John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  Adams was not disposed to credit omens and portents, but during this period Washington was also shaken by an earthquake for the first time in memory. At eleven at night on March 9, Adams was writing in his journal when first the table and then the floor itself began to shake. The window shutters banged. For two long minutes the room bucked and swerved—like a ship being tossed by the waves, he thought. Adams was more curious than frightened, though a terrified Louisa cowered in bed.

  Those humiliations thickening around the president largely took the form of allegations of misconduct. Adams had a clerk unearth records from as far back as 1794 to prove that he had not abused public finances. He was forced to respond to the absurd claim that while in Russia he had prostituted his servant, Martha Godfrey, to Tsar Alexander. He was said to be the author of a satirical song against Jefferson published in 1802. He was said to be a Mason. (He wasn’t, though Jackson was.) He and his cabinet members had to gather records to rebut the claims of James Chilton’s Retrenchment Committee. Adams felt as if he were fighting a hydra—the many-headed monster of the aroused and confident opposition. The two houses of Congress, he wrote to Charles, “are united by a spirit of bitter, unrelenting, persecuting malice, against me individually, and against the Administration, which they conspired to overthrow.” For once, Adams was not exaggerating. The opposition really was bent on his destruction.

  Adams also found himself entangled in the coils of patronage. Over the previous two years, John Binns, editor of the pro-administration Democratic Press of Philadelphia, had been railing against that city’s postmaster, Richard Bache, the publisher of the anti-Adams Franklin Gazette. Binns accused his rival of practicing gross favoritism on behalf of the administration’s opponents; Bache responded with a physical assault that landed him in court. But every time Adams spoke about Bache to John McLean, the postmaster general defended his employee’s record—further proof to Clay and others of McLean’s own perfidy. In fact, senior postal officials had been warning McLean about Bache for years, to no avail. Finally, in 1828, Bache was found to have stolen funds from his postmaster’s accounts. At last McLean fired the man—and then replaced him with Bache’s brother-in-law, an investor in the Franklin Gazette and another inveterate opponent of the administration.

  In early June, the assistant postmaster general informed Adams that Bache’s embezzlement amounted to $25,000, an immense sum. Adams was shocked, finally, into a clear recognition of what Clay and others had been telling him since the beginning of his tenure. “The conduct of Mr. McLean has been that of deep and treacherous duplicity,” he wrote. “With solemn protestations of personal friendship for me, and of devotion to the cause of the Administration, he has been three years using the extensive patronage of his office in undermining it among the people.” Adams hadn’t exactly been taken in; it was rather that he had not wanted to act against so obviously effective a civil servant as McLean. And now it was too late: firing McLean, he feared, would confirm the opposition’s otherwise flimsy claim that he had politicized the civil service. Adams left the postmaster general where he was. Andrew Jackson would reward him for his good work by placing him on the Supreme Court.

  The new Jackson-Calhoun–Old Radical coalition was now driving the legislative agenda. By 1828, the Democratic Republicans had hijacked the all-important issue of the tariff—the administration’s own issue. The United States had been levying duties on imported goods since its foundation in order to raise revenues. As early as 1816, Henry Clay had begun arguing for the imposition of tariffs for an entirely different reason: to protect domestic manufactures from foreign competition. What Clay meant by the American System was a powerful domestic market tied together by internal improvements and protected by duties. The two ideas were so strongly linked in his mind that he developed the shorthand “D.M. & I.I.,” for “domestic market” and “internal improvements.” In 1824 he had helped push the highest tariffs in history through Congress—an average of 37 percent. He and Adams planned to raise duties yet higher.

  In the years before and during Adams’ presidency, the economy shifted in ways that sharpened the divide between pro- and anti-tariff forces while also producing fractures within them. A massive increase in imports from England in the years after the War of 1812 had created a negative trade balance and raised a clamor for protection among manufacturers, above all in the North and the Mid-Atlantic. At the same time, the explosive growth of cotton cultivation in the South had created a lucrative export market that, farmers feared, would face retaliation if the United States raised tariffs. And when the price of cotton plunged between 1825 and 1829, imperiling the economy of the South, farmers blamed a British boycott rather than the actual culprit, which was oversupply. In 1827, the Virginia state legislature passed a resolution stating that the federal government had no right either to impose tariffs to protect domestic manufacturers or to authorize internal improvements. South Carolina, whose economy depended almost entirely on cotton, was equally implacable. At the same time, the sheep farmers and hemp manufacturers in the interior, who were largely supplying a domestic market, favored both discriminatory duties and the roads and canals needed to move their products. Boston merchants favored free trade; Massachusetts factory owners demanded protection. The politics of the protective tariff, which had begun as an instrument to protect New England manufacturers from cheap English woolens, became vastly more complicated. Emotions on the subject ran high all over the country.

  Tariff legislation encountered stiff resistance in the first years of the Adams administration. In March 1827, Clay wrote to a Pennsylvania legislator suggesting he hold a meeting of administration allies and tariff supporters in order to intensify the public demand for new legislation. A series of meetings in the state culminated in the convention of the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Manufactures and the Mechanic Arts in Harrisburg. The delegates crafted a series of resolutions calling on Congress to increase protection for both sheep farmers and woolen manufacturers, as well as for producers of iron and steel, flax and hemp, and so on. A more politically adroit administration might have been able to dramatize and reshape the resolution so as to bring diverse interests to rally together under its flag. The Republicans could have made themselves the party of “D.M & I.I.” But Clay and Webster were busy elsewhere, Adams paid scant attention, and there was no one else with the authority to act.

  When the Congress reconvened in late 1827, the opposition had a majority in both houses. The House Committee on Manufactures would consider only an opposition bill, not an administration one, even though it was the administration that favored tariffs. This presented an opportunity, but a very ticklish one, for Van Buren and his allies. The South, the opposition heartland, opposed tariffs of any kind. Calhoun, who had agreed to become Andrew Jackson’s running mate even he though he currently served Jackson’s opponent as vice president, had once favored both tariffs and internal improvements, but no longer. Now he saw the issue as a wedge dividing the nation against itself; the tariff, he wrote, would eventuate either in “defeat or oppression.” Jackson was on record favoring what he called, with studied ambivalence, a “judicious tariff.” Pennsylvania and New York favored some tariffs and not others. Adams had shored up his support in the former state by choosing as his running mate the Pennsylvanian Richard Rush, his treasury secretary. The Western states were split on the tariff. The issue, in short, could have undone Van Buren’s careful work uniting a fragmented opposition.

  The committee crafted a bill with consummate skill and cynicism. Presented in late January, the bill raised duties to prohibitive levels on a vast range of raw materials, though not on manufactured goods, thus helping farmers rather than factory owners; erected palisades of protection around staples produced in the Western states likely to go for Jackson; and did virtually nothing for the New England wool industry, a redoubt of old Federalists. The bill’s features were so extravagant and nonsensical that it was dubbed the Tariff of Abominations. As Silas Wright, the
prime mover on the committee, later explained, “we had put the duties upon all kinds of woolen cloths as high as our own friends in Pennsylvania, Ohio & Kentucky would vote them. Why did we put the duty on molasses so high? Because Pennsylvania and our friends west of that state required it to induce them to go fore the woolens.” And so on with duck cloth and hemp and the rest.

  Administration supporters were bewildered and infuriated. Webster was buried under letters from the wool industry opposing the tariff. At the same time, the bill offered protection to many other interests that would be outraged should the bill fail. Calhoun was right in the sense that a tariff bill—any tariff bill—split the country along geographic and economic lines, and accelerated the rise of a new “sectional” politics. Webster wrote plaintively to a friend, “Can we go the hemp, iron, spirits and molasses for the sake of any woolen bill? Can we do it for a poor woolen bill?” Republicans suspected that the opposition had intentionally shaped a bill so inimical that the Adams forces would vote against it, thus sending it to a defeat that Jacksonites in places like New York and Pennsylvania would blame on New England rather than the South. Or maybe the intention was the exact opposite. George McDuffie, the South Carolina Calhounite, wrote that “we determined to put such ingredients in the chalice as would poison the monster and commend it to his own lips.”

  Clay was both impressed by the ingenuity of the bill’s authors and disgusted by its likely outcome. “The Jackson party is playing a game of brag on that subject,” he wrote. “They do not really, desire the passage of their own measure & it may happen, in the sequel, that what is desired by neither party, commands the support, of both.” And that was pretty much what happened. Clay concluded that the administration could not afford to lose the Midwestern and New England farmers who saw tremendous benefit in the bill, and instructed the administration’s allies in the House to vote for it. The bill passed 105 to 94. The Jackson forces who had imposed the bill voted against 59 to 44, while the Republicans who had been its victim provided the margin of victory, the poison having commended itself to the monster’s lips. The Tariff of Abominations passed the Senate and was signed by the president, thus becoming the single most dubious feature of Adams’ legacy.

  Adams remained mute throughout the debate; then again, so did Jackson. Adams had no wish to alienate the South by coming out foursquare for a high tariff, and in any case the etiquette of the day dictated that presidents did not openly seek to tip the scales on pending legislation. Adams was not entirely above electioneering, so long as it involved pointing to what he considered the genuine merits of his position or the deficiencies of his rival. In early March, Peter Force, publisher of the pro-administration National Journal, had published a verbatim copy of a letter from Jackson full of his typical grammatical and spelling errors as well as his wrath—and next to it a copy of a grandiloquent address he was alleged to have written but was widely thought to have come from the pen of Henry Lee, his paid propagandist.

  Now a hunt was on among Adams’ supporters for real specimens of Jackson’s semiliterate prose and explosive temper. Secretary Barbour went rummaging through the files of the War Department and brought to the White House a Jackson letter that Adams described as “still more ferocious than barbarous in style and composition.” Adams’ allies hoped to get this one published as well. A few weeks later the letter was printed in the National Intelligencer, but the high-minded Gales and Seaton insisted on correcting the errors first, much to Adams’ frustration. Of course, the whole episode was founded on the archaic assumption that Americans would not elect a man who couldn’t spell or hold his temper.

  The Adams press did not cede the low ground to the Telegraph or the Franklin Gazette. Charles Hammond, of the Cincinnati Gazette, brought out a special journal, Truth’s Advocate and Monthly Anti-Jackson Expositor, to publish only malicious material on the Democratic candidate. The pro-administration press had made hay from the discovery that Jackson had ordered six militia men court-martialed and executed during the Creek War. John Binns of the Democratic Press had the inspired idea of printing up black-bordered handbills with the names of the six men and, below them, six black coffins; a mournful bit of doggerel recalled “Those shrieks! That cry of death!” when the men were shot. The “Coffin Hand Bill” was widely circulated and probably did a good deal more damage than had the samples of Jackson’s mangled prose—though the truth was that the six men had mutinied, broke into the commissary, and deserted. No prior election in American history had begun to approach the campaign of 1828 for sheer vileness and dishonesty; it would be hard to say which side sunk lower.

  Jackson was, in fact, a violent-tempered man, at least when he thought no one was looking. When he heard that Navy Secretary Samuel Southard had been overheard claiming that James Monroe deserved more credit for the Battle of New Orleans than did Jackson himself—Monroe was then directing the overall war effort—he exploded with anger and prepared to challenge Southard to a duel. (The secretary said the whole story was false.) As for Monroe himself, Jackson wrote, “I will unrobe his hypocrisy and strip him of much of his borrowed plumage.” Jackson’s managers worried that the volcano of the Hermitage could blow at any moment. John H. Eaton wrote to caution him not to respond to newspaper attacks or the stories about Monroe: “There let your friends who are fully competent battle the affair; your course under all circumstances is retirement and silence.” When the tariff issue began agitating the South, another advisor, Colonel Arthur P. Hayne, wrote to express his “most earnest wish that for the present you would neither write or express any positive opinion upon this subject.” And Jackson, at times the most refractory of men, mostly sat on his hands and kept his fury to himself.

  Jackson was contemptuous toward Adams, but he despised the very ground on which Henry Clay trod. “He is certainly,” Jackson wrote to his confederate Sam Houston, “the basest, meanest scoundrel, that ever disgraced the image of his god.” In his blind fury Jackson had publicly claimed to have proof of Clay’s “corrupt bargain” and then had to watch helplessly as his case had collapsed when James Buchanan retracted the central claim. Clay was convinced that he could Jonathan-Russell the old soldier. He delivered a speech in Richmond in late 1827 rebutting the whole story and then sent copies of it all over the country. The South, he thought, was turning toward the administration.

  Clay had taken over much of the hard work of the campaign from Webster, whose wife had died after a long illness in January 1828. Other cabinet members barnstormed across the country for Adams—a new phenomenon the opposition press denounced—but none more eagerly than Clay, whose own future was bound up in the result as much as Adams’ was. William Crawford wrote from Georgia to tell Clay that he shouldn’t have joined the Adams government: “It appears to me that he is destined to fall as his father did, and you must fall with him.” Clay responded equably that when one chooses between two alternatives, time develops the consequences of the one chosen and not of the other. He could not be provoked against Adams, though he certainly had cause; he would go down with the ship rather than scramble off. To his friend Francis Blair he wrote, “I had fear of Mr. Adams temper and disposition, but I must say that they have not been realized, and I found in him, since I associated with him in the Executive government, as little to censure or condemn as I could have expected in any man.”

  The intensely uncomfortable cohabitation between the Adams administration and an implacably hostile Congress drew to an end in the first days of June. Taking a final opportunity to distribute boons to the people, legislators passed a bill authorizing the building of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, and another paying for harbor improvement. The United States would purchase $1 million in stock in the canal and appoint directors to the company. The canal authorities would be breaking ground immediately outside of Georgetown, and they had decided to do so on July 4. For once, Adams agreed to attend the kind of ritual event he deprecated, with bunting and huzzahs and jolly crowds.

  At eight that mo
rning a marching band set off from a Georgetown hotel, and then Adams followed in a crowd of dignitaries. Three steamboats took the group to the entrance of the Potomac Canal, where they switched into smaller canal boats to reach its head, near the border with Maryland. There they disembarked. The president of the company made a brief speech and handed a spade to Adams, who began to address the two thousand or so onlookers. But in that distant era no advance man was available to ensure that nothing unexpected or actually spontaneous happened, and Adams found that the first strike of his spade clanged against the stump of a tree. So did the second and the third. At this point, Adams later recorded, “I threw off my jacket”—perhaps for the first time in public—“and, resuming the spade, raised a shovelful of earth, at which a general shout burst from the surrounding multitude, and I completed my address, which occupied about fifteen minutes.”

  By the time Adams returned to the White House that night, he was exhausted. He felt relieved that he hadn’t made a fool of himself. And he realized that the real event of the day had been not the speech but the doffing of his jacket. This was the kind of folksy gesture politicians made even then—but not men of Adams’ generation or background. He was shocked at the effect. “It struck the eye and fancy of the spectators more than all the flowers of rhetoric in my speech.” At age sixty, Adams had discovered politics. He might even have been good at it, but it was a little late.

  ADAMS LEFT FOR QUINCY IN EARLY AUGUST—WITHOUT LOUISA. The relationship between the two of them had reached its nadir. Louisa told Charles that she and the president now only saw one another at meals. “I cannot bear the loneliness of my life,” she confessed. She would stay in Washington, she wrote, since “your father had much rather go without me.” She herself wouldn’t want to stay at Quincy, and it would only provoke talk if she stayed elsewhere. Also, Mary was pregnant and helpless—“one of the greatest sufferers I have ever seen,” said Louisa, herself a past master. To George she sent the kind of romantic verse he had a weakness for, but which would have embarrassed Charles. She wrote a ballad about a shipwreck full of foaming seas and watery graves. Louisa had been preoccupied with death, and actively yearned for it, since the death of her infant daughter fifteen years earlier. At times she blamed her husband for her deep depression, though at other moments she accused herself, with equal abandon, of having given up on life.