John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  Adams’ response to Pickering ran to about ten thousand words, densely argued and mostly temperate. He began on the solid ground of federal authority. Pickering had called on the “commercial states” to refuse to enforce the embargo—that is, to defy the authority of the federal government. If New England can nullify a federal statute, Adams observed, so could the Southern states. How, then, would the Union stand? Here he anticipated by a generation the argument over states’ rights and “nullification,” which would lead to the creation of the Confederacy. The peril, even then, was scarcely hypothetical, since Adams knew that only a few years earlier Pickering and other leading members of the Essex Junto plotted to secede from the Union.

  States, Adams went on, must act not out of partial interests, but for the good of the country. He acknowledged that the embargo was hurting the region, and he reminded readers that he had sought unsuccessfully to bring it to an end. But it was too early to say that it had failed. And what was the alternative? Would the United States simply accept British terms? The Order in Council would restore the era of the tea tax and the Stamp Act. Adams sought to explain British politics: the liberals had come to accept American independence, but the Tories, now in power, hoped to restore America to a state of subjection. Those like Pickering who insisted that the United States had no quarrel with British policies offered, in effect, “unconditional surrender to the pretensions of our antagonist.” And such a cringing policy was bound to fail: “Submission never yet set boundaries to encroachment.” Perhaps war could not be avoided. “If we must perish,” Adams ringingly concluded, “let it be in defense of our RIGHTS.”

  This was a battle Adams could not win; his father even wrote to say that his arguments would never sway those being harmed by the embargo. Printers in Massachusetts published five thousand copies of the letter, and then five thousand more, but Boston printers, in league with the Junto, refused to print the letter at all. The embargo, which had largely idled the merchant fleet and devastated the regional economy, was wildly unpopular. By this time armed mobs in some Massachusetts ports were preventing federal customs officials from enforcing the measure. Federalist journals tore into Senator Adams. The Hampshire Gazette called him “a party scavenger.” In the Salem Gazette, Adams was one of “Bonaparte’s Senators.” The Greenfield Gazette went yet further: Adams was a traitor “associating with the assassins of his father’s character.” His family despaired over the onslaught, though Adams did not regret a syllable of what he had written. Many years later, when the pamphlet was republished, he added a note describing the whole episode as “one of the transactions of my public life to which my memory recurs with the most gratifying recollections.”

  The Tenth Congress ended in a manner that drove a few more nails in Adams’ coffin. On April 7, the Senate convened as a judicial body to consider the expulsion of Senator Smith, a man whom Adams did not despise but whom he nevertheless considered unworthy of holding his seat. It fell to Adams to serve as chief prosecutor, and he held the floor for four hours. The movement to expel fell one vote short of the two-thirds required, an outcome Adams felt “sufficiently reprobated” the offender without depriving him of his seat. But Adams’ role further inflamed his party members against him. The week following, Adams once again called for a lifting of the embargo, substituting in its stead suspension of trade with England, France, Spain, and Holland and restoring commerce with the colonies. This, too, was rejected.

  On April 23, just before the Senate was to adjourn, Adams was approached by Senator Nicholas Gilman, a New Hampshire Republican, saying that “it was the wish of several gentlemen with whom he had conversed to bring me forward, in some active and distinguished station.” Apparently Adams relished the euphemism. All he needed to do, said Gilman, was to write something clarifying that he did not favor “monarchical government,” since some Republicans, identifying him with his father, feared that he did. Adams recoiled before all mandatory oaths. He would not, he said, “speak ten words, nor write two lines to be President of the United States”—nor, to clear up any possible confusion, “to be anything subordinate to that.”

  Adams returned to Boston. For the first time in his life, he did not feel welcome in his own hometown. He went to a dinner at Harvard, a pleasant affair, he wrote, until a Dr. Osgood from Medford “attacked me in a rude and indecent manner on the subject of my letter to Mr. Otis.” His old friend Judge Davis thought he was wrong; indeed, all but one or two of his friends thought so. Theophilus Parsons, his law teacher, mentor, and friend, now a judge and a leader of the Junto, told him that the British had every right to seize American merchant ships. “He also thinks the people of this country corrupted, already in a state of voluntary subjugation to France, and ready to join an army of Bonaparte if he should send one here, to subdue themselves. The only protection of our liberty, he thinks, is the British Navy.” Many of Adams’ great friends seemed to him to despise their own country—and to scorn him for defending what they deemed indefensible. Adams felt so beleaguered that he could scarcely concentrate on the lectures he was preparing.

  In a genuine blow, Harrison Gray Otis broke off relations and pointedly ignored Adams at social events. Louisa felt closer to the Otises than to anyone else in Boston; the break was terribly painful for her. The friendship between the families had begun forty years earlier with Otis’ uncle and Adams’ father. It would resume, but never as before. The temperate Otis would characterize the entire line of Adams men as “a peculiar species of our race exhibiting a combination of talent & good moral character, with passions and prejudices calculated to defeat their own objects & embarrass their friends.” Adams, in turn, would call Otis “an adder in my path.”

  Pickering’s immediate goal in disseminating his pamphlet had been to poison the incoming state legislature against the senior senator from Massachusetts, and in this he succeeded. At the end of May, legislators voted 248–213—closer than one might have expected—to appoint James Lloyd Jr. to succeed Adams, even though Adams’ term ran to 1809. The legislature also instructed its federal representatives to vote to overturn the embargo. This was an extraordinary rebuke—in effect, a recall. John Adams had managed to keep the loyalty of his party until he was president; his son had worsted him, at least in this regard. Rather than waiting for the guillotine to fall, Adams responded to the vote with a terse letter of resignation. He was already back home in Boston; now he would stay.

  Adams spent the second half of 1808 delivering his lectures and corresponding with Massachusetts Republicans in Congress like Orchard Cook and Ezekiel Bacon, as well as other leading Republican figures. To William Branch Giles he wrote, “I have felt on this occasion a little of the spirit of martyrdom; knowing that my governing motives have been pure, disinterested and patriotic, I can consider every calumny cast upon me, as the tribute of profligate passions to honest principle.” In a later letter he told Giles that he could not find a single Federalist willing to stand with him in public, whatever they would say to him in private. (He would later publish these letters as evidence of the Federalist secession plot.) But Adams had long since recognized that the embargo wasn’t working. He favored replacing it with “non-intercourse” with France and England, though others, including his father, felt certain that New England merchants would undermine and evade the one as they had the other.

  Whatever Adams’ intentions were, his flinty integrity had made him a valuable political commodity. In the first weeks of the fall of 1808, leading Republicans visited him at home to ask him to run for Congress. Adams was hardly averse to returning to Washington, including as a Republican, but he would have had to stand against his friend Josiah Quincy, a moderate who had not distanced himself from Adams as others had. He declined. He thought seriously of running for governor of Massachusetts but ultimately chose not to. There were so many rumors of secret deals Adams had reached with the Republicans in exchange for his support on the embargo that he may have felt that anything he did under a Republican banner wo
uld be taken as proof of an unseemly bargain. Nevertheless, in retirement he was shaping the debate over the response to British depredations. On New Year’s Day 1809, Republican Senator Orchard Cook wrote to say, “Your Letters do much good, are treated with very great respect indeed—I think you have now more influence than when here—not mere opinion in which you deal very sparingly but the excellent Arguments & reasons you give for every conclusion.” Cook implored Adams to keep writing with advice.

  Adams for once had time to spend with his family. He had been vowing for years to bolster George’s French, though he found that he lacked both the patience and the perseverance for the job. He worried constantly over the children’s spills and sneezes. When George banged his head on a stone step, Adams was, he admitted, “unhinged” by his fears and prayed for fortitude. In December, all three children fell ill, and Adams drove Louisa crazy with his desperate anxiety. His fears were so inordinate that they both wound up laughing. They often disagreed about how to raise the boys. Adams bridled when Louisa sent George to dancing school. All civilized people, as Louisa understood it, learned to dance; Adams himself had learned to dance in France and Holland, though he had been a bit older. Adams groused that it was foolishness. In this case, Louisa won.

  In late January 1809, Adams left for Washington to argue a case before the Supreme Court. By this time New England was, as Adams feared, up in arms over the embargo. Judge Davis had agreed to hear an argument that the embargo violated the state constitution. Adams wrote to Louisa from New York to say that everywhere he went he was asked whether the court would nullify the statute, whether the New England states would secede, whether it was true that ships were massing in the harbors to break the embargo. On February 1, the Massachusetts legislature passed a resolution calling on states to meet to consider forming a New England confederation. Adams’ inveterate fear that the pull of foreign loyalties would tear apart the Union was proving to be not at all hyperbolic. Talk of noncompliance with the embargo was everywhere.

  Adams spent his first few weeks in Washington attending the Supreme Court and feverishly preparing for his argument in Fletcher v. Peck, a case which had grown out of a dispute over sales of a massive tract of land that would later become the states of Mississippi and Alabama. He argued the case March 2 and left certain that the judges had been averse to his view and that his presentation had been “dull and tedious almost beyond endurance.”

  The embargo gave way before the Union did. In Washington, Southern congressmen, who had remained staunch supporters of the embargo, began to waver. On March 1, 1809, in the final days of the Jefferson administration, Congress repealed the embargo by enacting instead the Non-Intercourse Act, setting restrictions on trade to British and French ports and lifting all other embargoes—precisely the course Adams had proposed. He was hardly alone, but it may be that Orchard Cook was right in saying that his influence had become greater once he had been forced out of office. In fact, Madison was no more eager for war than Jefferson had been; like Jefferson, he hoped that the problem would solve itself over time.

  On March 6, President Madison, who had just taken office, asked Adams to visit him at his home on Capitol Hill. (Jefferson hadn’t yet moved out of the president’s house.) Madison informed Adams that in literally half an hour he would be submitting his name to the Senate as minister to Russia. The “pressure of business,” he said, had prevented him from discussing his plans until now. President Madison explained that while he had no specific negotiations in view, Tsar Alexander was eager to establish diplomatic relations with the United States. In recent years the Russian army had played a key role in blocking Napoleon’s advance to the east, but otherwise had remained a neutral between the two great combatants. The other neutrals, like Sweden, were far too weak to resist concerted pressure from either France or England. Russian support, both commercial and diplomatic, could enable the United States to remain independent of the two great powers. Russia was the most powerful nation in the world with whom the United States had not yet established diplomatic relations. It was an assignment very much befitting America’s most seasoned and brilliant diplomat, but it was also extremely onerous owing to Russia’s remoteness and its dismal climate. When Adams asked how long the assignment would be, Madison said that the duration was indefinite “and might last three or four years.” The president needed an answer right away. Adams said that he “could see no sufficient reason for refusing the nomination.”

  On March 8, however, the Senate voted against sending a minister to Russia, on the grounds that no such mission was necessary. Adams hadn’t yet plucked up the courage to tell Louisa, or his parents, of a new stage in his life that would horrify all of them. Now he wrote to Louisa to say that he imagined she would be pleased to hear that a diplomatic mission he had been offered had been rejected. He said he, too, was relieved. He then returned to Boston. Adams spent the spring and early summer practicing the law in his desultory way, reading, and seeing to George’s education, as his parents had seen to his. Every morning before eight he and George took turns reading to each other four chapters of the Bible, and then father and son talked about the meaning of the passages. He showed George the countries of the world on a map. He took George and John to a performance of Hamlet.

  The private life Adams assured everyone that he craved seemed to be unfolding before him. Then, on July 4, he attended an Independence Day celebration that began at the statehouse and proceeded to the Old South Church. While he was there, his cousin William Smith Shaw brought him papers that included an official notification from the secretary of state that after another vote in the Senate he had been confirmed as minister to the court of St. Petersburg. Adams informed the thunderstruck Louisa that they would soon leave for Russia; in addition, he had decided that they would bring the baby with them but leave George and John with the Cranches. Louisa had consented to live without the boys for a few months at a time, but even then very unhappily. Now her husband was not asking but informing her that she would have to do without them for years on end—no one knew how long. Louisa was crushed. “O it was too hard!” she would write later. “Not a soul entered into my feelings and all laughed to scorn my suffering at crying out that it was all affectation—Every preparation was made without the slightest consultation with me.” That, of course, was the Adams way. Abigail had watched her husband and son sail away to Europe not once but twice, and she had stifled her tears. An Adams understood that one lived not for oneself but for the nation. All Louisa wanted was to live as others did, among their friends and loved ones. The first great wound of Louisa’s life had been her father’s public disgrace. The second would be the abandonment of her boys. And there would be others, worse still.

  Adams didn’t have to go, of course; the nation scarcely needed this mission as it had his father’s to France thirty years before. He used his journal, as he often did, to review his own thought process. “My personal motives for staying home are of the strongest kind,” he wrote; “the age of my parents, and the infancy of my children both urge to the same result. My connection to the College, is another strong tie which I break with great reluctance; and by refusing the Office I should promote my personal popularity more than by accepting it”—by rebutting the presumption of a quid pro quo over his support for the Republicans. Louisa’s feelings evidently did not figure in his calculations; she did not matter in the way that his parents and children—his blood relations—did.

  On the other hand, he wrote, he had “the duty of a citizen to obey the call of his country,” the opportunity to leave behind “the most virulent and unrelenting Persecution,” the “vague hope” of actually doing some good, and the wish to justify President Madison’s confidence in him. He addressed God directly, as he often did at moments of supreme importance, humbly asking for his blessings and praying for “the entire extrication of my Country from her difficulties and dangers, and for myself the continued consciousness of purity in my motives, and so far as it has been or may be d
eserved, the approbation of my Countrymen.” He did not, however, ask God for guidance. That he found within himself.

  Adams spent his last few weeks packing up thousands of books for storage, paying a last round of visits, trying to rent out part of his home, resigning his board memberships. Every well-born and underemployed young man in Boston seemed eager to accompany him as private secretary. Adams agreed that he would take Nabby’s son, William Steuben Smith, who had found little to do in New York City and whose father was hopelessly incapable of supporting his own family. He decided as well that Louisa’s younger sister Kitty should come along to keep Louisa company, though Russia was hardly the place for a single young woman concerned about her marriage prospects. Abigail and Aunt Cranch came to Boston for a last visit. Louisa went with them back to Quincy for a heart-rending farewell with her two older boys. Adams secured passage on the Horace for the traveling party, which also included Martha Godfrey, Louisa’s maid, and Nelson—his last name doesn’t appear in extant documents—Adams’ black manservant. On August 5, the day of his departure, Adams composed a devotional poem imploring Providence to steady his soul so that he might do good to mankind.

  CHAPTER 13