by James Traub
Adams never met a burden he wasn’t prepared to shoulder, but in this case he had very little choice. President Madison had proposed that the United States establish a Home Office, after the British fashion, but the Congress had refused. The president could scarcely take up the slack, for he had no staff of his own. Much of the routine work of government had thus come to land in the State Department. State was responsible for publishing laws, conducting the census, keeping a registry of federal officials, affixing the great seal to presidential commissions. The secretary sat on the board of the sinking fund that administered the federal debt. Congress had assigned to the department the responsibility to publish the records of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and a report on weights and measures—the great obsession of Adams’ years in Russia. All these obligations fell on Adams and his handful of clerks.
When President Monroe and his cabinet members returned from their summer vacations and began meeting at the White House in late October, they faced an urgent decision about the US role in the ongoing struggle between Spain and its South American possessions. The European powers supported Spain’s colonial pretensions; King Ferdinand VII of Spain held out hopes that France or Great Britain might dispatch a force to reclaim the renegade provinces. The United States had not yet recognized any of the self-proclaimed republics. American foreign policy had never deviated from the strict neutrality first declared by President Washington. This was Europe’s affair, even if in America’s backyard. At the same time, the South American rebels consciously emulated the language of the American patriots, and many Americans viewed them as brothers-in-arms, as they had the French revolutionaries of 1789. How could the United States remain neutral between the despotism of monarchical Europe and the citizens of the self-proclaimed republics? Newspapers across the country set up a clamor for recognition.
At the first cabinet meeting Adams attended, on October 30, President Monroe distributed a series of questions about policy toward Spain. The first question was: “Has the executive power to acknowledge the independence of the new states whose independence is not recognized by the parents country and between which parties war exists?” Adams did not doubt that the executive had that power but was not prepared to abandon neutrality, which he saw as the great bulwark of American strength, simply to gratify the wishes of the South American patriots or their American supporters. And he had no illusions about America’s relative power: he feared that recognition might provoke European monarchs into sending an expeditionary force to crush New World republicanism or even to declare war against the United States. He complained in a letter to his father that, “as at the early stages of the French revolution, we have ardent spirits who are for rushing into the conflict, without looking at the consequences.”
Adams viewed the contest more dispassionately than did many Americans: Spain, he wrote, had been thoroughly brutal, but so had the insurgents, who “present to us the prospect of very troublesome and dangerous associates, and still more fearful allies.” Adams’ paramount goal was to strengthen America; siding with the Spanish colonies would be morally satisfying but strategically reckless. Adams thoroughly approved of an expedient the president had adopted earlier that year of sending a fact-finding commission to South America. The commissioners still hadn’t left, and the president seemed to be in no hurry to send them.
Monroe’s next question was: What should be done about Amelia Island? This was a dot of Spanish-owned land off the Georgia-Florida coast that a group of South American revolutionaries had seized and used as a base to launch privateering missions against Spanish shipping. Spain controlled the Floridas, a region that stretched along the Gulf of Mexico all the way to New Orleans. The United States had been seeking to buy the territory since the early part of the century; the privateers might make life miserable enough for the Spanish garrison to help persuade the king that Florida was more trouble than it was worth. Perhaps, then, these rogues should be regarded as patriots. Adams found his colleagues “backward upon giving their opinions.” He was not: piracy was piracy, no matter the cause. He advised the president to evict the “marauding parties” immediately. Monroe agreed and dispatched a land and naval force that occupied the island on December 23.
Spain quite naturally expected the United States to turn over Amelia once the pirates had been ejected. That was Monroe’s inclination as well. At a cabinet meeting on January 6, 1818, William Crawford, secretary of the treasury, argued for returning the territory, as did William Wirt, the attorney general, and Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Crowninshield. Crawford said that Spain might view continued American occupation as a casus belli. Adams, who had already conceived a low opinion of the treasury secretary, sneered at the idea. He and John Calhoun, the secretary of war, argued for keeping Amelia. Adams was already engaged in border negotiations with the Spanish minister, and he wanted to make it perfectly clear that America had the stronger hand and would play it. On January 9 Adams met privately with Monroe to press his case. He succeeded: on the twelfth, Monroe announced that the United States would hold on to Amelia “for the present.” The following week, Monroe had second thoughts when he heard a rumor that the Spanish governor of Cuba would retaliate for the decision by seizing all America ships in the harbor. Adams was disgusted with the president’s “alarm”; the secretary of state was not a man to flinch in the face of danger. Fixity of purpose was his watchword. The rumor, in any case, proved false.
It was Spain’s misfortune to be perched at the turbulent edges of the expanding American republic. Frontiersmen from Kentucky and Tennessee were moving not only to the west but to the south, toward Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana—territory the United States had bought in the Louisiana Purchase but Spain still regarded as its own. Settlers pressed up against the northern border of Florida, a refuge both for runaway slaves and for Indians displaced from their homes; conflict between the white and non-white populations was inevitable. In late 1817, American troops evicted Seminoles from a village north of the border, burning down their encampment and killing several villagers. The Seminoles counterattacked, murdering forty members of a supply convoy, including women and children, along the Apalachicola River, which separated east from west Florida. The blood-curdling details of the raid were given a great deal of play in the American press—far more, of course, than were those of the American assault. The federal government was bound to respond.
Days after news of the raid reached Washington, Secretary Calhoun wrote to General Andrew Jackson ordering him to assemble a militia to drive the Seminoles south of the border. Jackson had routed the Indians of Georgia in the Creek War of 1812–1813 and then had won millions of acres of land for the United States through a series of treaties with defeated or thoroughly intimidated tribes. Calhoun authorized Jackson to pursue the Seminoles into Spanish territory but to refrain from attacking any Spanish fortification, since the president had no wish to antagonize Spain while the United States was seeking to win Florida through negotiations. Jackson had scant regard for any authority save his own, and in any case, as President Monroe and Calhoun would have known very well, was committed to territorial expansion south of the current border. Indeed, even before receiving instructions from Calhoun, Jackson had written to the president promising that on a quiet signal from an unofficial source “that the possession of the Floridas would be desirable for the United States,” he would see that it was done “in sixty days.” Monroe later claimed that he had never seen the letter and would never have countenanced its rash proposal. Perhaps he hadn’t, or he may have wanted what would nowadays be called “deniability.”
Jackson destroyed unresisting Seminole villages in Florida and seized the Spanish garrison in the east. He captured two British citizens whom he accused of conspiring with the Seminoles, subjected them to a summary court-martial, saw to their conviction, and executed them. The general then promptly turned west, where no threat to American settlers existed, and took Pensacola, the capital of the Spanish empire in Flori
da. Jackson expelled the Spanish authorities and placed West Florida under American jurisdiction—thus attaining by force the goal Monroe had been seeking through diplomacy. It had taken him about ninety days, rather than sixty.
Jackson had fought a personal, unprovoked war against a European power on America’s border. He had violated express instructions from both the president and the secretary of war in order to bring about an outcome that the president almost surely welcomed by means that he could not be seen to accept. The dashing general was on his way to becoming America’s Napoleon, a dangerous figure but also an adored war hero—the first since George Washington himself. Monroe now found himself in the kind of quandary he could not abide. He was loathe to rebuke this supremely tempestuous figure but also unwilling to permit him to openly flout executive authority. The president convened his cabinet officers on July 15 to discuss what action he should take against Jackson; they would meet almost every day for the next week.
This was a foreign as well as a domestic crisis: both the Spanish and the French ambassador had written to Adams demanding that the United States repudiate Jackson and restore Spanish territory. Adams reported the messages to the president, adding mockingly that “there was something tragical in the manner of both these gentlemen.” Adams had, in fact, sided unhesitatingly with Jackson, and he had assumed that the president would be of like mind. After all, he noted, “we could not suffer our women and children on the frontiers to be butchered by savages, out of complaisance to the jurisdiction which the King of Spain’s officers avowed themselves unable to maintain against these same savages.”
But at the cabinet meeting, Adams discovered that he was wrong. The president believed that Jackson needed to be reprimanded. Calhoun wanted to see him court-martialed. Even Crawford, who had shared Jackson’s own bloodlust a few months earlier, favored some form of punishment. Adams was, in fact, alone. In his journals, where he kept an extensive record of the debate, he wrote that Jackson’s actions were justified by “the necessity of the case, and by the misconduct of the Spanish commanding officers,” by which he meant their unwillingness to stop the Seminoles themselves. (In fact, the Spaniards were too weak to stop either the Seminoles or the Americans.) Jackson, he insisted, had recognized that the border had become indefensible and thus had had no choice but to seize Spanish territory.
At first, Adams won no converts to his side, but he succeeded in forcing the debate to another day. He continued to defend Jackson and to advance the hardheaded view that the public would support him and the taking of Pensacola, while the European powers, including Spain, would resign themselves to a fait accompli. Adams recognized that he was on logically shaky ground in characterizing Jackson’s aggression as necessary to the defense of America sovereignty. “But if the question was dubious,” he wrote in his journal, “it was better to err on the side of vigour than on the side of weakness”—a telling sentiment. Better to err defending a heroic officer than the rights of America’s enemies, and better to err on the side of executive power than to apologize for its exercise.
Monroe concluded that the United States had to return Pensacola and reprimand Jackson, if lightly. This was still a far milder response, and far less satisfying to Spain and its European allies, than Monroe and Calhoun had intended before Adams had weighed in. Adams drafted a letter to Don Luis de Onis, the Spanish minister, acquiescing to the demand for the return of Pensacola but including, in his usual stubborn way, his own justification for Jackson’s conduct. His colleagues struck that out; Adams would spend a lifetime having his texts softened by cooler heads. Monroe wrote a painstakingly mollifying letter to Jackson, asserting that in “transcending the limit prescribed” by his orders “you acted on your own responsibility,” but also suggesting that his belligerent letter to the president had been written “under the press of fatigue and infirmity.” If America is to have war with Spain, the president noted, it must do so on secure constitutional grounds, not as the aggressor—a point one might have thought Adams himself would have taken to heart. Monroe was more cautious than his secretary of state, but he was not weak-willed or indecisive, as Adams sometimes thought him to be.
Adams had many reasons for unconditionally backing Jackson’s Florida campaign. He had been horrified by reports of Seminole atrocities, which included grisly tales of Indians seizing children by the ankles and dashing out their brains against the sides of boats. At this point in his life, it would not have occurred to Adams that the Seminoles had the right to defend their own territory against the ceaseless depredations of US settlers and soldiers; he regarded them more as part of the order of nature than as individuals endowed with rights. He admired Jackson’s martial vigor, and he recoiled at much of the criticism of the campaign, which he regarded—rightly, in some cases—as partisan. He shared Jackson’s view of America as an inexorable force destined to spread across the continent, and, like Jackson, he was inclined to favor any course that enhanced American power. Adams himself was engaged at this very moment in his own diplomatic effort to win a vast expanse of territory from Spain. Jackson’s campaign of brutal intimidation only tipped the balance further between the rising and the declining power. It is striking that so self-consciously moral and Christian a figure as Adams was prepared to excuse bellicose behavior in the name of national self-aggrandizement. For Adams, American destiny had a moral force of its own.
The United States had been negotiating with Spain over continental territory since the Pinckney Treaty of 1795 had given Americans the right to navigate the Mississippi and had defined the borders of Florida. The negotiations had been stalled by Spain’s insistence that the Louisiana Purchase had been illegitimate and that in any case it had not included western Florida, which Spain had not granted to France. Monroe himself had served as minister to Spain and had tried and failed to win Florida as well as the territory west to the Rio Bravo in eastern Texas. Under Madison, however, the United States had annexed portions of West Florida to its Mississippi and Louisiana territories. And by the time Monroe became president, Spain had become increasingly unable to support its colonies and was prepared to sacrifice Florida in the hopes of saving Mexico and the Southwest, including Texas.
Adams was fortunate to have in Don Luis de Onis, the Spanish minister, a diplomatic foil fully as experienced as himself, determined to maximize Spain’s position but fully aware of its weakness. Onis had served the Spanish government in various capacities since 1780 and had been appointed minister to the United States in 1809. Adams’ assessment of him may be taken as a backhanded tribute to a worthy adversary:
Cold calculating, wily, always commanding his own temper; proud because he is a Spaniard, but supple and cunning, accommodating the tones of his pretensions precisely to the degree of endurance of his opponent; bold and overbearing to the utmost extent at which it is tolerated; careless of what he asserts, or how grossly it is proved to be unfounded, his morality appears to be that of the Jesuits, as exposed by Pascal.
That was too harsh a judgment; Onis was a passionate monarchist and reactionary, but also a supple diplomat perpetually probing for the limits of the possible. The two men began a series of meetings on January 10. Each restated largely familiar claims on the Louisiana Territory. Adams demanded the sale of the Floridas; Onis temporized. Adams noted ominously that if Onis didn’t negotiate the sale soon, he wouldn’t have them to give away—a not-at-all subtle reference to General Jackson and his troops. The Spanish minister responded with a note angrily observing that Adams had asked Spain “to cede provinces and territories of the highest worth without proposing an equivalent or compensation.” But Onis was backpedaling all the while. He acknowledged that Spain was prepared to surrender Florida—a major concession. And he sent a messenger to Spain seeking instructions.
After an exchange of letters with his foreign minister, Onis resumed the discussion in the summer of 1818. He visited Adams in his State Department office, where the secretary pulled from the shelf a copy of The Map of the Uni
ted States and Contiguous British and Spanish Possessions. Onis now offered to acknowledge US ownership of territory along the Gulf of Mexico up to 100 miles west of the Mississippi. Adams demanded an additional 150 miles (between what is now Houston and San Antonio). The Spanish minister asked the secretary of state what the United States wished beyond that. According to a letter Onis wrote to his foreign minister, Don Jose Pizarro, Adams suggested drawing a line north to the Missouri River, “thence straight to the Pacific Ocean.” This appears to have been the first time any American diplomat proposed extending American sovereignty from ocean to ocean. Onis was shaken by the magnitude of the American claims. “Here are their views, clear enough,” he wrote to Pizarro. If Spain couldn’t win the support of the major European powers, as seemed increasingly clear, Onis concluded, it should make “the best settlement possible, seeing that things certainly won’t be better for a long time.”
Adams’ project of extending American power to the farthest reaches of the continent required testy diplomacy with Great Britain as well as with Spain. In the course of the War of 1812 the United States had abandoned, and the British seized, a trading outpost on the Columbia River. Both Adams and President Monroe were determined to reassert sovereignty over this toehold on the Pacific. In his first weeks in office, acting on Monroe’s instructions, Adams ordered a warship, the USS Ontario, to sail around South America and back up the distant coast in order to raise the flag over this lonely outpost. When Sir Charles Bagot, the British ambassador, heard the news, he hastened to the State Department to say that he had been deeply disturbed to learn that the United States was dispatching a ship “for the purpose of disturbing the British settlement” in the northwest. Not at all, Adams said blandly; the Ontario had been sent to reclaim American property. “It would hardly be worth the while of Great Britain,” Adams added, in the same measured tone, “to have any differences with the United States on account of the occupation of any part of so remote a territory.” Sir Charles immediately submitted a complaint to London, but Lord Castlereagh, who had no wish to quarrel with the United States over what was, in fact, a remote piece of territory, instructed his forces to let the Americans hoist their flag.
