John Quincy Adams

by Harlow Unger

  John Quincy submitted a proposal that “the American continents by the free and independent condition which they have assumed, and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subject for future colonization by any European power.”32 The President included it verbatim in his annual message, later called the Monroe Doctrine.

  In his two-hour address—aimed at foreign leaders as well as Congress and the American people—Monroe embraced John Quincy’s political philosophy and formally closed the Western Hemisphere to further colonization. He explained that America’s political system differed substantially from Europe’s and that the United States would consider any European attempts to extend its system anywhere in the Western Hemisphere as a threat to the United States. From its origins, he said, the United States had sought nothing but peace—for its citizens to fish, hunt, and plow their fields unmolested. The United States had never interfered in Europe’s internal affairs and would not do so—indeed, it wanted no part of Europe’s incessant wars. To that end, he pledged not to interfere with Europe’s existing colonies in the New World. But he declared it to be “a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved” that “the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” He warned that the United States would view “any interposition . . . by any European power . . . as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States”—in effect, a declaration of war.33

  Monroe’s new “doctrine” drew universal acclaim across America. Although much of the European press and some European leaders condemned it, few European powers had not learned the lessons of the British in the American Revolutionary War and, more recently, of the French in Russia. As the Duke of Wellington had warned, no nation on earth was powerful enough to sustain military supply lines long enough to challenge American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. With the Monroe Doctrine, most European leaders realized it would be far less costly to trade with Americans than to try to subjugate them.

  “I went to the President’s,” John Quincy described the hours following delivery of the Monroe Doctrine, “and found Gales, the half-editor of the National Intelligencer, there. He said the message was called a war message and spoke of newspapers from Europe announcing that an army of twelve thousand Spaniards was to embark immediately to subdue South America.”

  John Quincy all but laughed in the half-editor’s face, calling the reports absurd. “The same newspapers,” John Quincy scoffed, “announced . . . the disbanding of the Spanish army.”34

  As the Monroe Doctrine quelled European ambitions for new conquests in the Americas, it also dispelled American fears of imminent attack by foreign powers and unleashed a surge of popular energy that strengthened the nation economically and militarily. State governments worked with builders and visionaries to cover the Atlantic states with networks of canals, free roads, and toll roads, or turnpikes, that generated revenues from user fees to pay the costs of maintenance and expansion. The Lancaster Pike tied Philadelphia to Gettysburg; the Boston Post Road connected Worcester to Springfield and Boston to Providence; and work began to extend the great Cumberland Road—then often called the National Road—from Baltimore to the Mississippi River. Speaker Henry Clay envisioned its eventual extension to the Pacific Ocean. In New York State, continuing construction on the great Erie Canal extended the link between Rome and Utica westward to Seneca Lake. Already tied to the Atlantic Ocean by the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers, the canal’s western tip stood only 120 miles from Buffalo and the entrance to the Great Lakes. Plans for other roads, turnpikes, and canals were legion. One proposed canal was to stretch from Boston to Savannah, while a turnpike out of Washington was to reach New Orleans.

  Economic expansion spurred advances in the arts and education, as well as industry and agriculture. The works of American writers—Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and others—replaced English literature as the most widely read in the United States. In addition to female academies, free schools open to all children sprouted in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Boston opened the nation’s first “high school” in 1821, and Massachusetts passed a law requiring every town of five hundred families to establish a high school for their children. Institutions for adult education appeared as well, with 3,000 “lyceums” in fifteen states offering adult education and self-improvement courses.

  The apparent end to threats from abroad and the boundless opportunities at home left the Monroe administration with few major projects to pursue in the time it had left in office, thus freeing cabinet members to pursue personal ambitions. In the naive assumption that his cabinet and other government leaders would serve the nation as selflessly as he, Monroe emulated his presidential predecessors and announced early in his second term that he would limit himself to two terms in office. With the exception of John Quincy, cabinet members all but renounced their oaths of office and personal pledges to the President and launched a bitter struggle for political power that left the President impotent—and ended what a Boston newspaper had labeled the “Era of Good Feelings.”35

  The frenetic activity of the Monroe years had left John Quincy exhausted and without the physical, let alone emotional, energy to seek the presidency himself. Although based in his native country after so many years overseas, his time as secretary of state had left him few moments to spend with his wife and family, and he was simply too tired and, in effect, lonely for family life to concern himself with the forthcoming elections. Not so the other cabinet members and presidential aspirants.

  When budget restrictions forced a reduction in the number of army officers, Treasury Secretary Crawford pressed Monroe not to dismiss any Crawford confederates. When the President ignored the request, Crawford went to the White House in a rage, calling the President an “infernal scoundrel” and raising his cane as if to assault him. According to Navy Secretary Samuel L. Southard, who witnessed the confrontation, “Mr. Monroe seized the tongs and ordered him instantly to leave the room or he would chastise him, and he rang the bell for the servant.”36 Realizing how closely he had flirted with treason, Crawford left and never again set foot in the White House during Monroe’s presidency.

  In Florida, meanwhile, Andrew Jackson, whom President Monroe had appointed governor, embarrassed the administration by violating the outgoing Spanish governor’s diplomatic immunity and arresting him for failing to surrender documents needed in a legal proceeding. The arrest caused a furor in the press, which assailed Jackson as a would-be dictator. Jackson resigned in a rage, went home to Tennessee, won election as senator, and returned to Washington to wreak havoc on his political enemies.

  As cabinet members and other presidential aspirants turned on the President or on each other, the vicious rhetoric created political schisms in Congress not seen since the days of the Confederation of American States. “I have never known such a state of things,” Monroe lamented to his predecessor in office, James Madison, “nor have I personally ever experienced so much embarrassment and mortification.”

  Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford of Georgia had ambitions to succeed James Monroe as President but suffered a paralytic stroke before the elections. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  Where there is an open contest with a foreign enemy . . . the course is plain and you have something to cheer and animate you to action, but we are now blessed with peace. . . . There being three avowed candidates in the administration is a circumstance which increases the embarrassment. The friends of each endeavor to annoy the others. . . . In many cases the attacks are personal, directed against the individual.37

  Only one candidate remained silent and above the fray. John Quincy, the most obvious and logical choice to succeed President Monroe, refused to state whether he even wanted the office. Raised in a society where the ignorant deferred to the educated propertied class, he hewed to what his grandson H
enry Adams would later call “the Ciceronian idea of government by the best,” selected by an elevated class of educated, propertied professionals who “chose men to represent them because they wanted to be well represented and they chose the best they had.” Those selected did not accept “pay” for their services but “honoraria.” Those who accepted public office were “statesmen, not politicians; they guided public opinion but were little guided by it.”38

  Clearly alarmed by John Quincy’s reticence, former congressman Joseph Hopkinson, a close family friend and prominent Philadelphia lawyer, wrote to Louisa,

  I think our friend Mr. A. is too fastidious and reserved on a certain subject as interesting to the country as it is to himself . . . . His conduct seems to me, as it does to others, to be calculated to chill and depress the kind feeling and fair exertions of his friends. They are discouraged when they see a total indifference assumed on his part. . . . Now, my dear madam, this won’t do. The Macbeth policy—“if chance will make me king, why chance may crown me”—will not answer where little is left to chance or merit. Kings are made by politicians and newspapers, and the man who sits down waiting to be crowned, either by chance or just right, will go bareheaded all his life.39

  Louisa, of course, showed Hopkinson’s letter to her husband and urged him to campaign more aggressively. “Do for once gratify me,” she pleaded. “Show yourself if only for a week . . . and if harm comes of it I promise never to advise you again.”40 But John Quincy was adamant, insisting that the presidency “is not in my opinion an office to be either solicited or declined. . . . The principle of the Constitution in its purity is that the duty shall be assigned to the most able and the most worthy.”

  The law of friendship is a reciprocation of good offices. He who asks or accepts the offer of friendly service contracts the obligation of meeting it with a suitable return. He who asks or accepts the offer of aid to promote his own views necessarily binds himself to promote the views of him from whom he receives it. . . . Between the principle . . . that a President of the United States must remember to whom he owes his elevation and the principle of accepting no aid on the score of friendship or personal kindness to him, there is no alternative. The former . . . I deem to be essentially and vitally corrupt. The latter is the only principle to which no exception can be taken.41

  For one of the few times in their marriage, Louisa decided to ignore her husband and take matters into her own hands. Aware of his ambitions and fearful of the effects of a loss on his spirit, she decided to compete with wives of other candidates by expanding the scope of her popular Tuesday evening receptions. “My Tuesday evenings appear to have some attractions,” she realized.

  At least they afford the probable certainty of giving opportunity for amusement throughout the winter and in this consists the charm. . . . If Mr. A instead of keeping me back when I was a young woman had urged me forward in the world I should have better understood the maneuvering part of my situation. But instead of this I find myself almost a stranger to the little arts and intrigues of the world in which I move.42

  Louisa learned quickly, however, realizing that “wine maketh the heart glad” and gradually enlarging the number of guests she invited. One party drew one hundred guests; another, “one hundred and thirty odd persons all very sociable and good humored. The young ladies danced, played, and sang and were very merry. . . . I am very willing to show that I am the public servant.” As she enlarged her parties, she hired the Marine Band for a fee of “five dollars to each performer plus wine and supper.” She then organized a party for 252—“ladies being a much larger proportion than we have had this winter.” Although William H. Crawford’s wife, Susanna, sent six hundred invitations to a ball she sponsored, Louisa, not surprisingly, found it “dull and uncomfortable, and we left before ten o’clock.”43

  Consciously or unconsciously, John Quincy refused to help Louisa plan the parties she hosted for his campaign, acting disinterested at times and even failing to appear at some events. She, in turn, suppressed her growing irritation at her husband and simply threw herself into organizing her entertainments. Her ambitions seemed to surpass those of her husband. “My whole morning was occupied with visits and writing cards of invitation,” she smiled. “We have had forty or more members of Congress already here and all who call I invite to my evenings. If I can help it I will invite only those who call, lest it should be said I am courting them to further a political purpose.”44

  With the approach of summer, Louisa curtailed her campaign work, and John Quincy left for Cambridge to enroll their youngest son, Charles Francis, in Harvard—and to attend the graduation of his oldest son, George Washington Adams. Once at his beloved alma mater, however, he met with nothing but disappointment. Although George did graduate, he finished only thirtieth in his class of eighty-five. Then, to John Quincy’s dismay, he learned that his middle boy, John II, in his next-to-last year at the school, ranked even lower—forty-fifth in a class of eighty-five. To compound John Quincy’s disappointment, fourteen-year-old Charles Francis did so poorly on his Latin entrance examination that the college granted him only a conditional admission. He had spent years teaching Charles Francis his Latin and erupted in anger, storming into President John Kirkland’s office charging that his son had been unfairly treated. In no mood for a confrontation with the man likely to be the next President of the United States, Kirkland ordered Charles Francis retested, and to every one’s relief, the boy passed and gained unconditional entry into his father’s alma mater.

  John Quincy sensed, however, that his troubles with the boys were just beginning. “I find them all three coming to manhood with indolent minds, flinching from study whenever they can.”45 He could not and would not allow what he deemed the indolence of the boys to go unpunished and told them they could not return to Washington for Christmas. Instead of enjoying holiday balls and lavish White House dinners, they would have to spend Christmas and New Year’s in the somber mansion of their grandfather in Quincy—studying. Not until they ranked among the top ten students in their classes would he allow John II and Charles Francis to enjoy holidays with their parents. In the meantime, he sent George to study law with Daniel Webster in Boston.

  A few months later, John Quincy’s discipline produced the opposite of its intended effects: John II joined a student riot, Harvard expelled him, and he returned to his parents in total disgrace. The boy could not have returned home at a worse time. The Adamses were already caring for Louisa’s sister’s three orphaned children—two boys, Johnson and Thomas, who were proving more difficult than the Adamses own sons, and the flirty Mary Catherine. John Quincy had paid for Thomas to attend Phillips Academy at Exeter, New Hampshire, then Harvard, but he dropped out and returned to Washington to loaf in the Adams home—without a degree, a skill, or a job. His older brother, Johnson, did not even bother enrolling in Harvard. From the first, he preferred loafing.

  Young Charles Francis, meanwhile, fell in love with Mary Catherine, but the two were both too young to marry, and when Charles Francis went off to Harvard, their relationship cooled. When George Washington arrived for a visit, however, he took his brother’s place in Mary Catherine’s heart. John Quincy put a quick end to the relationship, sending George back to Boston to finish his legal studies with Daniel Webster.

  Depressed by his sons’ failure at Harvard, John Quincy resigned himself to failure in the presidential race and returned to his boyhood home in Quincy to spend time with his aging father and to look at farming as a possible occupation after he retired from public office. Not only his father but three previous generations of the Adamses had farmed the land in Quincy successfully, and he concluded that, once out of government, he might have to do the same. He soon realized, however, that a life in diplomacy had not prepared him for the physical demands of farm life. His only skills lay in the law, but he feared he had made too many political enemies in Boston’s powerful Federalist community to ensure much success.

  A run for the presidency
was clearly the most logical next step in his career, but he stubbornly refused to demean himself, the American people, or the office of the presidency by actively campaigning. He believed that merit alone, not party or political campaign rhetoric, should determine the choice of the American people—a unique concept voiced only once before, by George Washington, but never since.

  “My career,” John Quincy proclaimed, “has attached no party to me precisely because it has been independent of all party . . . and the consequence has been that all parties disown me.”

  I have followed the convictions of my own mind with a single eye to the interests of the whole nation. . . . If I am to be a candidate, it must be by the wishes . . . of others, not by mine. If my countrymen prefer others to me, I must not repine at their choice. Indifference at the heart is not to be won by . . . the loudest trumpet. Merit and just right in this country will be heard. And in my case, if they are not heard without my stir, I shall acquiesce in the conclusion that it is because they do not exist.46

  As his opponents resorted to every ruse they could invent to win votes, John Quincy refused to compromise his values and political beliefs—even if, as seemed likely, those values doomed him to defeat in his lifelong quest for national leadership.

  CHAPTER 12

  The End of the Beginning

  Although President James Monroe believed John Quincy was the most qualified candidate for the presidency, he remained silent. “He thought it incumbent on him to have nothing to do with party politics,” explained Egbert R. Watson, Monroe’s private secretary. Watson said Monroe considered it “beneath the dignity” of an outgoing President and “unjust to the people . . . to throw the weight of his name and character on either side of any contest.”1