by Harlow Unger
After his return to Quincy, town officials invited him to give the July 4 oration, and he set to work drafting a fierce attack on the doctrine of “nullification,” which had regained currency in the South in response to high federal tariffs on cotton goods. Thomas Jefferson had fathered the concept in 1798, when he was vice president and opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts of President John Adams. Declaring the Constitution only “a compact” among sovereign states, Jefferson insisted that the states retained authority to restrain actions by the federal government that exceeded its constitutional mandate. Jefferson persuaded the Kentucky legislature to approve a resolution allowing it to declare unconstitutional any federal government exercise of powers not specifically delegated by the Constitution. His protégé, James Madison, marched in lockstep and convinced the Virginia legislature “to interpose” its authority to prevent federal “exercise of . . . powers” not granted by the Constitution.5 Federalist legislatures in other states, however, declared the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions “mad and rebellious” and rejected them by declaring U.S. courts to be the sole judges of constitutionality.
Vice President John C. Calhoun subsequently revived southern interest in the concept with an essay he called “South Carolina Exposition and Protest.” In it, he insisted that the Tenth Amendment gave every state the right to nullify a federal act that it deemed a violation of the Constitution. In his July 4 oration in Quincy, John Quincy countered by labeling the concept of state sovereignty a “hallucination” and nothing “less than treason”—a fierce charge that resounded across the country after an enterprising printer distributed more than 4,000 copies of his speech nationwide.
As John Quincy delivered his oration, the President he had served for eight years died in New York—joining John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as the third of the first five Presidents to die on July 4. Asked to deliver a eulogy for Monroe at Boston’s Old South Church, John Quincy produced a stirring reminder of Monroe’s courage as an officer during the Revolution, “weltering in his blood on the field of Trenton for the cause of his country.” Then John Quincy turned to his own—and Monroe’s—favorite subject: public improvements. He urged mourners to “look at the map of United North America, as it was . . . in 1783. Compare it with the map of that same Empire as it is now. . . . The change, more than of any other man, living or dead, was the work of James Monroe.” John Quincy recalled how Monroe had scoffed at Congress for denying it had “the power of appropriating money for the construction of a canal to connect the waters of Chesapeake Bay with the Ohio.”6 He portrayed the “unspeakable blessings” of Monroe’s vision of a transnational network of roads and canals. “Sink down, ye mountains!” John Quincy called out. “And ye valleys—rise!”
Exult and shout for joy! Rejoice! that . . . there are neither Rocky Mountains nor oases of the desert, from the rivers of the Southern [Pacific] Ocean to the shores of the Atlantic Sea; Rejoice! that . . . the waters of the Columbia mingle in union with the streams of the Delaware, the Lakes of the St. Lawrence with the floods of the Mississippi; Rejoice! that . . . the distant have been drawn near . . . that the North American continent swarms with hearts beating as if from one bosom, of voices speaking with but one tongue, of freemen constituting one confederated and united republic of brethren, never to rise . . . in hostile arms . . . to fulfill the blessed prophecy of ancient times, that war shall be no more.7
Charles Francis Adams was the youngest child of John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams. Like his father, he was a Harvard graduate and lawyer. (NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE, ADAMS NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)
After he had delivered his eulogy, John Quincy and Louisa learned to their delight that Charles Francis’s wife, Abby, had given birth to their first child, a girl they named Louisa Catherine Adams. With John II’s two daughters, John Quincy and Louisa now had three granddaughters, but they still awaited the birth of a grandson to carry the family name into the future.
By the time John Quincy and Louisa began their return to Washington for the opening of Congress in December 1831, his eloquence had resounded across the nation, with both his July 4 oration and eulogy to Monroe having been published in most American newspapers. Old political friends greeted him in New York. In Philadelphia, Albert Gallatin, his associate in Ghent, asked him to preside at the Literary Convention then in session and won his appointment to a committee drawing up plans for a National Library and Scientific Institution. By the time he reached Washington, his political enemies in Congress feared he was mounting a surreptitious campaign to recapture the presidency, and to prevent that possibility, they shunted him onto the least important committees. Instead of the Committee on Foreign Affairs—“the line of occupation in which all my life has been passed”—he found himself chairman of the Committee on Manufactures, “for which I feel myself not to be well qualified. I know not even enough of it to form an estimate of its difficulties.”8
Although any member of the House could introduce a bill relating to anything he chose, by tradition, members limited the bills they proposed to matters within the purview of their own committees. To escape what he considered a procedural straitjacket, John Quincy decided to flaunt House tradition and use the right of every committee chairman to read citizen petitions on the House floor—regardless of their content.
On his first day in Congress, therefore, he hurled his first thunderbolt on the floor of the House, shocking both sides of the aisle with not one but fifteen petitions from Pennsylvania Quakers “praying for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia.” Under rules adopted by the First Congress in 1790, the House had agreed to remain silent on the question of abolition—largely because of South Carolina’s threat to walk out at the mention of abolition or slavery. The Capitol all but imploded under the tension of his words. “I was not more than five minutes on my feet but I was listened to with great attention, and when I sat down, it seemed to myself as if I had performed an achievement.”9
He had indeed performed an achievement. Although most of the House rose as one to roar its disapproval, former President John Quincy Adams had burst open the doors of Congress to abolitionist voices for the first time in decades—voices that other congressmen had routinely ignored for years and would never be able to ignore again. Although Pennsylvania Quakers were not his constituents, he had proclaimed himself a representative of the whole nation, and the whole nation now took him at his word, inundating him with petitions they knew their own representatives would never accept.
It was not a good time to be a proponent of abolition in America, however. Only months before, a black preacher, Nat Turner, had led an insurrection in Virginia, killing fifty-seven white people, including eighteen women and twenty-four children. Only swift retaliation by U.S. marines prevented the insurrection from spreading into North Carolina. Although one hundred blacks had been killed and twenty were later executed, the specter of future black uprisings terrified southerners—and many northerners—and southern states were tightening their slave codes to curb black mobility. Some required blacks to carry special passes for travel; others banned all travel by blacks except to church meetings. Ten states were considering or had proposed changes in their state constitutions to ban voluntary emancipation of slaves by slaveholders.
Most House members responded to John Quincy’s petitions for abolition with such hostility that he feared for the very future of the nation. He had entered Congress convinced “that this federative Union was to last for ages,” but after his presentation, “I now disbelieve its duration for twenty years and doubt its continuance for five.”10
In his self-appointed role as representative of the entire nation, John Quincy was determined to fulfill his obligation to his huge constituency by attending every session of Congress—from its first day on December 5, 1831, to its last, in March 1833—regardless of the weather or his own health. He threw his mind and soul into his new work, studying rules and proceedings of previous Congresses and reviewing his l
aw texts and the language of laws. His work brought new joy into his life—and misery into Louisa’s. Unlike his presidency, John Quincy’s role as a congressman did not generate the need to entertain at home, thus leaving Louisa with so little to do that she took up fishing—and poetry writing. Even when John Quincy returned home, his mind, his heart, his soul remained in Congress. The only joy in her life came from caring for her two granddaughters.
As much as, and even more than, anything he had ever done in his life, John Quincy’s work in Congress seemed to him the ultimate patriotic service he could perform for his country. “The forms and proceedings of the House,” he exulted, were “a very striking exemplification of the magnificent grandeur of this nation and the sublime principles upon which our government is founded.”
The colossal emblem of the Union over the Speaker’s chair, the historic muse at the clock, the echoing pillars of the hall . . . the resolutions and amendments between the members and the chair, the calls of ayes and noes, with the different intonations . . . from the different voices, the gobbling manner of the clerk in reading over the names, the tone of the Speaker in announcing the vote, and the varied shades of pleasure and pain in the countenances of the members on hearing it, would form a fine subject for a descriptive poem.11
As it had throughout his life, tragedy forced its way into his sublime existence when he returned to his home on F Street one evening to find John II in a drunken stupor, still another inheritor of the disease that had plagued his maternal forbears for generations. And then, on March 12, John Quincy’s beloved younger brother, Thomas Boylston, died of the family affliction, leaving John Quincy the only surviving son of an American Founding Father. Thomas’s death left John Quincy the sole support for his brother’s spendthrift wife and their dysfunctional children.aa
Before long, John Quincy realized that Congress had not transduced his petitions for abolition into legislative proposals; although he kept presenting them, he knew he would need his committee’s support to produce actual bills for enactment into laws. He soon mastered all the intricacies of American economics and manufacturing—especially cotton and woolen goods manufacturing—and discovered the intricate ties between manufacturing and a broad range of other issues, including foreign affairs, tariffs, and slavery. He now knew the way to broaden the scope of his committee proceedings, using the most obvious issue first: tariffs.
For a while, high tariffs on imported English cotton goods had protected small New England manufacturers against competition from British imports, but the tariffs that protected New England mills against British competition hurt southern cotton growers, who shipped more of their crop to the big British cotton mills than they did to New England. As high U.S. tariffs cut British textile sales to America, British mills bought less cotton from the American South and left planters with too many slaves to support for the amount of cotton they picked.
John Quincy proposed—and Congress approved—a compromise tariff bill that reduced duties on British goods with a high content of southern cotton, but the British mills resented the selective tariffs, saying they would not submit to a foreign government’s dictating their sales policies. Responding to their British clients, southern planters demanded an end to the tariffs, and South Carolina’s governor called a special Nullification Convention in November 1832, which declared federal tariff laws null and void in South Carolina, prohibited collection of federal tariffs in the state, and threatened South Carolina’s secession from the Union if federal officials tried using force to collect tariffs. A week later, the South Carolina legislature authorized raising a military force and appropriated funds for arms. Civil war seemed imminent.
The state’s declaration and mobilization shocked the nation and left even President Andrew Jackson, a champion of states’ rights, aghast. “The nation will be preserved,” he declared angrily. “Perpetuity is stamped upon the Constitution by the blood of our fathers. Nullification therefore means insurrection and war, and the other states have a right to put it down.”12
South Carolinians responded with huge demonstrations in Charleston. South Carolina senator Robert Hayne resigned from the Senate to run for governor of his state and lead the fight for nullification. Vice President Calhoun resigned his post and won election as Hayne’s replacement in the Senate, although rumors swept through Charleston that he intended returning to become first president of a Southern Confederacy.
On December 5, 1832, Jackson overwhelmed John Quincy’s former secretary of state, Henry Clay, in the presidential election, with New York’s Martin Van Buren winning the vice presidency. Former vice president Calhoun from South Carolina won reelection to the Senate. Five days after his reelection, Jackson issued a presidential proclamation declaring “the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one state, incompatible with the existence of the Union” and warning of “dreadful consequence” for the “instigators” of the South Carolina Nullification Act. “Disunion . . . is treason,” he told the people of South Carolina. “On your unhappy heads will inevitably fall all raw evils of the conflict you force upon the government of your country.”13
The summer recess postponed further congressional debate over nullification until fall, and during that time, Harvard University voted to grant President Jackson an honorary degree. Although firmly on Jackson’s side in the battle against nullification, John Quincy refused to attend the ceremonies honoring the President. “As myself an affectionate child of our Alma Mater,” he explained, “I would not be present to witness her disgrace in presenting her highest literary honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.”14
Although the summer began disagreeably, it ended in joy, when Charles Francis and his wife realized what had become one of John Quincy’s cherished dreams—the birth of his first grandson. They named him John Quincy Adams II and ensured the preservation of the legendary Adams name in the United States for at least another generation. “There is no passion more deeply seated in my bosom,” John Quincy exulted, “than the longing for posterity worthily to support my own and my father’s name. . . . There is now one son of the next generation.”15
John Quincy returned to Congress refreshed and ready to battle nullification, even if it meant strengthening ties to President Jackson. On January 16, 1833, with civil war threatening, Jackson asked Congress to grant him authority to use military force if necessary to crush the nullifiers and enforce revenue- and tariff-collection laws. Congress complied, with John Quincy voting in favor. Jackson signed the Force Bill into law on March 2 and frightened South Carolina’s legislature into rescinding its Nullification Act.
After John Quincy had supported the President by voting for the Force Bill, he leaped back across the political fence to oppose efforts by Jacksonian Democrats to mollify the South by eliminating tariffs.
“Our slaves,” explained Georgia’s Democratic congressman Augustus Smith Clayton in arguing for tariff cuts, “are our machinery, and we have as good a right to profit by them as do the northern men to profit by the machinery they employ.”16
John Quincy listened to Clayton’s appeal in disbelief, the phrase “our machinery” resounding in his head until he exploded in outrage.
“That machinery,” John Quincy roared in response, “sometimes exerts self-moving power! ”17
With Nat Turner’s insurrection still fresh in the minds of many northern as well as southern congressmen, the House all but shouted John Quincy down, while another South Carolina member, William Drayton, cried out, “The member from Massachusetts has thrown a firebrand into the hall.”
“It is not I who have thrown the firebrand,” John Quincy shouted back. “The Nullification Ordinance is the firebrand.” 18
In the end, northerners capitulated by voting for further tariff cuts, as did Henry Clay, who had originally based his American System on high tariffs but was now licking his wounds from the presidential race and seeking to court southern votes for th
e next election.
Before the presidential election of 1834, tragedy struck the Adams family again. In the autumn of that year, John II suffered a series of seizures—a consequence of alcoholism—and lapsed into a coma. By the time his father reached his bedside, he was close to death, and indeed, he died the next day, October 22, without recognizing his father. Besides his wife and two daughters, he left debts of $15,000 (which John Quincy paid). John Quincy and Louisa turned to each other for comfort, with John Quincy calling his wife “the dearest partner of my life.” Both doted on their granddaughters, with John Quincy stopping at his dead son’s house each day on the way to the Capitol to help the older girl learn her arithmetic. John Quincy would support his granddaughters and their mother as long as he lived.
In December 1835, President Jackson sent Congress a curious and unexpected message: an Englishman, James Smithson, had left a bequest of about $500,000 to the United States “to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”19 Son of the first Duke of Northumberland, Smithson had, ironically, been the half-brother of General Hugh Lord Percy, the British commander at the Battle of Lexington in 1775. Although both houses of Congress licked their collective chops at the possibilities for personal profits, the House acceded to John Quincy’s fierce interest in science and named him chairman of the committee to determine how to disburse the money.
Besieged by schools and colleges for shares of the money, John Quincy ruled out disbursement of any of the principal, reserving it entirely to the government and limiting spending to interest generated. He intended combining George Washington’s vision of creating “institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge” with his own vision of national astronomical observatories—the “lighthouses in the sky” that his political opponents had ridiculed when he was President. He called “the link between earth and heaven . . . the means of acquiring knowledge . . . therefore the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind.”20 He was now prepared to fight his opponents in ways that had eluded him when he was President.