John Quincy Adams

by Harlow Unger

  Faced with revolts across South America and terrified of again confronting the man they called “the Napoléon of the woods [Jackson],”15 the Spaniards capitulated. In the negotiations that followed, John Quincy let the Spanish government save face by asking the secretary of war to withdraw American troops from Florida and restore nominal sovereignty over the Florida panhandle to Spain. Spain then ceded both East and West Florida to the United States and renounced all claims to both territories. The United States, in turn, renounced all claims to Texas and used the $5 million owed to Spain for the Florida acquisition to settle claims of American citizens against Spain for Indian depredations. In addition to ceding the Floridas, the Adams-Onis agreement, or Transcontinental Treaty, defined the western limits of the Louisiana Territory, with the Spanish ceding all claims to the Pacific Northwest and extending nominal U.S. sovereignty to the Pacific coast.

  Cowed by the President’s annual address, Henry Clay and the Senate approved the Adams-Onis treaty. Together with the rest of the Louisiana Purchase and the Florida conquest, the treaty expanded the small, East Coast nation that George Washington had governed into a vast, rich, and powerful empire, within a relatively impregnable wall of natural defenses.

  On February 22, 1821, George Washington’s birthday, John Quincy Adams effected the exchange of treaties ceding Florida to the United States—a transaction he called “the most important of my life . . . an event of magnitude in the history of this Union.”

  Let my sons, if they ever consult this record of their father’s life . . . remark the workings of private interests, of perfidious fraud, of sordid intrigues, of royal treachery, of malignant rivalry, and of envy masked with patriotism . . . all combined to destroy this treaty. Under the petals of this garland of roses . . . Onis had hidden a viper . . . and all the calculations of my downfall by the Spanish negotiation has left me with credit rather augmented . . . by the result.16

  Stung by their attempts to censure him, Jackson rode over the mountains to Washington City to confront his congressional challengers. An adoring public intervened. “Whenever the General went into the streets,” one newspaper reported, “it was difficult to find a passage through, so great was the desire of people to see him. . . . Among the people . . . his popularity is unbounded—old and young speak of him with rapture.”17 Congress responded to the public euphoria by overwhelmingly defeating Clay’s proposed censures, and when Clay went to Jackson’s hotel to apologize, the general had already left for New York.

  In addition to silencing Clay, John Quincy’s masterful policy statements silenced the British press and government. Jackson’s execution of two British subjects would, a few years earlier, have provoked a British naval attack, but after reading John Quincy’s paper, Lord Castlereagh agreed, “It is impossible not to admit that the unfortunate sufferers . . . had been engaged in unauthorized practices of such a description as to have deprived them of any claim on their own government for interference in their behalf.” He ordered the British minister in Washington not to take “any further step in the business.”18

  In the fall of 1819, John Quincy and Louisa returned to Quincy to visit John Adams—only to find that John Quincy’s beloved brother Thomas Boylston’s occasional drinking had become chronic. Not only had his law practice deteriorated, he had allowed John Quincy’s affairs to fall into disarray. Although Thomas promised to reform, John Quincy had no choice but to transfer his estate to another firm. By 1820, its attorneys had restored enough order to his investments for him to buy a large new double-house in Washington—on present-day F Street at Thirteenth, at the time within view of the White House. It came with a second-floor ballroom for Louisa’s huge Christmas assemblies, and its proximity to the Potomac allowed John Quincy to add a swim to his regular regime of daily walks. Bathing suits having not yet been invented, he simply left his clothes on a rock at the shore and waded in stark naked—and no one paid attention.

  To break the routine of diplomatic paperwork, John Quincy returned to his old reading habits—Tacitus, Alexander Pope, scientific journals, and, of course, the Bible. He became president of the American Bible Society and, in 1820, president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which his father had helped found.

  To John Quincy’s dismay, the Adams-Onis treaty he had negotiated created almost as many problems as it solved. Although it opened the West to settlement and promised an unprecedented period of growth and prosperity, it also extended the problem of slavery far beyond the confines of southern slave states. At the end of 1819, the Missouri Territory applied for statehood, provoking a motion in Congress to exclude slavery from new states. Although John Quincy had despised slavery since his first encounter with it in Germany as a youngster, he had never before involved himself politically in disputes over the issue because it was virtually nonexistent in his native New England and seldom a topic of discussion there—certainly not in Quincy.

  “I take it for granted,” he now realized, “that the present question [of slavery] is a mere preamble—a title page to a great tragic volume.” As he further studied the issue, he concluded, “This is a question between the rights of human nature and the Constitution of the United States. Probably both will suffer by the issue of the controversy.”19

  The controversy divided Congress—and, indeed, the nation—for political and economic reasons as well as moral. The North feared Missouri’s entry into the Union as a slave state would alter the free-state/slave-state balance in the Senate, where a succession of northern vice presidents had invariably tilted tie votes in favor of northern interests. When Alabama—a slave state—won admission as the twenty-first state, the admission of Illinois—a free state—restored senatorial balance. There was no semblance of balance in the House of Representatives, however. In the years since ratification of the Constitution, the population of the North had grown faster than that of the South. Free states counted about 5.2 million people, with 105 House votes, by 1819, while the population of slave states totaled about 4.5 million, with only 81 House votes. With Missouri’s admission, the South saw the opportunity to gain a one-state majority in the Senate to compensate for its minority status in the House of Representatives.

  Monroe had formed his cabinet with members from each region, and he ordered them not to involve themselves—or him—in the controversy. The dispute over slavery in the Missouri Territory, however, grew too widespread to ignore, and the more John Quincy heard cabinet members from the South defend slavery, the more convinced he became that it was “false and heartless.” Slavery, he asserted, made “the first and holiest rights of humanity depend upon the color of the skin.”

  It perverts human reason . . . to maintain that slavery is sanctioned by the Christian religion, that slaves are happy and contented in their condition, that between master and slave there are ties of mutual attachment and affection, that the virtues of the master are refined and exalted by the degradation of the slave; while at the same time they vent execrations upon the slave trade, curse Britain for having given them slaves, burn at the stake Negroes convicted of crimes for the terror of the example, and writhe in agonies of fear at the very mention of human rights as applicable to men of color. . . . The bargain between freedom and slavery contained in the Constitution of the United States is morally and politically vicious, inconsistent with the principles upon which alone our Revolution can be justified.20

  Cabinet members William H. Crawford, from Georgia, and John C. Calhoun, from South Carolina, were both slaveholders, as was the President. Hardly a champion of manumission, Monroe steered clear of the issue—not because of indifference but because the Constitution gave only Congress jurisdiction over the admission of states, and it gave territories the right to become states without restrictions or preconditions. As for his personal views, Monroe had no strong objections to slavery, saying only, “The God who made us, made the black people, and they ought not to be treated with barbarity.”21

  Apart from morality, both sides used the
Constitution to press their arguments. Although its power to regulate interstate trade gave Congress the right to prohibit interstate traffic in slaves, the Constitution did not give either Congress or the states powers to abolish slavery in states and territories where it already existed or to establish slavery in states where it did not exist. Although it was not his purview as secretary of state, John Quincy had enough standing as a constitutional scholar to step into the debate to help the President and Congress resolve the issue as it affected Missouri. While admitting he despised slavery as “a sin before the sight of God,”22 he said his role was not to debate the pros and cons of the institution but solely to determine whether the Constitution gave the federal government power to abolish it without a constitutional amendment. Clearly, it did not.

  “For the admission of a state where no slavery exists,” John Quincy explained, “Congress may prescribe as a condition that slavery shall never be established in it, as they have done to the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. But where it exists, as in Missouri and Arkansas, the power of extirpating it is not given to the Congress by the Constitution.”23

  John Quincy’s pronouncements, like those of a judge on high, silenced the debaters for a while, and before the end of the year, an opportunity for compromise materialized with a petition from Maine to separate from Massachusetts and join the Union as a new state. When the Sixteenth Congress met in mid-February 1820, it needed only two weeks to admit Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state. It then drew a line across the rest of the Louisiana Territory, excluding slavery in all new states above latitude 36°30’ and permitting slavery in new states below that line. (See map on page 214.)

  The Missouri Compromise solved the problem of admitting new states but postponed the question of abolition for nearly a decade, at which time John Quincy Adams would have no choice but to confront it head-on. “Slavery,” he declared presciently,

  is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union, and it is a contemplation worthy of the most exalted soul whether its total abolition is or is not practicable: if practicable, by what means it may be effected . . . at the smallest cost of human sufferance. A dissolution, at least temporary, of the Union as now constituted would be certainly necessary, and the dissolution must be upon a point involving the question of slavery and no other. The Union might then be reorganized on the fundamental principle of emancipation.24

  The Missouri Compromise of 1820 estabilished a dividing line between free territory and slave territory,with slavery illegal in any new states in the lands above the line and legal states formed below the line.

  The Missouri Compromise seemed to settle America’s future, and when James Monroe stood for reelection at the end of 1820, no one opposed him. Of 235 electoral votes, Monroe received 231, with three abstentions and only one elector casting a dissenting vote to prevent Monroe from matching George Washington as the only President to have won unanimously. “And that vote, to my surprise and mortification, was for me,” John Quincy Adams recounted with embarrassment. He was, however, pleased with the election results. “Party conflict has performed its entire revolution,” he said with satisfaction, “and that unanimity of choice which began with George Washington has come around again in the person of James Monroe. In the survey of our national history, this latter unanimity is much more remarkable than the first.”25

  Monroe’s unopposed reelection, however, marked the end of the Federalist Party and left his own Republican Party in disarray, with leaders in each state casting greedy eyes on the President’s chair if and when Monroe decided to vacate it. John Quincy warned the President that “as the first term . . . has hitherto been the period of the greatest national tranquility . . . it appears to me scarcely avoidable that the second term will be among the most stormy and violent. I told him that I thought the difficulties before him were thickening and becoming hourly more and more formidable.”26

  In 1821, a rising tide of populist sentiment swept in from the West, where, in a monumental clash of generations, frontiersmen and settlers rejected property ownership as a qualification for voting and holding office in the new states they founded. A concept that dated back to eighteenth-century colonial rule, when land ownership depended on royal grants from Britain, property qualifications for voting were alien to young, free-spirited, nineteenth-century frontiersmen. Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and other western states, therefore, rejected the concept in writing their constitutions, providing instead for white manhood suffrage. Although New Jersey had expanded suffrage in 1807 and Maryland in 1810, Connecticut waited until 1818 to eliminate property requirements for voting, with Massachusetts following in 1820 and New York in 1821.

  In addition to demands for greater democracy at home, western populists embraced the spread of democracy abroad, with Speaker Henry Clay asking Congress in 1818 to recognize the growing number of revolutionary governments in Spanish America. The House expressed its sympathy with the Latin Americans and pledged to support the President if he recognized any of the new regimes. Inspired by America’s Revolutionary War, South America’s wars of independence had broken out in 1810, but James Madison’s administration, and Monroe himself during his first term in office, had treated the conflicts as civil wars and, in the tradition of George Washington, kept the United States neutral.

  In March 1822, President Monroe was ready to assert America’s voice as a world power and asked Congress to recognize Latin American republics that had declared independence from Spain. It was, he said, “manifest that all those provinces are not only in the full enjoyment of their independence, but . . . that there is not the most remote prospect of their being deprived of it.” The new governments, he asserted, “have a claim to recognition by other powers” and the United States “owe it to their station and character in the world, as well as to their essential interests,” to recognize them .27 Led by Speaker Henry Clay, Congress supported the President, and the United States recognized Colombia and Mexico as independent nations.t

  Although Monroe believed Spain unable “to produce any change . . . in the present condition” of its former South American colonies, French king Louis XVIII led an alliance of absolute monarchs in pledging to send troops to his Bourbon cousin, Spanish king Ferdinand VII, to help him recapture his rich South American colonies. After decades of war against Napoléon to prevent French expansion, Britain threatened to resume her war with France rather than tolerate French military expeditions to South America—and asked the United States to join her.

  When they learned of the European threats to suppress South American independence movements, former Presidents Jefferson and Madison intruded into the political picture by urging President Monroe to accept England’s invitation, as did Secretary of War Calhoun and Speaker of the House Clay and his legion of congressional war hawks. John Quincy stood alone, arguing against any American ties to England or entangling alliances with any other foreign nation, for that matter. Like his father, he believed that even the slightest subservience to a foreign power represented a loss of independence—symbolically if not materially, but probably both. Still the champion of George Washington’s policies, John Quincy called “the principle of neutrality in all foreign wars fundamental to the continuance of our liberties and of our Union.”

  So far as [South Americans] were contending for independence, I wished well to their cause, but I have seen and yet see no prospect that they would establish free or liberal institutions of government. They are not likely to promote the spirit either of freedom or order by their example. They have not the first element of good or free government. Arbitrary power, military and ecclesiastical, was stamped upon their education, upon their habits, and upon their institutions.28

  Proclaiming a policy the President would later claim as his own, John Quincy urged the President to disclaim any intention of “interference with the political affairs of Europe” so that the United States could hold the “expectation and hope that European powers will equally absta
in from the attempt to spread their principles in the American hemisphere or to subjugate by force any part of these continents to their will.”29

  No sooner had he spoken than his friend Russian czar Alexander I extended his nation’s claims along the Pacific coast of North America to the Fifty-first Parallel in the middle of the Oregon Territory and closed the waters of the Bering Strait to commercial fishing by other nations. John Quincy urged the President to “contest the right of Russia to any territorial establishment on this continent” and to “assume . . . the principle that the American continents are no longer subjects for any new European colonial establishments.”30

  Just at that time, John Quincy learned that Britain intended claiming Graham Land, an island rich in seals that American hunters had discovered off the northern section of the Antarctic Peninsula. At John Quincy’s urging, President Monroe ordered a U.S. Navy frigate to sail around Cape Horn to claim Graham Land before the British. With the Russian attempt to claim the Oregon coast, he ordered a second warship to join the one at Graham Land and sail to Oregon. Although Monroe once again flirted with an unconstitutional de facto declaration of war, the Russians relented and agreed to move the boundary of the lands they claimed three hundred miles to the north and to remove all maritime restrictions on the surrounding seas. In effect, President Monroe successfully extended the United States’ sphere of influence beyond its western boundaries into the rich Pacific Ocean fisheries.

  With American warships showing the flag in all parts of the world—from the Mediterranean coast of North Africa to the Pacific coast of North America—the President decided to explain America’s intentions to the world. He asked cabinet members for written and oral suggestions for a policy statement that he would include in his annual message to Congress. “The ground I wish to take,” he told them, “is that of earnest remonstrance against the interference of the European powers by force with South America, but to disclaim all interference on our part with Europe, to make an American cause, and adhere inflexibly to that.”31