by James Traub
By the time Polk took over, Tyler had already annexed Texas, and the Senate had given its approval. By this time General Santa Ana had been overthrown in yet another coup, plunging Mexico into anarchy. Opponents like Adams could no longer argue that annexation would threaten Mexico’s stability. That is one of the reasons why the vote for war in May 1846 was so one-sided. Adams continued to view the war policy in apocalyptic terms. In a burst of temper, Adams wrote in his journal, “The Constitution is a menstruous rag, and the Union is sinking into a military monarchy, to be rent asunder like the empire of Alexander or the kingdom of Ephraim and Judah.”
Adams had fought the annexation of Texas because he viewed it as a pretext to extend the empire of slavery. He was, nevertheless, a fervent advocate of territorial expansion. Adams was one of the very few Northern Whigs who believed that the United States had a right to all of Oregon, which ran up to the Russian border at the edge of Alaska, at the latitude of 54° 40’. Most men outside of the West, which raised the famous battle cry “54 40 or fight!,” were not prepared to go to war with England over Oregon. Adams wasn’t either; he was prepared to accept a border at the forty-ninth parallel, near what is now Vancouver. In a speech in the House in early 1845 he stated that the time had come to tell Great Britain that negotiations over Oregon had come to an end. Congress should pass a law taking Oregon up to the forty-ninth parallel and then inform the British that it had done so.
British prime minister Sir Robert Peel stated that his nation held “clear and unquestionable” title to Oregon and would go to war to defend that title. Tempers rose on both sides. The House passed a resolution urging the president to seize Oregon with no further negotiations, and then it began to debate a bill to raise two regiments of riflemen to defend settlers in the territory. Adams abjured his colleagues to calm down, insisting that America could assert its rights to Oregon without provoking hostilities.
On February 9, 1845, Adams rose again with an apology for his feeble condition—and proceeded to fill the entire hour to which speeches were now limited. As the question of legal title had been much debated, he wished to shed some light on the foundations of the question. He bade the clerk open the Bible and read “what I conceive to be the foundation of our title, Genesis I:26–8”—the passage in which God commanded man to be fruitful and multiply and gave him dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air. Then he had him read Psalm 2, verse 8: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thy inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” Adams then explained that this power was understood to have passed from God to Christ, and from Christ to his vicar, the Pope, who in turn allotted lands to Christian kings. Americans might mock such a genealogy, but what was the foundation of Massachusetts’, or Virginia’s, title to its land but a grant from Charles I?
Adams’ point was that all the principles of international law that governed title were based upon historical conventions. Did King Charles have the right to give pieces of North America to British settlers? Alternatively, discovery was said to confer title, but why should this be so? “All these titles,” Adams said, “are imperfect.” Neither England nor the United States could claim “clear and unquestionable” title to Oregon. Yet there was an answer to this vexed problem. “There is nothing complete in the way of title but actual possession,” Adams said. This was the scriptural foundation of title, set forth in Genesis. “Actual possession” required tillage and husbandry, which is why Indians could not claim to have possessed the land over which they had immemorially ranged. Great Britain, like the Indians, used Oregon to hunt animals for furs. “We claim the country for what?,” Adams continued. “To make the wilderness blossom as the rose, to establish laws, to increase, multiply and subdue the earth, which we are commanded to do by the first behest of the Almighty God.”
It is unlikely that Adams’ exercise in theology and legal philosophy swayed many minds in Congress. His speeches did, however, have a significant impact in England. Adams had come to be seen as a crucial voice for diplomatic entente; now the old warrior seemed to be egging on the hotheads who were prepared for confrontation. In April, Adams received a letter from Joseph Sturge, a prominent Quaker and abolitionist in Birmingham, England, imploring him to use his voice to forestall rather than provoke conflict. It was in response to Sturge that Adams wrote the letter, quoted at the beginning of this book, in which he recalled his terror at Bunker Hill, the fervent patriotism of his parents, the Collins ode his mother had taught him to recite with his prayers.
Adams went on to say that his father knew very well the horrors of war with a vastly more powerful nation and knew that it could mean his death and that of his family—and had chosen nevertheless to defend his rights by taking up arms. War in the name of tyranny was abhorrent, but war to defend against tyranny was “a religious and sacred duty.” Adams had many Quaker friends, but he was no pacifist. A few weeks earlier, Indiana congressman Robert Dale Owen, the son of the eccentric Welsh reformer Owen of Lanark, had been explaining to Adams his principled objection to warfare; Adams rejoined that “philosophically speaking,” he considered war “not a corrupter, but a purifyer, of the moral character of man.”
The Senate finally agreed to a resolution that authorized the president to lay claim to the forty-ninth parallel. The British, thinking better of their bellicosity, responded with a compromise proposal, as Adams had predicted they would. By the summer the Oregon question had been settled to the satisfaction of both countries. The continental nation Adams had seen in his minds’ eye when the United States barely extended beyond the Alleghenies had become, at long last, a reality.
IN JULY 1845, ADAMS ATTENDED THE ANNUAL PARTY OF THE Neponset Bridge Company, of which he had long been a director. The lawn bowling reminded him of the happy days—at least they seemed happy in retrospect—when he was a novice lawyer and he and his friends would go bowling in Boston. “There is always something sweet and something sad in the remembrance of ancient enjoyments,” Adams wrote. He allowed himself, as he rarely did, to be lapped in nostalgia. He thought back to the times of his boyhood, to the battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill, the death of Grandmother Smith, the evacuation of Boston, the smallpox. Adams began to write down a list of his memories from the earliest days forward. Nabby’s birthday, on July 14, provoked distant memories of his beloved sister. His forty-eighth wedding anniversary, on the twenty-sixth, led him to think of the long course of his life, the death of his children and his parents, his career in public service, his “friends and benefactors” Washington, Madison, and Monroe, and of course his “base, malignant and lying enemies”—Ingersoll, Jackson, Jonathan Russell. He could name far more. He had been much slandered. What had happened to his rosy train of thought? “I am wandering far from my wedding-day,” Adams noted ruefully.
In this mood of retrospection and summation, Adams decided to make a collection of his speeches for Charles Francis. He started with his July 4 speech in 1793 and ran all the way through the address “Society and Civilization,” which he had delivered as recently as the previous December. The bookbinder made five volumes of the vast bundle. Adams reflected gloomily on the fact that publishers had brought out collections of the speeches of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Edward Everett. His own words were “so little estimated by the world that no other collection of them will probably ever be made.” Later that month he noted that at Harvard commencement, speakers competing for prizes delivered four speeches by Webster and one by Everett. There were none by Adams.
Adams had begun to shed commitments. He admitted to a publisher that he would never get around to writing the long-promised introduction to his letters on Anti-Masonry. He yielded to Harvard’s President Quincy the authorship of the report on the observatory. He felt his powers of concentration flagging. In September, he wrote despondently, “I have surrendered . . . all hope of recovering physical powers for active and useful existence.” He could no longer garden. He had bought a newfangled sh
ower-bath, a freestanding closet, but he could no longer stand up in order to use it. He suffered from the shooting pains of sciatica. On December 3, Adams, or rather his granddaughter Louisa Catherine, noted tersely that Joseph Story, his great friend and fellow warrior for republican principle, had died. The end seemed nigh for Adams too. But it wasn’t—not quite yet.
CHAPTER 38
The End of Earth
(1845–1848)
IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, HENRY ADAMS RECALLS AN INCIDENT that took place when he was six or seven years old, which is to say in 1844 or the year after. The family had moved for the summer into his grandparents’ home in Quincy. Henry, the fourth child of Charles Francis and Abigail Brooks, was throwing a tantrum in the hope of being permitted to skip school and was, he recalled, “in a fair way to win,” when the door to the upstairs library opened and his grandfather, known around the house as “the President,” came slowly downstairs. “Putting on his hat,” Henry writes, “he took the boy’s hand without a word, and walked with him, paralyzed by awe”—the boy, that is—“up the road to the town.” They walked the mile to the school in perfect silence. Only then, before the schoolhouse door, did John Quincy Adams release his grandson’s hand. Such an episode could have scared the daylights out of a little boy, but what Henry Adams recalled, decades later, was his gratitude that his grandfather “had uttered no syllable of revolting cant about the duty of obedience and the wickedness of resistance to law.”
In fact, Henry recalled, he and the president were on “friendly and almost intimate” terms. He was given free rein of his grandfather’s books and papers. The elder Adams never murmured after the little boy had made a mess of the coins and pistols and canes that lay around the library. It never occurred to Henry to fear the gentle old man who pottered in the garden and drowsed before the fire in his easy chair.
Louisa was known in the house as “the Madam.” She was, Henry Adams recalled, “a little more remote than the President, but more decorative. She stayed much in her own room, with the Dutch tiles, looking out on her garden with the box walks, and seemed a fragile creature to a boy who sometimes brought her a note or a message, and took distinct pleasure in looking at her delicate face under what seemed to him very becoming caps. He liked her refined figure, her gentle voice and manner, her vague effect of not belonging there, but to Washington or Europe.” He was drawn to her frailty and her air of suffering.
John Quincy Adams left no record of his thoughts about young Henry, but he had always doted on his granddaughters. He exchanged chatty letters with Charles Francis’ daughter, Louisa Catherine, who asked whether it was strictly necessary to begin every letter with an acknowledgment of a letter received. Yes, said her punctilious grandfather, though among friends the acknowledgment may be cursory. He loved Charles Francis’ wife, Abby, whom he regarded as a daughter and to whom he wrote frequent letters.
No one in the family meant more to Adams than Charles Francis, whom he had raised with something resembling the care his own father had lavished on him. Over time, the son had turned into a man very much like his father. He described himself in his journal as “grave, sober, formal, precise and reserved,” while his own son Charles Francis Jr. more bluntly called him (in a biography, no less) “introspective and morbid” and “repellent in nature.” As a politician and a regular contributor to newspapers, he advanced the same causes his father did—opposition to the war in Mexico and to slavery and the slave power, resolute defense of republican principles against encroaching “oligarchy.” He was a Whig, but he broke with Daniel Webster and the older generation over their support for Tyler; along with the abolitionist and Massachusetts congressman Charles Sumner and others, he founded the Young Whigs, later known as the Conscience Whigs for their commitment to moral causes, above all to the elimination of slavery. Charles Francis was his father’s one and only true confidante. In the spring of 1844, the older man wrote to his son to say that he grieved that he could not find the time or energy “to open my mind to you” at least once a week. He added, “I have noted with inexpressible pleasure your firm unwavering adherence to honest principles.” He trusted that Charles Francis would carry on the fight for truth as he himself faded from the scene.
In his final years Adams seemed to attain an emotional freedom he had not known before. At times he was, strange to say, almost playful. He wrote poems to some of his colleagues, and not just the rare beloved one, like Giddings. To one retiring member of the House, Charles Brown, he wrote, “Friend! After a war of words / In sharp debate and conflict sore: / Measure of minds and not of swords, / we part! Perchance to meet no more. / Oh, let us there forget our strife.” Adams increasingly indulged his passion for doggerel, above all with women, whom he had been plying with verse since college days. After he met Charles Dickens and his wife, Catherine, on their trip to America in 1842, he sent a farewell verse to Catherine. Miss Mary Inman sent him an album with a portrait of herself under a painted rosebud, and Adams filled in the space underneath with a poem. In March 1846, the seventy-seven-year-old Adams wrote the kind of saucy letter only possible in an era when actual transgressions were unthinkable. To a young woman from Owego, New York, who had sent a letter enclosing a kiss, he wrote:
But how can such a kiss avail
To touch my lips with bliss?
I to all favours such as these
Stone cold shall ever be
That fruit has naught to please,
Save gathered from the tree
Gathered from the tree! It wasn’t only the furnace of ambition that still burned within the old man.
ADAMS’ LONG CAREER IN POLITICS WAS FINALLY DRAWING TO A close. But his intellectual curiosity was undimmed. In the spring of 1845, after Congress had adjourned, Adams spent many happy hours at the Patent Office, whose leaders he had known and supported for decades. The current director, Henry Ellis, was eager to show Adams the new inventions that had come to his notice. He explained the system of lighthouse illumination developed twenty years earlier by Augustin-Jean Fresnel, a French engineer. The so-called Fresnel system used concentric layers of fine ground glass to reflect and magnify light with far more power than the lamps used in American lighthouses. Adams was captivated by the technology and quickly concluded that the government must pay to have them installed in lighthouses across the country. He found price lists so that he could estimate the cost of installation. He then brought Navy Secretary George Bancroft, Treasury Secretary Robert Walker, and Vice President George M. Dallas to the Patent Office for a demonstration.
Adams had once dreamed of writing a chronicle of the advance of science and invention. Now he decided to do just that in the form of a history of the Patent Office. He spoke of the idea to Ellis, who told him many of the records of the office’s history had been destroyed by a fire in 1836. But he continued to pursue the idea once he returned to Quincy. He spent $17 to buy the fifteen-volume Library of American Biography and also hunted up biographies of Robert Fulton and the explorer Sieur de La Salle. Advancing age and enfeeblement, or perhaps his usual distraction, put an end to this project.
Adams was still captivated by astronomy. Almost as soon as he reached home in early May 1846, Adams went with President Quincy of Harvard to visit the observatory then under construction. They found the chief astronomer, Professor Benjamin Peirce, sitting under a temporary wooden roof gazing through a six-foot-long telescope. Adams fastened his eye to the eyepiece and gazed on the planets. He then found the chief observer, Mr. Bond, who lived on the grounds with his son, observing the planets from inside a rough shed. Adams had to kneel on a cushion and throw his head all the way back so that he could look straight up, an experience he found excruciating. But he did it nevertheless. Adams reconvened at the observatory the following week with members of the university board of overseers. President Quincy informed them that they would need to raise $25,000 to $50,000 to pay salaries to the Bonds, father and son, as well as to purchase additional equipment and to complete constructi
on. Adams later paid visits to Abbot Lawrence and other wealthy Harvard alumni, flattering them with the immense role they had a chance to play in the advancement of knowledge.
Adams still clung to the hope that he could direct the Smithson bequest to astronomical research. The Smithsonian Committee in the House, which Adams chaired, ground sluggishly through alternative proposals. Few legislators cared about the bequest remotely as much as the chairman. One member suggested authorizing the hiring of a professor of agriculture and the purchase and distribution of seeds. Robert Dale Owen favored the establishment of a normal school to train teachers. William Giles of Maryland wanted to buy books for the blind. When the issue reached the floor of the House in late April 1846, Adams rose in a last-ditch effort to ward off what he considered abuses of the expressed will of the donor. He asked the House to strike any reference to normal schools, or to the admission of students for any purpose, from the enabling legislation. He won on two separate votes. The House also rejected Giles’ proposed amendment on Braille books.
In the course of the debate, Alexander D. Sims of South Carolina had noted, mockingly, that “the doctrine promulgated by a distinguished President of the United States had grown into popular favor.” Adams had been the great advocate, indeed the sole advocate, of “lighthouses of the skies.” None had existed when he had first spoken of them; now the US Navy had been authorized to build an observatory in northwest Washington, while others were rising in Cincinnati, Cambridge, and elsewhere. Something like the national network Adams had dreamed of was beginning to take shape. Adams rejoined that he was “very glad to hear that it has grown in popular favor,” and went on, “I claim no merit for the erection of the astronomical observatory, but in the course of my whole life, no conferring of honor, or of interest, or of office, has given me more delight than the belief that I have contributed in some small degree, to produce these astronomical observatories, both here and elsewhere. I no longer wish any portion of this fund to be applied to an astronomical observatory.”