferson, then lying gravely ill. In a pitiful coda to a splendid life, Jefferson was virtually bankrupt and could no longer support his own daughter. Two days later, Adams learned that Jefferson had died on the fourth. On the eighth, he received letters from his brother Thomas and from one of his nieces saying that John Adams, too, was at death’s door. The president and John left for Quincy at dawn the following day. Later that morning, a man coming from Baltimore told Adams that the papers carried the news that John Adams had died the evening of the fourth, only hours after Jefferson. To his granddaughter, bending over to hear, the old man had whispered, “Thomas Jefferson still surv—.”
Though the nation was very much divided between partisans of Adams and Jefferson, both men were profoundly venerated as fathers of the Revolution. The fact that both these men had, apparently, willed themselves to live until the fiftieth anniversary of that great day, that both had died within hours of one another on the fourth itself, that John Adams had been thinking as he neared death of the man whom he had loathed for long years before achieving a late-life reconciliation—all this could not fail to be understood as a heavenly blessing on the republic. John Quincy Adams himself reflected that “the time, the manner, the coincidence with the decease of Jefferson are visible and palpable marks of Divine favor.” He prayed that he might live a life and die a death worthy of a father whom he had never ceased to revere and to emulate.
Adams remained stoical until he reached the family house and entered his father’ bedroom. “That moment to me was inexpressibly painful,” he wrote in his journal, “and struck as if it had been an arrow to the heart.” Of all the things he had been in his life, he had been none so faithfully and unerringly as a dutiful son. He had governed his life by the precepts handed down by his parents and had feared doing anything to disappoint them. He had nothing to reproach himself for. Yet he had, in so many ways, lived for them, and now they were gone. He must have felt terribly lonely. At the Quincy meeting house a few days later, he found himself staring during the sermon at the pew his father, and his grandfather before him, had occupied. His mind reeled back to his own boyhood, and he saw that he was surrounded by the gray, bent figures who had once been his playmates. How close they all were to death! Once again the tears sprang to Adams’ eyes.
It was an interval of commemoration. Adams and George walked through the family graveyard. Louisa had reached Quincy by now, and the five family members attended ceremonies in Dorchester, Charlestown, Braintree, Salem, and the State House in Boston. Edward Everett and Daniel Webster spoke—a two-and-a-half-hour performance during which not a sound was heard from the audience in Faneuil Hall. Adams could not fail to contemplate his own mortality: in early September he told the Reverend Peter Whitney, pastor of the church in Quincy the Adamses had been attending since the 1620s, that he wished to take communion. Despite attending church every Sunday, often two or three times, for decades, Adams had never participated in this rite—owing, he said, to “the tumult of the world, false shame, a distrust of my own worthiness to partake of the communion,” and a continually changing residence. It might have been closer to the mark to say that he had such an inward conception of religious belief that he felt no need for, and perhaps distrusted, outward professions of faith. But now he wished to prepare to be gathered to his forefathers. On October 1, Adams stood when Reverend Whitney called on each communicant to rise in his place and remind them of their duties as Christians.
But Adams also had to worry about earthly matters. His father’s will divided his estate into fourteen equal parts for his direct descendants and left to his eldest son the family house and 103 adjoining acres—so long as he paid $12,000, the assessed value, to the estate. Adams could have put the place on the market, but he couldn’t bear the thought. He would go into debt—or rather, go further into debt. Louisa was accustomed to submitting to his lordly decrees, but the prospect of bankruptcy in the name of filial loyalty was too much for her. She could, she wrote, understand his desire to own the family house, but “that you should waste your property and burthen yourself with a large unprofitable landed estate, which nearly ruined its past possessor, merely because it belonged to him, is scarcely prudent or justifiable, and the Jefferson family afford too gloomy an instance of its foly to render such an act excusable.” Adams didn’t argue the point; he simply went ahead and bought the land and the home.
Adams returned to Washington and began working on his second annual message to Congress. This time Henry Clay tried to prevent Adams from doing the administration any further harm through his rash proposals. After Adams read the message to the cabinet, Clay asked if they could read it over by themselves and reconvene the next day for further discussion. Adams agreed. Still hoping to build a national transportation network, Adams had proposed endorsing a report by the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company that would authorize the funding of a vast new waterway. This was, Clay insisted, a terrible idea: the canal would cost far more than the budgeted $22 million, it had little support in Washington or the West, and it probably would prove less effective in moving goods than the sponsors hoped. And Clay had lined up everyone else in the cabinet save Rush. Adams agreed to strike that passage from the message. Clay was learning how to manage the president.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1827, WHEN CHARLES HAD REFLECTED ON THE grim prospects of his family, he had been thinking not only of his parents’ estrangement but of his older brother George, whose manners, he wrote, “struck me in a very strange way.” George struck almost everyone in a strange way. He seemed to be not quite rooted to terra firma—like a German sophist in his own ideal world, as Louisa had written. George had a law office but never worked. Rejected in courtship, he had declared himself indifferent to love and marriage. He drank too much; perhaps he used opium. Like his Uncle Tom, he was finding it very hard to be an Adams. He was deeply attached to old John Adams, whom he visited often, and very much afraid of his father, who over the years had delivered a series of stinging rebukes.
Despite his immense workload, John Quincy Adams wrote to George with an endless stream of admonitions: you must persevere in your vow to rise early; you must apply yourself to your work, for then “you will have no time to indulge moments of despondency.” It had been a mistake, it turned out, to entrust George with the family funds, as it had been years before to entrust his money to his brother Charles. In one of his rare letters, George admitted that he hadn’t kept up his father’s accounts, as he had promised to do, owing to “indolence and self-delusion.” Adams was angry, but more tha
n that, he was desperate. He saw the pit yawning before his aimless child. He no longer believed George’s blithe reassurances. “I have been horror-struck at your danger,” he wrote. Louisa begged George to come to Washington, but he remained in Quincy, perhaps terrified of a personal encounter with his father. Charles was almost as worried about George as his parents were. “Much conversation with George upon our relative prospects,” he wrote in his journal. His were bright, and George’s dismal. “George has changed for the worse.” “George is in danger of a relapse.”
President Adams depended on his middle son, John, as a one-man staff, though this chiefly involved serving as messenger, doorkeeper, and scribe. John had never fully matured; he was hot-tempered, rash, and undisciplined. The Adamses had come more and more to rely on Charles, and he in turn had the healthiest relationship with them. Charles enjoyed the occasional spree, but he never forgot that he was an Adams: at John Adams’ death he reflected that the violent criticism both his grandfather and his father had endured placed on him an obligation to vindicate the family name. Neither of his brothers would have entertained such a thought.
Charles’ combination of ambition and self-indulgence allowed him to skate on the edge of disaster without falling in. While in Washington in the winter of 1826 he had met and fallen in love with Abby Brooks, the daughter of a wealthy insurance man in Medford. (She was visiting her sister, who had married the congressman and Adams ally Edward Everett.) In his journal he wrote with cool calculation that great advantages might accrue to such an advantageous union. Perhaps it would serve as a spur to his flagging ambition as well as “a check upon my vagaries of independence.” This was an oblique allusion to the fact that he was keeping a mistress. Charles was not about to let his appetites ruin his future. In April 1827, he coolly wrote in his diary, “Ever since my engagement, I have been preparing for a close of my licentious intrigues, and this evening I cut the last cord which bound me.” The fact that neither his parents nor, apparently, Abby herself ever discovered what they would have viewed as a monstrous violation of morals and propriety is a testimony to Charles’ discretion.
The amiable, prosperous, cheerful Brookses presented a striking contrast to the lugubrious, if gifted, Adamses; whenever he thought of his own family, Charles reflected, “a creeping dread comes over me.” Charles viewed his mother, whom he seems to have loved very much, as a wounded, fluttering bird and sometimes chided her for her melodramatic flights of self-pity. After receiving one of her deeply melancholy letters, Charles wrote in his diary, “Her feelings are constantly carrying her into extremes which she repents when it is too late and then she attempts to hide them from herself.” Charles looked on his father as something of a graven idol, though one apt to inspire amazement rather than awe or terror. After listening to some of the president’s supporters wax enthusiastic over his tenure one evening, Charles wrote, “My father has unfortunately such a cold manner of meeting this sort of feeling that I am surprised at the appearance of it at any time among his supporters.” Another time he remarked, “He makes enemies by perpetually wearing the iron mask.” Charles was the only one of the boys who had grown up with his father as a little boy, had held his hand on long walks, and had sat on his lap at the circus. The iron mask had no powers to frighten him.
Charles proposed to Abby in January 1827. He was only nineteen. After initial resistance to accepting an engagement to so young a man, Peter Brooks, swayed by accounts of his daughter’s love, said that he would accept the match if Charles’ father did. And John Quincy Adams, remarkably, agreed, so long as the couple waited for several years. The president wrote to Peter Brooks to say that a young man like Charles, “his habits domestic and regular,” could marry at twenty-one, unlike a youth of “more tardy self-control.” Charles would have gotten a laugh out of that if he had seen it. Nevertheless, the elder Adams refused when Charles asked to have his allowance raised from $800 to $1,000 a year, enraging his son.
Throughout this period father and son carried on an extraordinary correspondence. In late 1827 Charles asked his father to help him develop a suitably elegant and grave writing style. Adams immediately responded with a reading list—Cicero and Pliny, Madame De Sevigné and Voltaire, Pope and Pascal. And Charles went out and bought the volumes. His father was so pleased that he wrote with yet more books. And when Charles wrote back with his thoughts on Pascal’s Provincial Letters, Adams discovered that he had something he had craved without even realizing it—an intellectual friend and partner. One night he stayed up until midnight writing a long letter about the great writers on ethics, modern and classical. He had, he said with obvious delight, been driven to open up the beloved friends gathering dust on his shelves.
Over the next six months, while his political career was, so far as he could see, drawing to an ignominious close, Adams spent countless hours writing to his son about books, the great comfort of his life. While George was writing to admit that he had fallen $1,000 in debt to a complete stranger, Charles was writing to question the idea that genius exists. Adams responded to the one with a check and a very harsh lecture, and to the other with quotes from Socrates, Milton, the Comte de Buffon, and Periander, the second tyrant of Corinth. In a later letter Adams expounded on Cicero, whose wisdom he had long revered as the highest human achievement save for the revelation of Scripture. “Make him the study of your whole life,” he advised. And Charles kept pushing back—on the virtues of early rising, on the moral value of political engagement, even on Cicero.
Nobody challenged Adams at the level of his deepest convictions—save his enemies, of course, who despised him. But Charles was a cocky Harvard man, impressed with his own learning and analytical skills and not the least bit afraid of a man who made others quake. He mocked the idea of “public service,” which had been his father’s watchword. Wasn’t it all just vanity? “In truth,” he wrote, “there are very few duties for which a man is clearly called upon by his country, and there are so many eager to perform those that there is no danger to it from neglect, to say the least.”
Even a man less sensitive than Adams might have taken offense at this cheap cynicism. But Adams couldn’t have been happier. He wrote back, “Because there are gilt counters circulated in the world, does it follow that there is no gold?” And he urged Charles to keep writing about whatever thoughts his reading prompted. “We shall not always agree in opinion, but each of us may rectify his own opinions by weighing those of the other.” And so they did, not only over great matters of history but over the most fundamental question of all—how to live. Charles, with the rigid self-certainty of youth, favored Cato, the “inflexible moralist”; his father, with the wisdom of years, preferred Cicero, “the practical statesman.” John Quincy Adams called Sir Francis Bacon to his defense: “All rising to great place is by a winding stair.” He did not say, and perhaps did not need to say, that he had reached his own great place by a winding stair.
Adams’ correspondence with Charles offered a source of deep solace amid the labor and the gloom of his last year in the White House. His wife was sickly, depressed, and resentful. His eldest son seemed to be racing toward his doom. His debts were mounting. His political prospects were dim. John Quincy Adams had always found sanctuary in books, thought, reflection. He was that man walking alone through the dark streets of Washington, silently communing with the shadows of the great statesmen and orators and philosophers whose example was never far from his thoughts.
CHAPTER 25
A Great Man in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time
(1825–1826)
IN HIS FAMOUS MESSAGE OF 1823, PRESIDENT MONROE HAD bluntly asserted that the United States would view any threat by the European powers to the liberties of the new South American republics as “dangerous to our peace and safety.” He was announcing, in effect, a special relationship among the New World republics. John Quincy Adams had played a central role in shaping the Monroe Doctrine, but neither he nor the president had ever explained the form they
saw that relationship taking. Did the United States envision, as Henry Clay had suggested, a league of republican states? Did America seek the role of hemispheric leader? And what of Spain’s remaining colonial possessions, Cuba and Puerto Rico? Was the United States prepared to accept this remnant of colonialism at the edge of its shores?
Adams was, in fact, perfectly comfortable with the situation he inherited. He cared far more about extending America’s continental reach and economic power than he did about issues of hemispheric leadership. He hoped to promote closer commercial ties, not political ones, with the republics, and he had no wish to meddle with Spanish control of the two islands off the America coast. He hadn’t said a word about South America in his inaugural address. But then South America came to him. Simón Bolívar, the Great Liberator, had long dreamed of an inter-American alliance—led by himself, in all likelihood—to establish collective security against European encroachment and to compel Spain to surrender its control over Cuba and Puerto Rico. His original plans did not include the United States. But the new powers of the continent were eager to strengthen bonds with the United States, and the election of Adams, and his appointment as secretary of state of Henry Clay, the great champion of the infant republics, made the idea yet more appealing. In the spring of 1825, the foreign ministers of Colombia and Mexico invited the United States to attend a Pan-American Congress to be held October 1 in Panama, then part of Colombia and the ligature between the two continents.