by Harlow Unger
When he learned of his father’s defeat, John Quincy wrote to console him, adding, “I hope and confidently believe that you will be prepared to bear this event with calmness and composure, if not with indifference; that you will not suffer it to prey on your mind or affect your health.”
In your retirement you will have not only the consolation . . . that you have discharged all the duties of a virtuous citizen, but the genuine pleasure of reflecting that by the wisdom and firmness of your administration you left . . . [the] country in safe and honorable peace. . . . In resisting . . . the violence of France, you saved the honor of the American name from disgrace. . . . By sending the late mission you restored an honorable peace to the nation, without tribute, without bribes, without violating any previous engagements. . . . You have, therefore, given the most decisive proof that . . . you were the man not of any party but of the whole nation.27
On March 4, Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office as America’s third President at the first inauguration to be held in the new, permanent federal capital of Washington City, as it was called at first. In his inaugural address, the new President appealed for an end to the bitter conflict between Anglophiles and Francophiles and between Federalists and Republicans. “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle,” Jefferson asserted. “We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans; we are all federalists.”28
In the written transcript of his address that he sent to Congress, he purposely left the words “republicans” and “federalists” uncapitalized. The election campaign, however, had left John Adams too bitter to attend the inauguration, and he never heard Jefferson’s speech. In any case, few Federalists believed Thomas Jefferson could halt the secessionist fever infecting the nation. The death of Washington in 1799 had left the young republic without a strong leader to unite vastly different, conflicting regional interests across the continent, and Congress had become a battleground for those interests instead of a center of collegial mediation, compromise, and unification.
On April 12, 1801, after four miscarriages, Louisa Adams gave birth to John Quincy’s first child. “I have this day to offer my humble and devout thanks to almighty God for the birth of a son at half-past three o’clock in the afternoon,” he prayed as he wrote in his diary.29 Three weeks later, the infant was baptized George Washington Adams, and John Quincy prayed for “the favor of almighty God that he may live and never prove unworthy of [the name].”30 By then, John Quincy had received his letter of recall, and the following day he presented it to his friend King Frederick, then went to say farewell to Louisa’s friend the queen. “In less than half an hour, all was over.”31
On June 17, Louisa and John Quincy Adams sailed from Hamburg, Germany, with their infant son, and after an uneventful Atlantic crossing, they disembarked in Philadelphia, where brother Thomas Boylston Adams awaited with the shocking news that their middle brother, twenty-nine-year-old Charles, had died of alcoholism. Several days later, Louisa and John Quincy separated for the first time since their marriage, with John traveling northward for a reunion with his parents and relatives, while Louisa took the baby to Washington, where her parents had settled after fleeing London. All but penniless when they arrived, they had turned for help to their son-in-law’s family, and John Adams had not only loaned them money but appointed Joshua Johnson superintendent of the Treasury Stamp Office, drawing enormous political flak for his generosity. By the time Louisa arrived, however, her father had died, and the rest of the family was living in the home of one of her married sisters.
After a joyful reunion with his family, John Quincy suddenly found himself without prospects for a job in the public sector. Republicans controlled government, and his mother and father could only suggest his “applying yourself solely to your own private affairs” by reestablishing a law practice.32
John Quincy bought a house in Boston, then traveled to Washington for the first time to escort Louisa and baby George back to Massachusetts. While in the capital, he dined with Thomas Jefferson, his friend from his adolescence in Paris and now third President of the United States. When he took office, Jefferson promptly fired most of his predecessor’s appointees, including Joshua Johnson. Jefferson apologized, saying he had not known that Johnson was John Quincy’s father-in-law.
After meeting with the President, John Quincy took Louisa to Mount Vernon to visit Martha Washington and show her the baby boy who had joined legions of newborn American boys bearing her husband’s name.
The Adamses arrived in Massachusetts in late November in time for Louisa’s formal induction into the huge Adams clan at her first Thanksgiving in America. After settling in their home in Boston, John Quincy set up his embryonic law practice and soon found it as boring as he had on his first try a decade earlier. Boston, however, reeked of politics, and the scent quickly lured him from his office—to the firehouse, for example, to become a volunteer fireman and to the influential congregation of the Old Brick Meeting House, where he purchased a pew. He also joined organizations that generated speaking opportunities before audiences of prominent Bostonians.
In April 1802, he won election to the state senate on the Federalist ticket and started two years of what he called “the novitiate of my legislative labors.” He spent most of his time tilting at political windmills—as he would the rest of his life. In one sortie, he tried unsuccessfully to strip the legislature of its control over the judiciary; in another he tried just as unsuccessfully to block legislators from using public funds to underwrite a new bank “whose shares were reserved to . . . members of the legislature.” 33 About his futile political battles, he wrote,
I was not able either to effect much good or to prevent much evil. I attempted some reforms and aspired to check some abuses, I regret to say, with little success. I [lacked] experience, and I discovered the danger of opposing and exposing corruption. . . . The mammon of unrighteousness was too strongly befriended.34
Because Federalists often shared the same beds of corruption with opposition Republicans, they soon found John Quincy’s campaigns against corruption as much a threat to their own political health as it was for their political foes. “A politician in this country must be a man of a party,” he lamented. “I would fain be the man of my whole country.” Then, with a malicious grin, he added, “I have strong temptation and have great provocation to plunge into political controversy.”35
At the time, each state legislature elected two of its own members to the U.S. Senate. To remove John Quincy from its midst without alienating powerful Adams family supporters in Boston, the Massachusetts legislature pretended to honor John Quincy by electing him to the U.S. Senate and sending him off to Washington in the hope that it would not hear from him again for at least six years. John Quincy, however, was about to shock the Massachusetts legislature and the nation’s entire political establishment with what became a courageous, lifelong crusade against injustice.
CHAPTER 7
A Profile in Courage
On July 4, 1803, Louisa Catherine Adams gave birth to her second child, John Adams II, named for his illustrious grandfather. Two months later, John Quincy sold their house in Boston, and the family started for the nation’s new capital in Washington. The move did not go smoothly. After carting their trunks to New London, Connecticut, they boarded the packet to New York, only to have two-year-old George Washington Adams behave like a two-year-old and throw his shoes overboard, then scamper away giggling with a bundle of keys to the family trunks, which promptly followed the little boy’s shoes into the sea.
When they sailed into Newark, New Jersey, the inns were full—indeed overflowing—with hysterical New Yorkers fleeing a yellow fever epidemic. The Adamses huddled in a room at a tavern until Thomas Adams, still practicing law in Philadelphia, learned of their plight and sent a carriage to bring them to Philadelphia and then to Washington.
The city of Washington remained, at best, a developing outpost of civilization, i
ts streets mostly mud tracks that often disappeared from view into fetid swamps. In fact, the city was a gigantic marsh, perforated by islands of reclaimed land topped with shabby boardinghouses, inns, taverns, stables, and, occasionally, government buildings—most of them still under construction. There was no church, hospital, museum, or park. Snakes slithered in and out of low-lying houses; a heavy rain turned muddy streets into raging torrents, and rats competed with pigs for footing and food on the few slime-coated islets of high ground. Clouds of insects surged through the air; disease was rampant; influenza reached epidemic proportions every winter. Clots of shacks—largely slave quarters—added to the horror. As John Quincy’s grandson Henry would put it years later after visiting his grandmother Louisa in Washington for the first time, “Slavery . . . was a nightmare, a horror, a crime, the sum of all wickedness. . . . Slave states were dirty, unkempt, poverty-stricken, ignorant, vicious!”
The two wings of the Washington Capitol stood all but isolated on a hill above the city’s mire, connected by a long, unpainted wooden shed and devoid of the domed central structure that would one day tie them together. According to one New England visitor, Pennsylvania Avenue was a mile of “rough road, bordered here and there by Congressional boardinghouses, with veritable swamps between” that led from the Capitol to the President’s house, which stood “in the midst of rough, unornamented grounds. Then another stretch of comparative wilderness till you came to Georgetown.”1
“We want nothing here,” the witty Senator Gouverneur Morris liked to tell visitors, “nothing but houses, cellars, kitchens, well-informed men, amiable women, and other little trifles of the kind, to make our city perfect.”2
British minister Anthony Merry lacked Morris’s sense of humor:
I cannot describe . . . the difficulty and expense which I have to encounter in fixing myself in a habitation. By dint of money I have just secured two small houses on the common which is meant to become in time the city of Washington. They are mere shells of homes, with bare walls, and without fixtures of any kind, even without pump or well. . . . Provisions of any kind, especially vegetables, are frequently hardly to be obtained at any price. So miserable is our situation.3
A French diplomat was no kinder in his appraisal: “My God!” he lamented. “What have I done to be condemned to reside in such a city?”4
Washington had only about seven hundred houses, of which one-third were brick and the rest wood. Paid only $6 a day in the House and $7 in the Senate, members of Congress often had to live as bachelors in squalid, cheaply built boardinghouses—usually, if they could, with friends from the same state or political party. Affluent government officials avoided the city as much as possible, preferring to live with their families in more substantial homes in nearby Georgetown, where Louisa Adams’s brother-in-law Walter Hellen, a wealthy—and generous—tobacco merchant and speculator, owned an enormous mansion. Hellen, who had married Louisa’s older sister Nancy, had housed his mother-in-law and her offspring after Joshua Johnson’s death, and he now invited John Quincy Adams, Louisa, and their two children to fill a nest of unused rooms in his spacious home, even giving John Quincy a quiet corner of his own for reading.
Senate life put no constraints on the family at first. It sat for less than three hours on weekdays—from noon until 2 or 3 p.m., and John Quincy enjoyed the forty-five-minute walk—about two and a half miles—to and from the Capitol, always getting home for the family’s 4 p.m. dinner. “At eleven this morning,” John Quincy wrote in his diary on his first day in the Senate, “I took my seat . . . after delivering my credentials . . . and being sworn to support the Constitution of the United States. . . . There was little business done, and the Senate adjourned soon after twelve.”5
When the Senate adjourned early enough, he often stopped to hear debates in the House of Representatives before walking home. With no churches in Washington, John Quincy made do with the two nondenominational services in the Capitol and at the Treasury—the first on Sunday morning, the second in the afternoon. Already well known by the city’s leading figures, John Quincy and Louisa were instant favorites on the social scene, attending dinners and balls at the President’s House, as the future White House was then called. When Louisa was not with him, John Quincy often retired to a quiet corner with Secretary of State James Madison to play chess. The two had not liked each other when they first met, but their deep interest in history drew them closer, and their encounters over the chessboard cemented their friendship. Unlike other southern political leaders, Madison had gone north to Princeton for his higher education and shared much of the same academic background as John Quincy.
The easy Senate routine allowed John Quincy to enjoy life at home as he had seldom done before, drawing closer to Louisa, who grew so robust she learned to ride and joined her husband on horseback excursions. The short Senate days left him ample time to resume his voracious reading and to read to his sons. Occasionally, he simply “passed the evening idly with George . . . or with the ladies.”6 During his first days in Washington, his time on the Senate floor produced nothing but bonhomie with his thirty-three colleagues, including the other senator from Massachusetts, former secretary of war and secretary of state Timothy Pickering.
As envisaged at the Constitutional Convention, the Senate was “to consist of the most distinguished characters, distinguished for their rank in life and their weight of property, and bearing as strong a likeness to the British House of Lords as possible.”7 For this reason the framers of the Constitution gave state legislatures, rather than the people, the power to elect senators.
It was not long, however, before John Quincy found himself disagreeing with most of his colleagues—Federalist as well as Republican. Several weeks after he first took his seat, the Senate considered the Louisiana Purchase. Comprising an area of about 1 million square miles, Louisiana was the largest territory any nation had ever acquired peacefully from another in recorded history—larger than Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Portugal combined. The United States had agreed to pay about $15 million—or about four cents an acre, compared with the average price of $2 an acre for which the U.S. government then sold federal lands to settlers. The acquisition would offer prospects of untold wealth to hundreds of thousands of Americans waiting to claim lands in the western wilderness.
Until his military setbacks in Egypt, western Europe, and Santo Domingo, Napoléon had intended sending 20,000 French troops to organize new French settlements in Louisiana, but a blast of Arctic air late in 1801 froze the fleet of troop transports in thick ice that prevented its departure. Frustrated by his incredible streak of misfortune, Napoléon exploded in uncontrollable rage:
Senator John Quincy Adams championed Senate approval of the Louisiana Purchase, an area of about 1million square miles that offered prospects of untold wealth to hundreds of thousands of Americans waiting to claim lands in the West.
“Damn sugar,” he shouted at his god. “Damn coffee, damn colonies. . . . I shall cede Louisiana to the United States.”
Although New England Federalists called the Louisiana Purchase too costly for the nation, their opposition actually stemmed from regional political, social, and economic issues. Virginia had emerged from the Revolutionary War as the largest, most powerful state in the Union, with the most territory, the most people, and the richest economy. With Thomas Jefferson as President and Madison likely to succeed him, Virginia had drained New England of much of its political power and influence; many New Englanders feared that the new states emerging from the Louisiana Purchase would ally themselves with Virginia and leave New England little more than an impotent commercial backwater. Adding Louisiana to the nation would extend slavery across the entire West, end all hopes of abolishing slavery in America, and allow western settlers to use slave labor to create vast new farms that would undersell and bankrupt small New England farms. The Mississippi River valley to New Orleans would become the primary artery for American international trade and destroy New Eng
land’s banking and shipping industries.
Boston’s Columbian Centinel led New England opposition, calling the Louisiana Territory “a great waste, a wilderness unpeopled with any beings except wolves and wandering Indians. . . . We are to give money of which we have too little for land of which we already have too much.” But a euphoric Tennessean wrote to President Jefferson, “You have secured to us the free navigation of the Mississippi. You have procured an immense fertile country: and all those blessings are obtained without war and bloodshed.”8
Initially, Jefferson was equally elated, saying the Louisiana Purchase had ensured “the tranquility, security and prosperity of all the Western country” and had permanently united East and West. But the President’s enthusiasm had limits. A strict constructionist, he knew the Constitution did not grant the government authority to buy foreign territory, let alone govern it, and that the Louisiana Purchase required a constitutional amendment. Federalists immediately grasped at the President’s reservations as a mechanism for rejecting the purchase. The President’s reservations appalled expansionists, who warned that the acquisition would be null and void if the Americans did not sign it within six months.
“Be persuaded,” American minister to France Robert Livingston warned Jefferson from Paris, “that France is sick of the bargain, that Spain is much dissatisfied, and that the slightest pretext will lose you the treaty.”9
With the Louisiana Purchase facing rejection, John Quincy Adams, alone among Federalists to favor the acquisition, acted to save it. As he told his parents, he believed deeply that the United States was