John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  The Report of the Minority of the Committee of Manufactures Submitted to the House of Representatives February 28, 1833 bore very little resemblance to the report of a Congressional committee. It was, rather, a single-minded effort to obliterate the edifice Adams believed that Jackson and his allies were seeking to erect in lieu of the American System. Adams began by taking exception to a phrase from the annual message: “The wealth and strength of its country are its population, and the best part of that population are the cultivators of the soil.” Adams insisted that the “cultivators” Jackson had in mind were not Jefferson’s yeomanry but rather the wealthy landowners of the South who constituted America’s feudal order. He insisted that the entire system envisioned in the president’s annual message was designed to serve the interests of that order. Echoing Jackson’s own language, he asserted that the president wished to reduce the federal government to “a simple machine.” Simplicity, Adams declared, “is the essential characteristic in all slavery,” for all men are either masters or slaves. The government of a free people is bound to be complex, for relations among them, the play of their interests, must be complex. Here was a new weapon in Adams’ rhetorical armamentarium: the play on words, turning the word “simple” against itself, as he had earlier with “machine.”

  Again and again in the minority report Adams turned his thunder on the forces of nullification, as if the president had not, in fact, trumped his own annual message with his magisterial proclamation. For Adams, Jackson as well as Calhoun sought to make the state serve the interests of the slaveholders and their allies. Nullification, he observed, permitted one-twentieth of the nation’s population to frustrate the will of the rest, for example by blocking internal improvements that would benefit all. For what, he asked, “is this enormous edifice of fraud and falsehood erected? To rob the free workingman of the North of the wages of his labor—to take money from his pocket and put it into that of the Southern owner of machinery.”

  And from this flowed a multitude of sins. The surrendering of federally owned land to the states was of a piece with nullification, since it supposed that the land belonged to those states as parties to the Constitution, when in fact it was individuals, not states, who were parties to that compact. In addition, that land would ultimately be used to benefit “party adventurers,” by which Adams meant Jackson men. Adams saw the issue of public lands as a scheme cooked up by Van Buren to buy the loyalty of the West in advance of the 1836 election. The national interest was being sacrificed to the interests of the powerful and the few.

  Adams now returned to the question of the tariff and thus to the issue of rival sectional interests he had raised in his speech before the House. Manufacturers, he said, had long been “protected from the injurious regulations of foreign nations, as the planters of the South and the settlers of the West have been protected from the depredations and hostile incursions of Indian savages.” Protectionism, for Adams, was simply one of the many forms of state protection. In the “Fort Hill Address” Calhoun had argued that states represented individual and sectional interests more faithfully than the national government could and thus needed to take precedence. Adams, in effect, rejoined that in a large, diversified republic only an active, complex central government could adjudicate among clashing interests.

  Adams ended this long and impassioned philippic by comparing his own vision of an activist government harnessing “national energies and resources to great undertakings,” to the one offered in Jackson’s message: “impending with universal ruin, draining all the sources of fertility from the fountains of internal national improvement, shaking to its foundations all commercial confidence, by the determined annihilation of the Bank, and wresting forever from the people of the United States and from their posterity, for unnumbered ages, the inestimable inheritance of the public lands.”

  The minority report was widely read, at least by the standards of congressional reports. Charles had five thousand copies printed in Boston, and Adams made sure that friendly newspaper editors published the document. Nevertheless, he was only a bit player in the great drama over nullification; the principal roles belonged to Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster. It was, in fact, precisely because he had little real power that Adams could afford to be doctrinally pure, as the others could not. The role of lonely truth-teller came naturally to him. “Mr. Clay and Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Webster adapt their political opinions to the circumstances of the Times,” he wrote to Charles, “and so do the Federalists, and so do the Democrats, and so above all do the National Republicans.”

  After hardly more than a year in Congress, Adams had discovered a role for himself: the scold, the Cassandra, the solitary voice of conscience.

  CHAPTER 30

  The Ark of Our God Is Falling into the Hands of the Philistines

  (1831–1835)

  THE TWO-PARTY SYSTEM THAT HAD COME TO AN END WITH the collapse of the Federalists would not fully reconstitute itself until the rise of the new Republican Party in the 1850s. The older Republican Party, and its later-stage variant, the National Republicans, began to give way as the Democrats gained in strength. John Quincy Adams fancied himself a man of no party, but even such a man needed an affiliation in order to remain in politics. In the early 1830s Adams began to try on new identities—first as an Anti-Mason, then as a Whig. He fought the confines of both, though he ultimately found that Whiggism fitted him more comfortably than any of the others ever had.

  When William Seward had paid his visit to Adams in the summer of 1831, he was on his way to the first convention of the Anti-Masonic Party in Baltimore. His real mission was to learn if Adams would be prepared to accept the party’s nomination for president. In his usual manner Adams deprecated any possible role for himself, saying that he had no wish to place an impediment in the path of Henry Clay, that the task was one for a younger man, that he had no wish to bear once again the burdens of high office. Nevertheless, he declared, “if the Anti-Masons thought his nomination would be better than any other, he would not decline.” Seward continued on to Baltimore prepared to raise Adams’ banner.

  The fact that Adams was prepared to run for president yet again in 1832 testifies both to the unending force of his ambition and to his increasingly passionate advocacy of Anti-Masonry, which many of America’s leading men dismissed as a cause for cranks and opportunists. Masonry had long enjoyed a reputation for high respectability: several of the Founding Fathers, including George Washington, had been proud to count themselves in their ranks. Few Americans not admitted to Masonic lodges had the faintest idea what went on inside. A spectacular and horrific crime had changed all that. In 1826, William Morgan, a disgruntled Mason in Genesee County, New York, announced that he had written a book divulging the secret oaths Masons swore in order to advance through the organization’s hierarchy. According to later testimony, his fellow Masons, outraged at this violation of the pledge of secrecy, kidnapped him, rowed him out into the Niagara River, tied him with rope and weighted him down with stones, and dumped him over the side near the falls. (His body was never found.) Thanks to a conspiracy of silence among Masons and lodges who had been in on the plot, the refusal of Masonic prosecutors to pursue the case and of juries thick with Masons to convict, only a few small fry were convicted over the course of twenty trials. A crime committed by individuals thus evolved into a scandal engulfing an institution.

  Anti-Masonry swept across New England and the Mid-Atlantic states like a prairie fire—first New York, then Vermont, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania. Masons were denounced from the pulpit and vivisected in pamphlets and books and newspapers. By 1830, about one-eighth of the nation’s one thousand newspapers preached Anti-Masonry. Many of the leading lights of Anti-Masonry were evangelicals caught up in the fervor known as the Second Great Awakening. This was an era of moral mobilization, when citizens formed temperance societies and abolitionist bodies and “Young Men’s Societies” devoted to the advance of public morals. Freemasonry drew upon the language and symb
olism of Christianity; the foul murder of Morgan, and subsequent revelations about the bizarre rituals of the order, recast Masonry as a kind of demonic parody of true faith.

  Masons also came to be seen as enemies of democracy. Though Masonry had long been understood as a benevolent society that promoted good works and public-spiritedness, it was a secret society. From the moment Morgan was killed because he had planned to reveal those secrets—whatever they were—and the lodges rallied to the side of his persecutors in order to obstruct justice—that secrecy was recast as, in effect, an ongoing plot by elites against the ordinary citizens of the nation. Freemasonry suddenly appeared to be a state-within-the state—“a distinct, and independent, government, within the jurisdiction of the United States,” as the report to a Massachusetts Anti-Masonic convention put it.

  Adams had paid no attention to the Anti-Masonic movement either as president or in his first years out of office. But as he began to study the growing body of Anti-Masonic literature, he came to see Masonry as a threat both to public morals and to republican principles. In May 1831 he had attended the Massachusetts Anti-Masonic convention. News of Adams’ presence spread swiftly among the leaders of the new Anti-Masonic Party, then looking for a standard-bearer for the 1832 election. Party officials had hoped that Henry Clay, a staunch Mason, would renounce the order and thus make possible a merger between the Anti-Masons and the National Republicans. Clay had refused to do so. Men began beating a path to Adams’ doorstep. In early June his friend Timothy Fuller came to ask Adams whether his new devotion to the Anti-Masonic cause meant that he would oppose Clay’s election. And Adams grandly said, “The dissolution of the Masonic institution in the United States I believe to be more important to us and our posterity than the question whether Mr. Clay or General Jackson shall be the President chosen at the next election.” Fuller understood that Adams was preparing to heed the call of posterity. William Seward left with the same impression.

  The rank and file at the Anti-Masonic convention in Baltimore balked when asked to select as their first candidate the president who had been drubbed in the previous election. Instead they nominated another member of Adams’ cabinet, William Wirt, the former attorney general. Had Adams seen Anti-Masonry as simply a vehicle to restore him to the White House, he would have heeded the call of his son Charles and other friends to end his dalliance with the movement. In fact, Adams now felt free to publicly take up the Anti-Masonic cudgel. He began firing off letters on the subject to friends and newspaper editors. “Are you familiar with the facts around Morgans murder, with the nature of Masonic rituals, with oaths and penalties?,” he wrote to Massachusetts governor Levi Lincoln. Adams filled in the details. He did not win many converts. Edward Ingersoll, a Philadelphia attorney, responded, “Many agree with you though a subject which they have as little considered as the Syriac language.” This was as close as any of Adams’ friends would get to telling him that they thought he was in the grip of a mania.

  Why was Adams so exercised on a subject most of his peers dismissed as a species of zealotry? First, he believed, more fervently than did many other men, that all politics, and all policy, rested on the foundation of “public morals.” Almost half a century earlier, Adams had delivered a graduation address at Harvard that contrasted the “austere republican virtues” of the revolutionary generation with the “selfish and contracted principles” of his own time. There was nothing in Adams of the rationalist utilitarianism of his one-time friend Jeremy Bentham. The former president was not just a deeply committed Christian but a Puritan who believed that both men and societies were continually called to defend virtue in a fallen world. For Adams, Masonry was both a moral crime and a public menace. This view set him apart from the other great statesmen of his day, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, who worried more about the political influence of Anti-Masonry, the threat it posed to their own National Republican Party, than about the alleged dangers of Masonry itself. Adams was fully prepared to pay the political price.

  It wasn’t simply the atmosphere surcharged with piety and fervor that made Anti-Masonry seem like a dubious cause to most men in Adams’ circle, but the frank anti-elitism of the movement. Adams, too, had always recoiled at any movement armed with pitchforks and at men like Thomas Paine—or Bentham—who provided those movements with a rationale. At the same time, Adams never saw himself as a member of a privileged elite. He was, if anything, an apostate. In Masonry he saw a deeply anti-republican, and thus un-American, scheme by the elite to perpetuate itself. In a letter addressed to the people of Massachusetts in January 1834, Adams wrote that “political Anti-Masonry sprang from the bosom of the people themselves, and it was the unsophisticated, unlearned voice of the people” that had cried out in horror at the events surrounding the murder of Morgan. “So it is,” Adams observed, “with all great moral reforms.” The Gospel of Peace, after all, had been proclaimed by the son of a carpenter.

  In his contempt for political calculation, his indifference to respectable opinion, his archaic faith in republican principles—and his sheer cussedness—Adams prefigured the great battle he would fight against the slave power in Congress.

  In 1832, Adams arranged to exchange a series of public letters with William Stone, a newspaperman and a rare moderate among the ranks of ex-Masons. Stone explained that the dreadful symbols, the terrible oaths, and the grim punishments used in the lodges were not meant to be taken literally and were preposterous rather than dangerous. Nevertheless, Stone concluded that Masonry should be dissolved. Morgan’s murder and the subsequent cover-up showed that Masons had come to wrongly believe that their oaths superseded their loyalty to the state. In any case, a secret order making use of allegorical speech had no place in a democratic society.

  In his letters to Stone, Adams refused to accept the proposition that Masonry was a harmless practice that had lost touch with its own Christian and patriotic principles. Even the mildest of the oaths, that of the so-called Entering Apprentice, Adams wrote, was “extrajudicial” and thus contrary to law, as well as violating Jesus’ injunction to swear no oaths. No decent Christian could either take the oath or accept the barbarous punishments to be meted out to transgressors. If anything, Adams added, the cynical deployment of Scripture offered the perfect rationale for unbelievers prepared to commit heinous deeds against non-Masons. Adams did not at first send the letters to Stone, but they were widely circulated among the leading Anti-Masons. Richard Rush reported that they were “enthralled to see Mr. Adams, the giant, engaged in the glorious contest for the demolition of the babel of misery.” Anti-Masonry could hardly be dismissed as a crackpot cause if such a man as Adams had taken it up. Stone published the letters in late 1832, and they were widely reprinted.

  The 1832 presidential election offered a stinging rebuke to political Anti-Masonry. Jackson was reelected by a thumping majority over Clay, while William Wirt took 2.4 percent of the popular vote and 7 of the 288 electoral votes. But for Adams, Anti-Masonry was a moral cause, not a political movement. He remained the chief publicist of the cause. In the spring of 1833 he wrote a series of hectoring letters to Secretary of State Edward Livingston, the highest-ranking Mason in the Jackson administration—a “General Grand High Priest of the Masonic General Royal Arch Order,” as Adams delightedly noted, as often as possible. He sent Livingston his letters to Stone, daring him either to refute the allegations or to call for the abolition of Masonry. Livingston did not even bother to respond. Adams wrote again and again—always, of course, sending copies to the press. He closed the series with a thunderous coda: “The strength, the glory, the happiness of a nation are all centred in the purity of its morals; and institutions founded upon imposture, are the worst of all corruptions, for they poison the public morals at their fountains, and by multiplying the accomplices in guilt, arm them with the confidence of virtue.”

  Anti-Masonry remained a powerful force in state politics, including in Massachusetts, and Adams continued to hitch his wagon to what turned out to be
a fading star. In September 1833, the state party unanimously passed a resolution naming Adams as its candidate for governor. Adams wrote back to say that, much though he had no wish to serve as governor, and so forth and so on, “I can not suffer any personal considerations to withstand the call of so large, so respectable, and so virtuous a portion of the population.” Adams said that he would run only in order to “heal the divisions of party”—that is, to serve as a bridge between the National Republicans and the Anti-Masons. He was not convinced that this was possible, but he could see no other clear path to his political future. And in fact in early October the National Republicans, rather than rally behind Adams, nominated John Davis, a congressman from Worcester. In the election, Davis took the most votes, followed by Adams and Marcus Morton, the Democratic candidate. Since none took a majority, the election was thrown into the state assembly—a bizarre rerun of Adams’ own 1824 election.

  Adams was loath to win by “legislative cabal,” as he once had. Even worse, he feared that running and losing would so damage his reputation that he would be turned out of office, “and my public life will terminate by the alienation from me of all mankind.” It wasn’t the alienation he feared, but the end of his political career. In the first days of 1834, Adams held a long talk with Davis, who pledged that if elected he would seek to heal the rift between his party and the Anti-Masons. That was good enough for Adams, who asked to withdraw from the runoff and urged party leaders to support Davis.