John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  Randolph spoke on March 26. He rambled across a range of arcane topics before coming to his central allegation: the Panama convention had been fabricated in January 1825 between Adams and Clay—between old Massachusetts and young Kentucky, “between the Frost of January and young, blythe buxom May”—as part of the “dirty bargain” over the presidency. Adams, he said archly, had “Jonathan-Russell’d himself”—had damned himself to “everlasting infamy,” as once he had damned another, through his collusion with Clay. He had contemptuously refused to turn over to the Senate the diplomatic correspondence with the South American ministers. This was tyranny—no, blasphemy. Randolph worked himself up into a frenzy, interrupting himself, offering asides to his asides, shouting in his wrath. Those few who sought to defend constitutional principles against autocracy had been beaten by an implacable force, “defeated, horse, foot and dragoons—cut up—and clean broke down—by the coalition of Blifil and Black George, by the combination, unheard of till then, of the puritan and the black-leg.” That was a supremely low blow and a master stroke, an ingenious analogy, which no one could miss, between, on the one hand, the pious hypocrite and the charming villain of Fielding’s Tom Jones and, on the other, the austere president and his roguish secretary of state.

  Vice President Calhoun, presiding over the Senate, had sat silently as Randolph’s wild polemic poured forth like lava. Allies of the administration were outraged; it was widely, and probably correctly, believed that the vice president had helped Van Buren orchestrate the attack. Clay lost his cool completely and challenged Randolph, a crack shot, to a duel. In the ensuing fight, Clay fired first and missed. Randolph then aimed for the secretary of state’s leg—being careful, he later claimed, not to strike the kneecap—and missed as well. The two men shook hands, signifying that the demands of honor had been satisfied. But the damage Randolph had done to the administration was lasting. The speech was widely reprinted, contributing to the political lexicon not only the expression “Blifil and Black George” but also Randolph’s sublime description of the proposed conference as “a Kentucky cuckoo egg laid in a Spanish nest.”

  The Adams administration continued to prepare for the conference, even as the ministers cooled their heels waiting for the House to approve funds for the mission. But domestic opposition ultimately carried the day. The House only appropriated funds for the trip in May—a month before the congress was to begin. News of the rancorous debate began to sap Adams’ credibility abroad. His minister in France wrote that “the divided state of our Senate and our House of Representatives . . . are well known in Europe and have their influence.” The South American states saw all too clearly that the United States could not take the leadership role they had envisioned. Owing to the need for a late start, one of the American ministers refused to leave, afraid of contracting yellow fever. Another died en route; the third arrived too late. The congress lasted from June 15 to July 22, decided very little, and never reconvened. Bolívar’s dream of a united South America came to naught, as did Adams’ and Clay’s hopes of establishing a confederation of republican states in the Western Hemisphere—a League of Nations avant la lettre.

  Clay continued to be preoccupied by the situation of Cuba. He reiterated Adams’ bottom-line positions: the United States wished “no change in the possession or political condition” of Cuba and could not accept the transfer or annexation of the island by either a European power or a South American republic. The Henry Clay of only a few years earlier almost certainly would have welcomed an indigenous independence struggle in Cuba. No longer: given “the limited extent, moral condition, and discordant character of its population,” Cuba could not now “sustain self-government, unaided by other Powers.” He added an ominous and unmistakable reference to Haiti: in any such convulsion, “one portion of the inhabitants of the Island . . . would live in continual dread of those tragic scenes which were formerly exhibited in a neighboring island.” And he wished the foreign ministers of Mexico or Colombia to understand that a war of liberation launched from their shores could well provoke a European response. In that case, the United States, “far from being under any pledge, at present, to oppose them, might find themselves, contrary to their inclination, reluctantly drawn by a current of events, to their side.”

  Clay was still a moralist and a romantic; he had tried, and failed, to persuade Adams to recognize Haiti. But in many ways he had come to adopt Adams’ more chastened and prudent sense of world affairs. The influence flowed in both directions. In speaking of South America, Adams had adopted Clay’s language of hemispheric fraternity and been mocked for it by his rivals. And he had abandoned his cautious neutrality between the Greek insurgents and the Ottoman Empire. In September 1825 Adams authorized Clay to send an official to Greece—another secret agent—to help Americans there, to discourage others from aiding the Turks, and to let the Greek authorities know that the people and the government of the United States “felt an anxious desire” that their struggle “might terminate in the reestablishment of the liberty and independence of that Country.” And Adams said as much in public in later congressional messages. The two men had formulated a post-Washington, post–Monroe Doctrine policy with a fine balance between what we would today call “idealism” and “realism.”

  Though Adams’ hopes for an inter-American federation failed, his Cuba policy succeeded. The United States neither attempted to annex Cuba nor permitted others to do so, and the island remained a Spanish colony until gaining its independence in 1898. The policy, of course, worked better for the United States than for the people of Cuba, who remained under the Spanish thumb throughout the nineteenth century.

  THE NET EFFECT OF THE DEBATE OVER THE PAN-AMERICAN CONGRESS was to bring a fractured opposition together for the first time and to give them confidence that they could defeat the politically hapless president—and not just on matters of domestic legislation but even on the more classically executive prerogative of foreign affairs. The debate also moved Vice President Calhoun decisively into the opposition camp. In June, Calhoun handed John H. Eaton, Jackson’s confidante, a letter for the master of the Hermitage. The letter read like a dispassionate version of John Randolph’s speech. “An issue has been fairly made,” Calhoun wrote, “between liberty and power; and it must be determined in the next three years, whether the real governing principle in our political system be the power and patronage of the Executive, or the voice of the people.” Calhoun alleged that “a scheme has been formed to perpetuate power in the present hands.” Once power has been transferred by “corrupt patronage,” elections will come to be seen as a “farce,” and the people will soon come to accept “the transmission of Executive power by hereditary principle, in some imperial family.”

  It is striking—in fact, it’s astonishing—that not only political schemers and pro-slavery advocates and reactionary ideologues but one of the nation’s greatest political thinkers had come to adopt a conspiracy theory about the president with no obvious foundation. Adams’ adversaries could not accept him as president, and not only because he had failed to win a majority and had then eked out a victory through a form of subterfuge. These men saw Adams as the representative of an archaic elite that had lost whatever right it had once had to govern the nation. And the president gave them all the help they needed by acting like just such a throwback. As a matter of character he was, indeed, a remnant. His ideas were bold and forward-looking, but he had formulated them at a moment when most Americans were seeking liberty rather than power. He was a man both behind his times and ahead of them. The British historian George Dangerfield summed up Adams’ presidency as “a rather conspicuous example of a great man in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the right motives and a tragic inability to make himself understood.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Cultivating His Garden

  (1826–1827)

  THE ELECTION OF 1824 HAD BEEN A CHAOTIC SPRAWL, WITH five candidates. By the time John Quincy Adams had served half of his term, he h
ad aroused vitriolic opposition in the Congress, but his rivals had not organized around one candidate and had not formed an alternative party. Most looked to Andrew Jackson, but others allied with John Calhoun or even William Crawford, who had recovered from his illness. Some favored internal improvements and high tariffs, while some deplored them; some favored the new America of the West over the old of the North and South, and some defended what they saw as ancient privileges under threat from the forces of growth and change. As the election of 1828 approached, it was obvious that Adams could be beaten if these heterogeneous forces could be gathered around one man. But someone would have to do the gathering.

  That man was Martin Van Buren. On May 12, 1827, Van Buren stopped by the White House for a chat with the president. The groundswell that had lifted Jackson so close to the presidency in 1824 had convinced Van Buren that he was the man to carry the banner of Jeffersonian republicanism against Adams’ big-government “national” republicanism, as it had come to be called. Van Buren had, in fact, just returned from a swing through the South organizing for Jackson, as Adams knew very well. The president thought of the New York senator as a figure much like Aaron Burr, but more subtle. Van Buren did not in fact pose a threat to the Union, but he did pose a threat to Adams. He would help turn the election of 1828 into a new kind of campaign, organized and coordinated at both the national and the local level. Adams only dimly understood the magnitude and genuine novelty of the efforts already under way to ensure that he would not serve a second term.

  After defeating the administration on one front after another in the spring of 1826, Van Buren had returned to Washington at the end of the year convinced that the time had come to form a new party, with Jackson at its head. He spoke to some of the men who had led the fight against the Pan-American Congress, including Littleton Tazewell of Virginia and Samuel Ingham of Philadelphia, about reviving the North-South alliance that had elected Jefferson. He visited Calhoun once again to enlist him in the coalition he intended to form; Calhoun agreed. In January 1827, Van Buren wrote to Thomas Ritchie, the editor of the Richmond Enquirer, the house organ of the Jeffersonians, saying, “We must always have party distinctions . . . and the most natural and beneficial to the country is that between the planter of the South and the plain Republicans of the North.” By “plain Republicans” Van Buren meant sincere proponents of small government, as opposed to Federalists in Republican clothing like Adams. He was proposing, he said, “the substantial reorganization of the old Republican party.” Van Buren understood that Ritchie’s circle had a litmus test, and he left no doubt where he himself stood: he promised to “protect the remaining rights reserved to the states by the federal government.”

  Van Buren embarked on his Southern tour with the goal of uniting the Jeffersonians, or Old Radicals as they called themselves, behind Jackson’s candidacy. The Little Magician apparently persuaded them that Jackson shared their views on tariffs and internal improvements, though this was scarcely the case. Ritchie wrote to him, “I was struck by your view of the benefits we might promise ourselves from General J’s election.” The Enquirer endorsed Jackson—a crucial moment in the formation of the new party. The adherents of this new alliance began to speak of a “Democratic Republican” Party, or sometimes simply of a “Democratic” Party.

  Jackson himself had been running for president virtually since the day he had been defeated. Fueled by an unquenchable sense of outrage over the “corrupt bargain” that had kept him from office, Jackson had gathered his confederates around him and planned his campaign. In the spring of 1827, eighteen of his leading supporters formed a Central Corresponding Committee in Nashville to block “falsehoods and calumny, by the publication of truth”—a “war room” in a time when the news cycle ran in weeks rather than hours. Van Buren formed a circle of Jacksonite senators, who in turn established a corresponding committee in Washington. Soon cities all across the South and West had sprouted similar organs.

  Most of Jackson’s inner circle consisted of serving and retired officers; military men, of course, are good at logistics and organization. Major Alan Campbell wrote from Louisville to say that he and others had built an organization that included every ward in the city and the surrounding counties and that they had harvested the view of every voter on the great national and local questions. A “Jackson Committee,” holding dinners and rallies, formed in states, cities, and counties across the country. It was this combination of organization from above and a restless desire for political engagement among ordinary men that produced what came to be known as the Jacksonian Revolution. The election of 1828 saw the rise of a truly democratic politics, a radical evolution from the republican politics of an earlier generation, in which a distinguished servant of the nation from a great family could rise to the presidency as by right. Adams couldn’t, and wouldn’t, compete.

  The Jackson forces understood how to manipulate public information. Jackson acquired a campaign biographer, the postal official Henry Lee, whom Adams had refused to fire despite his anti-administration pamphleteering. Jackson promised to furnish Lee his personal archives. The general’s allies established a vast network of sympathetic newspapers. In early 1826, Jackson and Calhoun forces loaned $5,000 to the editors of a new Washington newspaper, the United States Telegraph, designed to counteract the pro-Adams National Journal and the mostly nonpartisan National Intelligencer. The very first issue of the paper, on February 6, 1826, announced that its goal was the defeat of the Adams-Clay coalition. The Telegraph hammered away at the “bargain, intrigue and management” that had fraudulently raised the two men to power. Adams was a monarchist, Clay a libertine. The Telegraph was a frankly pro-slavery organ that warned that Adams would mount an all-out attack on the institution once he understood that he had no chance of winning the South. That fall the Jackson forces recruited a gifted and ruthless polemicist, Duff Green, from St. Louis, to take over the paper. Green became a traveling advocate for Jackson and a leader of the Washington correspondence committee. The Telegraph was soon printing forty thousand copies a day.

  Green worked directly with Jackson to rivet the country’s attention on the central theme of the campaign: the corrupt bargain. Jackson claimed that Adams’ men had conveyed to an intermediary—a political figure of unimpeachable respectability—the plan to offer the secretary of state position to Clay unless Jackson himself was prepared to do the same. Clay, in other words, would sell himself to the highest, or at least the first, bidder. This was the origin of the allegation George Kremer had published in the National Intelligencer, for Kremer had heard it from Jackson’s confidante John H. Eaton, who had heard from the source himself. The general, it turned out, had repeated it everywhere. Duff Green wrote to Jackson to say that he would trumpet the narrative in the Telegraph. If Clay was foolish enough to demand an investigation, Jacksonites in Congress would cross-examine Clay and turn the whole thing into a political carnival. This was much to be preferred to having Jackson himself lodge the allegations, Green observed.

  There was only one problem: the story wasn’t true. The ultimate source was James Buchanan, the senator from Pennsylvania and future president. Jackson himself wrote to Buchanan to ask him to “publicly affirm” the offer that he had been asked to convey. But Buchanan had never been approached; he had simply distilled a rumor from the atmosphere of the time and presented it to Jackson as fact, thus raising himself mightily in the candidate’s esteem. Buchanan felt compelled to concede in a letter to the editor of the Lancaster Journal that he had not, in fact, been authorized to strike a deal with Jackson. Clay whooped with vindication when he saw the clipping. “The tables are completely turned on the General,” he wrote to a friend.

  Perhaps they should have been, but they weren’t. Duff Green simply substituted for his own endless catalogue of accusations those made in the New York Enquirer or the Gazette of Culpepper, Virginia, whose analyses of the vile machinations of January 1825 filled the columns of the Telegraph. At the same time, the opposit
ion in Congress used every opportunity that came to hand to demonstrate Adams’ supposed illegitimacy. They accused him of using patronage to seed the government with political allies at the same time that Adams’ friends were tearing their hair out at the president’s steadfast refusal to do just that. In fact Adams would be the last president to stand fast against the mighty torrent of political opportunism: he would remove a grand total of twelve men from office, all for cause.

  Jackson’s allies demanded that the president produce a list of former and current newspapers authorized to print the public laws in order to prove how he had abused the privilege. (Clay had done his best to transfer this right to allies, but with limited success.) They accused Adams of opposing the Louisiana Purchase, of bartering Texas away to Spain, of ceding navigation rights on the Mississippi. A North Carolina congressman announced a shocking find: the president had billed to the American people the purchase of a billiard table, billiard balls, and a chess set—a total of almost $80! This caused a brief sensation, though of course the supremely scrupulous president had paid for the items himself. His son John had mistakenly accounted for them under “Furniture of the President’s House.”

  The abuse only confirmed Adams’ tragic sense of public life and thus his fatalism. But Adams’ friends, with ambitions of their own, would not sit idly by. In late March 1827, Daniel Webster wrote to Henry Clay from Philadelphia lamenting that “enemies laugh, and friends hang down their heads, whenever the subject of” executive appointments was raised. The administration only had one paper in town on its side—the Democratic Press. The Customs House was in the hands of the opposition. The postmaster was a disaster, but the president wouldn’t fire him. Philadelphia, a key bastion of pro-Adams sentiment, was locked in gloom. Webster and Clay began to correspond regularly. These men would attempt, almost by themselves, to counteract the vast network being built up around Jackson. Clay wrote in April suggesting that Webster and Edward Everett, the congressman who had married Abby Brooks’ older sister, “prepare a series of pieces, calculated for the region and first to be published in Penna., in which a solemn appeal should be made to their patriotism and intelligence.”