John Quincy Adams

by Harlow Unger

  Offered every public office but the presidency itself—along with many lucrative opportunities in private practice—John Adams made it clear he wanted to serve as the nation’s first vice president under George Washington. Accordingly, on January 7, 1789, the Electoral College elected George Washington first President of the United States and John Adams as the nation’s first vice president. Three months later, on April 20, 1789, Adams climaxed a weeklong trip from Massachusetts and crossed the bridge onto the northern end of Manhattan Island, where throngs of well-wishers lined the roads to welcome him to New York, the nation’s temporary capital. A troop of New York cavalry awaited with Foreign Affairs Secretary John Jay and congressional leaders to escort him southward to the city and his temporary lodgings at Jay’s magnificent mansion. The next morning, the Senate’s president pro tempore greeted him at Federal Hall and showed him to his chair in the Senate chamber, where he assumed the presidency of that body. A week later, on April 29, Adams witnessed the presidential swearing in and George Washington’s first inaugural address.

  A year after his father’s inauguration, John Quincy passed his bar exams, and on August 9, 1790, he opened a law office in Boston and waited for his family’s name and fame to draw a stream of clients to his door.

  He waited in vain.

  “Very busy with nothing to do,” he wrote in his diary. “Long walk, but solitary,” he wrote a day later. “Little to do. Reading Cicero.”18

  More than a month later, he found a few clients at the courthouse—all indigent petty criminals who paid him nothing. By mid-November, he had handled fewer than a dozen cases, none of which had yielded a penny, leaving him completely dependent on the £9-per-month allowance that his father had been sending him since his days at Harvard.

  “I have a profession without employment,” he lamented to his sister Nabby. “The hope of supporting myself [is] probably somewhat distant.”19 A month later, he wrote to his mother, saying that “there would not be a happier being in the United States . . . could I have just enough business to support my expenses, so as to relieve me from the mortification of being, at my time of life, a burden to my parents.”20

  His father tried to cheer him up: “It is accident commonly which furnishes the first occasions to a young lawyer to spread his reputation.”

  I remember it was neither my friends nor patrons among the great and learned: it was Joseph Tirrel the horse jockey who first raised me to fame. . . . Some odd incident, altogether unforeseen and unexpected, will very probably bring you into some popular cause and spread your character with a thousand trumpets at a time. Such a thing may not happen in several years. Meantime, patience, courage.21

  John Adams tried lifting his son’s spirits by giving him power of attorney and control of the family’s financial affairs in Braintree and Boston, including management of several income-yielding properties, with a retainer of £25 per quarter. Early in 1791, John Adams and Abigail gave their son another morale booster by inviting him to the national government’s new seat in Philadelphia. The visit threw John Quincy back into the midst of the powerful and famous and restored his conviction that he was bound for greatness. He heard debates in Congress, attended Supreme Court proceedings, and dined with such illustrious figures as Elbridge Gerry. He climaxed his visit by joining his parents at dinner with George and Martha Washington at the presidential mansion.

  John Quincy returned to Boston with a new sense of excitement. Although his law practice showed no signs of improvement, life in the federal capital had enthralled him, and he decided to force his way into the national political picture. Early in June, he wrote the first of eleven essays he called Letters of Publicola, assailing two icons of the American Revolution—Thomas Paine and, of all people, his friend Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. Paine’s pamphlets Common Sense and The Crisis had roused Americans to fight for independence from Britain, and to these he had just added another work, The Rights of Man, which called for a similar uprising in England to overthrow the monarchy. After Jefferson endorsed it, The Rights of Man received widespread distribution in America.

  “His intention,” John Quincy complained to Boston’s Columbian Centinel , “appears evidently to be to convince the people of Great Britain that they have neither liberty nor a constitution—that their only possible means to produce these blessings to themselves is to ‘topple down headlong’ their present government and follow implicitly the example of the French.” John Quincy blasted Paine’s assumption that the majority of the English people opposed monarchy. “It is somewhat remarkable that, in speaking of the particular right of forming a constitution, Mr. Paine denies to a nation . . . [the] right to establish a government of hereditary succession . . . . He supposes the essence of a free government to be the submission of the minority to the will of the majority, [but] in a free government the minority never can be under an obligation to sacrifice their rights to the will of the majority.”22

  John Quincy’s attack on Paine caused a furor—in Europe as well as America, coming as it did when the French Revolution was reaching a peak of savagery that sent emotional tremors across the United States. Radicals had seized control of the National Assembly and imprisoned King Louis XVI and his family in their own palace. Two years earlier, most Americans had hailed the French Revolution as an extension of America’s own revolution and the spread of democracy to the Old World. Jefferson, the American minister to France at the start of the revolution in July 1789, called it “an illumination of the human mind.”23 In the two years that followed, however, widespread drought combined with national bankruptcy to produce famine, mass unemployment—and mob action. Rioters raged through cities, towns, and villages, looting and burning manors, châteaus, and any other structure that smacked of aristocratic plenty. Although Jefferson dismissed the violence as an unfortunate consequence of social progress, Vice President Adams said the French revolutionaries “make murder itself as indifferent as shooting a plover.”24

  The slaughter appalled President Washington and other American statesmen. Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton condemned radical leaders of the French Revolution as “assassins reeking with the blood of murdered fellow citizens.”25

  The American press reflected the divisions in the cabinet. Philadelphia’s Gazette of the United States condemned French atheism, anarchy, and mass slaughter, while its rival, the National Gazette, reminded readers how France had ensured America’s victory over British tyranny in the struggle for liberty and independence. As groups gathered outside newspaper offices to read the papers, the French Revolution—and Paine’s defense—divided the American people.

  “Perhaps the strongly excited passions of the hour . . . contributed to the result,” John Quincy concluded, but the Publicola essays “at once attracted great attention, not less in Europe than in America. They were reprinted in the papers of New York and Philadelphia . . . and elicited numerous replies. . . . The reputation of Publicola spread far beyond the confines of the United States. No sooner did the papers arrive in England than they were collected and published in London. . . . Another edition was . . . published in Glasgow . . . and still a third at Dublin.”26

  As he had hoped, fame thrust John Quincy onto Boston’s political stage, giving him more than enough to do to occupy his time. Although his law practice did not expand, government officials across the region appointed him to citizen committees—to improve Boston’s police procedures, to recommend redistricting, and to look at so-called blue laws. Braintree asked him to convert its legal status from a parish to a town, which he promptly renamed Quincy, after his great-grandfather Colonel John Quincy. He thrust himself into every major political controversy. After Boston voted to permit theaters to open and perform plays, the state legislature defied Bostonians and banned theatrical productions. After police arrested an actor, “a mob of about two hundred people collected together . . . to pull down the theater,” and John Quincy wrote three newspaper essays t
hat heaped scorn on the legislative majority and opponents of theater. In contrast to his previous stand against anarchy, he called on supporters of theater to commit civil disobedience—urging actors to continue to perform and audiences to attend. “No obedience is due to an unconstitutional act of the legislature,” he declared—in effect, espousing a concept of nullification of laws that he would later despise.

  John Quincy’s essays put his name before Boston’s public just as a banking collapse was producing a windfall of legal work from investors trying to recoup their losses. “The bubble of banking is breaking,” he wrote to his father. “Seven or eight failures have happened within these three days, and many more are inevitable in the course of the ensuing week. The pernicious practice of mutual endorsements upon each other’s notes has been carried . . . to an extravagant length and is now found to have involved not only the principals, who have been converting their loans from the bank into a regular trading stock, but many others who have undertaken to be their security.”27

  “The late failures in Boston,” Abigail beamed as she wrote to her husband after visiting John Quincy, “have thrown some business into the hands of our son. He is well and grows very fat.”28

  John Quincy Adams grew fatter in the days that followed. By early 1793, events overseas—and their repercussions in America—had intensified the divisions between Americans who supported the French Revolution and its opponents. President George Washington pleaded for national unity, saying it would be “unwise in the extreme . . . to involve ourselves in the contests of European nations.”29 When newspapers ignored his pleas, Washington considered a formal proclamation of neutrality to ensure American independence from both English and French influence.

  In France, Jacobin extremists had seized control of the four-year-old revolution, overturned the monarchy, sent King Louis XVI to his death on the guillotine, and discarded the constitution. On February 1, 1793, France declared war on Britain, Holland, and Spain. Under the Franco-American alliance of 1778, each nation had pledged to aid the other in the event of an attack by foreign enemies, and France now demanded that the United States join her war against Britain. In April, Edmond Genet, the new minister plenipotentiary to the United States, bypassed normal diplomatic protocol and appealed to the American people to pressure the President and Congress to join the French war against England.

  French ambassador Edmond Genet arrived in the United States with secret plans to incite rebellion against the Washington administration and install a government that would join France in war against Britain. (FROM A NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGRAVING)

  “In the United States,” the French minister cried out, “men still exist who can say, ‘Here a ferocious Englishman slaughtered my father; there my wife tore her bleeding daughter from the hands of an unbridled Englishman,’ and those same men can say, ‘Here a brave Frenchman died fighting for American liberty; here French naval and military power humbled the might of Britain.’”30

  Secretary of State Jefferson hailed Genet’s arrival. “The liberty of the whole earth depends on the success of the French Revolution,” Jefferson exulted as he urged Washington to support the French. “Nothing should be spared on our part to attach France to us. Failure to do so would gratify the combination of kings with the spectacle of the only two republics on earth destroying each other.”31

  Outraged by Jefferson’s embrace of French revolutionaries “wading through seas of blood,” Treasury Secretary Hamilton argued against American participation, calling it self-destructive. He reminded the President that Britain remained America’s most important trading partner, buying the majority of her exports, producing the majority of her imports, and yielding most of the government’s revenues through import duties. To war beside France against Britain, Hamilton asserted, was not only economically suicidal but morally indefensible. Riding a wave of popularity in Boston, John Quincy marched into the fray to support the President: “To advise us to engage voluntarily in the war,” he declared, “is to aim a dagger at the heart of this country.”

  We have a seacoast of twelve hundred miles everywhere open to invasion, and where is the power to protect it? We have a flourishing commerce expanding to every part of the globe, and where will it turn when excluded from every market on earth? We depend upon the returns of that commerce for many necessaries of life, and when those returns shall be cut off, where shall we look for the supply? We are in a great measure destitute of the defensive apparatus of war, and who will provide us with the arms and ammunition that will be indispensable? We feel severely at this moment the burden of our public debt, and where are the funds to support us in the dreadful extremity to which our madness and iniquity would reduce us?32

  John Quincy’s words anticipated those of the President. With the United States all but defenseless, without a navy and only a minuscule army in the West fighting Indians, the President knew he could not risk war with England—or any other nation, for that matter. As John Quincy had noted, the powerful British navy could easily blockade American ports and shut coastal trade, while the British military in Canada could combine with Spanish forces in Florida and Louisiana to sweep across the West and divide it up between them. Washington agreed with Hamilton that France had embarked on an offensive, not a defensive, war and that the Franco-American treaty of 1778 did not apply. He also saw the economic good sense of seeking a rapprochement with England and issued the neutrality proclamation he had been considering.

  “It behooves the government of this country,” the President told Congress, “to use every means in its power to prevent the citizens . . . from embroiling us with either of these powers [England or France] by endeavoring to maintain a strict neutrality. I therefore require that you will . . . [take] such measures as shall be deemed most likely to effect this desirable purpose . . . without delay.”33

  John Quincy seconded the President, stating that “an impartial and unequivocal neutrality . . . is prescribed to us as a duty.”34

  Genet, however, responded differently, buying boldfaced newspaper advertisements that called on “Friends of France” to ignore Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation and enlist in the French service to fight the British. “Does not patriotism call upon us to assist France?” his advertisements asked. “As Sons of Freedom, would it not become our character to lend some assistance to a nation combating to secure their liberty?”35

  Francophiles across the United States rushed into the streets to protest the President’s stance and demand that Congress declare war against Britain. An estimated 5,000 supporters rallied outside Genet’s hotel in Philadelphia and set off endless demonstrations that raged through the night into the next day—and the next. Vice President Adams described “the terrorism excited by Genet . . . when 10,000 people in the streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in the government or compel it to declare war in favor of the French Revolution and against England.” Adams “judged it prudent and necessary to order chests of arms from the war office” to protect his house.36 Fearing for the safety of his wife and grandchildren, Washington made plans to send them to the safety of Mount Vernon.

  Adding to the turmoil was the sudden arrival of the French fleet from the Antilles. Genet ordered gangways lowered and sent French seamen to join Jacobin mobs in the crowded streets. “The town is one continuous scene of riot,” the British consul wrote in panic to his foreign minister in London. “The French seamen range the streets by night and by day, armed with cutlasses and commit the most daring outrages. Genet seems ready to raise the tricolor and proclaim himself proconsul. President Washington is unable to enforce any measures in opposition.”37

  As pro-French mobs formed on street corners demanding Washington’s head, Genet sent the President an ultimatum “in the name of France” to call Congress into special session to choose between neutrality and war. Genet warned Washington that if he refused to declare war against Britain, Genet would “appeal to the peop
le” to overthrow the government and unite with France. “I have acquired the esteem and the good wishes of all republican Americans by tightening the bonds of fraternity between them and ourselves,” Genet ranted. He predicted that Americans would “rally from all sides” to support him and “demonstrate with cries of joy . . . that the democrats of America realize perfectly that their future is ultimately bound with France.”38

  Infuriated by the Frenchman’s behavior, John Quincy assailed Genet’s “political villainy.” In a series of articles, he condemned the Frenchman’s activities in America; he labeled as “piracy” and “highway robbery” the attacks on British ships by privateers sponsored by Genet. Writing under the pseudonym “Columbus,” John Quincy called Genet “the most implacable and dangerous enemy to the peace and happiness of my country.” He called Genet’s conduct “obnoxious” and urged the President to demand his recall. “In a country where genuine freedom is enjoyed,” John Quincy declared, “it is unquestionably the right of every individual citizen to express without control his sentiments upon public measures and the conduct of public men. . . . The privilege ought not, however . . . to be extended to the conduct of foreign ministers.”39

  John Quincy’s articles “attracted much attention in the principal cities of the continent and drew forth many comments,” he recalled in his memoirs. “It fell under the eye of Washington, then . . . anxiously considering the very same class of questions in a cabinet almost equally divided in opinion. He seems to have been impressed by the proof of Mr. Adams’s powers to such an extent as to mark him out for the public service at an early opportunity.”40

  John Quincy’s articles generated national and international comment, with Boston Federalists embracing him—and even naming him the city’s official July 4 orator, the highest nonelective honor Bostonians conferred on one of their own each year. With his oratory, John Quincy pleased Federalists and Antifederalists alike by predicting that American liberty would soon inspire oppressed peoples in Europe to mirror the American Revolution.