John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  Above all, of course, the verdict gave the captives back their freedom. On November 26, they boarded the aptly named Gentleman to reverse the Middle Passage and return to the coast of Sierra Leone, which they had left two and a half years earlier as slaves.

  How much credit for the court’s decision does Adams actually deserve? We cannot know, of course, how the Court would have voted in his absence, but the truth is that, once the circuit court had accepted that the captives were neither pirates nor slaves, the appellant—the federal government—was left to advance Spain’s dubious interpretation of the Treaty of 1795. It was a weak case. And Baldwin had made a thoroughly convincing argument before both the circuit court and the Supreme Court. Adams may have won some extra votes. Beyond that, though, he had brought to the case both his priceless reputation for integrity and the sheer fact of his fame, elevating it in the public mind into the great cause of the day. The Amistad case set no lasting legal precedent; it was, however, a ringing triumph for abolitionism.

  Adams did not stop thinking about the case. He sent to Tappan a list of nine issues the Supreme Court had left unsettled. He complained to Joshua Leavitt that he had not had the chance to fully unfold his views on the Antelope case. He asked Secretary of State Daniel Webster whether the United States could send the captives home on a ship already heading to Africa. He studied papers on the slave trade sent him by an English correspondent. He must, he thought, embark on a campaign on the issue.

  Adams knew very well how little his own loved ones cared for his moral crusades. Louisa would stand by him come what may, but Charles worried about the consequences to himself. He had been elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1840, and he had shuddered at his father’s lead role in the case, as he had with Anti-Masonry and the cause of petitions. “It must,” he wrote in his journal, “greatly embarrass the political party with which I have undertaken to act.” Charles had come more and more to resemble the Brahmins with whom he worked and lived—prudent, measured, respectable. Upon receiving news of his father’s great triumph, he responded with the faint praise much of society Boston must have felt: “It is a great relief to me that your cause is settled and well settled. These poor negroes have had some good fortune after all. I hope they may do something with themselves which may save them from becoming a burden to society here.” Charles closed with a startling rebuke: “It may be very interesting to yourself and the public to be pleading in the Supreme Court but I must admit that I do not greatly admire the anxiety it occasions to those of us who do not regard it simply as a show.”

  His father responded tartly, recalling that Charles had warned him against “an experiment so afflictive to my family.” That admonition had been a thorn in his heart. The “agony of soul” he had endured throughout the case “was chiefly occasioned by the reprobation of my own family, both of opinion and my conduct.” He promised that he would never again provoke such acrimony—“unless it shall be in the decree of Providence.” Since Adams so often saw himself as an instrument of Providence, Charles Francis must not have found this caveat very comforting. Adams couldn’t help despising the idea of choosing comfort over honor. When they had argued the previous fall over his decision to take the case, he had told Charles how, as a boy of sixteen, he had seen the Magna Carta in the British Museum and made out the name of his ancestor, John de Quincy. “The memory of the seal and the signature” had stayed with him across the years and helped to guide his conduct. Charles thought he was “over-tenacious of the great principles of Magna Carta.” Adams would never apologize for being too tenacious of principle.

  In the face of present pain, Adams took comfort in the thought of posterity. He knew he had done right, and others, for once, knew it too. On April 15, the founders of the Amistad Committee—Lewis Tappan, Joshua Leavitt, and Simeon Jocelyn—wrote Adams a formal letter of thanks that noted, among other things, that he had refused to accept payment for his immense efforts. “But we feel,” they wrote, “and would hope you feel, that a long life devoted to the service of your country has derived a new and holy lustre from this noble effort in behalf of human life and liberty.” Adams would never say so, but he surely thought so. He had risked a great deal by agreeing to take on the defense of the Amistad captives. Rarely, in his long life, had he been vindicated so definitively as he had been at the moment Justice Story announced the Court’s decision.

  CHAPTER 35

  The Acutest Enemy of Southern Slavery That Ever Existed

  (1841–1842)

  IN THE YEARS AFTER ADAMS LOST HIS BID TO BE REELECTED president, the slave states and their allies had controlled the White House, as they did the Congress and the Supreme Court. So long as the Jackson/Van Buren coalition of Southern planters, Western pioneers, and Northern farmers and artisans remained in power, there could be no hope for the kind of activist government Adams and Henry Clay had championed. Finally, in 1840, the Whigs had broken through, in the person not of Clay, the perennial candidate, but of William Henry Harrison. Adams was inclined to dismiss Harrison as a genial buffoon, an “Indian fighter” like Jackson who had been puffed up into presidential material by the popular fancy for war heroes. “If he is not found time-serving, demagogical, unsteady, and Western-sectional,” Adams wrote of the Ohioan, “he will more than satisfy my present expectations.”

  Yet in the spring of 1841 the new president treated Adams with great deference. A week after taking office, Harrison appeared unexpectedly at the Adams home and chatted amiably with twelve-year-old Mary Louisa. When Adams drew him aside to ask if they could have a private conversation, Harrison said, according to a rather breathless letter Louisa wrote to Charles, “Come when you please, as often as you please, or drop me a line, for I shall at any time be happy to take your advice, and counsel, as that of a brother.” Louisa found him a warm man with a determination to do good.

  Harrison had made Daniel Webster his secretary of state. Adams viewed Webster as a grasping rival, but nevertheless considered his understanding of foreign policy solid. Moreover, the 1840 election had given the Whigs a substantial majority in both houses. Finally, after twelve long years, Adams had reason to hope that the program of enhanced federal revenue and investment he had championed would become a reality. He had equal reason to expect that he himself would play a central role in the new administration on both foreign and domestic affairs.

  Then, on April 4, one month after taking the oath of office, Harrison died of pneumonia caused by a cold he had contracted at his inaugural. He was succeeded by John Tyler, a slaveholder who had been raised on a 1,200-acre plantation in Tidewater Virginia. Adams called him “a political sectarian of the slave-driving, Virginia, Jeffersonian school, principled against all improvement, with all the interests and passions and vices of slavery rooted in his moral and political constitution.” Tyler had vehemently opposed the Missouri Compromise as an unacceptable restraint on the right of states to choose slavery. He had opposed the Bank of the United States and federal support for internal improvements. Tyler thought of himself as a Jeffersonian and had joined the Whig Party only after breaking with Jackson over the latter’s threat to use force to bring the South Carolina nullifiers to heel. He had been included as vice president in order to shore up party support in the slave states. It had never crossed anyone’s mind that he would exercise power of any sort; no president had ever died in office. No one even knew how to address the successor; the Constitution was unclear on whether the vice president would succeed to the presidency or merely assume its functions. Adams was outraged that Tyler considered himself the president and insisted on being addressed as such.

  Adams viewed Tyler’s accession to power as an unmitigated catastrophe. Not the least of its consequences would be the death of Adams’ hopes for a national policy of internal improvement. In a letter to Clay the following year, Adams wrote bitterly that “the idea that a nation destined by the Creator to be the mightiest that ever existed on the face of the Globe . . . should, with de
liberate purpose, have so constituted itself as to cripple all its powers of self-improvement, has always appeared to me a Doctrine the depravity of which is mitigated only by its stupidity.” In Adams’ telling, the Jeffersonian hostility to federal improvements had been defeated by the close of the Monroe administration—but then Jackson had revived it. Harrison’s election promised to restore Clay’s American System. But Tyler had “succeeded in thwarting all active government efforts by Congress.”

  Harrison had ordered a special session of Congress for the spring and summer of 1841. At the outset Adams had asked to be excused from the Committee on Manufactures, the scene of endless pitched battles over the tariff. The new Speaker, John White of Kentucky, had agreed to put him instead at the head of the Committee on Foreign Relations but then at the last minute appointed Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts to the post, putting Adams instead on Indian Affairs. Adams viewed this as another act of spite from Daniel Webster. He would not accept his new assignment. Adams had come to believe that the nation’s policy toward the Indians, from the Washington administration to his own, had been just and humane. Only with Andrew Jackson had the federal government surrendered to the importunities of Western and Southern pioneers and ruthlessly driven the Indians from their land. Without ever reexamining his own policy, he had come to conclude that the forcible resettlement of the Indians was “among the heinous sins of this nation,” as he put in his journal. “I turned my eyes away from this sickening mass of putrefaction,” he wrote, “and asked to be excused from serving as chairman of this Committee.”

  AS ADAMS SOLDIERED GRIMLY ON THROUGH ONE BATTLE AFTER another, Louisa lived in terror that her husband would be cut down by an assassin’s bullet or that the inflammatory rhetoric of the abolitionists would spark a race war. She had never adapted to a public life, much less to the life of endless struggle and controversy to which her husband had subjected her. She felt old, tired, exhausted by misfortune. Over time Louisa withdrew to the confines of her own soul, the one sphere truly her own. In her diary, resumed in 1839 after an absence of three years, she left her husband’s stormy world behind to explore her own spiritual deeps. The difference is striking. In December 1835, Louisa wrote, “How bitterly sick I am of all the nefarious details of political life!” By March 1839, however, she was speculating about the doctrine of salvation by faith, concluding that it was a species of arrogance—as was the doctrine of salvation by works alone. A few months later, Louisa began an entry, “What is transcendentalism?” Her husband had simply ridiculed this New England heresy, but Louisa could not so easily satisfy herself. Is it right, she wondered, to revere as an emanation of God “the light that burns within,” as Emerson and others suggested? Surely not, she answered herself: “Every flower bears its vital escense in billions of multiplied divisions; and man is but a flower like the grass that withereth away.” Louisa also devoted two long passages to Shakespeare, whom she felt she had not fully fathomed until now.

  But Louisa’s soul was not at rest. She could no longer recognize in herself the quick-spirited girl she had once been. Long years of worry, of responsibility, of affliction and grief will “tincture our manners, with severity,” she wrote, “when our hearts are full of all the benevolent feelings which naturally stimulate to kind actions.” Shedding her polite diction, she cried, “I am now nearly sixty-five years old—no one understands me one bit better than they did the day I arrived.” Her father had loved and solaced her, but he had died when she was still a young woman. Little Louisa had been taken from her, and then George and John. She thought of each on the anniversary of their death. Had Got not punished her for her failures as a mother? On Charles’ birthday, she wrote, “He is the only one of my children I never deserted. . . . To my other two I failed; and God Almighty forgive me!” Ever since her infant’s death Louisa had yearned for surcease, even as she clung to life; now she felt her grip slackening.

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY 1842, ADAMS RECEIVED A VISIT AT HOME IN Washington, DC, from the abolitionist legislator Joshua Giddings, Joshua Leavitt of the Emancipator, and another man he did not know. “Is it Mr. Theodore D. Weld?,” he asked. It was. Giddings had invited this great evangelical leader to Washington to serve as secretary and researcher for the Select Committee on Slavery, a group of activists who would coordinate the efforts of the growing number of legislators prepared to take on the South. A convert to immediatism, Weld was a tireless orator, organizer, and pamphleteer of the abolitionist cause. He was a beloved figure, modest and humble, invincibly determined but unfailingly polite—a kind of antitype to the explosive Garrison.

  Weld was immediately impressed by the former president. After the “pomp and tinsel” of President Tyler’s reception, Weld wrote to his wife, the abolitionist Angelina Grimké, he found the Adamses “living in a plain house, plainly furnished, and themselves plainly dressed—the President very plainly.” The feeling was apparently mutual, for Adams looked at his new visitor and said, “I know you well sir by your writings.” Adams was surely thinking of Weld’s monumental 1839 compendium, Slavery As It Is, which rebutted in terrifying detail the Southern lie that slaves were treated no worse than free laborers. (“We will prove that slaves in the United States . . . are often made to wear round their necks iron collars armed with prongs, to drag heavy chains and weights at their feet while working in the field, and to wear yokes, and bells, and iron horns.”)

  The gag rule continued to make a true debate over slavery impossible, but its days appeared to be numbered. At the outset of the 1840–1841 congressional session, Adams had succeeded for the first time in winning a vote to eliminate the gag. After another pitched battle, the House had voided that decision, though without reimposing the rule. Adams tried again the following year, but, despite the large Whig majority, a motion to restore the gag as a standing rule passed by three votes. The slavocracy’s margin was narrowing, though it still held sway.

  Finally, however, the forces of abolitionism had begun to organize themselves as the slavery advocates long had. The members of the Select Committee, as well as most members of the small abolitionist caucus in Congress, lived in Mrs. Spriggs’ rooming house directly facing the Capitol. There, in what came to be called Abolition House, they plotted strategy. They divided up the presentation of petitions among their members and ensured that their speeches were printed in the National Intelligencer and then circulated in the abolitionist press. Weld, meanwhile, took a desk in the Library of Congress and plunged into research. In mid-January 1842, a dozen congressmen gathered in Adams’ home to make plans for the coming weeks. It’s not clear if they agreed that the old man would lob a missile into the slaveholders’ ranks; that, however, is what he proceeded to do. On January 20, Adams told Weld that the following day he would present petitions that would set the slaveholders “in a blaze.”

  Adams was as good as his word. On the twenty-first, he presented a petition from citizens of Massachusetts complaining that the slave states, by their “absolutely despotic, onerous and oppressive” behavior, had denied the free states their constitutionally guaranteed right to republican government. This petition did not technically fall within the compass of the gag rule. Neither did his next one, a warning from the citizens of Pennsylvania that the nation was preparing to go to war with Great Britain to protect the slave interest, a reference to mounting tensions over England’s insistence on boarding American vessels in order to search for slaves. By now the House was in turmoil. Many of the slave representatives had gotten up from their seats to crowd around Adams and try to shout him down. Weld, who had come to witness the spectacle, was astounded and thrilled. He described the scene to Angelina: “A perfect uproar like Babel would burst forth every two or three minutes as Mr. A with his bold surgery would smite his cleaver into the very bone.”

  Speaker White ordered Adams to take his seat. He did, and then popped up to deliver a petition from Massachusetts men who wished it be known that they would not take up arms to defend slavery. Then came the coup d
e grâce, at least for that day: a petition from Habersham Country, Georgia, asking to have Adams removed as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, as he was “possessed of a species of monomania on all subjects connected with people as dark as a Mexican,” and thus ought not have authority over such issues as US relations with Texas and Mexico. (Adams had been restored to the chairmanship after Daniel Webster decided that the man he had put there, Caleb Cushing, had become too aggressive toward Great Britain.)

  This provoked a new round of bedlam, for Richard Habersham, the district’s eponymous representative, declared the petition an obvious hoax, like the alleged memorial from slaves that Adams had presented in 1837. The author had, after all, identified himself as “James Playfair.” Adams nevertheless demanded the right to defend himself from the charge of monomania. Henry Wise of Virginia implored the Speaker to declare Adams out of order; Thomas Marshall of Kentucky eagerly prayed the Speaker to let the monomaniac go ahead. On that wild note, the House adjourned.

  Adams still had the floor, and the next day he tried once again to present the Georgia petition. Perhaps it was a hoax, he conceded, but it still expressed the view of many in the House—though that must have sounded like a pretext even to Adams’ allies. The Speaker ordered Adams to his seat, but Adams had decided to provoke a confrontation. He demanded the recognition of Haiti. He read from abolitionist documents. Adams had now been on his feet for hours. Giddings, Slade, and Seth Gates of New York stood by him protectively; Wise and Thomas Gilmer, also of Virginia, and others hovered just beyond them. The Southern heckling rose to a crescendo. When the House voted not to receive the Georgia petition, Adams pulled from his sheaf of papers one more document that, Giddings wrote, he “appeared to examine with more than usual interest.” Turning to the Speaker, he said, “I hold in my hand the memorial of Benjamin Emerson and forty-five other citizens of Haverhill, in the state of Massachusetts, praying Congress to adopt immediate measures for the peaceful dissolution of the Union of these States.” The petitioners no longer wished to see the resources of the free states “drained” for the benefit of the slave states.