by James Traub
Adams still held the floor when Congress finally adjourned July 9. He was, he conceded, “sick at heart, exhausted, and faint with weariness and excessive heat, knowing that nothing further would be done by the House to any useful purpose.” In fact, he had succeeded; by rallying public opinion, he had persuaded Van Buren that annexation would have to be postponed. In October, the Texas envoys acknowledged the obvious by withdrawing their request for recognition.
ADAMS’ OTHER GREAT PREOCCUPATION DURING THIS PERIOD WAS an astonishing windfall the United States had received in late 1835. A previously unknown British citizen named James Smithson had left $500,000 to the United States in his will to “found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of Knowledge among men.” Smithson was a gentleman scientist and sole heir to a large fortune. A reticent man with no family of his own and little social life, Smithson was never known to have uttered a word about the United States and gave no outward sign of democratic sympathies. His gift was, and remains, a mystery.
The Smithson bequest offered a private solution to what Adams had long imagined as a public good, publicly supplied. Adams, like Henry Clay, had believed that the federal government had an obligation to promote economic development and build institutions, but while Clay thought almost exclusively in economic terms, Adams believed that the state needed to foster cultural and scientific institutions as well. In the most eloquent passages of his futile inaugural message to Congress in 1825, he had declared that God himself had enjoined upon society the obligation to improve man’s “moral, political, intellectual” condition. Adams had listed first among his proposals the establishment of a national university as well as academies for the propagation of knowledge, especially in “geographical and astronomical science.” If, as Adams believed, national greatness was to be measured not merely in wealth and military power but in enlightenment and understanding, the United States could not passively watch as the great powers of Europe made strides in scientific understanding.
Adams had failed, of course. But the Smithson bequest permitted the United States to make those strides without having to resort to its own funds. Nevertheless, champions of states’ rights opposed the Smithson gift for the same reason Adams favored it; John Calhoun argued that the money should be returned, though it wasn’t clear who else had title to it. Adams not only eagerly sought the bequest but knew exactly what he wanted to do with it. In June 1838, he held a two-hour conversation with President Van Buren in which he proposed that the legacy be devoted to the construction of an astronomical observatory—his long-time passion—as well as an “annual course of lectures upon the natural, moral and political sciences.”
The ridicule Adams had suffered when he had proposed a network of “lighthouses of the skies” in 1825 had not dampened his ardor on the subject. Astronomy, for Adams, was the celestial equivalent of the journeys of exploration, discovery, and mapping he favored at home—indispensable, of course, but also shot through with romance. Adams had been fascinated by astronomy since he had first looked through a telescope as a Harvard undergraduate. Charles had bought a house in Quincy, and that summer Adams set up a telescope there, often rising before dawn in order to watch the sunrise and returning at night to scan the stars. He pored over pages of algebraic tables. He was besotted with the glory of the heavens and suffused, he wrote, with “a painful desire to know more of this stupendous system; of sorrow in reflecting how little we can know of it; and almost desponding hope that we may know more of it hereafter.”
In the fall of 1838, as Richard Rush, who had been delegated to receive the Smithson bequest, was returning from London with 105 sacks filled with gold sovereigns, Adams wrote two long letters to Secretary of State John Forsyth, memorializing and expanding on his conversation with Van Buren and laying out the case for building an observatory. Adams’ great fear was that the bequest would be frittered away on schemes unworthy of Smithson’s majestic instructions. He admonished Forsyth that the funds must not be used to build a school, college, university, or, certainly, ecclesiastic establishment. The money must not “fall victim to the canker of almost all charitable foundations,” by which he meant handing out jobs to political hacks. Power should be vested in a board of trustees with members from both houses of Congress, eminent citizens, and cabinet officials.
In February 1839, Adams introduced legislation incorporating his vision for a Smithsonian Institution and warned his colleagues that the precious gift was in danger of being “wasted and dilapidated to feed the hunger and fatten the leaden idleness of mountebank projectors.” The struggle would go on for years.
ALL HIS LIFE ADAMS HAD STOOD ALONE, ACCEPTING AS RECOMPENSE his own gratified pride and the admiration of the few. He had grown accustomed to such cold comforts. Yet in recent years this man of no party had become a popular hero and an object of something like idolatry. In Quincy that summer of 1838, Adams received a letter from the abolitionist Lydia Marie Child, who said, “I am not willing to die without saying how deeply, how sincerely, how fervently, I thank you for the magnanimous course you have pursued in Congress.” While contemporaries “will imperfectly acknowledge your moral greatness,” she wrote, “the future will place you among the most illustrious of the world’s benefactors.” Adams deprecated all forms of praise, but he was plainly touched when a Quaker man came to fix a clock in his home and refused to accept payment owing to his veneration for Adams’ service to mankind.
In the late summer, Adams and Louisa were given a ball and a picnic by two hundred ladies from Quincy in gratitude for his role in presenting petitions. After a brief expression of embarrassed thanks, Adams told the ladies that he understood very well that “there was not the least danger of their obtruding their wishes upon any of the ordinary subjects of legislation,” such as banks and currency—indeed, that it was “scarcely consistent with civility to so much as name them in their presence.” He felt certain, however, that they would continue to devote their efforts to “the objects of kindness, of benevolence, of compassion” for which they were so well fitted “by the laws of their natures.” It was just as well that the audience included none of the members of Congress whom he had recently hectored about the heroic achievements of women of the past and to whom he had suggested that women had been unfairly deprived of political rights. On this subject, Adams was perfectly unregenerate.
In mid-November, Peter Chardon Brooks, Charles’ father-in-law, picked up Adams in his carriage and drove with him to Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Wet leaves plastered the ground; stagnant ponds dotted desolate valleys. The inscriptions on the old headstones had been worn to illegibility. Adams was deeply struck by the pervading air of gloom and decay. And it was here, in this baleful setting, that he stumbled on the tomb of Maria Sargent Curtis, Mary Frazier’s daughter. He was, as recounted earlier, moved to tears, both by gratitude that he had been spared the pain of the early death of a wife and perhaps a daughter and by the piercing memory of a love he had forced himself to surrender. Adams was seventy-one years old, rheumatic and gray and grim, but at that moment, in his imagination, he was a heartbroken young man of twenty-three.
CHAPTER 34
The Captives Are Free!
(1838–1841)
BY THE LATE 1830S, JOHN QUINCY ADAMS’ DAILY MAIL, ALWAYS stacked high with petitions, began to include as well an astounding number of death threats. The first one, dated February 10, 1837, featured a crude drawing of a hand holding a knife and, below, a sheathed sword. The author, who signed his name Dirk Hatteraich, wrote that if Adams dared raise his voice against slavery one more time, “You will be lynched if it has to be done by drawing you from your seat in the house by force. So be on your guard the author of this is now on his way to Washington with others able and determined to fulfill their threat.” Soon afterwards a package arrived from North Carolina containing a bullet inside a glove.
As Congress reconvened in December 1838, the letters began arriving in spa
tes—ten in January alone. On January 7, Thomas Jones of Westmoreland Country, Virginia, wrote to say that “some gentlemen” from the area were prepared to pay “a large premium” for Adams’ head. Until now, Jones had restrained them, but if Adams persisted in his course of presenting abolitionist petitions, he would “join their effort.” A week later came a much less polite missive from Richard Renald of Augusta, Georgia. Renald had been provoked by Adams’ support for establishing diplomatic relations with Haiti, which would lead to “a Big Black, Thick lipped, Cracked Heeled, Woolly headed, Skunk smelling, damned Negro” to be seated in Congress as “an equal to a white man in law and in justice.” Renald sought a duel. Should Adams decline, he warned, “you will when least expected, be shot down in the street, or your damned guts will be cut out in the dark.” Another would-be assassin, a B. J. Convield, serially heralded his arrival: he was stopped at the Ohio River by ice, he was laid up by rheumatism, but he was sure to arrive no later than February 22.
All the letters came from the South. Slaveholders seem to have persuaded themselves, and one another, that by killing Adams they could scotch the snake of abolitionism. This was a delusion, of course, but also a remarkable tribute to Adams’ reputation as the scourge of the slaveholders. The fact that Adams was not even an abolitionist seemed not to matter, for few men had launched so frontal an attack on slave owners as Adams had. Louisa was terrified for her husband but was of course powerless to make him change his rhetoric or his habits. She wrote to Charles that she was “harassed day and night by terrors for your father . . . who with that daring indifference to danger which he always displays has even taken pains to expose himself to attack and insult.” Adams did not bother to inform the House sergeant-at-arms or the DC federal marshal. In fact, he did nothing. Either good fortune or what he would have called a superintending Providence was watching over him; no desperado lunged at him in the dark.
The petition drama flared up anew in the first days of the 1838 session. Joshua Giddings, a new Whig representative from the Western Reserve of Ohio and a passionate abolitionist, watched in delight as the great Adams toyed with his would-be tormenters. In his diary he wrote:
The Speaker called louder and louder for “Order!” “Order!” “Order!,” but Mr. Adams continued speaking as though a perfect silence existed around him. The uproar increased, and the Speaker, rising from his chair, in great agitation and excitement, with stentorian voice called on the House to assist him in enforcing the rules. Amid this tumult Mr. Adams suddenly dropped into his chair, and the uproar immediately ceased, before the Speaker had fully pronounced his desire for assistance.
The old man, Giddings wrote, rocked with laughter.
Adams continued to fight, continued to treat the ever-renewed gag as a legal nullity, continued to present a great sheaf of petitions one by one, tolling off the name of the first signatory, the number of signers, and the place of origin. At first Giddings was too overawed to speak. Of the others, only Slade of Vermont shared Adams’ boldness. The others, Giddings complained in his journal, “mumble over the name of the first petitioner and their numbers in a low, indistinct voice, so as not to be heard.” Adams, by contrast, took an almost sadistic glee in exposing his enemies’ hypocrisy. He introduced what he claimed was a petition—in fact, he had invented it—to appoint a special committee to look into the “pedigree” of each member of Congress and to expel those who had “the least drop of coloured blood in their veins.” Adams was lampooning Southerners’ new fixation with racial purity, but no one could miss the barb: it was the plantation owners who were likeliest to have such blood in their veins. The Speaker ruled the resolution out of order.
Soon after the short session ended on March 4, Adams sat down to compose a series of open letters to the many Americans who had counted on him to present their petitions to Congress. The letters were reprinted in newspapers across the country. They give the strange impression that Adams had grown both more implacable in his horror of slavery and more skeptical of any of the available means of ending it. He had now concluded that abolitionism had been built into America’s foundation. Of the Declaration of Independence, Adams declared, “The same moral thunderbolt, which melted the chains of allegiance that bound the colonist to his sovereign, dissolved the fetters of the slave.” The unstated implication was that the three-fifths compromise embedded in the Constitution was not merely a piece of pragmatism but a violation of fundamental principle. Yet in a later letter, Adams asserted that immediate abolition was a fantasy, for public opinion would never permit it. Adams heaped scorn on the abolitionists for imagining that slaveholders could be converted to their cause without compensation. “I can,” he wrote, “lend my hand to no project for the abolition of slavery in these United States without the consent of their masters.” He lamented “the temper mutually rankling between the slave-holders and the abolitionists.”
After constructing an argument that revealed slavery to be an insult to republican principle as well as Christian doctrine, Adams had adopted the position of a “moderate” slave owner like Henry Clay, decrying the two extremes. Adams was a primeval republican who would not supersede the will of voters even for transcendent moral purposes. But he did not believe in the moral equivalence of slaveholders and abolitionists—far from it. He did not believe that emancipating slaves without compensation constituted an unjust “taking.” He did not regret the rankling of temper, for which he himself was so greatly responsible.
Once Adams had trembled before the prospect of a civil war severing the Union and ending slavery—and said, let it be so. But that was in his journal, with the prospect of such a war far in the distance. Now, with the likes of Garrison agitating for such an apocalyptic outcome, and the slavocracy increasingly prepared to accept it, Adams drew back. He was acutely aware of the fears abolitionism had awakened in the country. He had already made himself an object of hatred across the South and in much of Congress. Adams understood that he would do no favors to the cause by openly taking it up, as Tappan and others urged him to do. He had often told them as much. Adams wanted to preserve his usefulness. This was a novel course for him: he had spent most of his career defying public opinion. But he had not done so out of vanity. If he could serve the course of justice by soft-pedaling his views, he was prepared to do so—even as, at the same time, he made the intellectual case for a more absolutist position.
Adams was trying very hard to carve out a space for himself between the existing camps on slavery. In January 1839, he had introduced a constitutional amendment that would ban “hereditary slavery” after July 4, 1842; admit no new slave states save Florida; and prohibit slavery and the slave trade in Washington after July 4, 1845. The proposal was never even considered by the House and would have won few if any votes if it had been, as Adams knew very well. He had probably offered it as an answer to abolitionists who asked how he would end slavery voluntarily. Adams didn’t really see how slavery would be ended in any way save through war, though he would keep trying to find ways to do so. In the meantime, he would focus on the right of petition, which the American people supported, rather than abolitionism, which they didn’t.
Adams continued to cast a pox on both houses. In an open letter in July, he rebuked the American Anti-Slavery Society for insisting that every slave owner was a “man-stealer,” a crime for which the Bible mandated death. Such inflamed rhetoric would likely lead to a “civil, servile and savage war,” which of course was just what many Southerners predicted. Adams’ letters delivered a deathblow to the AASS, already starving for funds and unable to show its supporters even the smallest sign of success. Radicals denounced him; moderates like Channing tried, and failed, to establish a new organization advocating gradual abolition. The AASS disappeared in 1840. The movement splintered between firebrands and moderates.
Adams remained, as always, a party of one. Many of his abolitionist friends and allies wrote to express their deep dismay with his views. One of them, Gerrit Smith, a wealthy New
Yorker who was one of the movement’s chief financial backers, wrote that refusing to demand the abolition of slavery in Washington because Southerners opposed it was little different from acquiescing to burglary or counterfeiting because Congress had approved them. In his own letters, Adams continued to ridicule the anti-slavery society and to criticize the very concept of a “partial association,” or what we would call a “special interest group,” precisely on the grounds that it represented a special, or partial, rather than national interest.
IN SEPTEMBER 1839, ADAMS READ A LETTER FROM WILLIAM JAY, A leading evangelical reformer, to William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator that made him shake with indignation. Several weeks earlier, an American naval vessel had encountered a slave-trading ship, the Amistad, off the tip of Long Island. After finding that the captives, whom he took to be slaves, had mutinied and killed the ship’s captain and its cook, and were now seeking to return to Africa, the naval officer had seized the ship with its human cargo and brought it into port in New London, Connecticut. The captives were now to be tried as pirates and murderers. Adams picked up his pen and wrote to Jay, asserting that the mutineers had in fact “vindicated their own right of liberty” by “executing the justice of Heaven upon one pirate murderer, their tyrant and oppressor.” The abolitionist community had mobilized around the fate of the Amistad captives, and word quickly spread that the former president shared their feelings. Within days, leaders of the movement were seeking Adams’ legal advice.
Adams had just finished excoriating the movement for imagining that slavery could be ended by righteous rhetoric. He considered Garrison a wild-eyed radical. The captives on the Amistad had apparently killed a white man in cold blood. Why, then, had Adams so quickly leapt to their defense? Certainly Adams felt very differently about enforcing the laws and treaties that prohibited the slave trade than he did about the quixotic effort to overturn settled law in the face of overwhelming resistance. But Adams’ quick reaction also shows that he hated slavery as viscerally as Weld or Tappan did and that he instinctively saw slaves as fully human beings. And for Adams, a republican in his very soul, mankind’s great distinguishing feature was the inextinguishable wish for liberty. The more he learned about the Amistad case, the higher his dudgeon rose. There was, besides, a kind of romance in it: in the Amistad, Adams found a cause worthy of his dreams of heroic and solitary combat. Adams would begin the episode with self-exhortations of prudence and move inexorably toward commitment heart and soul.
