by James Traub
No president before Adams had ever gone on to serve in the House; no president after him ever would. (Andrew Johnson would serve briefly in the Senate after his tenure as president.) Both Charles and Louisa had asked him not to stand for office. Louisa was so upset that she refused to return with him to Washington, even though that meant doing without her adored grandchildren. Adams himself reflected that his new role “has drifted me back again amidst the breakers of the political ocean.” But the breakers beckoned to Adams more than any gentle swell ever could. And the election was sweet vindication. His old friends had deserted him. Otis had tried to destroy him. He thought of a line from an opera about Richard the Lion-Hearted: “O Richard! O mon roi! L’univers t’abandonne” (O Richard! O my king! The world is forsaking you.) Adams had persevered. His election as president, he reflected, “was not half so gratifying to my inmost soul.” What he could not know then was that his sixteen-year tenure in Congress would be far more gratifying to his soul, and to the nation, than his time as president had been.
ADAMS WOULD NOT TAKE OFFICE AS THE REPRESENTATIVE FROM Plymouth until the new Congress convened in December 1831. Nevertheless, he left for Washington at the end of 1830 and remained there through the spring. The beleaguered opposition welcomed him as a celebrity in their midst. Adams recorded receiving three hundred visitors at John and Mary’s house on President’s Park at a New Year’s Day reception. Opposition leaders like Edward Everett asked him to help formulate the response to Jackson’s second annual message to Congress. Adams was scarcely a source of optimism. He told Philip Fendall, an essayist who hoped to write a biography of him, that Jackson’s opposition to internal improvements and domestic manufacture was bound to be more popular than the American System because the first reduced the need for revenue, while the second increased it. “Of the two systems,” he wrote, in words today’s liberal Democrats would find all too familiar, “that of the Administration sacrifices the future and remote benefits to the present, and therefore addresses itself more to the prejudices and feelings of the people.”
Adams was not yet ready to plunge back into politics. He spent much of his time alone, reading. He read Jefferson’s memoirs, which had just been published, and was struck anew by the man’s gifts and foibles. Jefferson, he thought, was too indulgent with himself to accept truths adverse to his own happiness, including the evils of slavery, which he intellectually understood. He had “a memory so pandering to the will, that in deceiving others he seems to have begun by deceiving himself.” He had no fear of God or the afterlife. “The tendency of this condition upon a mind of great compass and powerful resources is to produce insincerity and duplicity, which were his besetting sins throughout life.” Jefferson, in short, was the very type of a man with great talents but weak principles. Adams wrote a review of the volume for Alexander Everett’s North American Review.
In early February, Adams endured a terrible bout of the inflammation of the eyes from which he had long suffered. At times he had to lie in bed in the darkness. He dictated to Louisa a letter for Charles, which included a poem on his condition: “Of my two orbs of vision one / Has caught fire; and while it burns / Swollen, bloodshot, from the blessed sun / And Heaven’s faint light it turns.” Perhaps Adams was thinking of Milton’s great verses on his own blindness. Barely able to read or write, Adams began to compose verses in his head, as he had done off and on for most of his life. Since he knew the Bible virtually by heart, he commenced by rewriting the Psalms. And he meditated something far more ambitious. The previous fall, he had read several biographies of Lord Byron, a Jefferson-like figure whose gifts he admired and whose morals he abhorred. When his vision cleared, he began reading some of Byron’s mock epic poems, including “Beppo,” written in Dante’s ottava rima. The ex-president, the old Federalist with the blood of the Puritans coursing through his veins, began to turn over in his mind the project of a satirical epic in ottava rima.
Adams had long meditated on the story of the English conquest of Ireland told in Hume’s History of England, which he had first read in St. Petersburg at age fourteen. According to Hume, a twelfth-century Irish prince, Dermot MacMorrogh, had cuckolded a fellow king’s wife, been driven from Ireland, enlisted the English King Henry II in a plot to conquer Ireland on behalf of England, invaded the island at the head of British troops, and overthrown its kings before himself being murdered, thus opening the way for the English dominion over Ireland that persisted to that day. Hume had described Henry as the very model of an English sovereign, whereas to Adams the narrative exemplified the licentiousness, brutality, and bald ambition that drives men to war and conquest and ultimately leads to the prostration of one nation before another. And the story of a legitimate king overthrown by an unscrupulous usurper now had a personal resonance, which Adams would scarcely have felt as a boy in Russia.
In early March, his eyes still smarting from his affliction, Adams took off on long walks at dawn along Pennsylvania Avenue, lost in thought as he arranged the scansion and meter of his Byronic stanzas. At first Adams made a game effort to keep up a tone of Byronic raillery, but it was too foreign to his nature, and before long he had lapsed into solemn moralizing. “All my attempts at humor evaporated in the first canto,” he reflected. Adams felt ashamed of how far his efforts fell short of his Byronic model, yet he had fallen into the grip of “a rhyming fit.” He would wake up in the middle of the night and compose five more stanzas by dawn. Then he would take his walk, write more stanzas in his head, and finally write it all down after breakfast. At night he would read the new portion to Louisa. Originally planned for fifty stanzas, Dermot grew to two hundred, and then more.
Adams finally put down Dermot on April 16. It ran over two thousand lines and contained a few absurdities and several quite touching verses. He wondered if he should throw it in the fire. If he didn’t, it may be because his object was as much polemical as poetical. Charles Edel, a recent Adams biographer, argues that Adams intended Dermot as an allegory of his own tenure. In the preface Adams observes that the old king, Roderick O’Conner, “could not unite the people in any measures, either for the establishment of order, of for defence against foreigners.” The moral of the tale, Edel asserts, is: “moral decay presaged and led to national decline.” Yet Adams was not content to be the kind of pamphleteer-poet who prated about Washington on the Delaware. He knew very well what great poetry sounded like and yearned with all his soul to produce it. Alas, he couldn’t.
Dermot was published in late 1832; the author received $100. Adams had copies sent to his friends, who duly wrote back to say that it was the finest thing he had written. Several loyal newspapers printed excerpts and published warm reviews. But Adams’ Irish epic was not widely reviewed or admired. Readers may have had trouble separating the poem’s esthetic merits from their views of its author, who was neither popular nor thought to be endowed with a deep reservoir of imagination. It is, however, safe to say that Dermot MacMorrogh is the greatest romantic epic ever composed by a former US president.
CHAPTER 29
Our Union: It Must Be Preserved
(1831–1833)
IN A LETTER WRITTEN IN THE SPRING OF 1830, JOHN QUINCY Adams sardonically observed that “a discovery has been made of a new attribute of state sovereignty, the right of every state legislature to nullify within the boundaries of the state every act of Congress palpably unconstitutional.” In fact the doctrine known as nullification dated back to 1798 and 1799, when the state legislatures of Kentucky and Virginia had declared the Alien and Sedition Acts unconstitutional. (Jefferson had written the Kentucky Resolution, and Madison the Virginia.) In Adams’ own time, Georgia had openly challenged the national government over an Indian treaty. The doctrine, however, would only be fully articulated with South Carolina’s repudiation of the Tariff of Abominations. The leading men of the state saw the tariff as a threat not only to their prosperity but to their entire slave-based culture. Cotton, the state’s great cash crop, would face reciprocal duti
es in Europe, while American duties would raise the cost of the imported goods on which South Carolina depended.
In late 1828, while Adams was still president, the South Carolina legislature had published a broadside titled Exposition and Protest, secretly written by John C. Calhoun. The vice president had claimed that “as an essential attribute of sovereignty,” states had the right to nullify federal statutes, such as the tariff, which constituted “an infraction of their powers.” The assertion of state supremacy would drain real power from the federal government and return the nation to the era of the Articles of Confederation. Calhoun claimed to be simply building on the foundation laid by Jefferson and Madison. The principle was, however, so self-evidently dangerous that no other Southern state agreed.
The state’s congressional delegation pressed the case in Washington. In January 1830, the Senate debated legislation on the sale of public lands. Robert Hayne of South Carolina argued that federal lands should be ceded to the states to dispose of as they wished. Daniel Webster, the Federalist champion, retorted that the federal government must retain jurisdiction over federal property. Hayne now showed his hand, insisting, as Calhoun had, that in a confederated union ultimate sovereignty rested with the states. Now the issue had been joined. Webster rose to deliver a majestic rebuttal in which he argued that the Constitution had been a pact not among states but among people, who had collectively agreed to establish a federal state. This was the speech that ended, “Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” It was the most famous congressional oration delivered until that moment; Gales and Seaton of the National Intelligencer printed and distributed forty thousand copies.
Adams was deeply impressed by Webster’s speech, which, he wrote to his friend Joseph Blunt, “pulverizes” the advocates of nullification. He told Van Buren, who claimed rather improbably not to have followed the debate, that he would do well to read it, for “it is the most important one that has taken place since the existence of the Government.” Jackson’s initial message to Congress had persuaded Adams, as well as a great many Southerners, that the president would be a friend to nullification. They were wrong, for Jackson was every bit the nationalist Adams was, though he did not share the Hamiltonian belief in an active national government. At a Jefferson Day dinner on April 13, Jackson lifted his glass, pointedly looked at Vice President Calhoun and said, “Our union: It must be preserved.” Calhoun, after a moment’s hesitation, had equivocally responded, “The union: next to our liberty, most dear.” The battle had been joined.
Adams was mulling this great question when he received an invitation from the townspeople of Quincy to deliver the July 4 address on what would be the fifty-fifth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration. He had used his previous Independence Day oration, in 1823, to lay out a new vision of America’s place in the world. Now he pondered whether to use this chance to expose the speciousness of the nullification doctrine. “Shall I speak my thoughts,” he asked himself, “or shall the fear of man deter me?” He was, he thought, “bolder in my youth than now.” In the end, of course, he spoke his mind. Adams began his oration, as tradition dictated, by speaking of the Revolution, but no one present would have mistaken his real subject. The Declaration, he observed, was issued by “the delegates of thirteen distinct, but UNITED colonies of Great Britain, in the name and behalf of their people.” The independence they announced proceeded from the union they declared. The colonies to which the people belonged were not even enumerated, for the Declaration constituted a “primitive social compact” among the peoples of those colonies. This was precisely the argument Webster had made in his debate with Hayne.
Adams now reverted to a familiar topic: England’s half-hearted commitment to its own constitutional principles. By what right had Parliament imposed taxes upon the American colonies, which had come into being through charters with the crown and were thus answerable only to the king? Blackstone, the greatest of all British legal authorities, had claimed that sovereignty, by its nature, must rest on “supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled authority.” Parliament had, in effect, availed itself of this species of constitutional absolutism. In fact, Adams said, absolute sovereignty is the doctrine of despotism, not republicanism. In a republic, sovereignty rests with the people, who covenant with one another to form a union, to which they grant limited powers. Adams then proceeded to make the very odd argument that the Articles of Confederation had failed not because citizens had refused to surrender enough sovereignty to the federal government, but because the state legislatures had insisted on retaining absolute power rather than sharing it with the national government. The Constitution had corrected the error. Those American states that asserted a sovereign right to determine the laws of the nation thus sought to annul the Constitution in favor of Blackstone’s monstrous doctrine.
Adams had turned nullification on its head: far from a response to the tyranny of an overweening federal government, as its adherents claimed, the doctrine was in fact a form of legislative tyranny. Even Webster hadn’t thought to make such an audacious claim. Nothing could be more characteristic of Adams than this combination of erudition, ingenuity, hyperbole, and spleen. His logic felt implacable even when his argument was improbable. This blend of reason and passion made him a fearsome disputant.
This was not, of course, a rhetorical game, but rather the emanation of Adams’ own vehement spirit, his deep and abiding sense of peril. Adams had been standing on the side of Union against sectional interest since the drama over the Louisiana Purchase three decades earlier. Now he saw the Union endangered not by a secret cabal but by a doctrine openly proclaimed and embraced by one of the original states. “Stripped of the sophistical argumentation in which this doctrine has been habited,” he cried, “its naked nature is an effort to organize insurrection against the laws of the United States.” Nullification sought to substitute force for democratic deliberation. “Let this agent but once intrude upon your deliberations,” he told the gathered citizens, and “despotic sovereignties will trample with impunity . . . upon the indefeasible and unalienable rights of man.”
A local printer distributed two thousand copies of the address, and then two thousand more. Adams sent copies to the men he regarded as his peers, including the Federalist legal scholar Nathan Dane, and Justices John Marshall and Joseph Story, now delivering lectures at Harvard on sovereignty and nullification. Story wrote back to say that he would cite Adams as an authority for his own views. Marshall stated he had been very much struck, and persuaded, by elements of Adams’ argument. Adams had found a way to join and shape this great debate. He sent a copy of his oration to Calhoun, “with the single assurance of regret, that upon topics of transcendent importance, our opinions should be so much at variance with each other.”
In many ways the debate between nationalists and nullifiers recapitulated the old tension between Federalists like Alexander Hamilton and anti-Federalists like Jefferson. But by now the irreconcilable economic interests of North and South lent urgency to what was already a profound disagreement over political principle. In the “Fort Hill Address” of July 1831, in which for the first time he made the public case for nullification, Calhoun described the doctrine as a “last resort” to be deployed only in the face of “dangerous infractions of the Constitution.” The tariff, imposed on the South by the national government, constituted just such an infraction. The interest of the two regions, he wrote “must, from the nature of things, in reference to the Tariff, be in conflict.” What were these “things”? Calhoun did not say; of course he meant slavery. A slave economy could not live by the same rules as one governed by free labor. Neither Adams nor Calhoun had referred to slavery; the issue was everywhere—and nowhere. Within a few years it would be the consuming question of Adams’ life.
ADAMS TURNED SIXTY-FOUR IN 1831. THIS HARDLY MADE HIM A fossil by the standards of the day: George Washington was still president at that age, and John Adams was just exiting. But John Quincy Adams had t
urned old when he was still young; to men who met him for the first time he had the remote majesty of a mountain seen in the distance.
In September 1831 William Seward, later Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state but then a young New York lawyer and aspiring politician, visited Adams at home. Seward recorded his impressions in a letter to a friend. “The house is very plain and old-fashioned,” he wrote. “Very plain ingrain carpeting covered the floor, very plain paper on the walls, modern but plain mahogany chairs.” On the walls were portraits of John Adams, George Washington, Martha Washington, and Jefferson (whom Adams, for all his misgivings, apparently still venerated). Adams himself was “sober, almost to gloom or sorrow,” his eyes inflamed, short, bald, slightly corpulent. He was dressed simply, in an olive frock coat, and seemed to be wearing as well a fine layer of learned dust. “It was obvious that he was a student,” Seward wrote, “just called from the labours of his closet.”
The two men spoke for three hours, chiefly about politics. “He spoke of General Jackson without one word of reserve or bitterness, or unkindness,” wrote Seward, “thought his Administration ruinous, but still doubted not that he would be re-elected.” The former president struck his young visitor as very much of a piece with his stolid and rigorously correct furnishings—“plain, honest and free in his discourse; but with hardly a ray of animation or of feeling in the whole of it.” Occasionally, Seward noted, “he rose into a temporary earnestness, and then a flash of ingenuous ardor was seen, but it was transitory, and all was cool, orderly and deliberate. . . . As I left the house, I thought I could plainly answer how it happened that he, the best President since Washington, entered and left the office with so few devoted personal friends.” But Adams remained a formidable presence. Elsewhere Seward wrote, “His vigor and his resolution astonished me,” and said that he had taken inspiration from the old man’s slow-burning fire.
