John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  As Monroe worked with the cabinet on drafts of his annual message in the last months of 1819, Adams tried to calibrate the exact amount of pressure that would make Spain capitulate without producing a backlash. First he suggested that the United States occupy Florida as the “assertion of a right, unjustly withheld,” but do so with as little show of force as possible. Then, when he learned that Ferdinand did, in fact, plan to approve the treaty, he suggested that Monroe say that the United States had every right to seize Florida but for the moment would forebear to do so. He strongly advised the president against recognizing the Spanish republics, which would provoke Spain’s conservative allies. In his annual message, Monroe adopted each of these proposals. The president had important reasons of his own for proceeding slowly. He saw that the prospect of a new frontier had released a rapacious and apparently illimitable appetite among his own people. “So seducing is the passion for extending our teritory,” he wrote to Albert Gallatin, “that if compelled to take our own redress it is quite uncertain within what limit it will be confined.”

  Adams counseled patience because he understood that time would be on the side of the rising power and against the declining one. Spain’s position would simply grow untenable. Events vindicated his expectations: a liberal convulsion in Spain led to the reconstitution of the Cortes. The new body approved the existing treaty in September 1820, and King Ferdinand signed it the following month. President Monroe nominated Andrew Jackson to serve as the first governor of Florida, and Spain was forever banished from the American Southeast.

  LOUISA HAD STOPPED KEEPING A DIARY IN EARLY 1819, BEFORE HER tumultuous journey from St. Petersburg to Paris; it’s not clear why. She began again in January 1819. Since her entries form the basis of letters to John Adams, Louisa’s motive may have been to inform and amuse her aged father-in-law, the one member of the family whose love for her she never had reason to question. Louisa, in turn, revered and adored the old man. Twenty years later she would write in her diary, “Among all the great characters whom it has been my lot to meet in the devious paths of a long and mingled life, I have never met a man with a mind of such varied powers, such accute discrimination, and which I may use the expression was intrinsically sound. . . . The young listened to him with delight, the old with veneration.”

  Louisa had almost nothing to say of the affairs of the day but instead wrote about the parties she went to and the people she met, knowing that the old man had always enjoyed gossip and liked to stay au courant. One day she told Adams the details of a duel between cousins—Virginian officers, of course—who blasted away at one another from ten feet; one was killed and the other gravely wounded. When Andrew Jackson came to Washington to defend himself from Henry Clay’s allegations, Louisa wryly described the bewilderment of locals who had expected to meet a savage and instead discovered a perfect gentleman.

  Louisa once reflected that she was very much the same woman who had married at age twenty-one, though perhaps less timid than she had been then—“the same romantic enthusiastic foolish animal unfit for real life as I was then and as conscious of all my defects which as I rise become more striking.” She took great delight in balls and parties and witty repartee. With her father-in-law she felt free to describe the whirl of life in the most breezy and self-mocking terms. “I assure you,” she wrote in February 1819, “that Genl Jackson and the Spanish Treaty can not compare in interest to the Bagot ball and the unfortunate launch”—a reference to the controversial decision by the British ambassador to play “God Save the King”—“and you could scarcely believe that the two former were of vital importance to the Country and Nation at large.”

  Louisa was an eighteenth-century woman with a gift for the great eighteenth-century game of satire, though she did not dip her pen in quite as much acid as her husband did. Of the president’s extremely unpopular daughter, Eliza Hay, she wrote, “This woman is made up of so many great and little qualities, is so full of agreeables and disagreeables, so accomplished and so ill bred, has so much sense and so little judgment, she is so proud, and so mean, I scarcely ever met such a compound.” Louisa’s insight into Henry Clay was penetrating but notably sympathetic: “If you watch his character,” she wrote, “you almost immediately discover that his heart is generous and good, and that his first impulse is almost always benevolent and liberal. But a neglected education, vicious habits and bad company, united to overweening ambition, have made him blush to act the better part.” As Clay became her husband’s great rival, however, Louisa’s sympathies flagged. The following year, she wrote of Clay, “He is always domineering and arrogant and usurps by his dictatorial manner the greater proportion of the discourse which he generaly contrives to make offensive to someone or other.”

  But Louisa also suffered greatly, both mentally and physically. Adams described one night when his wife woke in agony and he dosed her with twenty-five drops of laudanum—a very large amount. He then called for the doctor, who administered still more of the opiate before Louisa’s pain subsided. She remained in bed for the ensuing four days. Her miscarriages, of course, were terrible. She suffered crippling outbreaks of erysipelas, a disorder known as Saint Anthony’s fire, which turned the skin red and so swollen that at times her eyes would almost disappear. The disease was both extremely painful and humiliating, and Louisa would retire to her room until the swelling and the sensitivity subsided.

  Women of Louisa’s day—especially delicate, high-strung, well-born women—were so widely diagnosed with nervous disorders of one kind or another that it is impossible to say when Louisa was sick and when she was overcome by her emotions. She could be gay, as her husband could not, but her inner spirit often flickered, as his did not. She was prone to bouts of despair. During the long spells in her bedchamber Louisa sometimes fell into a sort of delirium, with day passing insensibly into night. Then she would feel that she was about to die, and it was not beyond her to welcome the prospect. The thought of infant Louisa was never far from her mind. “Since God in his wisdom took my daughtre on whom I madly doated I have never found a thing which could fill the void in my heart,” she wrote in the midst of one of her worst moments. She thanked God for taking her infant away so early, for had she died after reaching childhood, “madness or suicide must have been the result for me.” And then she would rally, and rise from her bed, and rejoin the world.

  In June 1820, the Adamses bought a large brownstone at 224 F Street in Washington, between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Street. (The address would now be 1333-5.) John Quincy spent the next several months supervising extensive renovations and of course quarreling with his contractor. He had the workers build what was almost a second house in the rear of the original structure, so that when finished the house had four large square drawing rooms measuring twenty-eight feet as well as more than half a dozen bedrooms. Louisa started throwing parties even before the construction was finished. Her fortnightly teas became so popular that she tried to restrict the crowd by decreeing that henceforward no dancing would be permitted, but Washington society came and insisted on dancing. Washington now had a little bit of the dazzle the Adamses had known in foreign capitals. When Congress was in session, balls and fine dinners were held almost every night. The most magnificent house in Washington had been empty since its owner, Commodore Stephen Decatur, the great naval hero of the War of 1812, had been killed in a foolish duel in March 1820. But now Baron Hyde de Neuville had purchased the three-story mansion on Lafayette Square and threw splendid parties there.

  For a time, the Adams house was filled with music and dancing and even giggling and flirting. The three orphaned children of Louisa’s sister Nancy Hellen—Mary, Thomas, and Johnson—had come to live with them. So had another of Louisa’s relatives, Fanny Johnson. At various times they also took in the four children of Adams’ brother Tom as well as Abigail Adams Smith, Nabby’s eldest child. John Quincy Adams supported all of them without a murmur of protest. In January 1821, all three Adams boys were home as well. Mary took
violin lessons, while George and Charles played the flute. A dancing master came for as much as three hours a day to teach all the young folk. Often they had their friends over for dancing parties.

  Romance—and therefore trouble—was bound to bloom among them. Mary was a shameless flirt, plump and pretty, and the boys, one after the other, fell hard for her. Charles described her as “one of the most capricious women ever formed by a capricious race.” She and George became engaged in 1823, when Mary was sixteen. Charles, who was Mary’s age, admitted years later that he had “too deeply loved the woman,” which almost certainly means that they were lovers. Mary would ultimately throw over both boys for John Adams II, who unlike the other two remained steadily in Washington and thus could stake a more permanent claim to Mary’s affections. The two would marry in the White House.

  Adams feared that his sons, and especially the two older ones, were idle and frivolous. In September 1821, while up in Cambridge, he asked to look at the Harvard class register. He was shocked to find that George, who had just graduated, stood thirtieth in the class, while John was forty-fifth, close to the bottom. As if that weren’t bad enough, the next day he learned that George had given $35 to a complete stranger, who of course had made off with it. At George’s age, Adams had traveled all over Europe by himself and taken care of his father in dangerous straits. He shouted at George, and the frail boy was so upset that Adams inwardly reproached himself. He lay awake all the next night worrying about his feckless children. “The blast of mediocrity,” he gloomily reflected, “is the lightest of evils, which such characters portend.” The greatest of evils, which he knew all too well from his own brother Charles, was self-destruction, with the accompanying shame to a great family.

  Adams’ own life had become immensely complicated by the extracurricular burdens peculiar to his job. Throughout 1820 and 1821, he was preparing the annals of the Constitutional Convention, the reports on weights and measures, the decennial census, the biennial register of federal employees, and—an entirely new congressional demand—a digest of commercial law, including the duties, tariffs, and other commercial regulation of all the nations with which the United States traded. It seemed unimaginable that one man—even with six clerks and two messengers—could accomplish all this while at the same time attending to the nation’s diplomacy and foreign affairs. The 1787 records alone made him feel like Laocoon wrestling with his serpents. George Washington had deposited his own copy of the records with the State Department, but Adams found large gaps that had to be plugged with whatever documents he could find elsewhere, including from the few signers still living. The sheer chaos drove him to distraction.

  Adams had come to view himself as a dray horse, long broken to the harness. “The operations of my mind are slow,” he wrote; “my mind is sluggish, and my powers of extemporaneous speaking very inefficient. But I have much capacity for and love of labour.” He set himself the task of making an index of his journals from 1795 to 1809 and then felt thoroughly disgusted at what seemed to him the pedestrian cast of his mind. The work, he reflected, “contains scarcely ever, either observation of reflection—incident or character—grave remark, or sally of humour.” Surely, he concluded, the great mass of material “will never be fit for exposure to any eye but my own.” Adams had something harsh to say about almost everyone, but the person he was most consistently unfair to was himself. His journals survive today not only as a precious resource for historians but as one of the great works of American political literature.

  The same can not be said of Adams’ report on weights and measures, of which he felt far more proud. The diary was labor; weights and measures were an addiction. Adams was pleased to discover that Washington had its very own keeper of weights and measures, a Mr. Leonard, who had a complete set of brass and copper weights from the half ounce to the twenty-eight-pound weight, as well as dry measures like the half bushel and peck, and liquid ones like the gill. Adams noted that the half bushel should contain 1089.353162 solid (i.e., cubic) inches, “which is a gill more than a half bushel Winchester measure.” As he headed into the last lap in the summer of 1820, Adams was writing three pages a day of the report while still conducting elaborate research comparing French, English, and American units of measure, as well as the mathematical calculations required to measure the volume of liquids. He wondered what tiny object of uniform size might serve as a universal basis of measurement. Perhaps a grain of wheat? No: “the weight of the kernels differ from 30 to 50 to a penny-weight Troy.” He explained his system at great length to the new British minister, Stratford Canning. Canning professed himself bewildered but took notes and promised to convey Adams’ views to the Foreign Office. When Adams finally sent the massive report to the publisher in January 1821, Louisa wrote, with an almost audible sigh of relief, “Thank God we hear no more of Weights and Measures.”

  “The Report of the Secretary of State Upon Weights and Measures” is without doubt one of the strangest documents ever to be issued by that office. Most of its 135 pages—followed by appendices of equal length—consist of the kind of abstruse calculations Adams had made in his journals. Adams traced the evolution of weights and measures from the Hebrews and the Greeks; he dilated at impressive length on the evolution of standards of measurement in medieval and Renaissance England. “By the English system of weights and measures before the statute of 1496,” he explained, “the London quarter of a ton was the one measure, to which the bushel for corn, the gallon, deduced by a measure, for ale, and the gallon, deduced by weight, for wine, were all referred.” He wrote of the confounding diversity of national measurements and of the intrinsically diverse nature of measurement itself, founded on such infinite variables as human dimension.

  But a theme shines through: “stimulated by the passion for uniformity,” Adams wrote, “the philosophers and legislators of Britain” had striven to organize the mass of vague and primitive inherited terms—the cubit and the span, the bushel and the peck—into a self-consistent system. They had been defeated by popular resistance. But the French Revolution had succeeded where British liberalism had failed. In 1795 the Directory had decreed the adoption of the “republican measures” of the metric system—an instrument “for all people for all times,” in the words of the Marquis de Condorcet, the great encyclopedist. Adams wrote that June 22, 1799, the day when French scientists had deposited the official meter and kilogram standard with the keeper of the public archives, marked “an epocha in the history of man.”

  The “universal uniformity” that was the object of thinkers and legislators on both sides of the Atlantic, Adams asserted, “is obtainable only by the adoption of the new French system of metrology.” Straining his rhetoric to the very highest pitch, Adams stupendously declared that “if the Spirit of Evil is, before final consummation of things, to be cast down from his dominion over men,” then “one language of weights and measures will be spoken from the equator to the poles.” Such rapture before the altar of the Enlightenment puts Adams in the camp of Jefferson, who thirty years earlier had advanced a “Plan for Establishing Uniformity in the Coinage, Weights, and Measures of the United States.” Adams was also a relentless improver who wished to bring order to all profuse and chaotic domains, including the State Department’s filing system.

  And yet . . . it wouldn’t work. Adams saw that ordinary French people refused to divide time into tens or even to abandon traditional measurements, which made more sense to them than the new ones did. “Nature,” he noted, “has no partiality for the number ten.” And though “it is mortifying to the philanthropist, who yearns for the improvement of the condition of man,” human activity proceeds from nature, not from abstract ideals. There was, in the end, far more of the conservative skeptic in Adams than of Jefferson or Condorcet. And so, after long years of “Alpine” labor, Adams concluded that “no innovation upon the existing weights and measures should be adopted.” Instead the United States should officially state what those measures were and commission “p
ositive standards” in brass or copper to fix the exact quantities.

  The report on weights and measures had no discernible effect on US policy. Few people could have read it; even the ever-loyal John Adams confessed that he couldn’t get through it all. The work, which Adams considered his greatest contribution to the literature of government, survives today as a monument to intellectual passion and obscure scholarship.

  ON MARCH 9, 1821, HENRY CLAY PAID A RARE VISIT TO ADAMS AT his office. Clay had managed to largely exhaust his family fortune; he had temporarily retired from Congress in order to earn his way back to prosperity. Clay always had an eye out for the main chance; he had secured the position of the Bank of the United States general counsel for Kentucky and Ohio. The visit was no mere courtesy; Clay had been pressing for months for payment for his role in helping to negotiate a commercial treaty with Great Britain in 1815, immediately after the Treaty of Ghent. Neediness, Adams thought, had made Clay unusually forbearing toward him. The Kentuckian said that he wanted the money right away, but Adams could not oblige him. Adams turned the conversation to Clay’s views on South America. He thought that Clay was naïve about the prospects of the republics, and said so:

  So far as they were contending for Independence I wished well to their cause; but I had seen and yet see no prospect that they would establish free or liberal Institutions of Government. They are not likely to promote the Spirit either of Freedom or of Order by their example. They have not the first Elements of good or free Government. Arbitrary power, Military and Ecclesiastical was stamped upon their education, upon their habits, and upon all their Institutions.

  Adams agreed that the analogy Clay drew between the American and the Spanish colonies was perfectly just insofar as both had a right to rebel against a distant and oppressive master and to govern themselves. But he thought this had no bearing at all on the capacity of the South Americans to govern themselves democratically, as the Americans had done. For Adams, Clay’s views smacked of a dangerous unreality, a commitment to principle in the absence of history, politics, national habit, and character. Like Burke, Adams reasoned from what men did, not from what one wished they did or imagined they might have done in an ideal setting. A foreign policy based on a priori assumptions about the world rather than a rigorous understanding of men and nations was bound to overreach and lead to grief.