John Quincy Adams

by Harlow Unger

  After John Quincy’s speech, Chief Justice John Marshall, a heroic soldier in the Revolutionary War whom John Adams had appointed to the court at the end of his administration, swore in the new President. John Quincy had spent his life training for the presidency and now left to review “military companies drawn up in front of the Capitol” before returning home to join Louisa and “a crowd of visitors” for a two-hour reception. Later, John Quincy went to a White House reception and, after dinner at home, attended the inaugural ball. It was to be one of the last joyous moments of his administration.

  He and Louisa spent the next six weeks moving, gradually dismantling their home on F Street and settling into the White House, selling furniture they did not need and buying furniture they did need, including a billiard table for John Quincy. The move was not simple. In addition to caring for their own two younger sons, John II and Charles Francis, the Adamses were still caring for Louisa’s orphaned niece and two ill-behaved nephews, one of whom raced right into the White House kitchen to flirt with maids. To add to the family’s immediate problems, the Marquis de Lafayette, his son George Washington Lafayette, his secretary Auguste Lavasseur, and his valet Bastien arrived at the White House late in July for a huge banquet. The feast climaxed Lafayette’s triumphant yearlong U.S. tour as “the nation’s guest” to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of American independence. He had just returned from New England, where he had said farewell to John Adams and now came to bid John Quincy good-bye. The two had known each other since John Quincy was a winsome boy of fifteen living with his father at Benjamin Franklin’s residence in Paris. To Louisa’s dismay, her husband waxed enthusiastic and insisted that Lafayette and his entourage remain at the White House as his personal guests for the rest of their stay in the United States—all of August into September.

  “I admire the old gentleman,” Louisa complained, “but no admiration can stand family discomfort. We are all obliged to turn out of our beds to make room for him and his suite.”15

  After celebrating Lafayette’s birthday on the night of September 6, John Quincy bid Lafayette an official farewell in the peristyle of the White House. With his cabinet surrounding him and a huge crowd of Lafayette well-wishers looking on, the President spoke with deep emotion: “We shall always look upon you as belonging to us . . . as belonging to our children after us.”

  Congress invited sixty-seven-year-old Marquis de Lafayette to tour America as a “guest of the nation” to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the victory at Yorktown. President John Quincy Adams invited Lafayette to stay at the White House during his last weeks in America. (FROM AN ENGRAVING IN THE CHTEAU DE VERSAILLES, RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX)

  You are ours by more than the patriotic self-devotion with which you flew to the aid of our fathers at the crisis of our fate; ours by that unshaken gratitude for your services which is a precious portion of our inheritance; ours by that tie . . . which has linked your name for endless ages of time with the name of Washington. . . . Speaking in the name of the whole people of the United States . . . I bid you a reluctant and affectionate farewell.16

  “God bless you, sir,” Lafayette sobbed. “God bless the American people.” He embraced John Quincy and, with tears streaming down his face, rushed back into the White House to collect himself before leaving American shores for the last time.

  Lafayette’s departure ended the few weeks of civil behavior that the French hero’s arrival had provoked among Washington political leaders. Even Vice President Calhoun now turned on John Quincy in a political tidal wave of outrage over what Americans perceived as “the theft of government” and disregard of the popular will. In designating Clay his secretary of state, John Quincy inadvertently provoked the founding of a new political party, with a broad popular base spanning the West and South.

  Calling themselves Democrats, the new party set out from the first to cripple John Quincy’s administration and ensure his departure after one term. John Quincy tried to forestall the inevitable by offering Jackson a cabinet post as secretary of war, but Jackson all but laughed in his face and refused even to consider serving an administration he was determined to bring down.

  While Jackson was building a political party to support his own presidential ambitions, John Quincy held stubbornly to his naive dismissal of political parties as antithetical to union. Even more naively, he refused to take advantage of patronage to put men in office who would support him and his policies. The result was a cabinet and government bureaucracy that, for the most part, worked to undermine both his policies and his chances of winning a second term.

  As Jackson and his supporters filled the press with charges headlined “Corrupt Bargain,” John Quincy reacted scornfully, calling the Democratic Party a “conspiracy” against national unity. Henry Clay grew so angry at Virginia senator John Randolph’s constant references to a “corrupt bargain” that he challenged Randolph to a duel. Although both men emerged unhurt, Clay managed to send a bullet through Randolph’s sleeve.

  The threat of duels notwithstanding, Jacksonians in Congress stepped up their obstructionist tactics. When a group of newly independent Latin American nations invited the United States to send representatives to a conference in Panama to form a pan-American union, Jacksonian congressmen purposely debated the qualifications of John Quincy’s appointees until the conference had ended, leaving the American delegates with no conference to attend.

  In addition to his political humiliations in Congress, John Quincy faced unexpected personal humiliation when he and his valet tried rowing across the Potomac River one afternoon, with John Quincy intending to swim back. “Before we got half across,” he explained,

  the boat had leaked itself half full and . . . there was nothing on board to scoop up the water. . . . I jumped overboard . . . and lost hold of the boat, which filled with water and drifted away. . . . Antoine, who was naked, had little difficulty. I had much more . . . struggling for life and gasping for breath. . . . The loose sleeves of my shirt . . . filled with water and hung like two fifty-six-pound weights upon my arms.17

  The President managed to strip and swim ashore, where his son John II pulled him from the water, while Antoine scampered out and dressed as best he could, before running to the Adams house across the bridge to get a carriage. “While Antoine was gone,” the President confided to his diary, “John and I were wading and swimming up and down on the other shore, or sitting naked basking on the bank at the margin of the river. . . . The carriage came and took me and Antoine home, half dressed.”18

  Although he escaped injury, the President did not escape a torrent of ridicule, and later in the year, in October, the Tennessee legislature heaped insult on top of ridicule by nominating Jackson for the presidency—three years in advance of the next presidential race in 1828. Jackson immediately resigned his Senate seat to begin a national campaign to unseat John Quincy Adams—sooner or later.

  Rather than reinforcing his presidency, John Quincy seemed to go out of his way to undermine it. Apparently unaware of or unable to address the needs of a semiliterate rural population in his speeches, he always appeared to address Harvard scholars or their ilk, insisting that “the great object of civil government is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact.”

  Roads and canals . . . are among the most important means of improvement. But moral, political and intellectual improvement are duties assigned by the Author of our existence. . . . Among the first . . . instruments for the improvement of the condition of men is knowledge, and to the acquisition of much of the knowledge adapted to the wants, the comforts and enjoyments of human life, public institutions and seminaries of learning are essential.19

  In what he considered—and what really was—a brilliant, forward-looking address to advance the nation, he called on Congress to promote “the improvement of agriculture, commerce and manufactures, the cultivation and encouragement of the mechanic and of the elegant arts, the advancement of literature, a
nd the progress of the sciences.” Among the sciences, he cited astronomy as the most important and called for federal construction of astronomical observatories, or “lighthouses of the sky,” to study the heavens. He warned that failure to do so “would be treachery to the most sacred of trusts.” If any congressmen still supported his program at that point, he proceeded to lose them all with one of the most politically inept statements of his career: “While foreign nations . . . are advancing with gigantic strides in . . . public improvement, were we to slumber in indolence . . . and proclaim to the world that we are palsied by the will of our constituents, would it not be to . . . doom ourselves to perpetual inferiority?”20

  Even his most loyal supporters misunderstood the phrase “palsied by the will of our constituents.” North Carolina congressman Nathaniel Macon charged that “the message of the President seems to claim all the power to the federal government.”21 And General Edmund Gaines, whom former President Monroe had sent to rid Amelia Island of pirates, predicted that “the planters, farmers and mechanics of the country” would see the next presidential election as “a great contest between the aristocracy and democracy of America.”22

  Jackson thundered a reply that devastated John Quincy, who seemed unaware of the implications of what he had written and said. “When I view . . . the declaration that it would be criminal for the agents of our government to be palsied by the will of their constituents, I shudder for the consequence. . . . The voice of the people . . . must be heard. Instead of building lighthouses in the skies, establishing national universities, and making explorations round the globe . . . pay the national debt . . . then apportion the surplus revenue amongst the several states . . . leaving the superintendence of education to the states.”23

  While newspapers ridiculed John Quincy’s “lighthouses in the skies,” Jackson addressed the needs and concerns of ordinary people. He called for an end to debtors’ prisons, citing a blind man in a Massachusetts prison for a debt of $6 and a Rhode Island woman behind bars for a debt of sixty-eight cents. There were five times as many debtors as criminals in prisons, most of them indigent, with debts of less than $50, and forced to pay for their food in jail—or starve.u Jackson also called for reform of bankruptcy laws to prevent employers from declaring bankruptcy to avoid paying wages.

  Although many of his proposals were two centuries ahead of their time, John Quincy was out of touch with his America. In what was clearly a clash of cultures—indeed, a clash of generations—John Quincy saw man in general, and the American man in particular, as having unlimited talents, restrained only by lack of educational opportunities that he believed the federal government could and should provide. In fact, Americans were largely a society of small landowners and laborers, tilling the soil, accepting their lot as all but predestined, and largely intent on meeting their physical rather than any perceived intellectual needs. The average American man yearned not to attend school or college but to own a plot of land—to work its soil, to plant and harvest enough to feed himself and his family, and to sell any surplus at market. John Quincy’s proposals were so alien to American thinking of his time that his programs—along with his presidency—met with nothing but ridicule and rejection, his chance for leadership spent, his dream of advancing the nation, culturally and economically, shattered.

  Depressed, he moped about the White House, lost weight noticeably, and reduced his presidential routine to early-morning Bible reading, a daily walk or swim in the Potomac, dinner with Louisa and the family, then an evening chat or a game of billiards. In the course of the day, he kept up with newspapers, signed letters, and received occasional visitors, but grew so moody he stopped writing in his diary, unable to understand why and how he had failed to make his countrymen understand what he was trying to do for them and the nation. His depression made Louisa’s life miserable.

  “There is something in this great, unsocial house which depresses my spirits beyond expression,” she complained in her diary. Evidently weary of the burdens of married life, she grumbled that a husband expected his wife to “cook dinner, wash his clothes, gratify his sexual appetites,” and then “thank him and love him for permission to drudge through life at the mercy of his caprices.”24 She and her husband grew strangely distant, and when he traveled to Quincy for his usual summer vacation, Louisa went off on her own, up the Hudson Valley and then to New Hampshire. Their estrangement would last for the rest of their stay in the White House, although she appeared at family dinners and public entertainments.

  The mood of the country worsened as well. Planters, farmers, craftsmen, and frontiersmen who made up the majority of Americans were independent and self-sufficient—unwilling to brook interference in their lives by a far-off federal government. They developed a deep resentment for the Harvard scholar who suggested he knew better than they what they needed to know and what they needed to do. They wanted less government, not more. They would read and learn what they liked—or not. They would build their own roads if they thought they needed any and grow and hunt what they pleased when they pleased.

  English-born First Lady Louisa Catherine Adams despised life in the White House, saying, “There is something in this great, unsocial house which depresses my spirits beyond expression.” (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  Sensing the outrage of ordinary voters, Congress blocked every Adams proposal and brought federal government to a halt. And still clinging to his belief that the public would recognize merit, John Quincy refused to campaign for his programs, refused to answer critics, refused to explain his vision in terms the public could understand. In short, he refused to lead or fight back—even after journalist Russell Jarvis of the Daily Telegraph assaulted his son John II in the rotunda of the Capitol.

  Jarvis had attended a White House reception after publishing a vicious attack on the President, and young Adams proclaimed in a loud voice that Jarvis should have shown the propriety not to show his face at the President’s home. Jarvis sent John II a letter challenging him to a duel, and when John II ignored it, Jarvis waited in the Capitol rotunda for the young man to arrive with messages from the President for Congress. He went up to John II, pulled his nose, then slapped his face—the standard, public provocation to duel. Unskilled with swords or pistols, John II faced certain death if he accepted the challenge. He wisely walked away, and John Quincy responded with a letter of protest to the Speaker of the House that his son had been “waylaid and assaulted.” He demanded a congressional inquiry.

  The second-born son of John Quincy and Louisa Adams, thirty-one-year-old John Adams II. (NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE, ADAMS NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)

  “Assault Within the Capitol,” ran the headline of a pro-Adams newspaper, while Jarvis’s Telegraph called “the pulling of the Prince’s nose . . . a signal chastisement . . . of the Royal puppy.” Congress held hearings, questioned both Jarvis and John II, and did nothing. The President never said another word.

  Politically impotent, John Quincy recognized that he would be the first chief executive in the nation’s short history to contribute nothing to his country. With little else to do, he joined Louisa in breeding silkworms outside his office and lengthened the time he spent walking, swimming, and horseback riding each day.

  The political misery that Jacksonians inflicted on John Quincy hurt Louisa as well. Calling the White House a “dull and stately prison,” she continually searched for ways to quash rumors that she and her husband had imported the aristocratic grandeur of European palaces to the executive mansion. She opened White House doors to the public and turned her home into a public museum that left her all but imprisoned in her living quarters, making it “impossible,” she said, “for me to feel at home or to fancy that I have a home anywhere.”25

  In addition, she resumed the weekly receptions, or “levées,”v that Martha Washington, Dolley Madison, and, for a time, Elizabeth Monroe had held. Like Elizabeth Monroe, Louisa stood under the rotunda as visitors passed before her, one by one, bowing or curtsying—shaking ha
nds was forbidden—acknowledging her welcoming nod and short greeting and passing on to partake of refreshments. “All classes of society mingled in the throng that crowded outside the audience chamber and surged into the great East Room,” according to one participant. Diplomats in powdered wigs and high-ranking officers with medals mixed with farmers and hunters in muddy boots and frontiersmen with jingling spurs.

  John Quincy’s inability to discuss the mundane at public functions, however, often stripped White House parties of the mirth that had filled the mansion during the tenures of some of his predecessors. What provoked John Quincy’s laughter—for example, a misinterpretation he had read of Tacitus—left others staring in disbelief without the slightest understanding of what he was talking about. Only Louisa understood.

  Going to the White House levée. First Lady Louisa Catherine Adams hosted weekly “levées,” or open houses, for the public to visit the presidential mansion and see the President and First Lady. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  “Mrs. Adams, like her husband, had . . . a love of literature,” explained one observer of the social scene of that era. “The most scholarly woman who has presided over the White House, she possessed the adaptability of a French woman or of an American and could turn gracefully from her books or her family cares to inaugurate certain much needed reforms in official circles. By her grace, tact, and savoir faire, Mrs. Adams did much to neutralize the effect of the President’s cold and often forbidding manner.”26

  The President, of course, had no intention of being cold or forbidding—and, indeed, did not realize he was. He could not, after all, alter the lines, shadows, and shape of his face. Though his thoughts often contained a smile, it did not leak onto his face or into his words. “I am by nature,” he said repeatedly, “a silent animal, and my mother’s constant lesson in childhood, that children in company should be seen and not heard, confirmed me irrevocably in what I now deem a bad habit.”27