John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  In Quincy, Adams went swimming with George and John, dined with old friends, attended commencement at Harvard, and went fishing with Tom. He visited the Atheneum to see the Gilbert Stuart portraits, including of himself and his father. Gardening remained the great solace of his life. Around the house he planted peaches, plums, apricots, and cherries, as well as chestnuts, oaks, walnuts, and apple trees. In early September he received a note—it’s not clear from whom—saying that Louisa was very ill. Whatever the state of feeling between them, Adams was always provoked into panic by Louisa’s bouts of illness. He wrote to say that he would leave as soon as possible, and sent George and John out to Medford to ask Charles to accompany him—perhaps because he knew that Charles was his wife’s favorite, or perhaps because he needed Charles’ company at what he feared would be a heavy moment. Charles reached Washington to find that Louisa was being bled and blistered, encased in a plaster of mud and cayenne. But Louisa often seemed to be at death’s door before recovering, and soon she was convalescent and then riding in a carriage. She wrote her first letter to George in mid-October—the election, she reported, was still looking hopeful.

  That was true: in the era before polling, it was possible to be wildly deluded about the outcome of an election. Adams had resigned himself to losing months, if not years, before. But as late as November 5, Webster was writing to a friend that the auguries were good; Maryland, he thought, would decide the outcome. The president and Rush, he thought, would carry New England and much of the mid-Atlantic including New York, plus Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana. He was still forwarding money to key newspaper publishers. Clay, better attuned, calculated that Adams needed to win five of six borderline states. When he learned soon afterward that Kentucky had gone to Jackson, he finally lost hope. Returns trickled in to Washington slowly. By November 30, Clay could write simply to Webster, “We are beaten.” On December 3, Adams learned that he had lost—only the second president to be denied a second term, the first of course having been his father. But John Adams had lost a close race; this one was a rout. Jackson and Calhoun had won the electoral college 178 to 83. Adams was confined to New England and the mid-Atlantic (not including New York). The popular vote was twice the size of the 1824 figure, and Jackson won 56 percent of the total.

  Adams did not feel humiliated by his defeat, but he did feel abandoned by his country. “The sun of my political career sets in deepest gloom,” he wrote in his journal. “But that of the country shines unclouded.” He hoped to return quietly to Quincy, the home of his ancient relations and his dearest friends. But he was denied even this, for the perpetual turbulence of his life would accompany him home. In mid-October, the National Intelligencer had published a letter Thomas Jefferson had written three years earlier recalling a long-ago correspondence in which Adams had allegedly asserted that the Federalists had conspired to help the British cause during the War of 1812. This presumably represented a last-ditch effort to blacken Adams’ reputation, even though he had broken with the Federalists by that time.

  Adams felt that he had no choice but to correct the historical record, and wrote to the Intelligencer explaining that Jefferson had garbled his history so many years after the fact. Jefferson must have seen a letter Adams had written to Senator William Giles of Virginia in late 1808, in the midst of the furious debate over imposing an embargo on British shipping in retaliation for British attacks on American merchant ships, and not during the war itself. Adams had written that tempers in New England were running so high that the enforcement of an embargo could lead to a confrontation between federal troops and the state militias. A politician of even moderate discretion, facing the contest of his lifetime, would have let the story lie there. But Adams had to pursue the truth, as he understood it, to the bitter end. And so he went on to note that, should such a confrontation have occurred, the Federalists would have sided with Great Britain, for they had planned since the Louisiana Purchase to dissolve the Union. Of this he had unequivocal evidence.

  Boston had long forgiven, if perhaps not altogether forgotten, Adams’ caucusing with the Republicans in 1808, his vote for nonintercourse, his acceptance of a diplomatic post from a Republican president. And now he had reminded everyone of that bitter moment. He was the president of the United States but nonetheless a traitor to his class, as he had been twenty years earlier. Though he had not named names, Charles wrote to say that “the whole body of the Federalists including your warmest personal friends consider themselves pointed at.” A group of fourteen leading figures released a public letter denying that they had conspired to secede in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase. Adams knew that many of these men, including Harrison Gray Otis and George Cabot, had been among the conspirators of the day. He persuaded William Plumer to write him a letter admitting that he and others had plotted “to establish a separate government in New England.” But that did not quiet the howls from Boston. Adams worried that he would be ostracized. He, of course, could live with that. But what of his family? In his letter Charles wrote that he didn’t know whether his father planned to pursue the matter once he returned home but reminded him plaintively that “the prospects of your family depend very considerably on the result.” How would Charles get respectable clients if the Adams name became a stain rather than a badge of honor?

  The president, too, had worries about his future. He had tended to his investments with great care. Nevertheless, ex-presidents received no pension and were expected to withdraw from public life. Jefferson had run through his savings, and his daughter had become a public charge. This great man’s fate loomed before Adams as a terrifying precedent. In the spring of 1828 Harvard had discreetly approached Adams to see if he would serve as president of the college should he not win reelection—a promotion, one imagines, in the eyes of the university administration—but Adams spurned the offer as he had the last time it had been made, a quarter of a century earlier. He was, he said, too broken-down. But how would he support his family as a pariah? He wrote draft after draft of a response to the Federalists, trying to state the truth without his usual asperity.

  During his last months in office, Adams read, and worked, and exercised, and met with visitors, as he had for the last four years. “This is a happy condition of life,” he reflected at the end of January, already missing a job he had so often regarded as a barely supportable burden. He was advised to attend his successor’s inauguration, as previous presidents had done, but he could not bring himself to do it. He had heard, correctly, that Jackson blamed him for the disgraceful calumnies published about himself and his wife. Adams had known nothing about Webster and Clay’s secret confabulations with Charles Hammond, but Jackson would never believe that. His anger blazed into unappeasable wrath when his beloved Rachel took sick and died—of a broken heart, Jackson believed—only days after he learned that he would be president.

  At the end of February, Louisa, Mary, and the rest of the household left for Meridian Hill, a neoclassical mansion situated on a hill directly north of the White House. On March 3, the day before the Inauguration, the president received the resignation of his cabinet members. At noon, along with John and his nephew Thomas, he rode to the Capitol to sign legislation for the last time. The three men walked back to the White House. That night, at nine, they left for Meridian Hill. Adams could look back from his temporary home and see the yet finer house he had just vacated. Underneath the stoical face he habitually turned to the world, Adams felt misunderstood, mistreated, and abandoned.

  PART V

  THE SLAVOCRACY

  CHAPTER 28

  Stay Thy Hand, God of Mercy

  (1829–1831)

  IN THE SPRING OF 1829, EX-PRESIDENT JOHN QUINCY ADAMS settled into a new life as a private citizen in Washington, DC. He found his new routines surprisingly agreeable. Meridian Hill was large, comfortable, well situated. Adams had a study upstairs whose window overlooked a garden and a nursery of young trees he delighted to gaze at. Then he would turn his attention ba
ck to the letters he was writing or the rather frivolous novel he was reading. Like many a stern father, he doted on his grandchild; Louisa wrote to Charles that his father was smitten with John and Mary’s daughter, also named Louisa. He was, she wrote, happier than she had ever known him to be. He took long rides on his horse, Governor, revolving lines of poetry in his head or simply listening and thinking as he passed through the woods. He wondered “whether in the history of any animal other than man there are dead languages.” Frogs made a noise like “brekekekex koax koax,” which, he recalled, “was the language of frogs in Homer’s time.” Thus did John Quincy Adams savor his retirement. “After 14 years of incessant and unremitting employment,” he wrote, “I have passed to a life of total leisure.”

  Still, Adams could not use the word “leisure” without an undertone of self-accusation: the inner goad urging him on to the next battle never fully relaxed. He worried about what he would do with himself now that his public life had come to an end. He could not simply retire to the farm and the garden, as his father had very contentedly done. He needed employment; more than that, he needed controversy. His chief plan was to write a biography of his father, a vindication of a great man who had been brought low by the scheming of his contemporaries, above all Jefferson and Hamilton. He would not stint on their bitter quarrels. Perhaps, he thought, the manuscript would have to be sealed until after his death. He could think of no other project that seemed fully worthy of his remaining years.

  The new administration studiously ignored the former president. The only member of the new cabinet to visit Adams was Martin Van Buren, the secretary of state, who knew very well that in politics today’s enemy could be tomorrow’s ally. Adams attributed the cold shoulder from the new team to a sense of guilt: “They hate the man they have wronged,” he wrote proudly. He took comfort from the follies of the Jackson administration, whose prodigies of patronage quickly became legend in his circle. The only principles governing the White House, Adams wrote ten days after Jackson took office, are “to feed the cormorant appetite for place, and to reward the prostitution of canvassing defamers.”

  Nevertheless, it was almost possible for Adams and Louisa to see a calm and settled future unroll before them. Their son John was working at the Columbia Mills, a granary Adams had purchased several years earlier in the hopes of gaining a steady source of income. Charles was engaged to marry into one of the finest families of the Boston area. Only George portended trouble. Louisa had asked Charles to look in on his older brother, and the reports he sent to Washington were extremely alarming. George’s rooms in the home of their friends the Welshes were a pigsty, and he seemed to see no one and do almost nothing. “He complains of dejection, low spirits and inability to occupy himself,” Charles wrote. He dwells upon “reflections of a melancholy kind in regard to father and himself.”

  George’s life had, in fact, become more desperate than any of them knew. He had begun an affair with Eliza Dolph, the Welshes’ chambermaid. In early 1828 Eliza had become pregnant, a fact the Welshes appear to have agreed to keep secret. Eliza gave birth at the end of the year, and in January an intermediary had succeeded in placing Eliza and the child in rented rooms. The landlord, Miles Farmer, had insisted that the father visit no more than twice a week, and then always in company. George sent a letter of introduction promising to honor the terms. But George apparently had a fight with Eliza, for in early April he showed up at the house—drunk, perhaps—noisily arguing with his mistress and demanding to take possession of the furniture. Farmer then kicked him out of the house, ordering him never to return.

  George had finally acceded to his mother’s fervent plea that he come to Washington. But by the time he started out, in the last days of April, the Adams’ eldest son was in a catastrophic mental state. He felt certain that his father would soon learn of his shameful behavior, which would blacken the family name—what John Quincy Adams held so dear. He had no prospects either of work or of family. The combination of despair and terror finally made him snap. George began to hear voices. The birds, he felt, were speaking to him. He was certain that someone was trying to break into his room, and he leapt out of bed in order to seize the perpetrator.

  George left Boston for Providence, where, on April 29, he boarded the steamer Benjamin Franklin. During the afternoon, he held a long conversation with a fellow passenger. He spoke, calmly, of the harrowing hallucinations he had experienced. He was, he said, having them again. The wheels of the steamship, rolling over and over, seemed to be whispering a phrase to him: “Let it be.” “Let it be.” “Let it be.”

  George was now in the full grip of his paranoid delusions. He returned to his berth, got up in the night, accused a stranger of plotting against him, and then went with a candle from room to room. At three in the morning he approached the captain and asked to be put ashore to escape the machinations of his fellow passengers. The ship was then churning through the Long Island Sound at sixteen knots; there could be no stopping. George then wandered to the upper deck, where he spoke briefly to a Mr. Stevens. A few minutes later, Stevens looked to the railing and saw that George was gone, but his hat and cloak remained behind. A search of the boat showed that he was nowhere to be found.

  At one P.M. on May 2, Nathaniel Frye, Louisa’s brother-in-law and a close family friend, came to Meridian Hill to see Adams.

  “Have you received a letter today?,” he asked. Adams said that he had not.

  “Have you heard anything of George?” Adams had not. And then Frye, who had hoped to be spared this heavy task, told him that the Baltimore papers were carrying a story that George had vanished from the deck of the Benjamin Franklin. His cousin William Cranch came with the same news and brought three letters confirming the event.

  Adams thought first of Louisa, whose unspeakable grief over the death of her daughter he could never forget. “Stay thy hand, God of mercy,” he wrote. “Let her not say, My God! My God! Why has thou forsaken me?” Adams still stood, but split, like a tree hit by lightning. The loss of his daughter, terrible though it was, had happened by degrees, so that he had almost welcomed her final release from suffering. George’s death was the greatest shock he had ever received. He felt his sanity slipping away. “My thoughts are so wandering that I distrust the operation of my own reason,” he wrote. Adams tried to put aside his own feelings in order to minister to his stricken wife. The two spent long hours together in prayer. Adams’ selfless generosity toward Louisa put an end to the terrible estrangement of the last few years—a strange, unlooked-for gift from poor George.

  Louisa had urged her husband to treat George with more tenderness than was natural to him. Now she might well have blamed him for George’s death. Many years later—it’s not clear when—Louisa wrote an extraordinary note to herself about this dreadful time. At a moment when, she wrote, “my beloved husband’s sufferings were alas beyond controul, I was so fearful that my full heart might betray its agony in the language of reproach, and thereby add to his misery that I think I begged him whatever I might say in my wanderings not to believe me.” She wished to declare—to herself and to posterity—that she had “no terror of conscience or of guilt.” Of course, the fact that Louisa felt the need to make this solemn avowal shows how close to the surface this terrible thought was.

  Adams did not in fact feel responsible for George’s torment or his death. A few months earlier he had written to Charles to defend himself from the charge of cold-heartedness. “You and all my children know that while my speech is sometimes harsh, my temper is not bad.” He lacked charm, but he failed “more by overindulgence than by asperity.” Neither his children nor his wife would have been likely to accept this self-assessment. Adams was not a good father; he was, in truth, difficult to live with. But that is not to say that he was responsible for George’s dreaminess, his fecklessness, or of course his ultimate psychic break. Charles, an acute and mostly dispassionate judge, felt that if anything his father had spared George the harsh judgment he deserv
ed. One might, in fact, just as easily connect George’s suicide to his mother’s own obsession with death as the deliverance from suffering, conveyed to him in one letter after another.

  Up in Boston, Charles went through George’s trunk and found a note George had written to him the year before declaring that, should he die that year, whatever remained after his debts had been settled should be paid “to a little girl who he had seduced and was then pregnant by him to the best of his belief.” Charles was just the kind of hardheaded young gentleman who knew how to dispose of such a problem. He destroyed the letter, reasoning that its strictures no longer held, as George had in fact died in 1829. Nevertheless, he vowed to himself to find the young woman and “preserve her from destruction.” There is no evidence that he actually did so.

  Weeks passed before Adams was able to resume work. On May 21, the New Bedford Mercury published a poem by George titled The Spark at Sea, which seemed both to strangely foretell his fate and to enfold it in a morbid and melancholy beauty:

  There is a little spark at sea

  Which grows ’mid darkness brilliantly,