John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  But when the moon looks clear and bright,

  Emits a pale and feeble light,

  And when the tempest shakes the wave

  It glimmers o’er the seaman’s grave

  Adams was deeply moved not only by the eerie adumbration but by the tone of tenderness and delicacy that so forcefully reminded him of George’s own nature.

  On June 11, Adams and his son John left for Quincy. Louisa was too sick to travel and in any case needed to stay with Mary and the child. On the ferry to New York, Adams read a paragraph in a New York paper saying that three days earlier George’s body had washed ashore on City Island, in what is now the Bronx. Putting in at New York, Adams learned that the body had been taken to the tomb of an Episcopalian church in Eastchester, immediately to the north. A coroner had already performed the inquest. Adams was brought to the underground vault, where George lay in a plain mahogany casket. He received George’s effects. His son’s watch had stopped at 3:44, thus fixing the moment he had plunged into the chill waters. That gave Adams a terrible shock. But he dutifully catalogued every object found in George’s pockets: “pocket book and papers, a loose shirt collar, silver pencil, comb, snuffbox, double penknife, a purse with about 2 dollars in change, and the key to his trunk.” Late that night, Adams sat down to tell Louisa the news, addressing her as “my most beloved friend.” He told her about each article and said that he hoped she would be soothed to learn that “the person was entire, without mark of violence or contusion.” He had not, that is, been murdered.

  Louisa wrote back with the identical endearment, saying that the letter had indeed reduced her agony. In the ensuing months they wrote one another constantly, always with the greatest tenderness; they had never before so utterly depended on each another, even though they were apart.

  ADAMS ARRIVED IN QUINCY JUNE 18. THE HOUSE LOOKED EMPTY, for his brother Tom had decamped with his family a few months before. Here was a gloomy reception to suit his mood. Charles saw in his father a quality of “quiet sadness” he had never glimpsed before. Adams filled his days with activity. He puttered in the garden. He tried to settle the estate of his late friend and relation Nicholas Ward Boylston, who had named him as executor. He did his best to organize the house, ordering bookshelves and virtually hemming himself in with books in his bedroom. He planned to build a stone schoolhouse in memory of his father on land his father had donated to the town. He thought of building a fine new house for the family, which elicited a quick response from Louisa: Don’t do anything until I get there. They could still rub each other the wrong way. Louisa apologized for having “as usual imagined myself of more consequence than I ought to be.” Adams concluded that he had far too many debts to afford a new house in any case.

  Most crucial of all, Adams began to put his father’s papers in order with a view to writing the great biography. He and Charles hauled John Adams’ papers into the library and began filing them. He found diary entries as far back as 1755, when his father was eighteen. He read old church records and wandered among ancient tombstones. But he seemed to be perpetually organizing and reorganizing, as if recoiling before the task itself. Adams devoted most of his attention to a mighty rhodomontade on the Federalist secession plot. It was bloody-minded work, for Adams still seethed at the men who had ejected him from the US Senate in 1808, “the mouldering relics” of the Essex Junto who had hatched the secession plan, and above all his former friend, Harrison Gray Otis. He sent a draft to Charles, who counted these men and their sons among his closest associates. Charles returned a copy with marks on “the passages which I thought bitter and personal,” and advised his father to swallow his wrath and put the manuscript on the shelf.

  Adams was now living with the consequences of his apostasy. He was persona non grata at the Otises and the Dexters and several other leading Boston families. He was summarily replaced as president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the distinguished body he had headed for the previous decade. (His father had been the first president.) Perhaps he decided to sue for peace. Whatever the cause, Adams acknowledged to himself that the project had become an unseemly exercise in revenge and agreed not to publish.

  On September 3, Charles was married to Abby Brooks at Medford. Louisa had hoped to attend, but she had gotten no further than New York before turning back owing to sickness (her own and baby Louisa’s). Adams was very fond of Charles’ sparkling and well-born bride. He wrote her jaunty letters in which he asked her to report any good jokes she had heard (very much as his father had to Louisa). He told her that on a stagecoach ride in New Jersey he had found himself with a lovely young flirt who was offering sugarplums to her fellow passengers in exchange for witticisms. Flummoxed, he had held his tongue and then lain awake that night composing a twenty-four-line poem imagining the good fortune of the man who would some day win her love. He delivered it to her the following morning.

  Adams came to rely more and more on the levelheaded, worldly, and ambitious Charles. Throughout the summer he spoke to his youngest son of his role as family scion, of the great family name he must help perpetuate. When his father finally left Quincy at the end of the year, Charles noted that the unyielding lawgiver he had (privately) railed against in years past had been “unusually kind” and that he actually missed him. A few days later, Charles wrote his father a long and uncharacteristically confessional letter in which he said he was very conscious of the “responsible position” he now occupied and was determined to do something useful with his life. As yet, he admitted, he had accomplished nothing. Now he had a settled home life, a house in Boston thanks to his generous father-in-law, and ample time for study. He had set himself three projects: to study the eloquence of the ancient writers, to improve his own writing style, and to master the history of his own nation. But how to go about it? Charles admitted that he felt overwhelmed.

  His father, utterly delighted, wrote back professing his wholehearted approval and suggesting a program of self-improvement. Try your hand at different forms—the oration, the sermon, the dissertation. Vary the style. Once you’re satisfied, publish it anonymously, and then learn from the reaction. He proposed that they once again begin reading Cicero together. Charles, who had reached an age and a stage in life when he no longer felt the need to resist his overbearing father, eagerly complied and wrote long letters with his thoughts, which often differed from his father’s. “Your epistles and those of Cicero are my delight,” the elder man wrote back. Adams had also transferred the handling of his funds to Charles, the first family member he found he could trust. Each man depended on the other and freely acknowledged it—a relationship very much like the one the younger John Quincy Adams had had with his own father.

  The same could not be said for Adams’ relationship with John. Adams’ middle son was the businessman in the family, and Adams entertained fond hopes that John would earn enough money to support not only himself but his parents. He was managing the Columbia Mills, which Adams had bought from a cousin of Louisa’s. But John was a self-centered young man who enjoyed his cigar and his pleasures. Louisa considered him weak-willed and wholly under the thumb of his domineering wife. As a businessman he was rash and unrealistic; the mill never turned a profit, though John continued to insist that its prospects were bright. In October he wrote to his father asking him to pour thousands more into the mill, and Adams responded gently that he feared his son’s “calculations may be a little over-sanguine.”

  Adams worried that he would ultimately suffer the humiliating poverty that had eventually engulfed Jefferson and even Monroe, who had not been a spendthrift. His parents had survived only by prodigies of austerity—and his own assistance. Adams had always put aside money to invest in government bonds and US bank stock, in companies building bridges and turnpikes, and above all in real estate in and around Boston and Washington. Nevertheless, he was supporting not only his immediate family but relatives as well; he was paying the tuition of his nephew, John Quincy, at Exeter. In buying his father’
s house and land from the estate, he had incurred a $12,000 debt to his nephews, to be paid as they reached majority. He had looked to the mill as the family salvation. Its failure filled him with anxiety about the future.

  If the mill was going to drain rather than fortify his stock of capital, Adams would have to depend on his investments and above all on rent from his property. Charles had found that George had never bothered to collect most of the rent and had left a skein of debts. He had begun taking over the management of the property. As he worked more closely with his father, he came to conclude that in matters of business his progenitor was more a theorist than a practitioner. “He is a singular man with regard to the management of his property,” he reflected.

  ADAMS WAITED IN QUINCY UNTIL GEORGE’S REMAINS ARRIVED, ON November 24. He saw to it that George was deposited alongside his aunt Nabby and close to his grandparents in the cemetery of Quincy’s Unitarian church. On December 3 he left for Washington with no purpose in mind and no occupation in view.

  What was Adams even doing in Washington? Ex-presidents retired to their country seats and received visits. Adams had no role to play in the new era of President Jackson. He and Louisa had, however, agreed that a warm climate would be beneficial for her frail health. And John and Mary lived there with little Louisa and baby Georgiana Francis, known as Fanny. Meridian Hill having been sold, the elder Adamses moved into the home Mary and John had been able to build at 1601 I Street with Mary’s inheritance from Walter Hellen. For the ex-president, all this was a welcome pretext to stay close to the center of national political life—and far away from the thorns of Boston.

  Adams busied himself with a number of projects. He wrote a long article about the Russo-Turkish war for the American Annual Register, a publication owned by his friend Joseph Blunt. He rode out to Maryland with John to look over the Columbia Mills. He received regular visits from members of the National Republican opposition seeking to enlist him in a more active role. He had initially taken the view that the path unrolling before the nation was so smooth that there would be little to fear from whatever changes in policy President Jackson introduced. That optimism was bound to dwindle. Jackson had shown his true colors in his first message to Congress, or so Adams and his friends believed.

  In that first message, Jackson had not only disposed of the Adams agenda root and branch but apparently sought to return the national political life to the era of Jefferson. The new president had virtually endorsed the states’ rights position the slave-owning South had come to profess with growing fervor. He bluntly warned against “all encroachments upon the legitimate sphere of State sovereignty.” He proposed, in an early version of “revenue sharing,” that whatever federal surplus emerged with the retirement of the national debt be returned to the states, in proportion to their representation in Congress (thus aiding the South, where each slave was counted as three-fifths of a person for electoral purposes). Internal improvements would be left to the discretion of the states. He declared, in regard to tariff reform, that the “agricultural interest” was “so superior in importance” to all others that it scarcely needed stating; manufacturing and commerce mattered only insofar as they tended to “increase the value of agricultural productions.”

  Like the new men of the West, Jackson spoke of the national government with something approaching scorn. He described federal officeholders as corrupt time-servers, and suggested that since their duties “are so plain and simple” that “men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance,” no federal employee should serve for longer than four years—a convenient rationale for a wholesale purging of Adams-era officials in favor of Jackson loyalists. (In his first year in office, Jackson removed 10 percent of all federal officeholders, more than all of his predecessors combined.) Jackson also used his first message to advocate a policy of wholesale removal of Indians beyond the Mississippi, albeit a “voluntary” one. He would sign legislation to do just that in late May 1830. At the same time, he issued vetoes of several bills authorizing expenditures for internal improvements. Jackson enjoyed a popular mandate Adams had never had, and he was intent on using it to put the country on a course radically different from the one Adams had sought. Adams’ usual sense of looming catastrophe now returned with a vengeance. Richard Rush, his former running mate, came by for a chat. “We agreed,” Adams recorded, “that the Indians are already sacrificed; that the public lands will be given away; that domestic industry and internal improvements will be strangled.”

  Adams derived bitter satisfaction from the new administration’s peccadilloes. He sent letters to Charles and to Abby describing the White House fracas over Peggy Eaton, a tavernkeeper’s daughter whom Jackson’s secretary of war and close confidante, John Eaton, had married and whom the wives of other cabinet members and of Vice President Calhoun refused to meet. Secretary of State Van Buren, a widower who had no problem meeting Mrs. Eaton socially, adroitly used the issue to further turn the president against Calhoun. Jackson was deeply reluctant to move against Eaton; Van Buren ultimately persuaded the president to ask the entire cabinet to resign, an unprecedented upheaval that allowed him to remove Eaton from office without singling him out. Adams, who had never fired a cabinet member, gloried in the evidence of his successor’s recklessness. The underlying truth, however, was that Jackson’s willingness to take bold and sometimes brutal measures made him a far more effective chief executive than Adams had ever been. Adams did not manage to expand the role of the federal government, but Jackson did succeed in shrinking it, even as he significantly expanded the powers of the presidency.

  ADAMS LEFT WASHINGTON AT THE END OF MAY. BACK IN QUINCY, he found that hundreds of the trees he had lovingly planted at the old family estate of Wollaston had died over the winter. Why, he wondered, had the horse chestnuts, elms, peaches, plums, apples, and apricots largely survived, while the oaks had not? Why had some trees of a species flourished, while others died? Horticultural societies, he thought, should take up a systematic study of fruit trees and of the insects that destroy them. Adams found that his rheumatism limited his own spade work; for the heavy labor he turned to his gardener, Augustus Farrar. Every summer and fall in the years to come, Adams and Farrar would spend countless hours planting seedlings, transplanting young trees from the cellar, and uprooting by the thousands those that had not survived.

  Adams’ battle with the elements over the lives of his beloved fruit trees constitutes one of the great subjects of his journal in the last decades of his life. Adams loved flowers, but they were evanescent. Trees endured; they could, if well planted and nurtured, defy time and live far beyond the span of the gardener himself. This was not so much a Christian conceit as a classical one, and Adams, like the Roman thinkers he revered, cherished the thought of his posterity. One day in late October, after he and Farrar had planted eighty grafted Baldwin apple trees in Mount Wollaston, he reflected that the mansion and the farm had been in the family for 190 years, since the very founding of the town. “It is now pregnant,” he wrote, “with at least ten thousands seeds of fruit and forest, mostly placed by my hand, and in a century from this day may bear timber for the floating castles of my country, and fruit for the subsistence, health and comfort of my descendants.”

  Adams awoke before dawn every day, read the Bible and Cicero, went swimming and riding, walked over his land, wrote letters to Charles and to dozens of friends and strangers, and tended to Louisa, who was afflicted with one of the worst outbreaks of erysipelas she had ever suffered. He wrote down absolutely everything in his journal, in a hand that had become so tiny, if still perfectly legible, that he often squeezed 650 words into a single small page. But it wasn’t enough. He was bored and restless. “My leisure is now imposed on me by the will of higher powers,” he reflected. “Shall I never do better?”

  On September 17, Adams attended a reception at the home of Lieutenant Governor Winthrop after a celebration of Boston’s two hundredth anniversary. He was approached by his old f
riend Edward Everett, who asked what he would think of standing for Congress from the Eighth District, which included Quincy. The incumbent, Joseph Richardson, had decided not to run, and local leaders had concluded that none of the available candidates was likely to gain a majority, which meant according to state law that the district would send no representative to Congress. Adams, and only Adams, could easily carry the day. Several local newspapers had mooted the idea.

  Richardson himself came to Adams to confirm that he would not run and helpfully observed that should Adams do so, he would raise the office rather than degrade himself. Adams replied stiffly that he didn’t think an ex-president would be degraded “by serving as a selectman of his town, if elected thereto by the people.” But he would make no promise; any such decision would depend on his own health and the nature of the opposition. Since Adams’ frame was strong enough for the job and then some, this was his way of saying that he would not take part in a seriously contested election. The job was not beneath his dignity, but a campaign would be. Richardson, who had assured him that the seat would be his for the asking, said that he was satisfied with Adams’ response and would get to work.

  Several of Adams’ neighbors and supporters came by to confirm that he was a legal resident of Quincy, since as president his residence had been listed as Boston. He confirmed that he was. John Bailey, the veteran representative of the adjacent Norfolk district, asked Adams what he should tell the many people who asked him if the former president would stand. “To say that I would accept would be so near asking for a vote,” Adams responded, “that I do not feel disposed to go so far. I wish the people to act spontaneously, at their own discretion.” Anyone who knew Adams at all understood that this meant yes. On November 13, the National Republicans placed his name in nomination. On December 6 Adams became Plymouth’s representative in Congress, winning 1,817 of 2,545 votes.