John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  Webster, who had little influence beyond New England and the mid-Atlantic states, continued to urge public shows of support from allies in New Hampshire, Maine, and Pennsylvania. He corresponded with friends in Maryland, New York, and Ohio. He gave a speech at Faneuil Hall observing that no true difference of policy existed between Federalists and Republicans (a claim that would not have traveled well beyond New England, the only region where Federalists were still taken at all seriously). He contemplated whether he could help the administration more by remaining in the House or standing for the Senate. He visited New York and interviewed potential candidates for Congress. Clay, meanwhile, made a swing through Kentucky and the South. An inveterate optimist, he assured his friends that Adams’ support was stronger than it looked. “My belief is that Mr. Adams will be re-elected and with ease,” he wrote in September.

  Money played a far more modest role in politics at that time than it does today, but even in 1827 it took cash to assemble a network of newspapers, as the Jackson forces had done. Webster reported to Clay from Baltimore that he hoped to convert the Patriot from neutrality to active support—“& by the aid of friends measures are in train which, I hope, may have that result.” He wrote to William Gales of the National Intelligencer lamenting the difficult straits in which publishers now found themselves, and suggested that one of them come to Boston in order to facilitate a financial arrangement. The most audacious plan Webster and Clay cooked up involved the scurrilous Cincinnati Gazette. The editor, Charles Hammond, had taken to circulating disgraceful libels about Jackson, describing his wife Rachel as a “convicted adultress” who had married Jackson bigamously. (The two appear to have lived together before Rachel’s husband had sought, much less received, a divorce.) According to one of Hammond’s squibs: “General Jackson’s mother was a COMMON PROSTITUTE brought to this country by the British soldiers! She afterwards married a MULATTO MAN, with whom she had several children, of whom GENERAL JACKSON IS ONE!!!”

  Clay was much taken with Hammond’s full-throated advocacy and in August 1827 wrote to Webster describing the editor as “every way worthy of encouragement and patronage.” Perhaps, he suggested, they could buy him a new set of types. Webster visited printers in Boston and found that the cost would be $500 to $600. Would that be the most effective means of supporting Hammond? Clay wrote back in mid-October to say that in fact “another & perhaps a better mode of accomplishing the object in view has presented itself.” Clay proposed that they raise a sort of slush fund from wealthy merchants and disburse money to sympathetic editors to increase circulation. By early November, Webster reported from New York that he could, if necessary, raise $1,000 just for the Richmond Whig, the rival to the Enquirer.

  Webster began to get nervous about committing to paper proposals that should never see the light of day. “I hope your office is confidential & trustworthy,” he wrote to Clay. “All is safe at my end, because no one opens my letters.” Clay reassured him that no one save Daniel Brent, the longtime chief clerk of the State Department and an ardent supporter of the administration, opened his mail.

  THE WORLD HAD CHANGED; JOHN QUINCY ADAMS HAD NOT. IN his History of the American People, Woodrow Wilson, later to become the president most like Adams, high-minded and unbending, caught him to the life:

  His very precision and stiffness of manner, as of the old school; his cool, unsympathetic aloofness from the men about him, repelling intimacy of any warm confidence; the dash of acid in his careful rectitude; his whole attitude, as of a man who administered his great office as a purely personal trust, for which he alone was responsible, and kept all others at arms’ length, enhanced the impression of his separateness, his single survival out of an age gone by.

  Yet Americans now expected to see and even meet the president; he was their president, after all. Adams came face to face with this new spirit on his rare trips outside of Washington. As he passed through Philadelphia on his return from his summer vacation in October 1827, crowds lined up on the wharf to greet him with “Hip hip hooray!” They saluted the president as he neared his hotel. A crowd formed again as Adams prepared to leave for Washington. He agreed that he would shake every hand if they all formed an orderly line. They did so, and Adams walked along the line for half an hour. As his steamer passed through the harbor, the crowds set up a cry that seemed to follow him out into the water. “I returned their salutation by a bow,” Adams wrote in his journal, “waving the hand and saying ‘God bless you all.’”

  The festival of democracy continued as Adams arrived in Baltimore, where he estimated that two thousand citizens came out to shake his hand—“people of all classes and all political opinions.” Adams shook thousands more hands the next day, and after dinner he came out of his hotel room to find another crowd waiting. He was beginning almost to enjoy himself. Standing on the hotel steps, he said, “I want each one of you that has at home a wife, or a mother, or a sister, or a daughter, to shake hands for me with her, and tell her that in shaking hands with you, I do, in heart, the same with her.” This may not have been a very potent political appeal, since at the time women were not allowed to vote. Nevertheless, that night Adams wrote that he felt “grateful for the kind and friendly entertainment I have experienced here.” Louisa described this giddy encounter to Charles, adding, “If he would only lend himself a little to the usages and manners of the people without hiding himself and too modestly rejecting their civilities no man would be more popular.” Even Louisa was a democrat compared to her husband.

  Adams appears to have known little, if anything, of Webster and Clay’s efforts to raise money and buy the loyalty of editors. Indeed, in early 1828 a Mr. Bailey from Massachusetts came to the White House, at Webster’s instigation, to explain that Kentucky state legislators would now be choosing national electors and to ask for $5,000 to $10,000 in order to publish pamphlets and handbills, and increase newspaper circulation, for the upcoming state poll. Adams replied brusquely that the practice of paying money to secure office was “incorrect in principle.” He was struck, and of course disgusted, by the monetization of politics, the consequence of which was “to render elections altogether venal.” Adams was also amazed to hear that Webster thought he had that kind of money. He explained to Mr. Bailey that he could barely support his family, that his properties were mortgaged, that of his annual rental income of $6,000 he was paying a third to retire debts, and that he had no idea how he would manage once he left office.

  Adams now understood that none of his most ambitious dreams would be realized. He began to yearn for release from his burden. “My duties are to prepare for the end with a grateful heart and an unwavering mind,” he wrote. He continued to work long hours, but he spent more time cultivating his garden, in the figurative and the literal sense. In the spring of 1827, as he watched the flowers and trees along Pennsylvania Avenue burst into bloom, Adams became fascinated by cultivation. It was a hobby well suited to him. Adams loved empirical subjects, with endless particulars and labyrinthine relations, whether weights and measures or astronomy. He also loved pursuits that allowed him to commune with his inmost being. Gardening also deepened Adams’ sense of kinship with the stoics of ancient Rome, who had retired from the world to the hortus conclusus.

  Before long Adams was spending an hour or two most mornings working alongside John Ousley, the White House gardener. He brought home blossoms from his walks, researched their names and attributes, and planted them in the garden. He wrote to foreign consuls asking them to buy seeds and plants and send them to the United States for cultivation. Adams became fascinated by the cultivation of trees, a potential source of wealth that heretofore had been left to nature. From London and Paris he ordered massive encyclopedias of dendrology—the study of trees. He planted walnut and chestnut trees. Fearing the demands of shipbuilding would deplete the native population of oak, he established an oak reserve in Florida that ultimately grew to thirty thousand trees—the first act of conservation by an American president.


  By early June, Adams could find almost nothing worth committing to his journal save his adventures in the garden. The two acres of White House gardens held perhaps a thousand varieties of flowers and plants; Ousley was teaching him their names. Walking among his trees and flowers in the midst of the brilliant Washington summer gave Adams a taste of joy. One morning, after planting cherries, he wandered through his gardens, finding the poppies in full bloom, the strawberries declining, the red and black currants ripening. “The catalpa trees are in full and beautiful blossom,” he wrote, “and Holyoke’s bladder senna, and other flowers, are blossoming. The rue, sage and hyssop are also in bloom. I remarked that the honey-bees had keen relish for the poppy-flowers, and the wasps for the wormwood, though not in blossom. . . . My apple-pippin, in the flower-pot, shed its shell forty-eight hours after its first appearance on the surface of the ground.” All of Adams’ senses, and his great intellectual faculties, were fastened on the harmless, enclosed world of the garden and on the microscopic process of growth, development, and decay, while the world beyond his gate connived at his downfall.

  WHEN ADAMS RETURNED TO WASHINGTON IN THE FALL OF 1827, he faced something that none of his predecessors in office ever had: a Congress controlled by the opposition. The party that the Democratic Republicans had built rolled over the National Republicans across the West and the South and in parts of the mid-Atlantic. With a solid majority of Democrats now in the House, Andrew Stevenson of Virginia, Martin Van Buren’s handpicked candidate, defeated the pro-administration Speaker of the House, John W. Taylor of New York. Committees in both chambers were now controlled by the opposition. Over the previous three years the opposition had been able to block Adams’ initiatives and subject him to continual harassment; now the united Jackson-Calhoun coalition could pursue an agenda of its own and ensure its victory in 1828. “The opposition party,” wrote John Tyler of Virginia, a Jeffersonian Democrat, “constitutes in fact the administration.”

  The committed partisans of small government used their newfound strength to authorize federal funds for the kind of expenditures that suited their own views, for example, to pay pensions to Revolutionary War veterans or to supply massive land grants to the states. These projects also suited the opposition’s political interests: the new Democratic Party was going to do whatever it could to win over wavering states and to purchase available votes. Nor did these avowed enemies of patronage omit the opportunity they now had to patronize their friends: the contract for the printing of the laws in Washington was taken away from the neutral National Intelligencer and given to Duff Green’s Telegraph.

  The new Congress, like many later iterations, opposed government spending in principle but not always in practice. Dr. James Chilton, a freshman legislator from Kentucky, introduced a resolution calling for the House Ways and Means Committee to report on federal offices that could be eliminated and fees and salaries that could be reduced. A committed Jeffersonian, Chilton had insisted on cutting the budgets of the House and Senate as well as of the executive branch. That was taking an admirable principle too far. Congressmen stoutly defended their own expenditures and sought, quietly, to limit the scope of Chilton’s investigation.

  The measure was referred to a select committee, whose report was issued only at the very end of the term and then largely ignored. It was a transparently partisan document, which accused the administration of a lengthy train of abuses. In fact, Adams had not expanded the government at all—he hadn’t been able to—and in his congressional message of 1827 had called for “the strictest economy” in order to speed the retirement of the national debt. As Adams noted in his diary, his treasury secretary, Richard Rush, had eight clerks to handle a national revenue of $26 million, while Albert Gallatin had had nine at a time when revenue was half as great.

  The committee’s hunt through state documents turned up the kind of “scandalous” material that could be exploited on the hustings. Ancient accounts in the State Department were said to demonstrate that Adams had padded his expenses as minister to Russia. The administration had paid for a junket to London by a friendly editor and had transferred a stationery account to the rabidly pro-Adams Democratic Press of Philadelphia (to which, it is true, Clay had awarded the right to print the laws). Each of these frivolous allegations, like the tale of the billiard table, served its political purpose.

  By the last days of 1827, Adams saw very clearly that he could not oppose the powerful political machine Jackson and Van Buren had built. Clay showed him a public letter he had written rebutting the allegations of the corrupt bargain. He had gathered corroborating statements from every Western congressman who had voted for Adams in 1825. Clay was still fighting both for his own reputation and for the next term. So little was he motivated by personal ambition, Clay had written, that he was preparing to retire from public life. Adams advised him to strike that passage. After all, Jackson was sure to win, since slander couldn’t be refuted. But then he would fail. “He is incompetent both by his ignorance and the fury of his passions,” Adams said of the man he had once championed as a national hero. His sycophants will fall upon one another. And then the public would turn to Clay.

  Adams, unlike Clay, really was thinking about his retirement. Perhaps he would write a memoir of his father, or a history of the United States from the time of the Constitution. He was reading again—Tacitus and Plutarch. He was writing to Charles about Cicero and to George about the virtues of keeping a journal. He had been called to serve, and he had served. The rest he would leave to fate.

  CHAPTER 27

  The Sun of My Political Career Sets in Deepest Gloom

  (1828–1829)

  ON APRIL 15, 1828, ADAMS DISPATCHED HIS SON JOHN TO Congress to deliver papers containing nominations for military posts. As John passed through the Capitol Rotunda, Russell Jarvis, a reporter for the Telegraph, darted out from behind one of the pillars and punched him square in the face. John picked himself up and took off after Jarvis; the two were separated before the fight escalated much further. The insult had begun with John, for when Jarvis had shown up at a White House gathering two weeks earlier, Adams’ son had loudly remarked that someone who made a living maligning the president should have the good manners to avoid his drawing room. Jarvis had delivered a note demanding an explanation, which John had indignantly refused to give. And so the reporter had waited for the chance to avenge himself, not through a duel but through a brawl.

  President Adams’ inclination was to do nothing; any outrage committed within the precincts of the Congress must be dealt with by the Congress. Leaving aside the question of prerogative, the public spectacle was mortifying to Adams, who was quite accustomed to defending himself from attack but now found his son’s name dragged through the mud. Clay, however, said that a dignified silence would not do. The president, he said, “had a duty to maintain his own dignity and security in the performance of his functions.” The Congress would do nothing unless the president forced them to. Even then they would probably produce a report siding with Jarvis, but nevertheless the executive branch could not let the insult pass. The other cabinet members agreed. In response to a message from Adams, the House impaneled an investigative committee, though one heavily weighted to the Jacksonian opposition.

  The fight quickly became fodder for public raillery. Duff Green wrote in his usual tone of wicked glee that Jarvis “could not have anticipated that the baby . . . would run blubbering to his daddy that he had had his nose pulled and his jaws slapped for his impudence.” Louisa told Charles that both she and the president were in agony over the affair. Far better, she thought, for her husband to announce that he would not seek reelection and thus leave this endless public trial behind. Yet to do so would “in some measure forfeit the reputation he has so justly acquired.”

  John was called to testify before the House investigative committee, which noted a “discrepancy” between his account and that of various onlookers. There he had to endure the indignity of being cross-examined by th
e arch-fiend Duff Green. In late May, immediately prior to adjournment, the committee issued a report conceding that Jarvis’ attack had violated congressional privilege but concluding that since Jarvis had not intended to do so, no further notice should be taken of the incident. For Adams it must have been confirmation, as if any further were needed, that he was no longer in control of events and that his enemies could assail him—and his family—with impunity.

  That spring the Adams administration, like the leaky canoe in which the president had tried to cross the Potomac three years earlier, seemed to be taking on water with no bucket on board. Clay implored Adams to let him retire; a paralysis was creeping up his left foot toward the hip. His friends thought he might be dying. Adams doubted it. And he found the thought of losing his most trusted advisor at so crucial a moment a “disastrous occurrence . . . among those of deep humiliation which are thickening around me.” He asked his secretary of state to take some time off instead; Clay reluctantly agreed. The whole cabinet seemed to be preparing to jump overboard. Both James Barbour and Richard Rush wanted to be appointed minister to London (reappointed, in Rush’s case). So did Daniel Webster, who had lobbied for the job when Adams became president. Adams could scarcely do without any of them; Clay had persuaded Webster to wait, though the latter must have understood very well that he would serve in London only in the unlikely case that Adams won a second term. Adams thought that all of them, Clay included, were hoping to save themselves “from the wreck.”