by Harlow Unger
On July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence from Britain, John Adams died in Quincy, Massachusetts—an hour after the death at Monticello of his onetime vice president and longtime friend, Thomas Jefferson. George Washington Adams was with his grandfather when he died. John Quincy arrived with John II in time for the funeral and burial at the local churchyard, after which he returned to his father’s house and went into his father’s bedroom. “That moment was inexpressibly painful,” he moaned.
My father and my mother have departed. The charm which has always made this house to me an abode of enchantment is dissolved; and yet my attachment to it and to the whole region round is stronger than I ever felt before. I feel it is time for me to begin to set my house in order and to prepare for the churchyard myself. . . . I shall within two or three years . . . need a place of retirement. Where else should I go? This will be a safe and pleasant retreat, where I may pursue literary occupations as long and as much as I can take pleasure in them.28
His father’s death gave John Quincy more work to do than his job as President. John Adams left a complicated will. For John Quincy to assume sole ownership of the ninety-five-acre property, the will required him to establish a trust for his brother, Thomas Boylston, who lived in his father’s house with his wife but had grown too dependent on alcohol to support himself. Thomas’s drunken orgies so disgusted Louisa that she refused even to visit the Quincy homestead with her husband, and when John Quincy left to spend the summer at his birthplace, she remained at the White House, neither writing letters of any consequence to the other.
Meanwhile, midterm congressional elections only added to the Jacksonian majority and further stifled John Quincy’s efforts to serve the nation. Although the best-prepared chief executive in American history at the time, he was the least effective and least popular, and he did not understand why, given his deep love for his country. “I must await my allotted time,” he sighed. “My career is closed.”29
As the new, decidedly hostile Congress assembled in Washington, John Quincy’s son John II provided the President and Louisa with a bright moment by marrying Louisa’s niece Mary Hellen in the Blue Room of the White House.
“The bride looked very handsome in white satin, orange-blossoms, and pearls,” wrote John Quincy’s niece, who said that she and the other three bridesmaids had “an amusing time . . . arranging flowers and ribbons.” They then “passed the cake . . . [and] cut slices to distribute among their friends.”30 Even the President joined in the festivities that followed the cutting of the cake by entering “with spirit into the mazes of the Virginia reel.”31 After the wedding, Louisa’s nephew Thomas, who had loafed about the White House after dropping out of Harvard, ran off with one of the young White House maids and, mercifully, left John Quincy with one less family member to support.
By spring of 1828, the President’s daily activities were devoid of consequence for the nation:
I rise generally before five—frequently before four. Write from one to two hours in this diary. Ride about twelve miles in two hours on horseback with my son John. Return home about nine; breakfast; and from that time till dinner, between five and six, afternoon, I am occupied incessantly with visitors, business, reading letters, dispatches, and newspapers. I spend an hour, sometimes before and sometimes after dinner, in the garden and nursery; an hour of drowsiness on a sofa; and two hours of writing in the evening. Retire usually between eleven and midnight.32
The President’s political inactivity triggered a barrage of scurrilous attacks by Jacksonian newspapers, which took aim at every member of John Quincy’s cabinet as well as John Quincy himself. The attacks left Henry Clay so distraught he took a medical leave of absence. Although John Quincy did not want to allow his enemies to topple him from office without defending himself, everything he tried failed. Invited to preside at a July 4 groundbreaking for the heralded Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, a symbol of the very national improvements he espoused, he addressed a friendly crowd of more than 2,000 spectators, then took a gilded spade to turn the first shovel of dirt—only to feel the shovel clang and rebound sharply, then slip from his hands after hitting a hidden tree stump. As murmurs of disappointment spread through onlookers, the President tried again—and again. Finally, he did something he had never done in public: “I threw off my coat and, resuming the spade, raised a shovelful of the earth, at which a general shout burst forth from the surrounding multitude, and I completed my address.”
It was the first time in months that an audience had cheered the President, and he left elated, inviting the officers who escorted him home to join him for drinks in the White House. Although it was too late, John Quincy had evidently learned a lesson about relating to the general public: “My casting off my coat,” he wrote later, “struck the eye and fancy of the spectators more than all the flowers of rhetoric in my speech.”33 He was, of course, a master at interrelating with czars, kings, counts, and courtiers, but had simply never had the chance to befriend ordinary citizens—at home or abroad.
Although eager for the first time to enter the election fray, it was all too new to him, and he let others do the electioneering. They attacked Jackson and his allies viciously, with Clay allegedly coaxing the editor of Cincinnati’s Gazette to charge Jackson with having maintained an adulterous relationship with his wife, Rachel, before she had divorced her first husband. The Jacksonians fired back with equally vicious libels against the Yankee “aristocrat” with an “English wife,” who had spent public funds to purchase a billiard table for her husband’s amusement in the White House.
In the end, election campaign rhetoric made little difference. The hero of the Battle of New Orleans was simply too popular, and the public was thoroughly convinced that the aristocratic New Englander from Harvard had ignored the will of the people and purchased his election by appointing Henry Clay as secretary of state. Unlike John Quincy, Jackson had formed a new and well-organized political party that operated at both local and state levels and acquired consummate skills in obtaining newspaper publicity.
As the 1828 election approached, New England textile manufacturers set up a drumbeat of demand for higher protective tariffs. The War of 1812 had cut off cloth imports from England and given New England manufacturers a monopoly. After the war, however, renewed competition from larger, more-efficient British mills saw American markets flooded with less costly, high-quality British cloth, and Congress responded to complaints from New England mills by passing protective tariffs in 1816 and again in 1824. Agricultural interests in the South—especially cotton growers—protested, fearing that their best customers, the British cotton mills, would retaliate and curtail purchases of American cotton. Ignoring such protests, other raw materials producers and manufacturers demanded similar tariff protection—for wool, cotton, hemp, flax, iron, distilled spirits . . . the list grew endless—with the final bill called a “Tariff of Abomination” by its opponents. Passed by a huge veto-proof congressional majority, the bill left John Quincy no choice but to sign it into law. Southern states reacted with outrage, with South Carolina’s legislature calling the tariff unconstitutional and blaming John Quincy for not having vetoed it. Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia followed suit and cost John Quincy the entire South in the 1828 election.
When the votes were counted on December 3, Jackson had humiliated John Quincy Adams—with 647,276 Americans voting for Jackson and 508,064 for Adams. In the Electoral College, Jackson captured 178 votes, more than twice John Quincy’s 83 votes. “The sun of my political life sets in the deepest gloom,” John Quincy sighed, “but that of my country shines unclouded.” To ease the pain of his loss, he took “a ride of an hour and a half on horseback.”34
Louisa stepped forward to try to cheer her husband by organizing a huge party to celebrate his return to private life. “The defeated party . . . are more smiling and gracious and agreeable than they ever were before,” Mrs. Samuel Harrison Smith, wife of the owner of the National Intel
ligencer, wrote to her son.
At Mrs. Adams’s drawing room last week, every one attached to the administration, as well as the members of the cabinet, appeared with their best looks and best dresses. Mrs. Adams never on any former occasion was so social, attentive, and agreeable. Instead of standing in one place, making formal courtesies, she walked through the rooms conversing with every one in the most animated manner. To add to the gaiety and brilliancy of the evening the great audience chamber was lit up, the band of music stationed there, and dancing took place.35
Shortly after the election results appeared in the newspapers, Rachel Jackson saw the story alleging her adulterous relationship with Andrew Jackson before she divorced her first husband. Shocked to the core as she read, she collapsed—a stroke, perhaps, or a heart attack. She died several days later and was buried on Christmas Eve without seeing her husband assume the presidency.
On March 4, 1829, Andrew Jackson was inaugurated as seventh President of the United States. Ignoring tradition, John Quincy refused to attend either the inauguration or the new President’s White House reception afterwards. “I can yet scarcely realize my situation,” he shuddered in disbelief, saying, “posterity will scarcely believe . . . the combination of parties and of public men against my character and reputation such as I believe never before was exhibited against any man since this Union existed.” He continued:
This combination against me has been formed and is now exulting in triumph over me, for the devotion of my life and of all the faculties of my soul to the Union and to the improvement, physical, moral and intellectual, of my country. The North assails me for my fidelity to the Union; the South, for my ardent aspirations of improvement. Yet . . . passion, prejudice, envy, and jealousy will pass. The cause of Union and of improvement will remain, and I have duties to it and to my country yet to discharge.36
Although the vast majority of American voters had rejected John Quincy and his vision for America, he refused to accept their judgment and vowed to continue his struggle to lead them and the nation to greatness. His only uncertainty was how to do it.
CHAPTER 13
A New Beginning
After his 1828 defeat, President John Quincy Adams prepared to return to his father’s house in Quincy, Massachusetts, resigned to a life of semiretirement, puttering about the farm a bit, but focused on writing a biography of his father and practicing law part time. John Quincy and Louisa were waiting for George Washington Adams to arrive from Boston to help them move back to Quincy, when a messenger delivered a thunderbolt:
Their firstborn son was dead at twenty-eight.
George Washington Adams had been en route to Washington on a steamboat from Providence to New York. On April 30, at 3 a.m., after a night of heavy drinking, he turned irrational, demanding that the captain stop the ship to let him off. When the captain refused, he went topside by himself and either jumped or fell overboard, leaving only his cloak and hat on board—and no note. In the weeks before his death, his drinking and gambling had not abated, and his work had suffered. Still worse, a maid working for the family where he was living had given birth to his child and was blackmailing him.w
After learning of her son’s death, Louisa decided to remain in Washington apart from her husband. She was too despondent to cope with her husband’s moodiness and his brother’s drunkenness. John Quincy bought a home two miles from the Capitol and left her there.
“The parting from my wife was distressing to her and to me,” he confided to his diary. “The afflictions with which we have been visited—especially the last—has so weakened us in body and mind that our dejection of spirit seems irrecoverable. We parted with anguish that I cannot describe.”1
Early in September, John Quincy’s youngest son, Charles Francis—by then his and Louisa’s brightest hope—married Abigail Brooks, whose sister had married Massachusetts congressman Edward Everett.x Everett’s brother Alexander had trained in the law with John Quincy and served in his St. Petersburg legation for a year. Although John Quincy attended his son’s wedding, Louisa was still too distraught from the death of her oldest son to travel to Boston.
Later that fall, John Quincy rejoined Louisa in Washington, spending his time on walks, swimming in the Potomac, and writing articles on international affairs that found their way into scholarly journals. In the spring of 1830, he returned to Quincy, this time with Louisa, leaving John II in Washington to try to extract profits from the Columbian Mills flour business.
As the summer progressed, however, John Quincy fell deeper into depression, finding his only pleasures in walking and swimming, reading the Bible and Cicero’s Orations, planting fruit trees, and tending a garden of peas, beans, corn, and other vegetables. He made halfhearted attempts at organizing his father’s papers, rummaging through boxes and finding some mementos of his youth—largely books, such as a fondly remembered edition of Arabian Nights. “The more there was in them of invention, the more pleasing they were,” he recalled. “My imagination pictured them all as realities, and I dreamed of enchantments as if there was a world in which they existed.”2 Charles Francis and his wife visited regularly for family clambakes, John II came up from Washington for two short visits, and the summer slipped away.
As ill disposed as he was to public functions, he agreed to attend the bicentennial celebration of the founding of Boston on September 17, and to his surprise, two honorary marshals escorted him from the State House to the Old South Church. Well-wishers hailed him as he passed, and even former Federalist adversaries approached with warm salutations. At the end of the day, he attended a reception at the lieutenant governor’s residence, where his friends, the Everett brothers and the editor of the Boston Patriot, were huddling with Quincy congressman Reverend Joseph Richardson. After greeting the former President, they asked if they could visit him the following day. He agreed, and at the appointed time, they informed him that Richardson’s parishioners had pleaded with him to retire from Congress to devote himself full time to his church, and he had agreed. The Everetts then asked John Quincy to run for Richardson’s seat, assuring him that he would win without opposition and flattering him with the notion of “ennobling” the House of Representatives with the presence of a former President.
Always in character, John Quincy feigned disinterest, saying he would do nothing to support his own candidacy. Explaining his familiar position on political campaigns, he asserted that if the people called on him of their own volition, he “might deem it my duty to serve. . . . I want the people to act spontaneously.”3 He made it clear, however, that he would remain independent of party affiliations and represent the whole nation, with his only political loyalty tied to national independence from all foreign entanglements and preservation of the Union.
Both Louisa and Charles Francis were appalled that John Quincy would even consider returning to politics after the humiliation he had suffered. Louisa threatened not to accompany him if he returned to Washington—to no avail. Quincy voted overwhelmingly to return their former President to Washington, giving him 1,817 votes, while the two other candidates garnered a combined total of only 552 votes.
“I am a member-elect of the Twenty-Second Congress,” he wrote in joyful disbelief that night, and nothing Louisa could say could detract from his satisfaction. “My return to public life . . . is disagreeable to my family,” he admitted, “yet I can not withhold my grateful acknowledgment to the Disposer of human events and to the people of my native region for this unexpected testimonial of their continued confidence.”
It seemed as if I was deserted by all mankind. . . . In the French opera of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, the minstrel Blondel sings under the walls of his prison a song, beginning:
O, Richard! O, mon Roi!
L’univers t’abandonne.y
When I first heard this song, forty-five years ago . . . it made an indelible impression upon my memory, without imagining that I should ever feel its force so much closer to home. But this call upon me by the people of the di
strict in which I reside, to represent them in Congress, has been spontaneous. . . . My election as President of the United States was not half so gratifying to my inmost soul. No election or appointment conferred upon me ever gave me so much pleasure.4
As his spirits revived, he finally coaxed Louisa into returning to Washington, and the two left in December. Along the way, he showed himself still a champion of public improvements by being among the first to ride on the new steam-driven train between Baltimore and Washington. And to his delight and Louisa’s amazement, a crowd awaited to greet them on their return. Although he would not take his seat until 1832, three hundred callers came to their house on New Year’s Day 1831, buoying his spirits still more and spurring him to seek out and meet members of Congress to determine their political views. He attended the House of Representatives to learn the rules and study member quirks and tics, and as he soaked up the thinking of his future colleagues, the joy of his return to politics spurred a renewed interest in scholarly pursuits, including poetry. By spring, when the time came to return to Quincy, he had reread Childe Harold, Don Juan, and other works of Lord Byron—and written his own epic, 2,000-line poem titled Dermot MacMorrogh, on Henry II’s conquest of Ireland. He considered it his finest work and at least one publisher agreed, producing three successive editions.z On the way north, he stopped to see former President James Monroe, who was gravely ill in New York and destitute, living off the charity of his daughter and son-in-law at their New York City home.
