John Quincy Adams

by Harlow Unger

  destined by God and nature to be coextensive with the North American continent . . . and become the most populous and powerful people ever combined under one social compact . . . speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs.10

  To ensure what others called the nation’s “manifest destiny,” he studied the Louisiana Purchase agreement, then moved for the addition of a simple phrase: “with the assent of the French government.” John Quincy argued that the phrase converted the document from an unconstitutional purchase agreement into a formal—and constitutionally sanctioned—treaty. Whether or not his assertion had any legal or constitutional justification, he was so eloquent a lawyer that he convinced the Senate it did. Despite fierce opposition from Federalists, the Senate approved his motion and ended the furor (and Jefferson’s misgivings) over whether the government could acquire Louisiana.n

  A Republican newspaper predicted that “the Hon. John Quincy Adams will certainly be denounced and excommunicated by his party,”11 and, indeed, the denunciations came like cannon shots. “Like a kite without a tail,” one Boston Federalist leader snapped at John Quincy. “He will pitch on one side and the other, as the popular currents may happen to strike.” A Federalist newspaper charged John Quincy with “political patricide” for supporting President Jefferson, who had unseated John Quincy’s father from the presidency. But Aurora editor Benjamin Franklin Bache, the avowed political enemy of the Adamses, called John Quincy’s political courage “gratifying, coming from a high New England Federalist.”12

  President Thomas Jefferson found Senator John Quincy Adams a valuable ally in consummating the Louisiana Purchase, but an implacable foe in efforts to pack the Supreme Court. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  John Quincy was quite prepared for the attacks, writing in his diary that he had fully expected “the danger of adhering to my own principles.

  The country is so totally given up to the spirit of party that not to follow blindfold one or the other is an inexpiable offense. . . . Between both, I see the impossibility of pursuing the dictates of my own conscience without sacrificing every prospect not merely of advancement, but even of retaining that character and reputation I have enjoyed. Yet my choice is made, and, if I cannot hope to give satisfaction to my country, I am at least determined to have the approbation of my own reflections.13

  Federalist Timothy Pickering, the other Massachusetts senator, responded to the Louisiana Purchase by stepping up efforts to unite New England states with New York—and perhaps Nova Scotia—in a Northern Confederacy that would secede from the Union under the aegis of the British Empire. “I gave the first warning to Mr. Jefferson,” John Quincy asserted, “to be upon his guard against the intrigues of the British government through the governor of Nova Scotia with the disaffected party in New England.”14

  John Quincy’s father also learned of the Pickering conspiracy. “Mr. P[ickering],” John Adams wrote to his former political opponent Thomas Jefferson,

  carried with him from his friends in Boston a project of a division by the Potomac, the Delaware, or the Hudson, i.e., as far as they could succeed, and communicated it to Gen. Hamilton. There can be little doubt . . . that there is a party in New England . . . who wish to urge the nation to war with France and to shelter themselves and their commerce under the wings of the British navy. I have long opposed these people in all such projects . . . and the consequence will soon be, if it is not already, that I and my sons and all my friends will be hated throughout New England.15

  John Quincy compounded Federalist outrage by attending with Louisa President Jefferson’s private family dinners at the presidential mansion—and then joining seventy congressional Republicans at a dinner the President hosted with his cabinet to celebrate the Louisiana Purchase. “Scarcely any of the Federalist members were there,” John Quincy noted. “The dinner was bad and the toasts too numerous.”16

  But just as Jefferson thought he had lured John Quincy into the Republican fold, the New Englander proved him wrong by voting with Federalists against giving the President power to tax the people of Louisiana and appoint territorial officials. John Quincy argued that both bills violated the Constitution by depriving the people of Louisiana of their right to self-determination, and he introduced three resolutions—“which produced a storm as violent as I expected”:

  Resolved, That the people of the United States have never . . . delegated to this Senate the power of imposing taxes upon the inhabitants of Louisiana without their consent.

  Resolved, That by concurring in any act of legislation for imposing taxes upon the inhabitants of Louisiana without their consent, the Senate would assume a power unwarranted by the Constitution and dangerous to the liberties of the United States.

  Resolved, That the power of originating bills for raising revenues being exclusively vested in the House of Representatives, these resolutions be carried to them by the secretary of the Senate.

  “After a debate of about three hours,” John Quincy shook his head sadly, “the resolutions were rejected.”17

  Despite his defeats on the Senate floor, John Quincy remained a consummate constitutional scholar and applied to become, and was sworn in as, an attorney and counselor in the U.S. Supreme Court. He made a point of spending an hour or two a day listening to court proceedings, and, a week after his swearing in, on February 16, 1804, it was his turn to stand and argue his first case—and lose.

  Notwithstanding his status as a constitutional lawyer, John Quincy continued outraging both Republicans and Federalists at every turn. He even opposed an inoffensive resolution for senators to wear black crepe arm bands for a month to memorialize the deaths of three patriots, including his father’s cousin Samuel Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

  “I asked for the constitutional authority of the Senate to enjoin upon its members this act,” Adams wrote in his diary. Told it was not binding upon its members, “I then objected against it as improper in itself, tending to unsuitable discussions of character and to an employment of the Senate’s time in debates altogether foreign to the subjects which properly belong to them. This led to a debate of three hours.” Adams lost not only the debate but the goodwill of most of his Senate colleagues, who now viewed him as an unconscionable turncoat and chronic malcontent.

  “The agency of party is so organized in our country,” he groaned, “that the undertaking to pursue a course altogether independent of it as a public man is perhaps impracticable. However this may be, I do not regret having made the attempt and, whether in public or private life, it is my unalterable determination to abide by the principles which have always been my guides.18

  John Quincy even aroused the ire of his chess mate, Secretary of State Madison, by opposing a new treaty with Britain fixing the boundary between Canada and the United States from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean. Left open by the 1783 treaty of peace ending the Revolutionary War, the line, by convention, had run along the Forty-ninth Parallel. Madison’s treaty would have dropped it southward and ceded Britain a strip of land about 150 miles wide, including Lake of the Woods in northern Minnesota and Puget Sound in northwestern Washington. Adams roared his opposition and cowed the Senate into rejecting the treaty, leaving the lands in the so-called Adams Strip in the United States.

  Despite the friction John Quincy’s unpredictably independent voting engendered, Senate membership was too small, the number of committees too large, and John Quincy Adams’s knowledge of the law and the foreign world too vast to ostracize him. He soon found himself on more than a dozen committees, conducting himself on each with total disregard to party. On one he revised the articles of war, on another he helped acquire books for the Library of Congress, and on a third he helped revise Senate rules. His work on one committee included writing legislation for the Louisiana Territory and laws for the District of Columbia; on still another, he proposed building a network of roads acro
ss the Appalachian Mountains to connect Atlantic coast ports with the Ohio River valley—a scheme originally proposed by George Washington when the states were still a confederation.

  John Quincy Adams ensured the inclusion of the 150-mile-wide “Adams Strip” on the American side of the Canadian-American border.

  Resolved, That the secretary of the treasury be directed to prepare . . . a plan for . . . opening roads, for removing obstructions and making canals . . . which, as objects of public improvement, may require and deserve the aid of government. 19

  Washington’s—and Adams’s—scheme would have allowed western crops, pelts, furs, and ores to travel directly to Atlantic sea-lanes to Europe instead of following the circuitous route down the Mississippi River and across the Gulf of Mexico.

  Deemed by most senators to be an unconstitutional federal intrusion in state prerogatives, Adams’s proposal for domestic improvements went down to defeat without even a word of debate. “I have already seen enough,” he responded, “to ascertain that no amendments of my proposing will obtain in the Senate as now filled.”20 He believed Senator Pickering and other Federalists “hate me rather more than they love any principle.”21

  John Quincy proved far more popular at the President’s House than he did in the Senate. His language skills and overseas travels as a diplomat combined with his erudition to make him a favorite among diplomats who dined with Jefferson. And whenever ladies attended such functions, Louisa attracted as much attention as her husband or more, being as fluent in French as he but far more extroverted.

  Despite her son’s status in Washington, Abigail Adams was far less able than her husband to accept him as other than her little boy. “You must not let the mind wear so much upon the body,” she warned her thirty-seven-year-old senator-son as Christmas approached in 1804. “You eat too little and study too much.”22 And fully two years later, as he approached his thirty-ninth birthday, she cautioned,

  I hope you never appear in the Senate with a beard two days old or otherwise make what is called a shabby appearance. Seriously, I think a man’s usefulness in society depends much upon his personal appearance. I do not wish a senator to dress like a beau, but I want him to conform so far to the fashion as not to incur the character of singularity nor give the occasion to the world to ask what kind of mother he had.23

  Over the winter, the Adamses learned of the failure of a London bank where John Quincy had placed a sizable portion of his father’s European accounts, and to prevent his parents from sustaining any losses, John Quincy filled “the chasm created by this circumstance.”24 To compensate for his loss, he looked for ways to cut his own spending and decided that moving the family back and forth between Washington and Quincy twice a year had become a luxury he could no longer afford. In a bitter confrontation with Louisa, he told her she and the boys would have to stay put the year around—either in Washington or Quincy; her choice. When the Senate adjourned in the spring of 1804, John Quincy was ready to leave for his parents’ home in Quincy, and after an angry exchange with her husband, Louisa chose to stay with the boys in Georgetown at the comfortable home of her sister and brother-in-law. If they were to be separated half the year during each of the six remaining years of his Senate term, she told John Quincy she “preferred passing the summer months with my family to living alone in Quincy through five dreary winters.”

  When John Quincy accused her of disloyalty, she snapped back, “I do not think, my beloved friend, you do me justice. I prefer a separation from you rather than separation from them. I don’t think my affection for you admitted of doubt.” To add to his guilt after he had left, she wrote to him that three-year-old George “is very angry with you. He says you are very naughty to go away and leave him. . . . John calls everybody Papa he sees. Poor little fellow was too young when you left us to remember you.”

  Without his father, however, George, at three, became ungovernable, chasing the chickens and ducks unmercifully whenever he was left to himself. And Louisa grew miserable without her husband. “Life is not worth living on such terms,” she admitted. She was wretched in Washington and realized that without him, “I must be wretched everywhere.”25

  Their separation left him equally distressed. He missed his children and longed for the comfort of Louisa by his side at night. True to form, he turned to poetry to effect a reconciliation, sending her some playful eroticism from John Donne’s To His Mistress Going to Bed (1669):

  Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals.

  Licence my roving hands.

  Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee.

  As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be

  To taste whole joys.26

  John Quincy promised to dip into capital if necessary to end their separation and prevent their ever again being apart. Before he returned to Washington, Harvard’s overseers invited him to stand for the college presidency, but he was too intent on rejoining his wife and children and declined in favor of returning to Washington. He arrived in time for the presidential election.

  On July 11, 1804, while John Quincy was still in Massachusetts copying Donne’s erotic verses for Louisa, Senate president Aaron Burr Jr., the vice president, shot and killed former Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Fifteen years in the making, their enmity had reached a climax earlier in the year during the New York gubernatorial election campaign, when Burr called for “a union at the northward” between New York and the New England states to thwart the assumption of power by Jefferson, Madison, and Virginia’s political dynasty. Fearing civil war, Hamilton all but ensured Burr’s defeat in the gubernatorial election by calling the vice president “a dangerous man who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government.” 27 Jefferson had already rejected Burr as a potential running mate in 1804, and Burr’s defeat in the gubernatorial race effectively ended his political career. As Hamilton’s barbs struck, the editor of the American Citizen added to their sting by calling Burr the “most mean and despicable bastard in the universe . . . so degraded as to permit even General Hamilton to slander him with impunity.”28 Burr sued the editor, then challenged Hamilton to the fatal confrontation.

  After the duel, outraged Hamilton supporters posted handbills bearing the words “Hang Burr!” on walls across New York City. A grand jury indicted Burr for murder, but he fled to a hideaway on a Georgia plantation. When the Senate reconvened on November 5, however, John Quincy joined other members in a collective gasp as Burr stepped through the door and strode down the aisle to his accustomed chair as president of the Senate.

  “The coroner’s inquest,” John Quincy wrote in disbelief, “found a verdict of willful murder by Aaron Burr, vice president of the United States. The grand jury . . . found a bill against him for murder. Under all these circumstances Mr. Burr appears and takes his seat as president of the Senate of the United States.”29

  John Quincy grew even more annoyed when the Senate voted to go into executive session—and promptly left the Capitol to go to the horse races. And they repeated the exercise for the next ten days. “The consideration of executive business,” John Quincy fumed, was “merely for the sake of having on the printed journals an appearance of doing business though there was really none to do. This vote passed. . . . Mine was the only voice heard against it.”30

  Earlier in the year, an effort by President Jefferson to alter the Federalist bias of the Supreme Court came to fruition when he coaxed his political allies in the House of Representatives to impeach Associate Justice Samuel Chase. A signer of the Declaration of Independence and appointee of President Washington, Chase had, at times, displayed outrageous political bias in his rulings, but he crossed a particularly dangerous political line by attacking the adoption of universal white manhood suffrage in his native state of Maryland. Until then, only property owners had been able to vote. Chase argued that the “constitution will sink into a mobocracy, the worst of all possible government,” and he cited as “a mighty mischief ” the doctrine “t
hat all men in a state of society are entitled to enjoy equal liberty and equal rights.”31

  Calling his words an improper political address in a judicial proceeding, the House of Representatives charged him with sedition and treason—both of them “high crimes and misdemeanors” and a basis for impeachment under the Constitution and removal from office. With John Quincy howling his objections, Chase went on trial before the Senate the following February. In one of the most important trials in American history, the House of Representatives threatened to convert the American republic into an autocracy by criminalizing political dissent. Although John Quincy did not like Chase, he argued that the constitutional phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” referred to indictable criminal acts—not political statements—and he convinced the Senate to support him. On March 1, 1805, after the Senate had voted, Vice President Burr announced, “There not being a constitutional majority who answer ‘guilty’ to any one charge, it becomes my duty to declare that Samuel Chase is acquitted upon all the articles of impeachment brought against him by the House of Representatives.”32 In what was then the most significant defense of the First Amendment ever mounted, John Quincy had prevented the American President and the House of Representatives from criminalizing free speech.

  “This was a party prosecution,” John Quincy reflected afterwards, “and has issued in the . . . total disappointment of those by whom it was brought forward.”

  It has exhibited the Senate of the United States fulfilling the most important purpose of its institution, by putting a check upon the impetuous violence of the House of Representatives. It has proved that a sense of justice is yet strong enough to overpower the furies of faction. . . . The attack on Mr. Chase was a systematic attempt upon the independence and powers of the Judicial Department and, at the same time, an attempt to prostrate the authority of the National Government before those of the individual states.33