John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  Adams did, of course, want to be president, but only on his own terms. Perhaps he wished, like Cicero, to be chosen by popular acclaim. But the vinegary secretary of state was hardly the man to be hurrahed to the presidency. His two immediate predecessors had become president, but Adams could no longer count on that effortless path to the highest office; his rivals for the job would fight for it, whether he would or not. Adams stirred less enthusiasm than some of those rivals and was less prepared to campaign for the job than were some of the others. In a more democratic era, Adams would have had little chance to become president. Luckily for him, he came along at the last moment when an unpopular man who refused to court public opinion could still win the highest office.

  Adams silently watched the other presumed candidates for 1824 steal a march on him. In 1819 Monroe had asked Calhoun to accompany him on a tour through the South and West, where they were met by cheering throngs. The following year Calhoun took a northward swing through Albany, Saratoga, and Boston. Crawford steadily attacked Calhoun over the alleged mismanagement of the War Department, and Adams over the negotiations with Spain. Adams wrote bitterly that “Crawford has been a worm preying upon the vitals of the Administration within its own body.” Clay was steadily recruiting allies, and editors, to his side.

  Newspapers had long propagandized for political candidates. But in recent years they had vastly increased in number and reach. The second decade of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of the American small-town paper. Almost every new town cleared from forest and swamp was bound to have not just a bank and a dry-goods store but a printer, and that gentleman, after making a living turning out handbills, would soon be publishing a newspaper as well. The United States had four hundred papers in 1810 and double that number by 1825. Great Britain, with twice the population, had half as many newspapers. Improved postal routes spread these local products across the country, so that a concerned citizen could find out what people were thinking and doing all over America. John Quincy Adams read thirty to forty newspapers a day—a remarkable fraction of the total, since most papers were then weeklies. By this time newspaper editorials had largely replaced the open letter or pamphlet as the chief instrument for influencing public opinion. The journals of the day were “outrageously partisan,” as one historian of the medium notes, and played a central role in organizing the factions into which the country was becoming divided. Politicians and editors learned that they could not get along, and need not get along, without each other.

  Long before there was a recognizable campaign to succeed Monroe, there was a growing skirmish in the press. One of Adams’ own clerks, John B. Colvin, published the Washington Gazette, which had started carrying fawning articles about the secretary of state as early as 1819. Adams told Colvin that while he was pleased to see the administration’s initiatives enjoying favor, he would rather not be the object of praise. Adams feared that today’s sycophant would be tomorrow’s enemy, and in fact by 1821 Colvin was regularly attacking him in print and supporting the ambitions of William Crawford. At the same time, Adams carried on a running battle with newspapers that habitually abused him in the service of rival candidates, especially the inveterately anti-Federalist Aurora of Philadelphia—the paper started by his old schoolmate Benjamin Franklin Bache.

  Adams was not entirely averse to buttering up editors. He sent a copy of his July 4 address to Robert Walsh Jr., an essayist who had founded America’s first quarterly, the American Review of History and Politics. Walsh had probably first come to Adams’ attention with an article attacking the same anti-American pieces in the British press that Adams had targeted in the address. Walsh had just founded the National Gazette of Philadelphia. Much more a polemicist than a political hack, Walsh was not averse to criticizing Adams, who nevertheless—or perhaps for that very reason—saw in him a man worthy of his attentions. They would correspond often and meet regularly in the coming years.

  In 1817, Congress had passed a law requiring at least two newspapers in every state and territory to publish federal laws. The newspapers would be paid for the space, and at first the job of assigning this lucrative privilege was given (like almost everything else) to the State Department. Adams may have used this power as a means of currying favor with preferred editors, though he was more apt to record the embitterment of those he had passed over. In any case, his attitude toward the exploitation of the new medium was of a piece with his views of politicking in general. When Joseph Hopkinson, a Philadelphia congressman and staunch Adamsite, made one of the many futile efforts to induce the secretary of state to actively campaign, Adams told him, “I will have no stipendiary editors of newspapers to extol my talents and services.” Hopkinson, who must have known what was coming, responded that it was precisely these archaic virtues that made Adams so attractive a candidate in his eyes but added that perhaps Adams might, as a small gesture, refrain from openly attacking Federalists on his next trip to Boston.

  Adams’ rivals were not so scrupulous. The Richmond Enquirer, voice of the Jeffersonians, was widely understood to play a crucial role in Crawford’s campaign; Crawford also had loyal papers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Portland, Maine. The Argus of Western America, a feisty broadsheet of outsize influence based in the frontier town of Frankfort, Kentucky, served as a Clay organ, as did papers in Cincinnati and elsewhere in the West. In the summer of 1822, John Calhoun spoke to Adams about his high-minded plan of starting a politically independent paper in Washington. Adams laughed; any such endeavor, he said, “would be beset on all sides by slander, obloquy and probably assassination.” Perhaps, in any case, Calhoun was trying to throw dust in Adams’ eyes: he had begun canvassing for president the previous December, and in September, a few months after this conversation, the Washington Republican would begin publication as a Calhoun paper. Soon the Franklin Gazette of Philadelphia would be running an adulatory nine-part profile on Calhoun.

  The most politically gifted of the men vying to succeed Monroe was Henry Clay. Unlike Adams, Clay had built up a vast network of contacts during his years in Washington and was writing to friends in states across the country asking for their estimates of his standing. Clay calculated that with a three- or even four-cornered contest, no one was likely to win a majority of electoral votes, which would, according to the Constitution, lead to a choice by the House of Representatives among the top three finishers. Clay had good reason to feel that he would win any such contest: he simply needed to ensure that no one won an outright majority and that he himself made it into the final three. Clay may have believed that even if he couldn’t keep Adams out of the House contest, he could play on popular fears in order to weaken him in a three-man battle with himself and Crawford.

  Adams considered Clay a schemer—he viewed all his rivals as schemers—but he never doubted the Kentuckian’s gifts. He was, Adams wrote, “an eloquent man with very popular manners, and great political management. He is like almost all the eminent man of this Country only half-educated. His school has been the world, and in that he is proficient.” In fact Clay had deeper and more genuine political convictions than Adams would credit him with. In Congress and out, he talked up a plan he had labeled, with typical ingenuity, “the American system.” In foreign affairs, Clay argued for a policy focused on the Americas rather than on Europe—a Holy Alliance of American democracies. “It is in our power,” he said in a speech in the House in 1820, “to create a system of which we shall be the centre, and in which all South America will act with us. . . . We should be the centre of a system which would constitute the rallying point of human freedom against all the despotism of the Old World.” Clay was perhaps the first American politician to recognize the political power of a romantic, and not merely nationalistic, foreign policy.

  But the American system was preeminently a forward-looking vision for the United States. Clay argued that America had permitted itself to be an economic handmaiden to Europe. Instead, the United States should keep out cheap English manufactur
es through a system of duties and thus protect the infant industries of the Northwest as well as New England. He had shepherded a tariff bill through Congress in 1816 and then made an unsuccessful effort to raise duties in 1820. Clay also argued that the federal government should seek to knit the country together through public works programs, which at the time were known as “internal improvements.” Roads and canals would help the manufacturers and farmers of the interior to bring their products to the major population centers of the coast and thus make such goods more competitive with foreign articles. Adams held virtually identical views of domestic policy, but he had never propounded them as clearly, or tied them as neatly, as Clay had.

  But Clay was a schemer. In early 1822 he appears to have carried out an audacious plan to blacken Adams’ reputation. For reasons that seemed obscure at the time, a congressman, John Floyd, had called on President Monroe to turn over to the House a complete record of the correspondence from the Treaty of Ghent. Clay appears to have inspired the request; he was probably hoping to rake up the old controversy between him and Adams over whether the British should have been permitted to keep the right to navigate the Mississippi in exchange for preserving the right of New Englanders to fish off Newfoundland. In fact, the other commissioners had sided with Adams, and in any case the proposed deal had fallen through. But now it could be made to appear that Adams had been guided by his family’s pro-British sentiments—a false claim—and had been prepared to help his native New England at the expense of the West, which was at least arguably true.

  In the course of gathering the material, Adams came across an unpublished letter from Jonathan Russell, a junior member of the delegation at Ghent, objecting to the proposed swap and suggesting that he would detail his concerns in a later letter to then Secretary of State Monroe. Russell had gone back to his position as interim minister to Sweden but had not been asked to serve as permanent ambassador—a failure he may have blamed on Adams. He had returned to the United States and won election to the Senate from Massachusetts. He joined Floyd in calling for the fullest possible production of documents. Adams asked Russell if he would mind including the letter. Russell said that he would not; indeed, he would like to include the later letter as well. This was nowhere to be found in the State Department archives, so he offered to furnish a duplicate from a copy he said that his daughter had made. On April 22, Russell dropped off the duplicate at the State Department.

  What Adams read was shocking. After reciting claims and counterclaims with which Adams was perfectly familiar, Russell accused his fellow commissioners of deliberately ignoring instructions not to barter away the Mississippi for the fisheries. In fact, Secretary of State Monroe had issued such instructions in 1813 but then countermanded them in 1814—as Russell would have known perfectly well when writing the letter. From this fact, and other small discrepancies, Adams realized that the “duplicate” was a fake—a forgery designed to do terrible damage to his reputation and play right into the hands of Clay, the champion of the West. Adams concluded that Clay was the master puppeteer of the drama. He was far from alone in that assumption. Senator Daniel Barton of Missouri, no friend to Adams, described the Russell letter as “one of the artifices of Clay to render Adams unpopular & advance his own pretensions to the Presidency.”

  Provoking John Quincy Adams to righteous wrath was a poor idea. Adams immediately winkled the original of the letter out of President Monroe, confirming that, unlike the “duplicate,” it made no allegations of bad faith. By going painstakingly over every jot and tittle, Adams found in all 172 variations between the two letters. Monroe, who had no wish to be coated with flying mud, asked Adams to keep the letter private, in exchange for which he would state that he had approved the transaction at Ghent. Russell, now realizing that his plot had miscarried, raced to the White House to tell the president that in fact there was no reason to release the letter; Adams found him there. Now the positions were reversed: Adams’ good name depended on the release of the letter and the alleged duplicate. Monroe hated the idea; after a heated exchange, the president said that he would convey the letters only if Congress asked him to do so. Congress would soon adjourn, and the whole affair would be dropped. Adams now engaged in a subterfuge: he asked a friend in Congress to call for the letters. On May 7, Congress passed a resolution seeking the documents.

  That very day—it must have been a happy one—Adams rode with the president to the House in order to deliver the letters and his report on the discrepancies. The report provoked the kind of newspaper donnybrook he professed to deplore. Russell had gotten his “duplicate” letter published in the National Intelligencer, which printed congressional debates and enjoyed a semiofficial status. Adams persuaded his friend Walsh to print both letters, along with yet another version Russell had supplied. Walsh added a commentary noting that Adams had been utterly vindicated. Now the anti-Adams press swung into action: the Aurora, the Franklin Gazette, and the Richmond Enquirer ran articles supporting Russell’s allegations. Adams himself refuted Russell’s claims in two letters to the National Intelligencer.

  Louisa, up in Quincy, wrote almost daily to entertain her husband with news and gossip, as once she had done for her father-in-law. She implored him to have done with Russell; so did other friends. He had, after all, reduced the man to smoking rubble. It was a brutally hot summer, and Washington was almost empty. Adams must have yearned to go north to join his family. But he would not—not while Russell refused to admit guilt. “If he wishes for peace with me,” Adams wrote a friend, “he must hold out the white flag.” Adams committed all his thoughts on the subject to a pamphlet—in fact, a book—that he self-published in September under the title The Duplicate Letters, the Fisheries and the Mississippi.

  Clay himself did not surface until November, when he wrote a letter to the National Intelligencer disavowing any connection to the “unhappy controversy.” Clay noted, as if in passing, that “he thinks there are some errors (no doubt unintentional) both as to matters of fact and matters of opinion” in Adams’ account. Clay should never have given the Adams beehive even a modest shake. Adams promptly wrote in to say that since Clay’s enumeration of those errors “may chance to be postponed until both of us shall have been summoned to account for all our errors before a higher tribunal than that of our country,” he wished to stipulate that in fact his own assertions would “be found to abide unshaken the test of human scrutiny of talents and of time.” In the months to come, Clay would insist to correspondents that he had done nothing to instigate Russell, but few believed him.

  Adams had fought a newspaper war and won hands down—not by calling on a “stipendiary editor” or conferring official favors but by deploying the gift for inspired polemic that had served him well since the era of Publicola. He had vindicated his honor and at the same time greatly raised his standing in the court of public opinion. He had utterly silenced his critics and dismayed Henry Clay. Adams received letters of support and congratulation from all over the country. He learned of one of the most unexpected tributes from Robert Walsh, who wrote to say that at a dinner he had heard the venerable Timothy Pickering—he of the Essex Junto—declare, “I regard Mr. Russell as a man fairly done over. Mr. Adams will be exalted in the estimation of New England by his Remarks, and ought to be exalted in any part of the world.”

  The Russell episode looks in retrospect like a smashing political victory, but if Adams thought of it that way, he never said so. For him, the stakes were far higher than office. To Louisa he described the fight with Russell as “an affair of more than life or death”—an affair, that is, of honor. In one of her letters to her husband, Louisa suggested that he come join her in Philadelphia, which would permit him to do some campaigning as well. Adams refused. “There will be candidates enough for the Presidency without me, and if my delicacy is not suited to the times, there are candidates enough who have no such delicacy.”

  Was Adams lying to himself—or to Louisa and his friends and supporters? In our o
wn time we take it for granted that people are propelled by their hungers, very much including those who won’t confess to them. It is a staple of modern scholarship on Adams that he pursued higher office with as much ardor as his rivals, even if he deployed different methods. Ernest May, one of the great scholars of nineteenth-century American history, has subtly teased out the political calculations embedded in Adams’ foreign policy views. Yet there is little if any evidence that Adams thought this way and a good deal of evidence that he didn’t. This was the same man who had gotten himself recalled as a senator by taking positions directly at odds with the interests of his constituents.

  Adams was not less ambitious than other men, but he had learned from childhood to force his appetites through the narrow straits of principle. Republicanism, for Adams, meant self-abnegation. He had never, as he said in his letter to Louisa, sought partisan allies in Congress, or in the press, or in state legislatures. Should he start now? Should he, who had not taken a day off in the blazing Washington summer, take a vacation from his job in order to campaign in Philadelphia? Tell my friends there, he said, “that I am going by another road and to another temple.” Adams would fight only the fights he considered worthy, and he would do so, as always, by himself. On his fifty-fifth birthday, July 11, he was stuck in sultry and empty Washington. He must have been feeling very alone, for he wrote that, while he was beset by enemies, “I have my own errors to dread more than the power of my adversary. A single false step will ruin me. I need advise very much, and I have no one to advise me.” Or rather, he would not listen to those who wished to advise him, and even he found it difficult to live always by his own counsel.