John Quincy Adams

by Harlow Unger

  With so little official work to do in London, John Quincy moved his family into a rented house in rural Ealing, about eight miles from his London quarters. John Quincy called the house “one of the most delightful spots upon which I ever resided.”16 He enrolled the two older boys in a local private school, then supplemented George’s daily academic chores with advanced work in Greek, Latin, and history—essentials for entrance into Harvard. He and Louisa occasionally went into town to the opera—they both loved Mozart’s Don Giovanni—and he took John II to see several debates in Parliament. But he spent most of his time at Ealing.

  At night, he and the boys gazed at the heavens, and he took time to write long, intimate letters to his father, often digressing into complex discussions of political philosophy. Louisa, meanwhile, began writing Abigail, and the two ladies, often cool to each other during the first years of Louisa’s marriage, established a deep and warm mother-daughter relationship. To Abigail’s delight, Louisa described her sorties to the opera, theater, and formal dinners in London and details of her activities with the boys in Ealing. She was particularly generous in describing the progress of the boys—knowing, of course, how much Abigail and John Adams missed their grandchildren.

  “How delighted I should be to have them all about me,” John Adams wrote in one of his increasingly emotional letters to John Quincy. “Yet they would devour all my strawberries, raspberries, cherries, currants, plums, peaches, pears and apples. And what is worse, they would get into my bedchamber and disarrange all the papers on my writing table.”17 The elder Adamses also missed their son. “A man should be in his own country,” the former President admonished John Quincy.

  Inspired perhaps by his nightly studies of the stars, John Quincy started writing poetry again—serious poetry. He had harbored ambitions of writing poetry since his days in Newburyport, when he wrote rhymes to ease the boredom of reading law. “Could I have chosen my own genius and condition,” he now thought to himself, “I should have made myself a great poet.”18 John Quincy often read some of his poems to his family and neighborhood friends, after which they all gathered about Louisa and her harp to sing. While at Ealing, Louisa assumed chores as her husband’s private secretary, writing and answering routine letters—mostly from Americans in Britain needing or complaining about one thing or another—or, too often, stranded without money.

  While Louisa replied to his letters, John Quincy was writing

  “Man wants but little here below,

  Nor wants that little long.”q

  ’Tis not with me exactly so,

  But ’tis so in the song.

  My wants are many, and if told

  Would muster many a score;

  And were each wish a mint of gold,

  I still should long for more.19

  In 1816, Secretary of State James Monroe rode a wave of popularity for his wartime successes to an easy election victory to succeed his friend James Madison as President. Next to the President himself, the secretary of state held the most important and powerful post in any administration, with a portfolio that included far more than simple foreign relations. In modern terms, the secretary of state in the early 1800s controlled many functions of today’s Secret Service, Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Interior, Department of Commerce, Department of Agriculture, Department of Transportation, and a number of agencies such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Given the secretary of state’s range of executive authority, it was no coincidence that the American electorate had chosen three successive secretaries of state to succeed the Presidents they had served—Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and, in 1816, Monroe. Two days after his inauguration, President Monroe named John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts to be secretary of state—the first sign of a break in the Virginia dynasty that had provided four of the first five Presidents.

  Despite widespread calm in the Western world, the United States remained surrounded on land and sea by powerful foreign powers, each greedily eyeing the rich resources of the American continent and ready to pounce if an opportunity arose. The secretary of state and his overseas envoys were therefore central to the nation’s survival, tiptoeing away from military confrontations while maintaining trade relations essential to the American economy. John Quincy had been the most visible and most eloquent American diplomat in Europe for seven years and, like Monroe himself, had proved himself the most skillful—parrying and thrusting delicately and effectively, taking a stand or not, as the situation required, to extract the best terms he could realistically obtain, given his nation’s relatively weak military and naval posture.

  “The question whether I ought to accept the place . . . is not without difficulties in my mind,” John Quincy wrote about his new appointment. “A doubt of my competency for it is very seriously entertained.”20 Former President John Adams had sensed his son’s fatigue with public service and his infatuation with the poet’s quiet life in Ealing. Fearing his son might reject the appointment—as he had the Supreme Court—he urged John Quincy to

  accept without hesitation and share the fortunes of your country whatever they may be. You are now fifty years of age. In my opinion you must return to it or renounce it forever. I am well aware of the critical situation you will be in. I know you have not the command of your feelings or the immutable taciturnity of Franklin and Washington, but you must risk all.21

  Abigail added her voice to her husband’s appeal, saying that American political leaders were already pointing to him as “worthy to preside over the councils of a great nation.”22 Some of John Adams’s colleagues from the Continental Congress of 1774 had indeed written to congratulate him on his son’s appointment: “It seems that the office of secretary of state . . . is the stepladder to the presidential chair, at least it has been so in the case of the last three presidents,” wrote one of John Adams’s friends. “Now, as your son . . . is appointed to that station, if he makes the best advantage of his situation, it is more than probable that he may be the next President of the United States.”23

  As he had in the past, John Quincy yielded to his parents’ ambitions and accepted his new assignment. Critics predicted that as a former Federalist, he and the Republican President would soon be at odds over foreign policy, but he scoffed at the allegations, pointing out that he had worked harmoniously under Secretary of State Monroe for eight years. “I have known few of his opinions with which I did not cordially concur. . . . My duty will be to support and not to counteract or oppose the President’s administration.”24

  On June 15, John Quincy Adams abandoned his idyll at Ealing and, with his wife and three sons, set sail for America, taking with him two maids, a household manager, thirty-one trunks, barrels, and boxes, and furniture accumulated in Russia and England. Without any space to spare left on board, he had to sell his 560 bottles of red wine and 298 bottles of champagne before leaving.

  After celebrating his fiftieth birthday in mid-ocean, John Quincy Adams stepped on shore in America for the first time in eight years, landing in New York City on August 6, 1817. He immediately sent word to his parents of his and his family’s safe arrival.

  “Yesterday was one of the most uniformly happy days of my whole life,” the ecstatic former President replied to his son. “Kiss all the dear creatures for me, Wife, George, John and Charles. I hope to embrace them all here in a few days. God Almighty bless you all. So prays John Adams.”25

  “God be thanked,” an equally joyful Abigail wrote to her son in a separate note. “We now wait in pleasing expectation of welcoming you, one and all, to the old habitation, altered only by the depredation of time, like its ancient inhabitants. Come then all of you; we will make you as comfortable as . . . love and affection can render you.”26

  After attending several functions in New York in his honor, John Quincy and his family left by boat for Boston, and at 10 a.m., on August 18, their carriage pulled up to John and Abigail Adams’s house in Quincy. Abigail stood in the door as John Adams II flew from the carriage into hi
s grandmother’s arms in tears, with George Washington Adams just behind him crying, “Oh! Gran’! Oh! Gran’!”

  Poor little Charles, only ten, held back. He had not seen his grandparents since he was an infant, didn’t know them or what to do or say, and could not yet share their “affection and reverence.”27 He quickly changed his mind, however, as seventy-three-year-old Abigail resumed her role as family governor and hectored all three boys to be diligent, punctual, neat and clean, and so forth. Like his older brothers, he learned that hectoring was the only way his grandmother knew to express her “love and warm affection.”28

  Over the next three weeks, friends, relatives, and enthusiastic Republican supporters of President Monroe took turns entertaining John Quincy and Louisa, and they managed to settle briefly into the old house that had been John Quincy’s birthplace. His brother, Thomas Boylston Adams, had prospered in Boston. A successful lawyer and father of five, he had won appointment as a judge and, privately, built John Quincy’s estate to more than $100,000 in cash and securities and acquired five income-producing residential properties for his brother. But the size of his family was growing uncontrollably, and the strain, it seems, motivated him to begin drinking—a fatal error for anyone with Abigail Adams’s genes.

  Less than a month after their arrival, John Quincy and Louisa had to leave Quincy for their new home in Washington. They enrolled Charles Francis and his older brother John II in the prestigious Boston Latin School and took George Washington Adams to Cambridge to enroll in Harvard, but the faculty found the boy academically unprepared for admission. John Quincy arranged for him to board with the family of a Harvard faculty member who agreed to tutor the young Adams and prepare him for the college curriculum.

  Satisfied that he had provided for the education of his sons, John Quincy set off with Louisa for New London, Connecticut, where they stepped aboard a steamboat for the first time in their lives. They “steamed” successively to New Haven, New York, and Philadelphia, covering in a day and a half, in comfortable quarters, a distance that would have taken three times longer by coach—and that produced a collection of bruises. They arrived in Washington on September 20, 1817, and went to stay with another of Louisa’s sisters and her husband until they could find their own property. In accordance with the President’s instructions, John Quincy went immediately to confer with Monroe. Because of the thick, gleaming coats of white paint workers had slathered on its blackened exterior after the War of 1812, the presidential mansion had acquired a new name: the White House.

  Work on the interior was still progressing when John Quincy arrived to see the President. Out of deference for the secretary of state’s first rank in the cabinet, Monroe had awaited John Quincy’s arrival to announce his other cabinet appointees. The President had intended to ensure representation of all the nation’s regions in his cabinet by naming Kentucky’s Henry Clay as secretary of war, Georgia’s William H. Crawford as secretary of the Treasury, Maryland’s William Wirt as attorney general, and Benjamin Crowninshield of Massachusetts as secretary of the navy. Clay, however, lusted for the presidency—and had sought appointment to head the State Department as his own “stepladder” to the White House. When Monroe appointed John Quincy, Clay decided to remain in his powerful, high-profile post as Speaker of the House rather than recede into semi-obscurity as a peacetime secretary of war. The President named John C. Calhoun of South Carolina instead.

  Although John Quincy had expected cabinet members to work as a team, he realized after its first meeting that far from a cooperative venture, James Monroe’s cabinet was a hornet’s nest of ruthless, politically ambitious adversaries, bent on crushing his chances of becoming President. And beyond the confines of the cabinet meeting room, Henry Clay sat in Congress ready for every opportunity to promote his own candidacy by undermining John Quincy.

  My office of secretary of state makes it the interest of all the partisans of the candidates for the next presidency . . . to decry me as much as possible in the public opinion.

  The most conspicuous of these candidates are Crawford . . . Clay . . . and De Witt Clinton, governor of New York. Clay expected himself to have been secretary of state, and he and all his creatures were disappointed by my appointment. He is therefore coming out as the head of a new opposition in Congress to Mr. Monroe’s administration, and he makes no scruples of giving the tone to all his party of running me down.29

  Indeed, Clay, as Speaker of the House, acted immediately to restrict John Quincy’s activities in the State Department with so low a budget that he could barely function. His salary, for example, was a mere $3,500 a year, compared with the more than $75,000 a year that British foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh earned in London. With only eight employees, the State Department had a budget of less than $125,000 a year—one-tenth the budget of the British Foreign Office. Under pressure from President Monroe, Congress raised John Quincy’s salary to $6,000 a year in 1819 but gave him no funds to cover his annual entertainment expenses, which totaled about $11,000, or nearly twice his salary.

  Monroe himself, of course, had struggled under the same budgetary restrictions as a U.S. minister overseas for six years and as secretary of state for five, and because of his experience in foreign affairs, he involved himself more in State Department business than that of any other executive department—with the warm approval of his secretary of state.

  “They were made for each other,” Thomas Jefferson declared. “Adams has a pointed pen; Monroe has judgment enough for both and firmness enough to have his judgment control.”30 As Jefferson predicted, the two men worked so closely and comfortably together and became such intimate friends that John Quincy could anticipate what the President was thinking before the President himself even knew. The warmth that developed between the two men was evident years later, after the President’s retirement, when he told Adams, “It would afford me great satisfaction if we resided near each other and could frequently meet and indulge in that free and confidential communication which it was, during our residence in Washington, our practice to do.”31

  John Quincy was all too aware, of course, how Secretary of State Jefferson’s opposition had undermined President George Washington’s neutrality policy, and he was even more cognizant of Secretary of State Timothy Pickering’s unconscionable efforts to undermine the John Adams administration. On taking his constitutional oath and assuming office, John Quincy vowed to be a loyal and effective secretary of state—advising the President but allowing him to make all policy decisions and putting those decisions in effect to the best of his ability. “Extend, all-seeing God, thy hand,” he prayed in a poem he wrote the night before he took his oath,

  In mercy still decree,

  And make his hand to bless my native land

  An instrument of me.32

  “From the information given to me,” he added, “the path before me is beset with thorns. . . . At two distinct periods of my life heretofore my position has been perilous and full of anxious forecast, but never so critical and precarious as at this time.”33

  As it turned out, Louisa’s path was as beset with thorns as her husband’s. She still displayed a “continental accent,” and Washington’s social elite soon referred to the Adamses as “aliens”—especially after John Quincy began walking in the winter weather wearing his exotic Russian fur hat and great coat. To make matters worse, the Adamses decided to forego the long-standing practice of cabinet members’ wives paying the first visit to each member of Congress at the start of each session. John Quincy scorned the practice as a waste of time, and Louisa simply saw no point in soiling herself in the mudflows that separated the buildings and homes of the capital. Although they had bought a lovely home, most of Washington City remained a relative wasteland of woods, swamps, cheap brick buildings, and tumbledown shacks. Seams of squalid slave quarters wove through every neighborhood. Streets were still unpaved, and every rain turned them into vermin-infested marshland that often provoked epidemics. Rats and snakes were com
monplace, as were cows, horses, pigs, and other livestock, and Louisa hated stepping outside her door. Washington’s ladies were outraged by the snub, however, and even complained to the First Lady. Elizabeth Monroe responded by asking Louisa to the White House—not, as it turned out, to admonish her but to explain the malignity that motivated the custom—namely, the ambitions of cabinet members, who sent their wives to court votes in Congress for their husbands to succeed to the presidency. After Washington’s retirement, few in the capital expected any presidential candidate to win a majority of Electoral College votes, thus leaving the final decision to the House of Representatives. As a result, candidates’ wives made a show of visiting every representative’s wife when she and her husband arrived in town.

  Cows graze near the Capitol in what was still the undeveloped capital city of the United States. At the time, the Supreme Court met in an area beneath the Senate floor. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  “All ladies arriving here as strangers, it seems, expected to be visited by the wives of the heads of departments and even by the President’s wife,” John Quincy learned. “Mrs. Madison subjected herself to this torture. . . . Mrs. Monroe neither pays nor returns visits. My wife returns all visits but adopts the principle of not visiting first any stranger who arrives, and this is what the ladies have taken in dudgeon.” Louisa told the President’s wife she had no intention of changing her habits—“not on any question of etiquette,” John Quincy emphasized, but simply because “she did not exact of any lady that she should visit her.”34 Surprised by the controversy over Louisa’s visits, an editor questioned John Quincy whether “I was determined to do nothing with a view to promote my future election to the presidency as the successor of Mr. Monroe,” to which John Quincy replied, “Absolutely nothing!”