by James Traub
CHAPTER 36
The Sober Second Thought of the People
(1842–1845)
THE POLITICS OF THE EARLY 1840S WERE EVERY BIT AS explosive as they had been a decade earlier, when Andrew Jackson had challenged the prerogatives of Congress over the national bank. John Tyler had come, by accident, to preside over a party whose deepest principles he opposed. Rather than defer to his fellow Whigs, he confronted them. Tyler had felt constrained to keep Harrison’s cabinet but not his policies. In August 1841, after Henry Clay pushed through a bill to reestablish a national bank, Tyler vetoed it. The Congress sent the president a new version of the legislation, and he vetoed it once again. In the ensuing furor, Tyler’s entire cabinet resigned—save for Daniel Webster, who convinced himself that the nation needed him to remain. Adams never forgave Webster for continuing to serve the president and to advance his policies.
With an all-but-Democrat now occupying the White House, Democrats in the House felt emboldened to push their agenda of “retrenchments,” budget cuts designed not to eliminate a deficit—there was none—but to throttle the growth of the federal government. They proposed cutting clerks from departments, requiring the House doorkeeper to pay for candles out of his own budget, and the like. Tyler gave the campaign his support, though he had not initially proposed such measures. The Whig majority pushed back. When the House passed a tariff bill, Tyler wielded the veto once again. Party members, including Southerners, implored Adams to take to the floor of the House to denounce Tyler’s policies, which of course he was delighted to do.
The bitterness between the two parties reached such a pitch that the House impaneled a special committee to examine whether Tyler had committed impeachable offenses by frustrating the will of Congress. Adams was asked to serve as chair. The committee issued a report in August stating that the president had perpetrated “offenses of the gravest character,” though it did not ultimately recommend impeachment. Forty years earlier Adams had defended judges faced with impeachment charges on the grounds that they had not committed “high crimes and misdemeanours,” as the Constitution required. Neither, it’s safe to say, had Tyler. But Adams viewed the president as illegitimate—just as so many rivals had viewed him after the 1824 election.
Whatever Adams’ views of Jackson and Van Buren, he considered them both, in their own way, accomplished men; Tyler, by contrast, he treated as a usurper, a villain out of Shakespeare. In September 1842, Adams delivered a speech to his constituents in Quincy in which he denounced the president as a liar and a hypocrite. Tyler had divided his own party in order to advance the interest of slave owners; had turned honest men out of office in favor of his own appointees; had plotted to starve the federal government of revenue, and thus endanger the union, by ending the sale of public lands. “Nullification,” he thundered, “is the creed of the Executive Mansion in Washington.” Adams spoke at length about Tyler’s designs on Texas. The previous winter, pro-administration newspapers had run articles calling for the annexation of Texas. Tyler had kept silent on the issue, but in his first message to Congress he called for major increases in naval spending, which Adams interpreted as preparation for war with Mexico. As minister to Mexico, Tyler had appointed Waddy Thompson, the most virulent of the defenders of slavery and a single-minded enthusiast of incorporating Texas into the union. Tyler’s diplomacy toward Mexico constituted “treachery of the deepest dye,” Adams said—though he was careful to exempt the popular Daniel Webster from this judgment. Adams thought he had scotched the forces of annexation with his filibustering oration of June 1838; now, he told his constituents, the monster was back.
Adams was angry about the shrinkage of government at home, but he was genuinely fearful about Tyler’s nationalistic and bellicose policies abroad. The United States and Great Britain were at odds over territorial issues in Oregon and New England, as well as the perennial question of the right of British ships to stop and search foreign vessels; Adams believed that Tyler was needlessly inflaming those tensions with his Mexico policy and thus threatening to plunge the United States into a third war with England. In April 1842 Henry Wise had declared in a speech on the floor of the House that the United States must annex Mexico right away to trump alleged British designs on the country. If Mexico didn’t like it, Wise wildly asserted, America, with its ally France, should be prepared to go to war against Mexico—and Great Britain, if need be. Settlers in the Mississippi Valley, which is to say, slaveholders, were prepared to rally to the flag. Tyler had been careful to deny the linkage between annexation and slavery. Not Wise: “Slavery should pour itself abroad without restraint,” he cried, “and find no limit but the Southern ocean.” Wise reminded Congress that while Adams now found so much to fault in the current administration’s policy toward Mexico, as president he had sought to purchase Texas.
Adams rose to defend himself. Since Mexico had abolished slavery, he observed, Texas would have been admitted as free territory. Wise interrupted to ask whether it was not true that Adams had instructed his minister in Mexico to protest the abolition of slavery?
“No sir, never!
“Not while the gentleman was President?”
“No sir, never!”
Adams calmed himself down and resumed. The self-declared republic of Texas had reinstituted slavery, which, he said, was even more reprehensible than simply perpetuating an age-old practice. “I would not take the territory if it were ten thousand times more valuable than it is,” said Adams, “sullied as it is with the crime of slavery restored.”
Adams’ hatred of Tyler was far less personal than it was political. Under this small-minded descendant of the great Tidewater statesmen, Adams believed, slavery had come to corrupt not only America’s domestic but its foreign policy, and thus to redefine the nation’s place in the world. In a conversation with Caleb Cushing, an anti-British and pro-Tyler Massachusetts congressman, Adams predicted a coming global war over slavery, with Great Britain on one side and the United States on the other. “I was going off the stage,” Adams wrote in his diary, “but he was coming on to it.” Adams implored Cushing not to side with the slave power. Cushing heard him out “without taking offense, but apparently without conviction.”
Adams had always seen America as being in the right. In virtually any conflict between the United States and a European power, he had automatically sided with his own country. When Jackson had seized Spanish territory in Florida in 1819, Adams had stood alone in the cabinet to defend him. But Adams no longer saw his beloved country as the world’s shining beacon of liberty. And though still prepared to repel any British designs on North America, he had begun to identify with the global champion of abolitionism. In a letter to his old friend Richard Rush, the former minister to the Court of Saint James, he admitted that “my jealousies of the ‘grasping and perfidious Albion’ have been greatly disarmed by her demonstrated ardour” for the cause of freedom.
Adams believed that the influence of the slave power was leading the United States to surrender the principles it had cherished since the time of George Washington. As secretary of state and president, he had sought to extend America’s dominion through diplomatic negotiations. He had used threatening language but avoided war. He was convinced that a conquering America would sacrifice its republican soul; he had said so in the great July 4, 1821, oration in which he had warned against seeking to slay monsters abroad. In his prophetic old age, he saw his greatest fears coming to pass. “The annexation of Texas to this union,” he wrote in his diary, “is the first step to the conquest of all Mexico, of the West Indian islands, of a maritime, colonizing, slave-tainted monarchy, and of extinguished freedom.”
Adams was wrong, of course: Tyler had no such autocratic or Napoleonic designs. Adams accused Tyler of waging an undeclared war in Mexico when the president in fact was doing no such thing. Perhaps one should say that Adams’ righteous fury at the slavocracy had blurred his perspective. What was also true was that the republican principles Adams so deeply
cherished were far more deeply rooted, and thus less endangered, than he imagined. Adams still inhabited the intellectual world of the founders and thus at times defended ramparts that were no longer embattled. Yet his role, more and more, was to remind Americans of their nation’s first principles.
Adams was so persuaded of the dangers of Tyler’s Mexico policy that he was prepared, like the radical abolitionists whose petitions he presented (but did not endorse), to precipitate a national crisis. In early 1843, he presented a resolution to the Committee on Foreign Affairs stating that neither the legislature nor the executive had the power to annex a territory or its people and stipulating that the free states would be duty-bound to resist any such move to annexation. This astonishing echo of the Hartford Convention from its most famous opponent had no chance of passing. But after the short session of Congress adjourned, in March, Adams and a dozen other anti-slavery congressmen signed a public letter making the same argument. Annexation, they concluded, would be tantamount to the dissolution of the union.
Adams still wasn’t finished. After his colleagues went home, he began to pay daily visits to the State Department in order to search for evidence of a secret project, maturing since the first days of the Jackson administration, to pry the entire Southwest from the grip of Mexico. He learned that Jackson had been dispatching agents to Mexico and receiving reports from self-appointed emissaries who insisted that the Mexican government under General Santa Ana was prepared to sell California. None of these plans came to anything, probably because Santa Ana in fact had no intention of surrendering his northern provinces, which had rebelled against his rule in 1835. But in Adams’ mind the correspondence demonstrated that Jackson had lied to the American people while pursuing a secret policy in league with slave forces; Adams would quote liberally from these documents as he strove to convince the public that annexation was the fruit of a long-standing plot to extend slavery across the continent.
Daniel Webster had stepped down as secretary of state in the spring of 1842, thus removing perhaps the single greatest obstacle to Tyler’s dreams of annexation. The president appointed a series of Southerners who shared his own views. The last of them was John Calhoun, the nullifier in chief. On April 12, 1844, Calhoun signed the treaty of annexation with Texas. Then, like Wise before him, he exposed what appeared to be the hidden calculations behind the transaction. In a startlingly intemperate letter to Richard Pakenham, England’s minister in Washington, Calhoun rebuked Great Britain for seeking to abolish slavery in Texas and went on to describe slavery as “essential to the peace, safety and prosperity” of the territory. The secretary of state even added a few grace notes about slavery’s salutary effect on the “number, comfort, intelligence and morals” of enslaved blacks.
These were Calhoun’s views, not Tyler’s, but they gave Adams and other opponents of annexation good reason to fear that the president was, indeed, carrying out a clandestine agenda of slavery promotion. The Senate firmly rejected the treaty, amazing the always pessimistic Adams, who privately celebrated “deliverance . . . by the special interposition of Almighty God.” But Tyler was determined to complete the absorption of Texas before his term ended. In the first days of 1845, with a new president, James Polk, soon to take office, the House began debate on a resolution authorizing the president to annex Texas. The resolution provided that as many as four states might ultimately be fashioned from the territory; states below the line of the Missouri Compromise would be slave, and those above would be free. In fact, only a small and barren slice of Texas lay above 36° 30’. This huge acquisition did, as Adams feared, hold the potential to decisively tip political power toward slave owners.
The seventy-seven-year-old ex-president no longer took the lead. Only on January 24, at the very end of a fierce debate, did he rise to speak for the last time on this supreme question. It was true, he said, that as president he had sought to buy Texas from Mexico. But that would have been a voluntary transaction. The difference between that moment and this one, he stated, was that “between purchase and burglary.” Adams had fought for territorial expansion—but through treaty, not through acts of force. He had endorsed the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, but America could not simply annex people against their will. Territory, he said, “was inanimate. It was matter. Man had an immortal soul—man had rights peculiar to himself, and they could not, without his consent, transfer man from one country to another.” The House voted the following day. The resolution passed 120–98. It then passed the Senate, allowing Tyler to formally annex Texas on March 1, three days before leaving office.
Polk continued Tyler’s bellicose policy, sending American troops to a disputed border area. He was hoping to provoke a war, and he succeeded. When Mexican forces launched an attack, in April 1846, Polk asked Congress for a declaration of war. Both houses of Congress gave him overwhelming support. Many legislators who had opposed annexation voted for the measure. In the grip of a chaotic military dictatorship, Mexico itself seemed bent on war. And a war on Texas was, of course, a war on the United States. Nevertheless, Adams voted against the measure. He was wrong about the causes of the war, as he had been wrong about the consequences for American democracy. Both Tyler and Polk cared more about territorial expansion than about spreading the empire of slavery (though both were quite prepared to accept the spread of slavery as a consequence of expansion). In the Senate, Calhoun abstained on the vote for war, which he feared would harm rather than help the cause of slavery. Nevertheless, the Mexican-American War did constitute an abandonment of the principles laid down by the founders and largely observed by the next generation of national leaders. Americans had insisted that they did not go to war for gain, as European states did. Now, essentially, they had: the national hunger known as Manifest Destiny had eclipsed the principles of Washington and Jefferson. Adams was the last living link to those men, and their vision.
ADAMS’ SPREADING FAME AS A CHAMPION OF REPUBLICAN PRINCIPLES made him a target for every lyceum and young men’s association looking for a speaker able to attract a mass audience. He received so many such invitations that he no longer had time even to write polite notes declining the offer. He posted a notice in the National Intelligencer, and then later in his hometown’s principal paper, the Boston Atlas, apologizing in advance for his inability either to deliver such speeches or even to properly respond. Adams had almost always refused invitations to speak, at least beyond the confines of home. Increasingly, however, he found a reason to say yes to certain choice requests.
Speeches gave Adams the opportunity to formulate, and disseminate, his views both on urgent matters like the perfidy of the Tyler administration and on the questions of history and political thought that he often turned over in his mind. In October 1842, he delivered an address to the Boston Lyceum entitled “The Social Contract Exemplified in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” In May 1843, he spoke to the Massachusetts Historical Society on the two hundredth anniversary of the New England Confederacy.
Adams almost never went anywhere to speak where he wouldn’t have been otherwise; he was not one for unnecessary travel. Sometimes, however, curiosity got the better of him. In the summer of 1843, Charles Francis’ wife, Abby, invited her father-in-law to join her and John’s son, John Quincy, on a trip to Niagara Falls. A thoroughly delighted Adams discovered the fine resort hotels and comfortable trains available to a new class of tourists and vacationers. He was thrilled by the beauty of the New Hampshire mountains as the sun first struck their peaks at dawn. He visited the Revolutionary War battlefield at Saratoga, took a steamer up to Montreal, and then crossed the 438 miles to Niagara in, he recorded, “two days and nine hours.” Niagara Falls thrilled him as much as it did any mortal. It’s odd that Adams didn’t travel more, since he so thoroughly enjoyed himself every time he did.
While in Niagara, Adams had received a letter from a Professor Mitchell of the Astronomical Society of Cincinnati, inviting him to lay the cornerstone for that city’s o
bservatory. Adams had never travelled to the West. The opportunity to do so in order to deliver a lecture on a subject as dear to his heart as any was too much to resist. The next day, he wrote back promising to come.
Once back in Quincy, Adams asked his friends to bring him reference books to prepare for his oration—Middleton’s Celestial Atlas, Bailly’s four-volume Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne et moderne. He spoke to President Quincy at Harvard about the university’s own observatory, then in the planning stages, and studied a catalogue of astronomical instruments. He plunged back into the rarefied world of the heavens that had obsessed him in the early 1830s. On October 25 Adams set off for the west. He took a coach to Springfield, Massachusetts, and then a train to Buffalo and a steamer across Lake Erie to Cleveland. There he was recognized in a barbershop and soon was shaking the hands of hundreds of eager citizens. A meeting at the Congregational church was hastily arranged so that residents could listen to the former president. Adams then embarked on a boat down the Ohio Canal. He stopped in Akron, where he gave a speech at Town Hall. Adams was almost giddy with pleasure. “Among the women,” he wrote, “a very pretty one, as I took her hand, kissed me on the cheek. I returned the salute on the lip, and kissed every woman that followed, at which some made faces, but none refused.” When the canal ended, at Hebron, Adams took a carriage to Columbus, where he was met by more cheering throngs. A “mulatto,” he wrote, delivered thanks from the black citizens of Columbus. In Dayton, it was more of the same.
