by James Traub
Adams left Quincy for Washington in the middle of November. On December 5 he was sworn in and assigned to seat number 203. For all that he was the former president and secretary of state, and was now a veritable ancient of days in the House, Adams was fascinated and delighted by service in Congress. He recorded the most tedious and obscure debates at endless length. He rarely missed a day, or even an hour, of a congressional session. Nothing bored him. The ritual of the calling of the states for the presentation of petitions, which happened every Monday, moved him to splendid flights of rhetoric. In the halls of Congress he saw, and felt, republicanism in action more vividly than he ever had as a member of the executive.
Adams’ first act in Congress was the presentation of twelve petitions from citizens in Pennsylvania seeking the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, over which the Congress exercised jurisdiction. Such petitions were ritually “laid on the table” and presented to the Committee on the District of Columbia, which consisted largely of slaveholders and ensured that such pleas never saw the light of day. Adams, however, accompanied the presentation with his maiden speech, which he used to make the very strange assertion that he did not believe the issue was suitable for congressional debate. Adams chose not to explain himself at the time. When a Quaker abolitionist paid him a visit a few weeks later, Adams explained that he felt obliged to present petitions from his fellow citizens but saw no point in exacerbating “ill-will” and “heart-burnings” in the House, which would never vote to curb slavery. Besides, he asked, what would Quaker citizens think if the people of the District of Columbia submitted a petition to require all Pennsylvanians to bear arms? For all his hatred of slavery, Adams was not about to waste the precious time of Congress on an ill it was not prepared to address.
The House Speaker, Andrew Stevenson, a Jackson loyalist, informed Adams that he would be chairman of the Committee on Manufactures, a subject that held almost no interest for him (though it was an appropriate post for a representative of Massachusetts). This was probably designed both to prevent Adams from doing real mischief on an important committee like Foreign Affairs or Ways and Means and to signal sympathy to manufacturing interests. Adams tried to work a switch with Edward Everett, who served as deputy chairman on Foreign Affairs, but Stevenson refused. Adams was thus plunged into domestic policy.
Jackson had stated in his annual message that he expected to have fully retired the federal debt by the end of his term. Rather than run a surplus, the president called for a gradual cut in tariff rates. The administration had referred the tariff question to Ways and Means, chaired by George McDuffie of South Carolina, an ardent nullifier who had done his all for Jackson in the last days of the 1824 election. McDuffie soon produced a bill that would drastically lower tariff rates over three years, thus addressing South Carolina’s fundamental grievance. This was too much for the Jackson administration, as it was for Adams, who was nevertheless prepared to accept a moderate reduction in order to dampen the fires of nullification. He began working on a compromise position with Treasury Secretary Louis McLane.
The questions of revenue and tariff rates were bound to loom large in the upcoming presidential election. At the end of December, Adams met with other members of the opposition, including Henry Clay, to map out a common strategy. Adams favored modest tariff cuts, which would reduce federal revenue from $28 million to $20 million. It was essential, he argued, to preserve surplus revenue for internal improvements. Clay, the author of the American System, ought to have taken the same view. In fact, Clay insisted that revenues must be slashed all the way to $7 million or $8 million. Adams felt certain that Clay cared less about building turnpikes than he did about denying Jackson the signal triumph of retiring the federal debt, which he would accomplish by plunging revenue below the level of federal expenditure. The National Republicans had already made Clay their candidate for 1832, and he was not about to let good policy get in the way of politics.
Adams observed with his usual cool politesse that he had promised the administration that he would not reduce revenue until the debt had been retired, and he would not go back on that vow. In any case, he added, no bill could pass in defiance of Jackson and his administration. “I do not care who it defies,” Clay snarled—or so Adams recorded. “To preserve, maintain, and strengthen the American System, I would defy the South, the President, and the devil.” Clay’s bearing, Adams wrote was “super-Presidential.” Everyone present except for Adams himself retreated before the party leader. This episode marked not a rupture between the two men, but the end of the deep mutual admiration that had lasted throughout Adams’ presidency.
Without remotely intending to, Adams had returned to the position he had occupied in 1807 as the lone Federalist prepared to work with the Jefferson administration. He would not oppose a policy simply because it advanced the views and interests of the ruling party. He constituted himself, once again, as a party of one. Adams tried to navigate along a narrow path between the neo-Jeffersonians, like Van Buren, who wanted to reduce the size of government; the nullifiers, who wanted to advance the economic interests of the South; and the National Republicans, who were trying to defeat Jackson. He worked closely with Secretary McLane to work out a minimally acceptable tariff. He spent the hot months of early summer defending the compromise measure in the House; at one point he slammed the podium so hard that he broke a bone in his hand.
On July 14, to Adams’ amazement, the measure passed the House with an overwhelming majority, something that could scarcely be said of any measure he had supported while president. The tariff sought to appease the South by sharply reducing duties on the rough wool used to clothe slaves and to appease the North by keeping rates far higher than McDuffie had envisioned. In the event, it disappointed everyone, which was almost certainly a sign of its fairness. But the Jackson administration was not about to thank Adams by reserving surplus revenue for internal improvements.
Adams’ flinty independence made him a potentially useful ally to Jackson, as he had once been to Jefferson. In March, Senator R. M. Johnson of Kentucky, a Jackson ally, told Adams that he would like to effect a reconciliation between him and the president. Adams, bending not an inch, said that any such approach would be up to Jackson, who had unjustly blamed him for causing his wife’s death. Johnson quickly agreed that some of Jackson’s loyalists had poisoned the president’s mind against his predecessor, but added that Jackson’s “disposition was now entirely friendly.” Johnson pressed his case.
“Would you be prepared to attend a private dinner?”
Adams would not; since Jackson invited every congressman to dinner, this would scarcely signal a will to reconcile.
“Perhaps the President could invite you together with a small party?”
The answer was still no.
“What would you have the President do?”
“It is not for me to prescribe.”
The following day, Johnson sent a note saying that he had relayed the conversation to Jackson, who assured him that he did not blame the former president for the scandalous publications against his wife and regarded him as “a man of honour.” Adams was content to pocket the fine words. He reflected that the Federalist remnant would have his head if he so much as crossed the president’s threshold. Still, these were men he had rarely hesitated to outrage; Adams may simply have been unwilling to afford the satisfaction of a feud resolved to a man he had once admired and now held in contempt.
On March 17, Adams received word from Quincy that his brother Tom had died after lingering for months on his deathbed. Years earlier, Tom had been his private secretary, invested his funds, and taken care of his ailing wife. But Tom, like so many other male members of the family, had never found his place in life, had become idle, and had turned to drink. His once sunny temper had soured, frightening his wife and children. Tom and his burgeoning family had become a financial burden to his elder brother. Neither in his letters nor in his diary did the elder Adams shed a tear at th
e news that the last of his three siblings had died. To Tom’s widow, Nancy, who may have been more relieved than heartbroken, he wrote a notably correct letter of condolence. Then, without a second thought, Adams accepted the responsibility to care for Tom’s family. He wrote to Charles to say that all the property Tom had mortgaged to him should be given to Nancy, as should all rent payments. If Nancy needed money right away, Charles should dip into his father’s funds to help her. In subsequent months, Adams worked hard to find a job for Tom’s son and his own namesake, John Quincy, a mediocre student fit for bookkeeping rather than law. The ex-president’s perennial money worries only increased; he wrote to John asking him to try to sell the family homes on F Street, as well as a property on Pennsylvania Avenue.
ADAMS SPENT THE SUMMER OF 1832 ARRANGING FOR THE PUBLICATION of Dermot; making fitful progress on his biography of his father, which he brought up to 1767; rewriting his will; and planting trees at Mount Wollaston. He received a visit from Harrison Gray Otis, who thanked Adams for protecting New England’s interests in a fierce debate over the apportionment of seats in Congress. The long feud had come to an end; Adams would give no further thought to publishing his book-length diatribe on the Hartford Convention. The former president kept a careful distance from the upcoming national election; he had not endorsed Clay and declined to make public statements of any kind.
Adams returned to Washington just as the rumbling volcano of nullification exploded. On November 24, a special session of the South Carolina legislature voted to invoke the principle of nullification in response to the Tariff of 1832. Throwing down a gauntlet before the national government, the legislature voted to raise a force of twenty-five thousand volunteers to resist any attempt to enforce the tariff, including by turning over revenues collected at the Port of Charleston. Jackson’s initial response to this challenge was surpassingly mild. In his annual message, delivered to Congress December 4, the president appealed to the good sense of Carolinians not to obstruct the execution of federal laws. Jackson not only promised to reduce duties still further, but insisted that protective tariffs could be justified only in order to ensure a steady supply of goods essential to national security and not to promote domestic manufacture. Indeed, the entire address was a sop to the South. Jackson spoke of his hope to reduce the general government to “that simple machine which the Constitution created” and reiterated his opposition to federal funding for internal improvements, instead relying on the spirit of free enterprise, aided by “the state sovereignties,” to fashion such improvements as the public required.
Adams was livid. He wrote to Southard that the administration had thrown its support to the nullifiers. Adams was all for confrontation. He moved a resolution in the Committee on Manufactures to inquire of the treasury secretary about the fiscal consequences should South Carolina withhold revenue. He was asked to withdraw the motion in the interests of sectional harmony. He refused, and the motion was voted down. Adams told a New York congressman, a Van Buren man, that he was deluding himself to believe that “states’ rights” meant anything save the preservation of slavery; the great question was whether the Union could survive half slave and half free.
The men around Jackson understood that his message to Congress had inadvertently given aid and comfort to the nullifiers. On December 10, Jackson issued a “Proclamation Regarding Nullification,” almost certainly written by his secretary of state, Edward Livingston, which put to rest the question of where the administration stood. The doctrine of nullification, the president stated, was “incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.” Jackson sided with Webster and Adams in stating that the Constitution is a compact among peoples, not states.
A fervent defender of state sovereignty, himself born in South Carolina, Jackson addressed the nullifiers as few others could. He compared himself to a father speaking to children “whom he saw rushing to a certain ruin.” He countered paranoia with plain sense: “You are free members of a flourishing and happy Union. There is no settled design to oppress you.” And he threatened the nullifiers with the blunt words he had flung in the face of innumerable adversaries, many of whom had wound up dead: “Their object is disunion, but be not deceived by names; disunion, by armed force, is TREACHERY.” The president made it perfectly clear that he would, if left with no other recourse, shed “a brother’s blood.” The proclamation was not only Jackson’s greatest statement but one of the greatest documents written by any American president to date.
In a letter to Charles, Adams grudgingly conceded that the speech “contained much sound constitutional doctrine”—more, he added snidely, “than properly belonged to the source whence it originated.” So sound, in fact, was the constitutional doctrine that the Boston papers, according to Charles, were speculating that Adams himself had written the speech. Nevertheless, Adams concluded that the annual message represented Jackson’s true convictions, while the proclamation was “made for sale and not for use.” And the message, as he wrote to a constituent, constituted a “total departure from the principles of Washington.” Had the annual message carried the same spirit as the proclamation, “South Carolina’s nullification would have been exterminated, and Andrew Jackson would have had the glory of putting it down.” Instead, the president had given the slaveholders everything they wished before abruptly reversing course. A less myopic interpretation would be that Jackson was both an adamant nationalist and a man of the West who distrusted banks, cities, trade, Europe—that he was, in fact, what today we would call a Jacksonian.
As chairman of the Committee on Manufactures, Adams expected to have jurisdiction over the tariff. But Speaker Stevenson had replaced protectionist members of the committee with free-traders, and the committee was so at loggerheads that the members finally agreed to stop meeting. The issue was referred to Ways and Means, which quickly proposed a reduction of duties almost as radical as the one George McDuffie had offered the year before. Adams responded with the first long speech he had delivered in the House. A tariff, he conceded, inevitably favors some interests over others—as all legislation did. He waved a copy of the Constitution. “The South has a great protected interest,” he said. Of course he meant slavery and the three-fifths compromise. “I am for adhering to the bargain, for it is a bargain.” Adams now contrived an ingenious argument founded more on analogy than strict logic. The Constitution, he noted, had given the “machinery” of the South—slaves—representation in Congress. The North enjoyed no such privilege. “I believe,” Adams said drily, “that their looms and factories have no representative in Congress.” Manufacturers accepted that bargain; they paid taxes to support a navy, which was of no use to them. “Why,” Adams cried, “should not they reason as South Carolina does?” Why shouldn’t Massachusetts nullify whatever measures it found inimical?
Adams had calmly reasoned his way to a conclusion bound to outrage his opponents—a foretaste of things to come. The former Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory had found an outlet for the full measure of his gifts. This particular shaft must have hit home, for a South Carolina legislator interrupted, shouting that the representative from Massachusetts had “thrown a firebrand into the hall.”
Fortunately, the firebrand was doused by the spirit of compromise—or of fear. Jackson had asked Congress for the power to enforce federal statutes in South Carolina, and the so-called Force Bill began moving through Congress. South Carolina had once again failed to lure other Southern states to its cause and began to see the wisdom of climbing off the ledge on which it was now perched. In January 1833, Clay and Calhoun, now a senator, reached an agreement to lower duties and end protectionism in exchange for a repeal of nullification. Clay, that is, had accepted a compromise that virtually doomed the American System. Adams felt that South Carolina had been rewarded for throwing a temper ta
ntrum. The Force Bill passed February 20, and the tariff a week later. Adams voted against the latter; from his point of view, it was a sacrifice that need not and ought not have been made in order to mollify the slaveholders. South Carolina was, in fact, mollified: on March 18, the state legislature repealed its nullification of the tariff.
The salient fact of this episode, from our own vantage point, is that the prospect of civil war was postponed for a generation. Clay and Calhoun had chosen compromise over confrontation. Calhoun and Webster had delivered stupendous orations in the Senate, the first opposing the Force Bill, the second opposing the reduced tariff—for Adams was far from alone in viewing the compromise as ruinous to Northern interests. The nullification crisis was a stage on which the great legislators of the day, now justly regarded as among the greatest lawmakers in American history, joined together to preserve the Republic. And the president played an indispensable role in threatening and cajoling and bribing South Carolina off the precipice.
That’s not how Adams saw it. He wrote to Charles that the tariff should rightly be called “an act for the protection of John C. Calhoun and his fellow nullifiers.” Clay had surrendered the American System to the power of the slaveholders. “I mourn over it as my own child,” he told Charles, “for I and not Henry Clay was its father.” The South, overrepresented in Congress thanks to the three-fifths compromise, had put its own man in the White House and, with the collusion of the West, substituted its own formula for the American System—low duties, free land, small government, and the protection of the interests of the plantation owner over those of the free laborer.
Adams had hoped to deliver a major speech denouncing not just the tariff compromise but the entire system of thought it represented, but he had been unable to do so before the vote. Instead he proposed that the Committee on Manufactures publish his speech in the form of a report. Michael Hoffman, a Van Burenite New Yorker who represented the interests of the administration on the committee, responded that they would issue no report at all. In that case, Adams said, he insisted on the right to issue a minority report on behalf of himself and the one other protectionist on the committee. Hoffman tried to block that as well, but the full House voted to make the document public.