John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  Over the next few years, Anti-Masonry would be largely absorbed into yet another new party, the Whigs. Though it had failed as a national political movement, Anti-Masonry had succeeded as a cause. By early 1834, the practice of Masonry had been virtually wiped out across much of the Northeast. Several New England states had passed laws prohibiting Masons from serving on juries. At the end of March, Adams attended a meeting of the Anti-Masonic caucus in Congress, where he was asked to serve as chair. One of the leading lights of the movement, a representative from the Anti-Masonic heartland in upper New York state, declared that the enemy had been so thoroughly routed that Anti-Masonry had no further reason for being. Adams could contemplate his labors with satisfaction.

  BY THE TIME ADAMS LEFT QUINCY IN NOVEMBER 1833, HE HAD, for the first time, the option of traveling part of the route by train. Adams was a man of settled and conservative habits who nevertheless welcomed all new forms of transportation, both because he was fascinated by technology and because he always wanted to get to his destination as fast as possible. In the fall of 1833, trains had begun to run on the Camden and Amboy Railway, which connected those two New Jersey cities, and thus Philadelphia and New York. The trip cost three dollars and took nine and a half hours, a modest improvement over steamboat and stagecoach. For Adams that was reason enough. Adams took his first ride on the C & A on November 8.

  Each of the railway’s three cars had three compartments with facing benches. About two hundred passengers filled the cars. Adams sat in the front. The train stopped a few miles south of Camden to oil its wheels. As it picked up speed, approaching thirty-five miles per hour—a velocity at which few humans had ever traveled at that time—Adams and his fellow passengers smelled something burning. Then they saw smoke rising from the left wheelbase. Before they could call out to the conductor to stop the car, the wheel lost contact with the rail, causing the right front of the car to rear up. Just as it was about to tip and crush those within, the car behind it rose up on the left and flipped over, wrenching Adams’ own car back on a level. He was saved only at the expense of those behind him.

  Miraculously, no one in the first car was seriously hurt. Those behind them were not so fortunate. “The scene of suffering,” Adams wrote, “was excruciating. Many women, and a child, scattered along the road, bleeding, mangled, groaning, writhing in torture and dying, was a trial of feeling, to which I had never before been called.” One man died within minutes, another soon after—the first recorded fatalities in the history of rail transportation. Adams listed the names and hometowns of both the wounded and the dead, perhaps having learned them through an inquest he attended that evening. A “Mr. Vanderbilt” broke his leg. This was the industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt, who vowed never again to ride on a train—a pledge he violated once he began buying up railroads in the ensuing decades.

  Adams had never seen violent death close up. He had been calm at the time but afterwards trembled at the prospect of what might have been. “When the thought came over me that a few seconds more of pressure, on the car in which I was would in all probability have laid me a prostrate corpse, like him who was before my eyes, or made me a cripple for life—and, more insupportable still, what if my wife and grandchild had been in the car behind me.” The idea that Louisa and little Mary Francis might have taken the train with him was “torture, a thousandfold worse than death.” Adams, like Vanderbilt, vowed to leave off rail travel, at least until the technology radically improved. That vow lasted one day, for the train from Philadelphia to Baltimore was too convenient to pass up. Adams seems to have worried about his own life no more than he had on the passage through the Gulf of Finland a quarter of a century before.

  Adams arrived in Washington well before the new session of Congress had begun. He spent much of his time plotting with Charles how to withdraw from the Massachusetts governor’s race with the least possible damage to his reputation. He wrote to party leaders to remind them that “I have never worn the collar of any party. Parties have taken me up and cast me off, as suited their caprice and pleasure.” Now Adams was casting off the party; with Masonry all but demolished, he was prepared to return to the great issue, as he then felt it: the fight for the principle of activist government in the face of Jackson’s argument for a “simple machine.”

  Though this war would have many fronts, the most dramatic of them was Jackson’s single-minded campaign against the Second Bank of the United States. The bank had been established in 1816 with a twenty-year charter. In his first congressional message, Jackson had questioned whether the bank’s charter should be renewed. Jackson had long been hostile to the bank on general grounds, for he distrusted paper currency and was prone to view banks as financial cabals. In 1829 he told Nicholas Biddle, the bank’s president, “I do not dislike your bank any more than all banks.” But the Bank of the United States was not just any financial institution. The bank received and disbursed all federal revenue; handled the nation’s foreign-exchange transactions; issued paper currency, which as legal tender could be exchanged for gold and silver; and made loans to state banks as well as to individuals. And yet it was a private company, controlled by its own board of directors and only indirectly answerable to the secretary of the treasury. Jackson regarded the bank as a usurpation of the authority of the states and a threat to his own power as president.

  Adams supported the bank as an instrument for national investment and a source of funding for internal improvements, trade, and business—as the financial engine of a robust federal government. He was also extremely close to Biddle, an intellectual with far-ranging interests who at the age of eighteen had served as private secretary to the American minister in Paris—a younger version of Adams himself. Biddle embodied for Adams the intellectual and social elite to which, he thought, the nation’s affairs should be trusted—just as for Jackson he embodied an Eastern establishment that sought to run roughshod over ordinary Americans.

  Adams’ support for the Anti-Masonic rabble had been a matter of republicanism, not populism. He believed in the political role of the propertied class. When George Bancroft, a distinguished historian, sent Adams an address in which he argued that democracy’s distinguishing feature was that it protected the rights of persons rather than of property, as aristocracy did, Adams wrote back to remind him that Aristotle had praised democracy but observed that it was prone to dissolve into ochlocracy, or rule of the mob. In fact, government had arisen to protect both. “If democracy is founded exclusively in persons and not in property,” he said, “I fear it will follow the tendency of its nature and degenerate into ochlocracy, and Lynch Law, burning down Convents and hanging abolitionists or gamblers, without judge or jury, without fear of God to restrain, and without remorse to punish.”

  Rather than wait until 1836, Biddle had asked for an early vote to renew the bank’s charter. The Congress favored the bank, and in July 1833, on the day after passing the tariff, both houses voted for recharter. Then Jackson vetoed the measure. This was an extraordinary act. Past presidents had used their veto power only in order to block a measure deemed unconstitutional. In his veto message Jackson was careful to cite constitutional grounds, but he reserved his passion for matters of policy and social justice. With his genius for the populist appeal, Jackson couched his decision in what we would today call the language of “class warfare.” When institutions like the bank “grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful,” he wrote, “the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.”

  Jackson typically met confrontation with violence. He decided that, rather than wait for the bank to expire in 1836, he would suffocate it by removing the $10 million in federal deposits that constituted half of its stock of capital. His cabinet opposed the measure, as did his treasury secretary, Louis McLane, who would have to sign a m
easure stating that the deposits were unsafe in the bank. Jackson then appointed the pro-bank McLane secretary of state and replaced him with an anti-bank figure, William J. Duane. But Duane shocked the president by refusing to certify that the funds needed to be moved. In September 1833, Jackson fired Duane in favor of his pliable attorney general, Roger Taney—a forerunner of Richard Nixon’s 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre.” Taney promptly began draining the bank by sending all new deposits to state banks. All this was done while Congress was out of session. In his 1833 congressional message Jackson justified this extraordinary measure by charging the bank with a plot to corruptly influence elections in order to retain its power.

  Adams was incensed by what he saw as the naked political conniving behind Taney’s move, for he was sure that Vice President Van Buren was orchestrating the drama, dispatching federal revenues to “pet banks” run by his supporters. “Every one of the 40 banks is at once an electioneering and a stock-jobbing engine,” he wrote. In effect, Van Buren had placed the entire federal treasury at his own disposal. Adams was hardly alone: Jackson’s high-handed tactics had galvanized his opponents and confirmed their fear that he was, at bottom, a populist tyrant. On December 26, a few weeks after Jackson’s message, Clay took the floor of the Senate to introduce a resolution censuring the president—a step just short of impeachment. The year before, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster had worked together to fashion a compromise tariff. Now all three delivered thunderous speeches against Jackson. The ensuing debate consumed four months, making it the longest treatment of a single subject in congressional history. The survival of the core constitutional principle of checks and balances seemed to be at stake. On March 28, the Senate passed the resolution, which asserted that Jackson had “assumed upon himself authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and the laws.” No president had ever before been formally castigated by Congress.

  Adams so loathed Jackson that when Harvard had awarded the president an honorary diploma the previous summer, he had refused to attend. He was enraged by Jackson’s ruthless campaign against the bank. And yet he opposed the censure motion; when a senator asked his advice, he recommended voting against the measure. Adams believed in a strong executive; he believed that Jackson had the right to choose cabinet members who would carry out his will. And he would not permit his feelings about the person to obscure the underlying principle. History has, of course, come down on Adams’ side of this debate, for this prerogative is universally accepted today.

  But Adams had more to say on the bank. In mid-March he had begun drafting a speech he hoped to deliver while presenting his constituents’ petition to restore the deposits. On April 4, he was literally about to move toward the podium in the House when Speaker Stevenson instead recognized another member, who called the previous question on the floor, thus rendering Adams’ speech out of order. Gales and Seaton of the National Intelligencer agreed to publish the speech in pamphlet form, and the “Suppressed Speech” appeared April 12. Adams defended the bank against the allegations mounted against it, accusing both the president and Taney of slandering Biddle and of denying him due process. He accused Taney of manipulating funds to benefit favored banks. As for the president, Adams went on, he had crushed the national bank in order to enhance his own control over the levers of power, to gratify his appetite for vengeance, to transfer wealth to the slaveholders whose support he depended on, and to further his supreme goal of reducing government to “a simple machine.” The price of his folly would be a terrible one. In his peroration Adams declared that if the founders could come down from the canvas on which they stood in that very hall, and sit down among their successors, they would wonder, “What scourge of God had desolated their cities? What convulsion of nature had palsied the arm of industry?”

  The “Suppressed Speech” thrilled bank supporters. Biddle printed fifty thousand copies. Adams used his congressional franking privileges to mail out hundreds of them. But the speech could not resurrect the Bank. Adams’ dire predictions seemed unwarranted, for the economy continued to grow in Jackson’s last years in office, and British capital substituted for that lost with the bank. However, a contraction of credit, first in Britain and then the United States, helped trigger the Panic of 1837, the worst financial crisis since the founding of the Republic. A national bank might have been able to mitigate the crisis by expanding available credit—though Adams himself was no friend of easy money policy.

  Jackson was gone from office by the time the panic struck. By defying opposition in order to eliminate the bank, he had succeeded in putting his imprint on the nation. He had transferred powers from the federal government to the states and diminished the reach of government itself, all while extending the reach of the executive branch. This unlettered barbarian, as Adams saw it, had succeeded where Adams had failed. He was more ruthless than Adams was, but he also understood better how to use the powers, implicit as well as explicit, vested in the office.

  ADAMS RETURNED TO QUINCY, BY HIMSELF, IN JULY; LOUISA STAYED in Washington to care for her brother and their son John, both of whom were seriously ill. He lapsed into his usual gloom. He had a premonition that he would not live another year, though he admitted that he had had the same premonition the year before. His memory was failing; perhaps his judgment as well. He had lost his appetite. He couldn’t sleep. “My hopes are blasted with disappointment,” he wrote in his journal. “Solitude quickens my fears.” John Bailey, a Massachusetts legislator, came to visit, and old Adams said, “My hopes for the long continuance of this Union are extinct.” Idleness often turned Adams morbid; he needed occupation.

  On July 26, Adams received a visit from President Josiah Quincy of Harvard. Adams had become a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, and Quincy, his distant kinsman and one of the oldest and most constant friends of his life, had come to discuss a grave disturbance that had forced him to suspend some students, expel others, and even refer some for prosecution. Quincy was an austere man with little patience for undergraduate high jinks. He was determined, he had said, that Harvard students should comport themselves as “high-minded, high-principled, well-taught, well-conducted, well-bred gentlemen.” His harsh measures had, instead, provoked a backlash; students regularly tested his authority. On May 26, the sea of discontent had finally broken the dam. After Quincy had expelled a freshman who had committed a series of minor infractions and then answered the president’s queries in a tone he found impertinent, the entire freshman class had rioted, smashing furniture and breaking windows in the chambers of an instructor blamed for provoking the whole affair. Sophomores failed to appear for morning prayers, and Quincy suspended all but three members of the class. He threatened to prosecute others. The students did not back off: juniors donned black armbands and burned the president in effigy, while seniors threatened to absent themselves from commencement. By the time Quincy showed up at Adams’ doorstep, Harvard was facing one of the worst crises in its two-hundred-year history.

  With his instinctive horror of the mob and his reverence for Harvard, Adams instantly took Quincy’s side. The students, he wrote, had manifested “a contumacious and insurgent spirit, which he has been laboring to subdue.” The board asked Adams to chair a subcommittee to look into the merits of the case. Adams drafted a report that defended President Quincy’s actions. The other members “thought it much too severe upon the students,” Adams reported. Alexander H. Everett, now publisher of the North American Review, described Quincy as “a man very wanting in discretion.” Adams retorted that “discretion was a negative virtue, perhaps possessed in higher perfection by knaves than by honest men.” His plain meaning was that “discretion,” in this context, was no more than a euphemism for “pusillanimity.” Quincy had acted as he himself would have acted.

  In the meanwhile the student uprising had begun to collapse. Virtually the entire sophomore class applied for readmission; the seniors changed their minds about the boycott under the threat of being denied a diploma. One of the three s
tudents facing indictment pleaded no contest and paid a minor fine. Quincy, who had confessed to Adams that he was utterly mystified by the truculence of students who had always treated him with perfect regard, pronounced himself satisfied. The commencement proceeded according to plan. Adams was deeply impressed with the Greek oration. The original English poem, however, he found, “a slovenly performance, the only merit of which was its brevity.” It had been delivered by a graduate named Ralph Waldo Emerson.

  In his wrathful response to student insurrection, and his wholehearted support for President Quincy, Adams was acting according to his deepest impulses, which led him not just to abhor anarchy but to regard abiding institutions and their rules with reverence. Adams had stood by Nicholas Biddle out of personal friendship and economic principle, but Harvard for him was more like the Constitution or his own ancient family, a thing so deeply rooted as to defy all the dissolute influences of fashion and time. Adams didn’t defend Harvard because it served his class, though it did. He was all too ready to become an abomination to his class. He stood by Harvard—rather than its students—because, like his father, he believed in durable things that outlasted human folly.

  Throughout this period Adams was receiving frightening news about his son John. He seemed to be losing his eyesight. Isolation and inactivity had lead to a physical breakdown. Louisa wrote to say that she felt a terrible sense of premonition. She beseeched her husband to write to their son to implore him to leave Washington for Quincy. Adams did so, saying that the climate would repair his health. He almost begged John to sell the family property in Washington and relocate to “the seat of your forefathers”—as he had implored George to do four years earlier. He wrote again to say that if John needed money for the trip, he could withdraw $300. Underneath these offers and entreaties was the painful truth that the Columbia Mills had irretrievably failed. “You have met with severe disappointments,” he observed, “but let them not overcome your resolution or your perseverance.” Those were attributes of the father, not the son. John and Mary remained in Washington when Louisa left for Quincy.