by Harlow Unger
He said that as others would not be so scrupulous, I should not stand upon equal footing with them. I told him that was not my fault—my business was to serve the public to the best of my abilities in the station assigned to me, and not to intrigue for further advancement. I never, by the most distant hint to anyone, expressed a wish for any public office, and I should not now begin to ask for that which of all others ought to be most freely and spontaneously bestowed.35
John Quincy said he had accepted his appointment “for the good of my country”—not for the good of his career. Although willing to accept higher office, he was determined that the public should decide on his fitness for any office by his record rather than his words. He would soon learn he had adopted a naive approach fraught with enormous political danger.
CHAPTER 11
The Great and Foul Stain
Although the controversy over Louisa’s refusal to visit congressional wives persisted for a while, she gradually calmed the social storm by turning her house into a coveted social destination with elegant receptions for illustrious friends from Europe. Washington’s ladies (and their men) soon sought invitations to Louisa’s Tuesday evening receptions more than to any other social event in Washington. And most gossip about their “alien” tastes ended abruptly when the Adamses hosted a New Year’s ball in January 1818 for three hundred guests, who called it the finest Washington festivity in memory. Louisa sparkled in a magnificent gown and emerged as a gracious and ebullient hostess. John Quincy, on the other hand, was a bit of a grouch. Although brilliant at serious gatherings and conferences, his face turned sour when the music began to play and those around him chitchatted and immersed the scene in badinage.
“I am a silent animal,” he grumbled1—although he usually exuded cheer with his immediate family in private. After the last guests had left one Christmas ball, he broke into a grin and even danced a reel with Louisa and his sons, who were home for the holidays from college.
At the State Department, John Quincy asserted firm authority over his department from the moment he entered. State Department papers had been in disarray since the War of 1812, so he ordered clerks to create an index of diplomatic correspondence and cross-reference every topic in every dispatch and letter to and from overseas consulates and ministries, foreign ministers, and foreign consuls. He then organized and expanded the State Department Library, which became one of the world’s largest collections of references and other works relating to foreign affairs. He also assumed an 1817 congressional mandate that directed the secretary of state to report on the systems of weights and measures of various states and foreign countries and to use these to propose a uniform system for the United States. His Report on Weights and Measures would take three years to complete, but it became a classic in its field and led to the establishment of the Bureau of Weights and Measures and was the basis for the uniform system that still exists in the United States.
When he finished the tasks of office management, he turned to foreign affairs policies. Always careful to obtain presidential approval, he issued a standing order that all U.S. ministers abroad adhere firmly to the alternat protocol he had championed in London, ensuring that the name of the United States appeared ahead of the other nation on alternating copies of international agreements.r
Despite peaceful relations with the world’s great powers, many stretches along the United States’ frontiers seemed at war. Pirates repeatedly attacked American shipping from encampments on Amelia Island in the Atlantic Ocean on the Florida side of the Florida-Georgia border and on Galveston Island in the Gulf of Mexico off the Texas coast. In addition, runaway slaves and Seminole Indians encamped in Spanish Florida were raiding and burning farms and settlements across the border in Georgia. In the North, the British had blocked American access to rich fisheries in and about the Gulf of Saint Lawrence between Newfoundland and the Canadian coast. Other unsettled issues between Britain and the United States included impressment and Britain’s compensation for slaves who had fled to the West Indies at the end of the Revolutionary War.
John Quincy Adams as secretary of state, an office considered “the stepladder to the presidential chair.” (AFTER THOMAS SULLY AND GILBERT STUART, NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE, ADAMS NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)
By the time John Quincy was ready to return to America, he and Lord Castlereagh had grown closer and learned to trust each other enough to discuss most remaining issues between their two nations—and both were eager to reach agreement. Britain wanted to focus on European affairs without fear of friction with the Americans, and the United States, in turn, needed to deal with the Spanish menace in the south without fear of a British attack in the north. After several months of complicated give-and-take on both sides, John Quincy Adams and Richard Rush, the new American minister in London, finally worked out an agreement with the British that solved a few things, postponed others, and, most importantly, produced lasting peace between the two nations.
Under the agreement signed in 1818, the British agreed to ban impressment for ten years, restore American inland fishing rights along the Canadian coast, and allow Czar Alexander I of Russia to mediate the slave-compensation issue.s The historic treaty also fixed, for the first time, the American-Canadian frontier from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains, giving the United States undisputed sovereignty over the so-called Adams Strip. By extending the boundary line along the Forty-ninth Parallel westward from the northwesternmost tip of Lake of the Woods in northern Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains, the Americans acquired a 150-mile-wide strip across northern Minnesota, North Dakota, and Montana. (See map on page 134.) Recognition of the Adams Strip as American territory established a precedent for eventually extending the northern border line to the Pacific Ocean, giving the United States sovereignty over Puget Sound and the mouth of the Columbia River. In the meantime the Oregon Territory west of the Rockies would remain open to both English and Americans, to trade with each other freely and come and go as they pleased, with neither nation claiming sovereignty over them or their lands.
In a subsequent discussion with John Quincy, however, Stratford Canning, the British minister to the United States, seemed to dismiss the agreement by claiming British ownership of the mouth of the Columbia River. When John Quincy disagreed, Canning replied sharply, “Why? Do you not know we have a claim?”
“I do not know what you claim nor what you do not claim,” John Quincy snapped back. “You claim India, you claim Africa—”
“Perhaps,” Canning interrupted, “a piece of the moon.”
“No,” John Quincy replied angrily. “I have not heard that you claim exclusively any part of the moon; but there is not a spot on this habitable globe that I could affirm you do not claim, and there is none which you may not claim with as much color of light as you can have to Columbia River or its mouth.”
“And how far would you consider this exclusion of right to extend?” Canning asked.
“To all the shores of the South Sea [Pacific Ocean],” John Quincy asserted.2
In the end, the British Foreign Office disavowed Canning’s claim of British sovereignty at the mouth of the Columbia River, thus ensuring peace along the U.S. frontier with Britain. Free to turn its attention to the conflict with Spain, the Monroe administration ordered Secretary of War John C. Calhoun to organize two military expeditions—one to crush pirates on Amelia Island and another to pursue and attack Indians and renegade slaves in Florida.
Two weeks later, General Edmund P. Gaines led troops to Amelia Island, while Tennessee militia commander General Andrew Jackson led a campaign into northern Florida, with President Monroe exhorting Jackson that “great interests are at issue, and until our course is carried through triumphantly . . . you ought not to withdraw your active support from it.”3 The President made it clear that he considered acquisition of the Floridas essential to the security of the United States. With the Spanish army attempting to suppress wars of independence in Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama, President
Monroe did not believe Spain would be able to spare enough troops to defend the Floridas.
Aware that his mission was a de facto declaration of war, Jackson at first refused to violate the Constitution by warring against another nation without a congressional mandate. Before setting out for Florida, he demanded a letter from the President clarifying his mission, but he never received one and invaded Florida without it. After seizing Spanish posts at St. Marks, about forty miles south of the Georgia border, he and his men swept eastward to the Sewanee River, where he captured the Seminole village of Bowleg’s Town and burned three hundred houses. He then marched his force westward across the panhandle, leveling every Seminole fort and black village he could find. To terrify the population into submission, he hanged two captured Creek chieftains.
“They will foment war no more,” Jackson declared.4
On May 24, Jackson’s troops marched into Spanish-controlled Pensacola, on the Gulf of Mexico near the Alabama border, effectively taking control of the entire Florida panhandle. He also captured two British traders, one of them a shipowner, and accused them of aiding the enemy. He hanged the shipowner from the yardarm of his own ship in front of a group of terrified Indians and ordered a firing squad to execute the other. On June 2, Jackson sent a message to Monroe that he had won the Seminole War, and if the President would send him the Fifth Infantry, he would march his men eastward to deliver Fort St. Augustine. “Add another regiment and one frigate,” he boasted, “and I will insure you Cuba in a few days.”5
“The President and all the members of the cabinet except myself,” John Quincy was surprised to find, “are of opinion that Jackson acted not only without, but against his instructions; that he has committed war against Spain. The question is embarrassing and complicated, not only as involving an actual war with Spain, but that of the executive power to authorize hostilities without a declaration of war by Congress.” John Quincy stood alone in disagreement, arguing that Jackson’s actions were “justified by the necessity of the case and by the misconduct of the Spanish commanding officers in Florida.” John Quincy insisted that Jackson “was authorized to cross the Spanish line in pursuit of the Indian enemy” and that the Constitution authorized the executive to wage “defensive acts of hostility” without notifying Congress.
Although John Quincy failed to convince the rest of the cabinet, he convinced the President that Jackson had actually strengthened America’s international standing by demonstrating a will to defend national interests. Switching to John Quincy’s position, Monroe rewarded Jackson by naming him governor of Florida—to the cheers of the overwhelming majority of Americans. The Spanish king, of course, protested, as did English and European government leaders and newspapers, all condemning Jackson’s invasion of Florida as brutal, runaway imperialism.
On June 13, Speaker of the House Henry Clay added his voice to the chorus of criticisms, charging Jackson with undermining the constitutional authority of Congress to declare war. “Efforts were forthwith made in Congress,” John Quincy explained, “to procure a vote censuring the conduct of General Jackson, whose fast increasing popularity had, in all probability excited the envy of politicians . . . but the President himself, and Mr. Adams . . . warmly espoused the cause of the American commander.”6
With President Monroe now giving him free rein on the Florida issue, John Quincy sent instructions to the American minister in Madrid to present the Spanish government with an ultimatum: cede Florida or act decisively to prevent further attacks on American territory by Florida-based renegades. John Quincy then called Spanish minister Don Luis de Onis y Gonzales to the State Department. He did not like the fifty-five-year-old Spaniard, called him “wily Don” in private, and disparaged him as “cold, calculating . . . supple and cunning . . . overbearing . . . careless of what he asserts or how grossly it is proved to be unfounded.”
I had an hour’s conversation with him. . . . I mentioned the hostilities of the Seminole Indians upon our frontiers, and I urged that if we should not come to an early conclusion of the Florida negotiation, Spain would not have the possession of Florida to give us.7
President Monroe then prepared to go before Congress for his second annual address, in which he planned to answer his critics. He instructed John Quincy to prepare a single policy statement that would respond to the king of Spain, to critics in England and Europe, and to the American Congress. John Quincy had no sooner started working on a draft, however, when a letter arrived from his son John II that left him all but prostrate with shock and grief: Abigail Adams had died on October 28, 1818, two weeks short of her seventy-fourth birthday.
“Oh, God!” he cried out, tears streaming down his face. “Oh, God! My mother, beloved and lamented more than language can express, yielded up her pure and gentle spirit to its creator.”
Oh, God! Never have I known another human being the perpetual object of whose life was so unremittingly to do good. . . . There is no virtue in the female heart . . . [that] was not the ornament of hers. . . . She had been, during the war of our Revolution, an ardent patriot, and the earliest lesson of unbounded devotion to the cause of their country that her children received was from her.8
After recovering his composure, he wrote to his “Ever Dear and Revered Father”:
By a letter from my son John, I have . . . been apprised of that afflictive dispensation of Providence which has bereft you of the partner of your life; me of the tenderest and most affectionate of Mothers. . . . How shall I offer you consolation for your loss when I feel that my own is irreparable? . . . Let me hear from you, my dearest father, let me hear from you soon. And may the blessing of that God whose tender mercies are over all his works still shed rays of heavenly hope and comfort over the remainder of your days.
He signed it, “Your distressed but ever affectionate and dutiful son.”9
Although President Monroe was deeply sympathetic, only a few days remained before he would have to justify the attack and seizure of Florida to the world and obtain retroactive approval from Congress. As Thomas Jefferson had predicted of the Monroe-Quincy relationship, John Quincy’s “pointed pen”—despite the sorrow of its holder—prepared a response that articulated the President’s thoughts better than the President could have done himself. Using John Quincy’s carefully considered words, the President hailed Jackson’s attack as “an act of patriotism, essential to the honor and interests of your country.” Brushing aside constitutional issues, Monroe declared that
the United States stand justified in ordering their troops into Florida in pursuit of their enemy. They have this right by the law of nations if the Seminoles were inhabitants of another country and had entered Florida to elude pursuit. It is not an act of hostility to Spain. It is the less so, because her government is bound by treaty to restrain . . . the Indians there from committing hostilities against the United States.10
The message scoffed at the Spanish king’s portrayal of Jackson’s assault as an outrage and Jackson himself as lacking “honor and dignity.” Monroe then quoted a letter from a survivor of one of the Indian attacks on settlers.
There was a boat that was taken . . . that had in it thirty men, seven women, and four small children. There were six of the men got clear, and one woman saved, and all the rest of them got killed. The children were taken by the leg and their brains dashed out against the boat. . . . Should inquiry be made why . . . after this event the savage Hamathli-Meico [the Creek chieftain] upon being taken by the American troops was by order of their commander immediately hung, let it be told that that savage was the commander of the party by whom those women were butchered and those helpless infants dashed against the boat.11
President Monroe went on to cite the law of nations [le droit des gens] as drafted by Swiss jurist Emmerich von Vattel, who wrote, “When at war with a ferocious nation which observes no rule and grants no quarter, they may be chastised by the persons of them who may be taken.”12 As for the Englishmen that Jackson ordered hung, John Quincy’s respons
e for the President called them “accomplices of savages, and, sinning against their better knowledge, worse than savages.”
General Jackson, possessed of their persons and of the proofs of their guilt, might, by the lawful and ordinary usages of war, have hung them both without formality of a trial. . . . He gave them the benefit of trial by a court-martial of highly respectable officers. . . . The defense of one consisted . . . of technical cavils at the nature of part of the evidence against him, and the other confessed his guilt.13
John Quincy’s text then addressed Henry Clay’s criticisms: “The President will neither inflict punishment nor pass a censure on General Jackson for that conduct, the motives of which were founded in the purest patriotism . . . and the vindication of which is written on every page of the law of nations as well as in the first law of nature—self-defense.”
And finally, the presidential address referred to John Quincy’s negotiations with Don Luis de Onis, saying that the restoration of Florida to Spanish sovereignty was based on the President’s confidence that Spain would
restrain by force the Indians of Florida from all hostilities against the United States . . . that there will be no more murders, no more robberies . . . by savages prowling along the Spanish line, seeking shelter within it to display in their villages the scalps of our women and children and to sell with shameless effrontery the plunder from our citizens in Spanish forts and cities. . . . The duty of this government to protect the persons and property of our fellow citizens on the borders of the United States is imperative. It must be discharged. And if, after all the warnings Spain has had . . . the necessities of self-defense should again compel the United States to take possession of the Spanish forts and places in Florida . . . restoration of them must not be expected.14
