John Quincy Adams

by Harlow Unger

  John Quincy was equally elated and wrote to his last surviving son, describing his courtroom triumph as one of the most notable events in the family’s illustrious history: “The signature and seal of Saer de Quincy to the old parchment [the Magna Carta],” John Quincy told his son, “were . . . almost my only support and encouragement, under the pressure of a burden upon my thought that I was to plead for more, much more than my own life.”17 John Quincy’s plea for the freedom of the Amistad captives marked more than six centuries during which he and his forbears had led man’s quest for freedom. “Well done, good and faithful servant,” he said to himself.

  A flood of anonymous hate mail awaited John Quincy when he returned home. “Is your pride of abolition oratory not yet glutted?” asked a Virginian. “Are you to spend the remainder of your days endeavoring to produce a civil and servile war? Do you . . . wish to ruin your country because you failed in your election to the Presidency? May the lightening of heaven blast you . . . and direct you . . . to the lowest regions of Hell!”18

  While John Quincy continued his daily walks and public swims unmolested, abolitionists paid the price for sending the Amistad captives back to their homeland. After they left, a shipload of 135 slaves mutinied aboard the ship Creole, bound from Hampton Roads, Virginia, to New Orleans. After killing one of the owners, they directed the crew to sail to Nassau, where British authorities hanged those identified as murderers and freed the rest.

  Although John Quincy had promised himself that if his life and health were spared to defend the men of the Amistad, he would “take my last leave of the public service,” his Supreme Court triumph so elated him that he decided the time had not yet come to keep his promise. “Fifty years of incessant active intercourse with the world,” he now said to himself,

  has made political movement to me as much a necessary of life as atmospheric air. This is the weakness of my nature, which I have intellect enough left to perceive, but not energy to control. And thus, while a remnant of physical power is left to me to write and speak, the world will retire from me before I retire from the world.19

  President John Tyler of Virginia was a slaveholder who defended slavery as a quintessential American institution and supported efforts in the House to censure and expel John Quincy Adams. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  A few days later, on April 4, 1841, President William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia after only a month in office. Vice President John Tyler, a fervent defender of states’ rights from Virginia and champion of slavery, succeeded to the presidency. With Tyler’s warm approval, slaveholders in the House prepared to censure and expel John Quincy Adams.

  Too elated by his Supreme Court triumph to notice the puerile antics of his congressional enemies, John Quincy pursued his interests in the sciences, using his chairmanship of the committee on the Smithson bequest to promote establishment of astronomical observatories—his famous “lighthouses of the sky.” He not only ignored the ridicule of political foes but gave his alma mater, Harvard, $1,000 to help build its own observatory and loaned $13,000 of his own money to Columbian College, the institution “for the general diffusion of knowledge” that George Washington had helped found with a bequest in his will. It would grow to become George Washington University.

  His constant glorification of the benefits of astronomical observatories to expand man’s knowledge encouraged the Navy Department, the University of North Carolina, Williams College, Western Reserve College, Miami College (Ohio), and the United States Military Academy to build observatories. Even Philadelphia’s high schools built one—the Philadelphia High School Observatory, which opened a John Quincy Adams “Lighthouse of the Sky” to the citizens of the city. Ridiculing those who had scoffed at John Quincy’s advocacy of such observatories, enlightened communities across the nation turned his vision into reality.

  John Quincy’s broad interest in science included insatiable curiosity about every new invention. As a boy, he had witnessed the first balloon flights in Paris and public demonstrations of Franz Mesmer’s then new technique, mesmerism, later known as hypnotism. In 1839, another French inventor, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a scene painter for the Paris opera, developed a process that used sunlight to make permanent pictures on metal plates. By 1842, John Plumbe Jr., a civil engineer, had opened the Daguerrian Gallery in Boston, which John Quincy visited in September 1842, becoming the first American President ever to be photographed live. Unfortunately, the Plumbe photos of John Quincy were lost, with much of that pioneering photographer’s works, but the following year, engraver Philip Haas opened another daguerreotype studio, and John Quincy Adams asked him to take another photograph. By then, sixteen portrait artists, five sculptors, and one medalist had captured John Quincy’s likeness. Haas produced the first surviving photograph.20

  The Amistad case touched John Quincy in ways different from any previous experience, pushing him firmly into the abolitionist camp. Although they had failed to organize a full-fledged political party, northern abolitionists had nonetheless formed a powerful Select Committee on Slavery and rejoiced when John Quincy accepted their long-standing invitation to join. He did so on condition that they accept his leadership in matters concerning the House of Representatives, and the first thing he made them do was change their name to the Committee of Friends of the Right of Petition. The change cloaked their divisive abolitionist goal in the mantle of constitutional rights and broadened their appeal to defenders of the Bill of Rights by calls to defend the rights of all Americans to petition and to free speech.

  Daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams is the first surviving live photograph of an American President. Taken by Philip Haas, a pioneer in the process.

  When Congress convened in January 1842, John Quincy hoped his Supreme Court victory had covered him—and the Constitution—with enough laurels to convince the House to repeal the Gag Rule. As he had at the beginning of every session since its imposition six years earlier, he opened the January 1842 session of Congress by assailing the Gag Rule as a clear violation of his own constitutional right to free speech and the right of his constituents to petition government for redress of grievances. To these, he added the questionable constitutional right of uninterrupted free debate in Congress.

  In renewing the Gag Rule, each session of Congress had extended its scope, so that instead of simply banning the mention of the word “slavery,” the rule now stated, “No petition, memorial, resolution or other paper, praying for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, or any other state or territory, or the slave trade between the states and territories of the United States where it exists shall be received by this House, or entertained in any way whatsoever.” The increased strictures offended many congressmen unopposed to slavery in the South but concerned only with its spread into other states and territories. The new Gag Rule seemed too restrictive. Far from the overwhelming majority that had instituted the rule in 1836, it passed by only four votes in 1841, and John Quincy sensed victory near as he honed his rhetorical weapons for 1842. He picked what he knew “would set them in a blaze”—a petition from “the citizens of Haverhill, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts . . . that you will immediately adopt measures peaceably to dissolve the Union of these States.”21

  As he knew it would, the parliamentary lynch mob from the South gathered about him, with cries of “Order!” “Stop him!” He raised his voice and continued above the din.

  “Old Nestor,” said an eyewitness at the scene, “lifted up his voice like a trumpet, till slaveholding, slave trading, and slave breeding absolutely quailed and howled. . . . The old man breasted the storm and dealt blows upon the head of the monster. Scores . . . of slaveholders [strove] constantly to stop him by . . . screaming at the top of their voices, ‘That is false!’ . . . ‘I demand that you shut the mouth of that old harlequin.’”22

  Kentucky congressman Thomas Marshall, a nephew of the deceased chief justice John Marshall, moved to censure John Quincy for having “committed high treason when
he submitted a petition for the dissolution of the Union.”

  “Sir,” John Quincy shot back, “what is high treason? The Constitution of the United States says what high treason is. . . . It is not for the gentleman from Kentucky, or his puny mind, to define what high treason is and confound it with what I have done.” John Quincy then ordered the clerk to read the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. When the clerk hesitated, John Quincy repeated his demand, shouting, “The first paragraph!”

  “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation—”

  “Proceed!” John Quincy thundered. “Proceed! Down to ‘right’ and ‘duty’!”

  The clerk continued: “It is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government.”

  “Now, Sir, if there is a principle sacred on earth and established by the instrument just read, it is the right of the people to alter, to change, to destroy, the government if it becomes oppressive to them. There would be no such right existing if the people had not the power in pursuance of it to petition for it. . . .

  “I rest that petition on the Declaration of Independence!” John Quincy boomed.

  When the House had quieted down, he then challenged its right to charge him with high treason, a crime for which, he said, “I could only be tried by a regular circuit court, by an impartial jury.”23

  Virginia’s Henry Wise stood to contradict John Quincy but made the tactical mistake of talking too much and digressing into a defense of “the principle of slavery” as “a leveling principle . . . friendly to equality. Break down slavery and you would with the same blow destroy the great democratic principle of equality among men.” Wise had built a reputation as a staunch defender of slavery, which he said was “interwoven in our political existence . . . guaranteed by our Constitution . . . resulting from our system of government.”24

  After catcalls from northern congressman subsided, Wise got back on track, pretending to mourn John Quincy’s having “outlived his fame. . . . To think of the veneration, the honor, the reverence with which he might have been loved and cherished. . . . I thank God that the gentleman, great as he was, neither has nor is likely to have sufficient influence to excite a spirit of disunion throughout the land. . . . The gentleman is politically dead.”25

  Far from politically dead, John Quincy found new life across the nation, as tens of thousands in the North and parts of the West rallied to his side. “When they talk about his old age and venerableness and nearness to the grave,” Ralph Waldo Emerson responded, “he is like one of those old cardinals who, as quick as he is chosen Pope, throws away his crutches and his crookedness and is as straight as a boy. He is an old roué, who cannot live on slops, but must have sulphuric acid in his tea.”26

  When the time came for John Quincy’s final defense against the attempt to quiet him, he challenged the southern parliamentary lynch mob, daring them to punish him for having presented the Haverhill petition. “If they say that they will punish me, they must punish me. If they say that in grace and mercy they will spare my expulsion, I disdain and cast their mercy away. . . . I defy them. I have constituents to go to who will have something to say if this House expels me. Nor will it be long before gentlemen will see me here again.”27

  John Quincy then turned and pointed to Virginia’s Henry Wise, whom the House had blandly readmitted after his participation in a duel that was tantamount to murder. Crack shots and swordsmen from the South had used dueling as a weapon to silence political opponents who lacked shooting skills and feared uttering even the slightest criticism that a southerner might interpret as an insult and thus grounds for a challenge. John Quincy’s son had faced just such a challenge, and Wise had been a second in such a duel between two other congressmen. When both had survived the first round and would normally have left the field with their honor—and bodies—intact, Wise insisted that they keep firing, until the third round left one duelist dead. John Quincy Adams was so outraged at the spectacle that he sponsored a landmark bill—the Prentiss-Adams Law—to ban dueling in the District of Columbia. In proposing the ban, John Quincy called dueling a form of slavery that allowed trained killers to blackmail the less skilled marksman or swordsman into suicidal combat or face a loss of honor.

  “That far more guilty man,” John Quincy pointed at Wise, “came into this House with his hands and face dripping . . . reeking with the blood of murder.” Turning, he then pointed at Kentucky’s Thomas Marshall, urging him to “go to some law school and learn a little of the rights of the citizens of these states and the members of this House.”28 John Quincy’s public scolding sent Marshall scurrying back to Kentucky humiliated, with his intellectual tail between his legs, never again to return to national politics.

  With John Quincy luring more House members to his side, one southerner offered to withdraw the petition of censure if John Quincy would withdraw the Haverhill petition for disunion.

  “No! No! I cannot do that,” John Quincy replied in the deepest tones he could find to add to the drama of the moment. “That proposition comes to the point and issue of this whole question . . . the total suppression of the right of petition to the whole people of this Union. . . . If I withdraw this petition, I would consider myself as having sacrificed . . . every element of liberty that was enjoyed by my fellow citizens. . . . Never more would the House see a petition presented from the people of the Union expressing their grievances in a manner that might not be pleasing to the members. . . . There is the deadly character of the attempt to put me down.”29

  The debate continued for two weeks, with John Quincy’s eloquence stirring the nation to petition Congress. Day after day, he held the floor, as petitions flew through the door protesting congressional attempts to censure him. On February 7, he tried holding back a smile as he announced he would need another week to complete his defense, to which a member of the Virginia delegation moved to table the censure motion and end the matter. When the House agreed, John Quincy responded by presenting two hundred more petitions and addressing the House with one of the most momentous speeches he would ever deliver. Indeed, his words would later serve as the constitutional basis for Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

  “Under this state of things,” he spoke, staring at the southerners, “so far from its being true that the states where slavery exists have the exclusive management of the subject, not only the President of the United States but the commander of the army has power to order the universal emancipation of the slaves.”30

  Years later, Henry Wise would characterize John Quincy as the “acutest, astutest, archest enemy of southern slavery that ever existed . . . and his prophecies have been fulfilled . . . far faster and more fearfully . . . than ever he anticipated.”31

  John Quincy’s triumph in the House provoked the usual hate mail, but the number of his supporters swelled across the nation, with one Pennsylvanian writing, “You are honored, old man—the hearts of a hundred thousand Pennsylvanians are with you.” Another called him “the only public man in the land who possesses the union of courage with virtue.” Poet John Greenleaf Whittier prayed, “God bless thee, and preserve thee.”32 Even those who had opposed the aggressive tactics of abolitionists now wrote, “I am no abolitionist, yet I am in favor of the emancipation of the colored race.”33

  His popularity exceeded that of the President, and had he defended his beliefs as aggressively when he was President, he would certainly never have suffered the humiliation of defeat in his run for reelection. Few Americans knew or understood him as President; almost every American now knew and understood him—indeed, revered him—after his battle in Congress, and millions now listened to every word of the Sage of Qui
ncy. Hundreds lined up to see him, to hear his words, to try to talk to him as he walked about Washington, striding to and from the Capitol each day. Luminaries from all parts of the United States, Britain, and Europe called at his home. Charles Dickens and his wife stopped for lunch, and Dickens asked for John Quincy’s autograph before leaving. John Quincy had emerged as one of the most celebrated and beloved personages in the Western world.

  In 1843, his son Charles Francis, by then a member of the Massachusetts state legislature, introduced a resolution calling for a constitutional amendment abolishing the right of slave states to count five slaves as equal to three white men in determining representation in the House of Representatives. With deep pride, John Quincy in turn introduced his son’s amendment in the House—which ignored it. After he won reelection in 1844, however, the House could not ignore his resolution abolishing the Gag Rule. Indeed, it passed it immediately, 105–80, ending the great battle he had fought for freedom of debate in Congress, freedom of speech generally, and the right of citizens to petition their government. It was the first victory the North would win against the South and the slaveocracy.

  “Blessed, ever blessed be the name of God,” John Quincy exulted afterwards.34

  Riding his wave of popularity, he set off to promote national interest in science and education by accepting an invitation to speak at ceremonies laying the cornerstone of the Cincinnati Astronomical Society’s observatory. It was an arduous trip for an old man, but one with opportunities to promote science education—especially his “lighthouses of the sky”—across a broad territory.

  He had no sooner received his invitation to speak in Cincinnati when another invitation arrived—this one to attend the long-anticipated completion of the Bunker’s Hill Monument, commemorating the battle he had witnessed as a seven-year-old with his mother in 1775. When, however, he learned that President John Tyler “and his cabinet of slave-drivers” would also attend, he refused. “How,” he asked, “could I have witnessed this without an unbecoming burst of indignation or of laughter? John Tyler is a slave-monger.”