by James Traub
Dear Sally! let thy heart be kind—
Discover all thy charms—
Fling the last fig-leaf to the wind,
And snatch me to thy arms!
Louisa said that she had been startled by his “saucy” lines, but she did not, apparently, worry over her husband’s wandering eye. And soon he paid her a rich tribute of her own. Louisa’s birthday fell on February 12, and that day he set out to compose a birthday gift of verse. He would, he decided, chronicle his day, from dawn until he snuffed out his bedside candle; it took him four days to complete all fourteen of his eight-line stanzas. The last of them read:
Thus, in succession, pass my days,
While time with flagging Pinion flies,
And still the promis’d hour delays,
When thou shalt once more charm my eyes
Louisa! thus remote from thee
Still Something to each joy is wanting;
While thy affection can, to me
Make the most dreary Scene enchanting.
CHAPTER 12
If We Must Perish, Let It Be in Defense of Our Rights
(1807–1809)
BY 1807 AMERICA STOOD AT THE LIP OF A FUNNEL DOWN which it would slide, slowly but inexorably, toward war with England. The preparations for war would heighten the divide between those Americans who identified with Britain and benefited from its trade and those who did not. The Federalists would increasingly become a minority faction clinging to America’s old colonial master and to the nation’s past, and Adams would be forced to choose between Federalist and Republican, and indeed between New England and the nation. The process that began with Louisiana—or perhaps with his first days in the Massachusetts State Senate—would end with the debate over policy toward England. Adams would, of course, choose exile and ostracism.
The first months of the new legislative session were calm; Adams often whiled away the time in the midst of boring speeches by writing letters or planning the next year’s lectures on rhetoric. Only toward the end of the term did something consequential occur: news reached Washington that James Monroe, the minister in England, had won agreement on a treaty designed to end the rising hostilities. Jefferson and Madison had instructed Monroe to demand an end to impressment and a restoration of the trading rights of neutral powers. But by this time Britain and France were embroiled in an escalating trade war, with Napoleon seeking to starve Britain into submission by blockading all the European ports over which France exercised control, and the far stronger British navy seeking to choke off commerce from France’s (and Spain’s) West Indian colonies. George Canning, the British foreign minister, refused to end impressment and insisted on maintaining England’s right to retaliate against neutrals unless they had broken relations with France. Monroe, exceeding his instructions, had signed a pact that preserved those British prerogatives. Jefferson and Madison rejected the agreement as an unwarranted and unnecessary show of deference to a superior power and refused to even submit it to the Senate. The United States and England were drifting toward war, though both the president and his secretary of state were eager to find some way out of the impasse.
Then the British perpetrated an atrocity that aroused the nation to patriotic fury. On June 22, the captain of the HMS Leopard, a British warship patrolling the waters just a few miles off the Virginia coast, demanded the right to board the USS Chesapeake, a naval vessel, in order to search for British seamen on board. When the American captain refused, the Leopard opened fire, killing three and wounding eighteen. The Chesapeake had been caught unawares, and the captain, who had himself been wounded, ran down its flag. Officers from the Leopard boarded and seized four seamen, of whom only one was a true deserter (and was forthwith hanged from the yardarm).
News of this humiliation raced up and down the Eastern Seaboard; the Chesapeake’s unfortunate captain was court-martialed. Mobs destroyed whatever British property they could find; towns passed resolutions ending all commerce with England. In Boston, however, the Federalists refused to convene a town meeting. Any confrontation with England would prove disastrous for the merchants whose wealth had fueled the development of Boston and whose interests the Federalists steadily protected. Moreover, the Essex Junto so feared and despised Napoleonic France—and the allegedly pro-French President Jefferson—that some were prepared to rationalize incidents like the attack on the Chesapeake, to John Quincy Adams’ disgust.
The state’s Republicans, by contrast, were eager to convene and called a meeting for July 10. Adams, already a renegade Federalist, attended—a coup for his party’s rivals. He was asked to serve on a seven-man committee that drew up a resolution condemning the naval assault and vowing to support “with our lives and fortunes” whatever measures might be required to defend national honor. The following day, Adams recorded that a friend had told him, “I should have my head taken off, for apostasy, by the federalists.” He began hearing rumors that he had switched parties. The grain of truth behind the story was that his position within his own party was rapidly becoming untenable.
THAT SUMMER ADAMS WAS SETTLING INTO HIS NEW LIFE AS HARVARD professor. He delivered his lectures every week and spent some time trying to referee a confrontation at the college, where President Samuel Webber had demanded that students sign a confession admitting to disciplinary infractions, on pain of expulsion. The students dared him to expel them instead. Asked to intervene, Adams advised the students to comply; most didn’t and simply abandoned Cambridge for home, leaving Adams’ classes half-empty. Nevertheless, Adams devoted himself heart and soul to his lectures, which he described in his journal as “the labors of Sisyphus.” He was no longer rooming with Waterhouse; he had purchased a new home at the corner of Nassau Street and Frog Lane, later Boylston Street, though he complained that it both smoked and leaked.
The great event of the summer was the birth on August 18 of a third boy, Charles Francis. Louisa’s labor was agonizing, and Adams, never calm at such moments, feared that he would lose either his wife or his child. Both recovered rapidly, though two weeks later Adams recorded that Louisa was in such intense pain that she could not sleep without laudanum, the opiate applied to all excruciating ailments of the day. Charles Francis and George were ill as well. Adams himself had a severe cold and sore throat, which he treated with “rasped spermaceti” and loaf-sugar. Everyone recovered, if slowly.
In mid-October, Adams and Louisa headed down to Washington with Charles Francis, for President Jefferson had asked Congress to convene three weeks early in order to confront the crisis with England. (George and John once against stayed back with their grandparents.) Adams’ own situation in the Senate had changed radically, and he scarcely knew what to make of it. Of his closest friends in his own party, William Plumer had retired, and Uriah Tracy had died. The remaining Federalists largely spurned him. In his journal Adams noted, “I have met with at least as much opposition from my party friends as from their adversaries, I believe more.” The Republicans, on the other hand, embraced him, for who could better promote their cause than a New Englander known for his uncompromising commitment to truth? Adams was made chairman of the committee considering a bill to exclude British warships from American ports—the “aggression bill,” it was derisively called in New England—and another to consider whether to expel Ohio senator John Smith, a Federalist who had for a time aided Burr’s conspiracy. At the end of the year he wrote, in a state of perplexity, “My general consideration among my fellow-citizens, though not marked by any new public testimonial in the course of the year, has been to my observation apparently rising.”
Adams gazed over the horizon and saw the outlines of a coming war. He was, it’s true, an alarmist temperamentally disposed to see calamity encroaching from all sides. There may have been as well a part of him that sought war, as a test of whether he had the inner steel of his father and his father’s generation. “May I meet it as becomes a Man!,” he abjured himself. Yet Adams was torn. Jefferson was following a policy of procrastination,
hoping that the problem would eventually sort itself out without hostilities. Adams fretted that both the pacific president and his docile Congress were simply unwilling to grasp the nettle of conflict. “I observe among the members,” he wrote, “great embarrassment, alarm, anxiety, and confusion of mind. But no preparation for any measure of vigour.” At the same time, his constituents were suffering; the nonimportation law was wreaking havoc with the shipping industry. Adams could not keep telling them to endure privation for the good of the country. The historian Samuel Eliot Morison, writing in 1913, called Jefferson’s embargo “the greatest failure of any political experiment ever tried in the United States.” Morison notes that the political effects of the embargo were almost as calamitous as the economic ones, for it threw the Federalist Party back into the arms of the Essex Junto, thus deepening Adams’ isolation in the party. When Josiah Quincy asked Adams to present to the Senate a petition from eight hundred Boston citizens seeking modification of the rules, he agreed. Adams favored repeal but would not deny President Jefferson the negotiating leverage the law provided.
Adams’ greatest fears were realized in mid-December, when word arrived of an astonishingly onerous British Order in Council requiring all American shipping to pass through a British port and pay a British license. The rule seemed to have less to do with Britain’s contest with France than with its desire to undercut the competitive advantage of the American fleet and place the United States in a state of complete dependence on England. Had Jefferson been looking for a casus belli, he might well have found it here. But he wasn’t. Like John Adams, he was prepared to go to the very edge of war but was deeply reluctant to fire the first shot, or even to provoke it. Instead the president whipped through Congress a bill placing an embargo on all British maritime commerce. Adams was, once again, the only Federalist to support the measure.
Meanwhile, Adams was working night and day, weekends and even Christmas, on the question of whether to expel Smith. Many Federalists viewed the Burr conspiracy as a Republican fabrication and thus saw Adams’ role as yet another act of betrayal. Senators James Bayard of Delaware and James Hillhouse of Connecticut (who had succeeded Tracy) delivered stinging attacks on the floor; Adams fumed and bit his tongue. He was enduring withering criticism in the press for his role on the “aggression bill” and for his vote on the embargo. He knew that New England merchants would circumvent the embargo, but he saw it as the only alternative to war. In a long letter to his father on December 27, he agonized over the embargo and over Smith. His position, he said, was “singular”—though rejected by his own party, “I have no communication with the Administration, but that which my place in the Senate of course implies.” He had intended to be a man of no party; now his wish had been granted him in the worst possible way. He didn’t—couldn’t—regret his choice, but it had brought him a terrible isolation.
If there was anyone who could understand his predicament, it was his own father. John Adams wrote to say, with a brutal form of sympathy, “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: and where is there another Man who is not? You may depend upon it then that your fate is decided.” He would be an honorable outcast, like his father.
John Quincy often turned to his father in these trying times. The elder Adams, who had nothing left to dispense but advice, was only too happy to oblige. He often prefaced his letters by saying that he knew all too well the press of business, that of course his son should feel quite free to ignore the meanderings of an old gentleman with time on his hands, and so forth. Then he would launch into the subject at hand. The “too honest a heart” letter went on for about three thousand words, which is to say that it must have taken much of the day to write. Senator Adams had asked for help on the question of international law as it bore on impressment, and the ex-president cited Roman and French law, British common law, the difference between British and American doctrines of naturalization, and on and on. He also pointed out that the United States would never have found itself in such a predicament in the first place had Jefferson adhered to the principles of vigorously enforced neutrality, which he, Adams, had devised. And so forth. The elder Adams couldn’t help himself: he not only sympathized with his son but wished he were standing and fighting alongside him. As he wrote the following week, “I, who perhaps ought to be indifferent to all Things in this World, and certainly should conscientiously resign all Men, Measures and Events to Providence, must acknowledge myself to be not less anxious about public affairs, than in my Youth or middle Age. I know not but I am as solicitous about your responsibility as I was formerly for my own.”
John Quincy was torn not simply between party and country but between the dangers of war and of disunion. He had seen a letter from the British governor-general of Nova Scotia to leading Federalists alleging, absurdly, that the French were conspiring with President Jefferson to start a war to gain control of British colonies in North America. Adams believed that the British were seeking to lure the Federalists into collaborating with them, and he feared that if tensions grew higher they might well succeed. The secessionist murmurings of 1803–1804 might well become a reality. Whatever faith Adams previously entertained in his own party had all but evaporated.
This may explain why Adams then took a step that was extraordinary even by his own standards of stubborn nonpartisanship. On January 23, 1808, Republican legislators convened a party caucus to nominate a candidate to succeed Jefferson. Adams was invited to attend and agreed to do so. He later explained weakly to Tom that he hadn’t known that no other Federalists would go. Senator Stephen Bradley of Vermont, who organized the meeting, had said that all save “inveterate opponents” would be invited. In fact the meeting had been called to advance the candidacy of James Madison over the more radical James Monroe. Adams had been invited in an unsubtle effort at recruitment. He even received a vote for vice president.
And yet Adams spoke as if he did not believe that he had broken from his party or advanced his position in the rival party. When, the following week, Senator William Branch Giles of Virginia spoke elliptically to him about the possible advantages of crossing party lines, Adams asked the Republican whether he thought trading parties for personal benefit “was a sound course of proceeding on moral and political principle.” Giles, apparently little daunted, responded that while Jefferson would never offer a position to an ex-Federalist, Madison might feel otherwise. Adams rejoined that whatever support he might give to any party “shall be governed solely by public considerations.” And Giles, perhaps amused rather than offended by this zeal for purity, conceded that “he believed I considered every public measure as I should a proposition in Euclid, abstracted from any party considerations.”
For once, Adams’ behavior had flabbergasted even his loved ones. Abigail, of all people, wrote to say that attending the caucus was “inconsistent both with your principles, and your judgment.” Adams had never been so judged by his own family, and he wrote in his journal that the letter from his mother, as well as another from his father, “contain a test for my firmness, for my prudence, and for my filial reverence.” (His father would take his side in subsequent correspondence.) In Washington, Josiah Quincy took him aside to say, as a friend, that Adams’ principles “were too pure for those with whom I was acting, and they would not thank me for them.” Adams of course protested that he sought no thanks. He told Quincy that a division in the country over the question of war with England would end “either in a Civil War or in a dissolution of the Union with the Atlantic states in subserviency to Great-Britain.” And to avert such an end he was prepared “to sacrifice everything I have in life, and even life itself.”
The Federalists did not view Great Britain as their enemy; they viewed the Republicans as their enemy. John Adams had conciliated the Republicans a decade earlier; now his son had defected to their sid
e. Adams received anonymous letters denouncing his conduct. The embargo was destroying the economy of New England with no sign that it was squeezing Great Britain to make concessions. Citizens were staging a spontaneous revolt: juries refused to convict merchants accused of violating trade restrictions. Adams worried that the embargo he had favored would provoke the civil dissension he feared. He introduced a resolution to replace it by the arming of merchant ships, as many New Englanders preferred. It was rejected. Adams was placed in the acutely uncomfortable position of defending a policy that was politically toxic and had very little chance of succeeding. But he defended it anyway.
Now the Essex Junto went on the attack. On February 16, Timothy Pickering, Adams’ inveterate foe in the Senate, sent a letter to Governor Daniel Sullivan of Massachusetts, later published as a pamphlet, accusing Adams of doing Jefferson’s bidding and Jefferson in turn of doing the bidding of Napoleon. “By false policy, or by inordinate fears,” Pickering wrote, “our country may be betrayed and subjugated to France as surely as by corruption.” Pickering had apparently swallowed the allegations made in the secret letter from the British governor-general. His letter was reprinted in the Federalist press all over the country. Several leading Republicans approached Adams and asked him to publicly refute the rumor of secret designs with France. Adams sought a private meeting with the president. On March 15, Jefferson reassured him that no such deal existed, and he also reiterated his view that war with England could be and should be avoided. Adams took the president at his word.
Now fully certain of his ground, Adams set out to clear his name. He decided to publish his response to Pickering in the form of an open letter to Harrison Gray Otis, an old friend and a leading member of the Junto. This was a common means of joining one side of a public controversy. The decision, he noted in his journal, “will be to me of the first importance. It will not be without importance to the Nation. It was taken from a strong sense of duty. That it will increase the difficulties and dangers of my situation I am fully aware. That it will bring upon me the fury of all my former enemies and a host of new ones, I perceive.” This was, for once, no exaggeration. On March 31 Adams sent the letter to William Smith Shaw, asking him to send copies to his father, to Otis, and to Governor Sullivan, and to see to its publication.
