by Gore Vidal
In Havana, two Spaniards, José Ruiz and Pedro Montes, bought fifty-three slaves, paying four hundred and fifty dollars apiece for the adult males, among them Cinqué. The captives were then herded aboard the schooner Amistad to be transported to Puerto Príncipe, the Cuban town where they would be sold. Below deck, Cinqué found a nail and broke the lock on his iron collar. Then he freed the others. Mutiny on the Amistad had begun. Captain and cook were killed, and two sailors leaped overboard. Ruiz and Montes were taken captive. Cinqué spoke no Spanish; he also knew nothing about navigation. But he did know that when they came from Africa they had sailed into the setting sun, so now, to return home, he wanted the course set into the rising sun. Through sign language, he instructed Montes, who took the helm. But Montes tricked him. In the daytime, he would let the sails flap, making little headway; then, at night, he headed north to the Mecca of slavery, the United States. After two months, the ship ran out of food and water off the coast of Long Island.
When Cinqué and several men went ashore to forage, they were met by the local inhabitants. Once Cinqué was convinced that these white men were not Spaniards, he offered them doubloons to take them all home to Sierra Leone. But by then an American man-of-war was on the scene, and the Amistad, with its human cargo, was taken not to a port in New York, where slavery had been abolished, but to New London, Connecticut, where slavery was still legal.
At first, Cinqué and his comrades got a predictably bad press. They were pirates—black pirates—who had murdered captain and crew. (Happily, personality and appearance have always meant more to Americans than deeds, good or bad, and Cinqué was unmistakably handsome, “son of an African chief,” the press sighed—a young Sidney Poitier.) A Connecticut judge promptly put the new arrivals in the clink and bound them over to the next grand jury of Hartford’s United States Circuit Court.
* * *
At this point I said to Jean-Jacques Annaud, the director with whom I was discussing how to film Mutiny on the Amistad, in 1993, “What do we do with the dialogue? For almost half the picture Cinqué and the Africans don’t talk in English, while Montes and Ruiz speak Spanish. That means an awful lot of subtitles.” He was unperturbed. As it turned out, Annaud and I did not make the picture, but now Spielberg has, and I’m curious to see how he handles dialogue in the “action” sequences. The opera in Chicago, one reads in the press release, will be “sung in English with projected English titles,” a somewhat inspired solution.
It was the last half of the Amistad story that most intrigued me, although the sympathetic Cinqué hasn’t much to do at this point. The story turns into a titanic legal struggle at whose heart is the explosive question: Can slavery be permissible in a nation ostensibly founded on the notion that all men are created equal? More to the point, the United States was the last among civilized “white” nations to maintain the institution rightly called peculiar. That is the real story back of the Mutiny on the “Amistad,” the title of a first-rate study by Howard Jones (Oxford, 1987). Coincidentally, I should mention that there is also a new book called Amistad, the work of a journalist named David Pesci (Marlowe; $22.95). The publishers refer to it as “a page-turning novel,” a true novelty for the Internet’s jaded readers; and it comes to us with high praise from one Roberta Flack, the “singer, songwriter, and entertainer.” Apparently, Spielberg has not used Mr. Pesci’s book as a source for his movie.
Why bother now with this long-forgotten incident? Because it shows a black man who wins—a rarity in the age of slavery. Cinqué gets to go home, as he intended all along. He outsmarts the government of the United States, and in this enterprise he is aided by one of the most remarkable men in our history, the sixth President, John Quincy Adams. After one unhappy term (1824–28), Adams was defeated by Andrew Jackson, who is best remembered for driving Eastern Indian tribes to “reservations” west of the Mississippi and for his wild destruction of the Bank of the United States, which led to several years of financial chaos. But Adams was destined for greater things than the Presidency. He became the permanent scourge of what he called the “slaveocracy.”
Of all our forgotten Presidents . . . As I write that line, I recall what the wife of a film director once said to a journalist who was writing yet another in-shallow study of the late Grace Kelly. Inevitable question: “How many of her leading men did she go to bed with?” Gracious response: “It might save us both time if I were simply to skip to the ones that she did not.” Now, in a somewhat similar context, when I speak of forgotten Presidents I refer to just about the whole line. Although the names of the four on Mount Rushmore are not entirely unknown to Anglophone Americans, the rest of the cavalcade is very dim indeed. At the time of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, it was discovered that 10 percent of the American people had never heard of him. It was not until the televising of his proto-Dianesque funeral that they were put, at last, in the picture. Of course, we’re now up to forty-two Presidents, and more than two centuries have passed since the first one. Even an attentive, politically minded person would have trouble keeping them all straight. Nevertheless, with a history as murderously fascinating as ours, it is truly a marvel that, year after year, History is found to be the least popular subject taught in high schools. Certainly, it is the least well absorbed.
Adams. Amistad. Spielberg. If the film—an action thriller, I suspect—works, people will, for a few months, learn of J. Q. Adams and his fierce brilliance in the matter of race. Since there is no longer any possibility of actual American history ever being taught in the public schools—and not all that much penetrates the private ones—the only way our history will get to us is through movies and television. Unfortunately, on the rare occasion filmmakers put a horny Jurassic toe, as it were, into controversial waters, the result is muddied. Some years ago, television made a fine mess of the Adams family, turning four generations of our most interesting family into costumed dummies. Lately, the estimable Ken Burns turned his attention to the mind and landscape of Thomas Jefferson. Despite the presence of several fine historians onscreen, the result was chloroform. Any attempts (at least mine) to note significant flaws and contradictions in Jefferson’s character were carefully removed. In regard to Jefferson, J. Q. Adams himself might have been called as witness. He found dining with Jefferson exasperating, because of what Adams called his “prodigies,” a polite word for lies of a Munchausen splendor. When Jefferson was in France, he claimed that the thermometer remained below zero for six weeks; then he shyly confided that on a trip to Europe he had taught himself Spanish. “He knows better,” J.Q.A. groaned, “but he wants to excite wonder.” And admiration, something no Puritan Adams could ever do.
Currently, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life, by Paul C. Nagel (Knopf; $30), is being published—the first biography of J.Q.A. in a quarter century, according to the publisher, and the first “that draws upon Adams’ massive manuscript diary.” That journal is now available on microfilm; it is unlikely ever to be published in its entirety. But then four generations of the Adams family probably produced more words than any other family in American history, starting in 1755, when John Adams began his diary, and ending only with the death, in 1927, of his great-grandson Brooks, whose sketch of the intellectual tradition of the Adams family forms a preface to his late brother Henry’s The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919)—a title that suggests a not entirely sanguine view of our national development. Mr. Nagel feels that there is a mystery at the core of J.Q.A.’s life. It is true that family and contemporaries found him “enigmatic,” a necessity for a hard-minded politician not about to give away the game. He was often accused of “disagreeableness.” But anyone who takes on unpopular causes is bound not to agree with those millions who supported slavery, say, or who find risible the spending of government money to educate the people; Adams was much mocked by congressional yahoos when he called for astronomical observatories, which he poetically called “lighthouses of the sky.”
Adams was the first President
to be photographed—fourteen years after he left office. He was five feet seven, bald and stout, like most of his family—his father, John, the second President, was known as His Rotundity. Now I read that Adams is to be impersonated in Amistad by Anthony Hopkins, a solid, workmanlike English repertory actor, often excellent with a good English script like The Remains of the Day, often not so good if miscast, as in Nixon. But then it is always dispiriting that whenever a somewhat tony highbrow sort is to be impersonated, American producers, as vague about American class accents as about English ones, seize on British actors. I am sure that there are American actors more than capable of re-creating that sharp-tongued total New Englander J.Q.A. As Joe Pesci said when I joined the cast of a picture in which he starred, “I saw this list of all these English actors for the part of this Harvard professor you’re playing and I said, ‘Why do we always have to take an English asshole when we have one of our own?’ ”
Although the occasional screening of our history is probably the last chance we shall ever have to know something about who we were, a moving picture, because it moves, is the one form of narrative that cannot convey an idea of any kind, as opposed to a generalized emotion. Mary McCarthy used to counter dedicated cinéastes with “All right. In Battleship Potemkin, what does that abandoned baby carriage bouncing down the steps mean?”
Worse, our writers and directors tend to know as little about the country’s history as the audience, so when they set a story in the past the characters are just like us except they’re in costume. But the past is another country, and to bring it to some sort of dramatic life takes a capacity for which there is no English word. It was not until the eighteenth century that a German, J. G. Herder, coined Einfühlen—the act of feeling one’s way into the past not by holding up a mirror but by stepping through the mirror into the alien world.
For instance, we keep death out of sight, and out of mind, too. But the world of the Adamses was saturated with death: infants dead at birth; their mothers, too. Plagues took off whole families—memento mori on every side gave a dark resonance to their days. Words were also different for them. They looked upon words as deeds. Words defined the republic that the Adamses helped create. Words defined the role that the Adams family wanted our Union to play in the world. But convincing words are the one commodity that Hollywood cannot supply our predecessors, as American vocabularies shrink with each generation. “I don’t do grammar,” an expensive screenwriter said to a director friend of mine who had suggested that perhaps a highly educated English teacher in a film wouldn’t keep saying “between you and I.” Now that the action film’s clattering machinery and vivid flames have crowded so much else off the screen, dialogue is more and more used as captions to pictures, to explain to slow members of the audience what they are looking at. Yet spoken language is not only the sum of a dramatized character; it is just as much action as a car crash.
John Quincy Adams spoke as follows on the Fourth of July, 1821: the true America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. . . . She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the powers of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. . . . She might become the dictatress of the world; she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.” This is a terrible truth that can still, I think, rock an American soul—if such there be, of course. It is also language that, chauvinistically, I would rather hear from Newman or Pacino or Hoffman than from an actor, no matter how gifted, not implicated in our curious enterprise.
The standard life of J.Q.A. remains that of Samuel Flagg Bemis (personally I prefer Marie B. Hecht’s John Quincy Adams, 1972). Mr. Nagel now gives us the inner man, based on the diaries that J.Q.A.’s son Charles Francis once cut down and edited to twelve volumes. Of his father, he said, wearily, “He took to diary writing early, and he took to it bad.”
J.Q.A. was always something of a prodigy with words and ideas and concepts. When John Adams was made American minister to France, and then Holland, he took his son with him. An aptitude for languages combined with a natural eloquence made J.Q.A. a formidable diplomat. At fourteen, he was sent to St. Petersburg as secretary to an American diplomat. After John Adams was posted to England, in 1785, J.Q.A. glumly gave up his exciting life to enter Harvard and prepare to be a lawyer. Even before we had a country, we had lawyers, who, in due course, gave us the Revolution and the Constitution, under which, in succession to George Washington, John Adams became President and moved to the village in the Southern wilderness named after his predecessor, where he and his wife, Abigail, camped out in the unfinished White House.
Although J.Q.A.’s mother is one of the first brilliant women recorded in our history, she was not at her best as a mother. She was cold, domineering, and insensitive. J.Q.A. had a good deal to put up with. She also proved to be the carrier of an alcoholic gene: J.Q.A.’s two brothers and, later, his two sons were all to die of acute alcoholism. J.Q.A. himself often confided to his diary that he had talked “overmuch” the night before and felt somewhat despondent the next day. Much of his famous depression (Nagel’s “Rosebud” is that J.Q.A.’s irritable nature was due to manic depression) sounds to me like serial hangovers. Luckily, Adams married Louisa Johnson, a woman as intelligent as Abigail and far more amiable.
After Harvard, J.Q.A. listlessly tried the law. But he found his true métier as a polemicist. Under various newspaper pseudonyms, he supported George Washington’s general policy of neutrality in regard to other nations. Washington’s celebrated—and long ignored—farewell to the nation, warning against passionate friendships and enmities with foreign powers, was influenced by letters that he (and Alexander Hamilton) had read from J.Q.A., whom he had made minister to The Hague.
In 1802, J.Q.A. was elected to the Massachusetts legislature, and then to the United States Senate, where he proved to be disastrously independent. Though President Jefferson’s personality got on his nerves—throughout Jefferson’s career, Adams found his perfidy “worthy of Tiberius Caesar”—Adams supported Jefferson whenever he thought him right, particularly in regard to the 1807 embargo on American products to England and France, a retaliation for their wartime restrictions on United States trade. Since New England lived by trade with Europe, J.Q.A.’s support of the embargo so infuriated Massachusetts that he was forced out of the Senate before his term was up. But Jefferson’s successor, Madison, made him the first U.S. minister to Russia, and then sent him to Ghent to negotiate the end of the War of 1812, and on to London as minister, where he stayed until he became Secretary of State to the new President, Monroe, for whom he drafted what is still known (even if it is no longer in force) as the Monroe Doctrine.
In those days, Secretaries of State tended to succeed their Presidents, and so J.Q.A. made, many thought, “a corrupt bargain” with Henry Clay. Although Andrew Jackson had got the most votes for President in 1824, he failed of a majority, and the election was decided in the House of Representatives, where the Speaker, Clay, gave Adams his votes. J.Q.A. began his Presidency under a cloud that got even darker when he made Clay Secretary of State. Four years later, when Adams was thoroughly defeated by the triumphant Jackson, he claimed to see a silver lining to this darkest cloud: at last he could go home, write poetry, plant trees, be a wise essayist, like Cicero. Instead, after a year of retirement he was so bored that he did what no other former President had—or has—done: he was elected to Congress. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who got his number when he wrote: “Mr. Adams chose wisely and according to his constitution, when, on leaving the presidency, he went into Congress. He is no literary old gentleman, but a bruiser, and he loves the mélée. . . . He is an old roué who cannot live on slops, but must have sulphuric acid in his tea.”
Paradoxically, as a lowly member of the House, J.Q.A. had now entered upon the major phase of his political care
er: ineffectual President became impassioned tribune of the people. To make sure that slavery could not be debated, the Southern members had put in place a so-called “gag rule.” For eight years, J.Q.A. fought the rule with all his wit and eloquence. Finally, in 1844, he got the House to rescind the gag rule. Of Jackson’s 1837 removal of the Indians to the West, he noted, “We have done more harm to the Indians since our Revolution than had been done to them by the French and English nations before. . . . These are crying sins for which we are answerable before a higher Jurisdiction.” As for slavery, he thought it “an outrage upon the goodness of God.” One difference between then—so foreign to us—and now is the extent to which Christians actually believed in the Christian God. Where our politicians oscillate between hypocrisy and bigoted religiosity, they had, for better or worse, religion, something that takes a lot of Einfühlen for us to grasp. Needless to say, in 1846 J.Q.A. found morally reprehensible the American invasion of Mexico that would give us the Southwest and California.
Finally, the mutiny on the Amistad. The noble Lewis Tappan, a founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, persuaded J.Q.A. to join forces with the lawyer Roger S. Baldwin to defend the by now thirty-nine Africans before the Supreme Court. A federal judge had agreed that the Africans were not slaves; rather, they were free men who had been kidnapped in order to be turned into slaves by Spanish Cubans, and their mutiny had forestalled enslavement. Thus far, the case was clear-cut. But, as so often happens in our affairs, a Presidential election had intervened, and Jackson’s heir, Martin Van Buren, a smooth New Yorker who was eager to be reelected with Southern votes, filled the air with arcane talk of laws of the sea and the complexities of international treaties, effectively stalling the release of the Africans. He also came up with a plan that would have sent them to Cuba for trial. What pleasure this might have given the voters of the South was insufficient to reelect Matty Van, as he was known; he went down to defeat in November 1840.
