John Quincy Adams

by Harlow Unger

  Just before the Chase trial, the Electoral College had announced the results of the presidential elections, with Thomas Jefferson the overwhelming victor over South Carolina Federalist Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, winning 162–14. With Aaron Burr out of the picture, former New York governor George Clinton, an ardent Republican, easily won the vice presidency. Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress. With their own seats secure until 1809, John Quincy and one-third of his colleagues had not faced reelection, but he now stood alone in the Senate, shunned by Federalists and Republicans alike because he invariably put preservation of the union and the nation’s independence from foreign influence ahead of party interests.

  The day after the Chase trial, Vice President Burr announced his retirement from the Senate, and with his resignation, the Eighth Congress adjourned. The following day saw the President return to the Capitol for his second inauguration, and, perhaps chastened by his setback in the Chase case, he “delivered an inaugural address in so low a voice that,” according to John Quincy, “not half of it was heard by any part of the crowded auditory.”34

  After the inauguration, John Quincy’s sons contracted chicken pox, but the Adamses nonetheless managed to go to Quincy for the summer, where they took up residence in what now seemed the somewhat crude old farmhouse in which John Quincy had been born.

  It stood at a distance from, but on the same land as, the newer, more luxurious retirement “mansion” where John and Abigail had installed themselves and where John Quincy spent evenings discussing politics with his father. After renovating the old house into a comfortable summer retreat, John Quincy took up gardening as a new hobby that allowed him to spend more time in the fresh air.

  Early in June, Harvard named John Quincy professor of oratory and rhetoric, a chair created by a bequest in 1771 from Nicholas Boylston, a first cousin of John Quincy’s grandmother. John Quincy worked out terms that would allow him to lecture when the Senate was out of session, with payment of $348 per quarter. Although he would not begin until the following year, in June 1806, he snapped up copies of Cicero’s Orations , Thomas Leland’s Demosthenes, and works by Aristotle to prepare his first lectures.

  During the next session of Congress, John Quincy dined frequently at the President’s House with Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison, and after an uneventful winter session, he returned to Massachusetts to prepare his Harvard lectures and open his Boston law office. Too far along with another pregnancy, Louisa again remained with her family in Washington and, in early July, lost another child. John Quincy wrote to her, repeating his thanks to God “for having preserved you to me through the dangers of that heavy trial both of body and mind which it has called you to endure.”35

  In 1806, the endless Anglo-French conflict spilled into the Atlantic again. The British reversed course and seized American ships, confiscated cargoes, and impressed hundreds of seamen. Early in 1807, John Quincy proposed—and the Senate passed—three resolutions, two of which assailed British actions as “unprovoked aggression” and “a violation of neutral rights.” The third resolution authorized the President to embargo all U.S. exports. Jefferson, Madison, and John Quincy believed that ending the flow of essential American goods to both England and France would force those countries to end their war with each other and their depredations on American ships. The embargo would not prevent imports from entering American ports, but ships carrying such goods would have to leave port empty, and few shipowners could afford such one-way trade. John Quincy was the only Federalist in either house of Congress to vote for the embargo, which he believed was a middle ground between a suicidal naval war with Britain and passive acquiescence to British rule over international sea-lanes.

  John Adams built this lavish “mansion” as a retirement home for himself and his wife, Abigail. See illustration no. 2, page 10, to view the entire Adams family farm. (PAINTING BY G. FRANKENSTEIN, 1849; NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE, ADAMS NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)

  Political isolation in Congress only intensified his loneliness. After the Christmas holidays, Louisa had remained in Boston with John II to be near George’s boarding school and see him on Sundays. Though surrounded by in-laws, John Quincy longed for his wife and children. At the end of a particularly cold winter day in Washington, he wrote to Louisa before going to bed, “I will not say I can neither live with you nor without you; but in this cold weather I should be very glad to live with you.”36

  Increasingly obsessed by thoughts of his wife, he spent his lonely evenings writing poems, dedicating A Winter’s Day “To Louisa”:

  Friend of My Bosom! would’st thou know

  How, far from thee, the days I spend.37

  In another poem, he pleaded with Louisa to

  Fling the last fig leaf to the wind

  And snatch me to thy arms!38

  She replied playfully, calling his words “the sauciest lines I ever perused” and asking whether he would like her to publish them.39

  When Congress adjourned in the spring of 1807, John Quincy returned to Massachusetts to find Louisa pregnant again, and in mid-August, she gave birth to their third son, Charles Francis Adams, whom John Quincy named for his dead brother Charles and for Francis Dana, the diplomat John Quincy had served as an adolescent in Russia.

  As Boston Federalists demanded reconciliation with Britain, the British stepped up their outrages against American vessels on the high seas, with the worst occurring on June 22, 1807, when the British frigate Leopard hailed the USS Chesapeake just outside the three-mile territorial limit off Virginia’s Norfolk Roads. As the American ship slowed, the British commander demanded permission to search the Chesapeake for four men he claimed were British deserters. When the American commander refused, the Leopard fired without warning, killing three Americans and wounding eighteen. The British boarded and, stepping over the dead and wounded on the deck, seized four men they claimed were British deserters. They hung one of the men from the yardarm and impressed the three others. The attack convinced President Jefferson and John Quincy that, short of war, the only effective way to prevent British attacks was to withdraw American ships from the oceans, impose the congressionally sanctioned embargo, and try to undermine the British economy.

  When Britain refused to pay reparations for the Leopard attack, Congress converted John Quincy’s resolution into the Non-Importation Act, which effectively ended all American foreign trade in December 1807. Although aimed at punishing Britain, the act punished Americans more. Within weeks, the embargo had shut New England’s shipbuilding industry, its shipping trade, and its fishing fleet. With export outlets closed, farmers—north and south—found their produce a glut on the market. By spring, a wave of bankruptcies had shut businesses and farms across New England and New York—quite the opposite of what Jefferson, Madison, and John Quincy had expected. All three believed the United States could survive as a self-sufficient economy, abandoning imports in favor of home manufactures and mitigating the effects of the embargo while the U.S. government built a larger navy and armed her cargo ships. The huge farm surpluses overwhelmed the internal economy, however, and plunged the nation into economic catastrophe.

  Although most of the nation blamed Jefferson for the country’s economic plight, Federalists and, it seemed, all of Boston blamed John Quincy Adams. “I would not sit at the same table with that renegade,” declared one Federalist.40

  “Most completely was I deserted by my friends in Boston and in the state legislature,” John Quincy admitted. “I can never be sufficiently grateful to Providence that my father and my mother did not join this general desertion.”41

  In January 1808, he added to Federalist anger by attending the Republican caucus in Congress to witness the nomination of his good friend from across the chessboard, Secretary of State Madison, to succeed President Jefferson. In the balloting for vice president, John Quincy received one vote, which effectively ended his ties to the Federalist Party. John Quincy, however, now viewed Federalists as the party of s
ecession, disunion, subservience to Britain, and the end of American independence. “To resist this,” he declared, “I was ready, if necessary, to sacrifice everything I have in life, and even life itself.”42

  In May 1808, Massachusetts Federalists met in Boston, their “principal object,” according to Republican governor James Sullivan, being “the political and even the personal destruction of John Quincy Adams.”43 Then and there—nine months prior to the expiration of John Quincy’s term—the Federalists elected his successor, then passed resolutions instructing their senators—Pickering and Adams—to vote to repeal the embargo. On June 8, 1808, John Quincy “immediately resigned what remained of my Senate term.”

  They had passed resolutions in the nature of instructions . . . which I disapproved. I chose neither to act in conformity with those resolutions nor to represent constituents who had no confidence in me. . . . [They] required me to aid them in promoting measures tending to dissolve the union and to sacrifice the independence of the nation. I was no representative for them. 44

  As usual in times of distress, John Quincy turned to his father for advice and consolation. “Your situation you think critical,” the former President counseled his son.

  You are supported by no party; you have too honest a heart, too independent a mind, and too brilliant talents to be sincerely and confidentially trusted by any man who is under the dominion of party maxims or party feelings. . . . In the next Congress . . . you will be numbered among the dead, like . . . the brightest geniuses of the country. . . . Return to your professorship, but above all to your office as a lawyer. Devote yourself to your profession and to the education of your children.45

  His father had made it clear: John Quincy Adams’s career in public service had come to an end, his dream—and the dream of his parents—to ascend to national leadership shattered.

  CHAPTER 8

  Diplomatic Exile

  Although Republicans urged John Quincy to run as their 1808 senatorial and even gubernatorial candidate, he was too disgusted with public service and chose to return to private life. At their request, however, he continued feeding his views on foreign relations to Republican leaders in Congress. Though a private citizen, he remained, after all, one of the nation’s leading foreign affairs analysts, and his first advice went to his friend President Jefferson. With New England secessionists threatening armed insurrection, he advised the President to narrow the scope of the embargo to France and England; the President heeded John Quincy’s advice, and the renewal of trade with noncombatant nations immediately improved the nation’s economy.

  Although Boston Federalists shunned him professionally and socially, enough Republicans found their way to John Quincy’s law office to set him on the path to prosperity. Indeed, his legal and oratorical skills even earned him several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court—some of historic importance.

  Early in March 1809, Boston land speculator John Peck retained John Quincy for what grew into a landmark case in contract law and, indeed, one of the most important cases in Supreme Court history. For $3,000, Peck had sold Robert Fletcher 15,000 acres that Peck had obtained in a state grant from the 30-million-acre Yazoo land tract in Georgia. As it turned out, land speculators like Peck had bribed Georgia legislators—en masse—to make the grants. After the press exposed the scandal, a new legislature cancelled all Yazoo land sales, including Peck’s sale to Fletcher. Fletcher sued to get his money back, but John Quincy argued that the legislature’s cancellation of Fletcher’s agreement to buy Peck’s land violated Article I of the Constitution, which prohibits states from “impairing the obligation of contracts.” The Supreme Court stunned the nation by sustaining John Quincy’s argument, ignoring the justice of Fletcher’s claim in favor of the letter of the Constitution declaring the inviolability of contracts and reasserting the constitutional prohibition against state interference in the rights of Americans to acquire property. John Quincy’s father had put it bluntly in an earlier pronouncement on the French Revolution: “Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist.”1 Now John Quincy had elicited a Supreme Court decision banning state interference in the rights of Americans to life, liberty, and property. Hailed by Americans across the nation, the decision raised John Quincy to the top of his profession.

  On March 8, 1804, three days after James Madison had taken his oath as fourth President of the United States, Madison asked John Quincy to be American minister plenipotentiary to Russia and asked for an immediate reply. John Quincy accepted—without consulting his wife and engendering a furious response from her when he returned to Boston. He tried to explain his rash decision—as much to himself as to her:

  My personal motives for staying at home are of the strongest kind: the age of my parents and the infancy of my children both urge to the same result. My connection with the college is another strong tie which I break with great reluctance. . . . To oppose all this I have the duty of a citizen to obey the call of his country . . . by the regular constitutional authority . . . the vague hope of rendering to my country some important service; finally, the desire to justify the confidence reposed by Mr. Madison in me . . . by devoting all my powers to . . . the welfare of the union. These are my motives—and I implore the blessing of Almighty God upon this my undertaking.2

  John Quincy’s explanation was an elaborate rationalization. As he himself admitted later, Federalists despised him so much they had pledged to prevent his ever again entering public service. It was James Madison’s friendship and generosity that reopened the door just enough for Adams to slip back into government. “I was proscribed in my native state for voting for the embargo and resenting British impressment and commercial depredations,” he wrote to a friend years later. “Mr. Madison sent me for eight years to honorable diplomatic exile in Europe.”3

  In his last lecture at Harvard, he issued a stirring encomium for his implacable embrace of neutrality: “Let us rejoice,” he cried out against Federalist Anglophiles, “that the maintenance of our national rights against Great Britain has been committed to men of firmer minds.”

  If our nominal independence of France rested upon no other foundation of power than the navy of England, the consequence would be that we should again be under the domination of England. Her argument would be that in all reason we ought to contribute our share to support the expense of protecting us and we should soon be called upon for our contribution of men as well as money.4

  Federalist attacks on John Quincy did not influence his students, who crowded about him after his lecture, many with tears in their eyes, inventing questions to keep him in their midst. “I called the students my unfailing friends,” he wrote to his brother a few days after his ship had put to sea on the way to Russia. He had asked his brother to have his two dozen Harvard lectures bound and published, and they later appeared in two volumes, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory.5 He said his compliment to the students “was justly their due. For they had withstood a most ingenious and laborious attempt to ruin me in their estimation.”

  Youth is generous, and although the majority of the students were made to believe that I was a sort of devil incarnate in politics . . . yet they never could be persuaded to believe . . . and they have all confirmed me in the belief that the safest guide for human conduct is integrity. I have inflexibly followed my own sense of duty. . . . I have lost many friends and have made many enemies . . . but the students at college are . . . the only steady friends that I have had. They have been willing still to be considered as my friends at a time when neither my name nor my character was in fashionable repute.6

  John Quincy’s decision to go to Russia without a word of warning, let alone discussion, devastated Louisa—left her angry, distraught, heartbroken. The boys were hysterical. The meager State Department budget—and the lack of an English-language school in St. Petersburg—would mean leaving nine-year-old George and six-year-old John II behind in Quincy. With John Adams too old and Abigail ill too often to cope with two growing boys, John Quincy
boarded them with John Quincy’s aunt and uncle. He put brother Thomas in charge of their education.

  Fearful they would die before ever again seeing their son, John and Abigail Adams were too distraught even to come to shipside to say good-bye. “This separation from a dear son,” sixty-four-year-old Abigail wrote to one of her grandchildren, “at the advanced age both of your grandfather and me was like taking a last leave of him and was felt by us both with the heaviest anguish.”7

  Although former Federalist friends stayed away, a crowd of Republicans cheered at dockside as the champion of union and independence boarded his ship with his wife and baby on August 5, 1809. Church bells rang out in Boston and Charlestown as the ship left the quay and sailed into the bay, and all the ships in the harbor sounded a salute—including the legendary Chesapeake. As darkness fell and he lost sight of his native land, John Quincy Adams retreated to a quiet corner of the ship with his God and penned,

  Oh, grant that while this feeble hand portrays

  The fleeting image of my earthly days,

  Still the firm purpose of this heart may be

  Good to mankind and gratitude to Thee! 8

  John Quincy and Louisa were not without friends aboard ship. Louisa’s younger sister Catherine had come as a companion to help mind Charles Francis, and William “Billy” Smith, Nabby’s son, had come as John Quincy’s secretary. Four young Harvard graduates each paid their own way to sit at the feet of and assist John Quincy—much as he had assisted Francis Dana when he was a youngster. Two were studying law with him in his Boston office and planned studying international law with him in Russia. A third was the son of Maryland senator Samuel Smith, brother of the new secretary of state, Robert Smith, while the fourth, Alexander H. Everett, planned making a career in the diplomatic service.