American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  If Virginia had led that earlier generation, it seemed most impoverished by the time of the second. Perhaps the end of the dynasty of the thinking gentlemen politicians of Virginia reflected underlying social and economic changes—the decline of the tobacco economy, the failure of Virginia to develop economically compared with the other middle states, the drift of potential leaders over the mountains to the West. Or perhaps that decline had long been fated. The incandescent glow of the Virginians had always been shadowed by their defense of the persisting system of social deference and hierarchy, the genteel subordination of women, the unavailability of schooling for great numbers of black and white children, and above all the blight of slavery. In these subordinate ranks lay concealed much of the potential social and moral and political grass-roots leadership of the Virginia of the next generation but that potential was left immobilized, and never to be realized, on the blind side of the leaders of the Old Dominion.

  THE CHECKING AND BALANCING OF JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

  It had been clear for months, even years, that 1824 would bring no ordinary election. Monroe’s campaign effort in the previous presidential election had been such a tepid enterprise—fewer than 1 percent of the whites in his own state of Virginia bothered to go to the polls—that even at that time politicians were less excited by the current “race” than by the battle royal in prospect four years hence. The one elector who had voted against Monroe in 1820—William Plumer, of New Hampshire—had cast his ballot for John Quincy Adams as a way of publicizing Adams’ availability four years later. Monroe’s administration was hardly under way when Adams and the congressional politicians were busy electioneering.

  Eagerly the press looked forward to the battle of the titans. Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford, widely considered the heir to the Virginia dynasty even though he was a Georgian, seemed an early front-runner, but for just that reason he attracted opposition from his rivals. Secretary of State Adams had reason to feel that he had rights of succession by virtue of holding the office that Madison and Monroe had used as a springboard to the White House. A “worm preying upon the vitals of the Administration within its own body,” was Adams’ reasoned view of Crawford’s role in the Monroe Cabinet. Henry Clay had quit the House of Representatives in order to concentrate on his lucrative law practice; he returned to the House in 1823, immediately won re-election as Speaker, and let his friends organize support for him in the states. As impressive as ever for his quick intelligence, compelling personality, and baffling combination of political daring and compromise, Clay calculated that he could win enough electoral votes to place among the top three candidates and then win election in Congress. John Calhoun was demonstrating, as Monroe’s Secretary of War, that his executive skills matched his parliamentary talents. Still at this point a nationalist who favored protectionism and internal improvements, Calhoun hoped that his support in the North, however spotty, combined with southern-backing, would at least gain him the magic circle of three. And Senator Andrew Jackson, an outsider temporarily inside, reckoned that his reputation as router of redcoats and redskins guaranteed him a personal popularity that could be converted into an electoral college majority.

  None of these four men liked Adams, and the feeling was more than mutual. Adams feared his opponents too, to the point where he urged Monroe to give them diplomatic appointments that would take them out of the country—Clay to Colombia (or Chile, or Argentina), Jackson to Mexico, and De Witt Clinton, another possible rival, to wherever. All declined.

  Soon the election race became a surly free-for-all, a far-flung game of King of the Rock—and a strident and ironic cacophony during the “era of good feelings.” Candidates’ followers spread spiteful whispers about their opponents. No candidate or party put out a program, or saw the need to. Every candidate ran on his record, though most voters were hardly aware of that record, save in the case of Adams and perhaps Clay. Each candidate organized, or at least attracted, a personal following that carried his message to state and local political leaders. Each candidate coped with the mélange of state or local party conventions, legislative caucuses, mass meetings, and of course the congressional caucus, and each argued for the special legitimacy of that portion of the electoral process that favored his own candidacy.

  And that electoral process was slowly changing. The congressional caucus had come into increasing disrepute; those who took part usually had been elected at least two years earlier, and the states and districts not represented by a party in Congress perforce were not represented in its caucus. King Caucus was giving way to the mixed caucus, which did seek to be more representative, and then to party conventions designed to mirror the party constituency. And more and more persons were voting in party and state elections as the suffrage was slowly broadened.

  Crawford fell victim to these changes when his supporters convened the congressional caucus and only sixty-six members showed up. Burdened also by ill health, Crawford slowly lost ground. Earlier, Calhoun had quit the presidential sweepstakes, and nimbly joined the vice-presidential, after he was beaten by Jackson forces in the Republican state convention in Harrisburg. The followers of Adams, Clay, and Jackson redoubled their efforts, especially in state legislative caucuses. Maintaining their posture of being above the battle, the candidates acted through their newspapers and circulars, committees of correspondence, and key state and party leaders to mobilize support. Soon it became evident that the more “popular” the selection process, the more evident was Jackson’s grass-roots support. Rivermen, miners, farmers, and mechanics endorsed Jackson in a Harrisburg mass meeting and sent their “nomination” in a letter penned by a local barkeep. A schoolteacher wrote from Cincinnati: “Strange! Wild! Infatuated! All for Jackson!…” It was like the “influenza,” and “I regard Mr. J. as the most independent of the southern gentry, one on whom they will be least likely to unite.…” If the influenza passed off soon, “the patients will vote coolly and dispassionately for the best man—Mr. Adams.”

  The combat between Clay and Jackson was especially intense. Both “Harry of the West” and the Hero of the West protected their state turfs while eyeing each other’s. Jackson flared up when he heard that the governor of his own state of Tennessee was conniving with Clay. Conceding New England to Adams, the Speaker and the general fought for support in the middle states. Inevitably they were entangled in the local rivalries of politicians who were more intent on controlling state patronage than the national presidency. In the imperial politics of New York State, Martin Van Buren and other chieftains of the Regency led “Bucktails” against De Witt Clinton. The Regency supported Crawford, but as the Georgian’s prospects declined, other candidates looked to the Empire State for support. Elsewhere the Republicans were even more fragmented, as followers mobilized around a congeries of state as well as presidential candidates. Federalists, with little to divide over, were hardly heard from; their party as an organization was defunct.

  The electoral college results nicely mirrored the fragmentation of Republicanism: Jackson 99, Adams 84, Crawford 41, Clay 37. Jackson’s popular vote of about 153,000 almost equaled the combined vote for Adams and Crawford. Adams won all of New England’s electoral votes, most of New York’s, and a surprising degree of support in the South. Jackson picked up Pennsylvania’s solid block of 28 votes, plus an expected good share of the South. Crawford drew his strength mainly from the South, including Virginia, and Clay from the West. Once again the faulty presidential electoral system was to bedevil American politics, as the election was thrown into Congress, where each delegation, whether as large as New York’s (36) or as small as Illinois’ or Delaware’s (3), had the same single vote. And Henry Clay, the trailer in the electoral college, looked like a winner in the Congress, for he could now do some shopping about.

  And that is evidently what he did. “The friends of Jackson, Adams, and Crawford watched him in dismay as—gay, insouciant, and somehow menacing—he wandered from boardinghouse to boardinghouse, from banquet to
banquet, not a candidate but a kingmaker,” according to George Dangerfield. But Adams, if less mobile, was no less political. He neglected not a single opportunity to win over a state to his support, Bemis concludes. Jackson’s and Crawford’s supporters were also on the move. Who would make the winning deal with whom? In mid-December, Robert P. Letcher, a Kentucky congressman and intimate friend of Clay, had several talks with Adams. Long used to such negotiations, the Secretary of State offered some conciliatory remarks about the Speaker. But what Clay’s friends wanted to know was whether Adams would assure Clay of a central role in his administration. Adams gave the necessary assurances. Later he and Clay met for hours and talked about the future, on the premise of those assurances. Clay was satisfied.

  No outright deal was made. No definite promise was given or contract signed. The two men traded in the soft currency of subtle implications and raised expectations, knowing that this currency was backed up by the hard political cash of agreed-on perceptions of shared interests. The effect on Clay’s thinking was magical. Having written to one friend on December 13, 1824, that he was not sure whether he would swing his support to Jackson or Adams—“And what an alternative that is!”—Clay was writing on December 28 to another friend that he had definitely decided for Adams.

  “What I would ask,” Clay wrote, “should be the distinguishing characteristic of an American statesman? Should it not be a devotion to civil liberty?” He could not, he added, on principle support a military man.

  On February 9, 1825, the House of Representatives, voting by states, elected John Quincy Adams President of the United States. He had done his work well. He won not only Clay’s three states (in the electoral college) of Kentucky, Ohio, and Missouri, but also Jackson’s states of Louisiana, Maryland, and Illinois. He won New York too when the longtime Federalist Stephen Van Rensselaer cast the delegation’s decisive vote either because Adams had promised him understanding treatment of Federalists, through the mediation of Daniel Webster, or because, as Van Rensselaer said later, he bowed his head in prayer when his turn came to vote and saw an Adams ballot on the floor.

  Said John Randolph: “It was impossible to win the game, gentlemen; the cards were packed.”

  Within two days President-elect Adams offered Clay the Secretaryship of State. “So you see,” Andrew Jackson wrote, “the Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver.”

  Far north, the town of Quincy still awaited the election news. When the patriarch John Adams was awakened with a horseman’s report, his heart swelled with pride. He was sad only that Abigail had not lived to see her firstborn become “guardian of his country’s laws and liberties.” The father seemed far happier than the son. When Daniel Webster came to Adams’ F Street house and formally notified him of his election, it was said that Adams stood shaking, sweat pouring down his face, as if considering the specter of all the un-Adams-like deals and compromises he had made to get to the top of the greasy pole.

  Well might Adams shake and sweat. Rarely has the character of a presidential election had such a direct impact on the presidency that followed—and perhaps on the President himself—as that of 1824.

  His hopes and goals he deeply felt. Rising above party and faction, he would serve as the steward of the people in an effort to enact and administer a program carefully designed to bring economic progress and political and social unity to the nation. His goals were founded squarely on his moral and political principle of personal liberty and property to be protected not merely from government but through government. This government would include the federal government, which Adams did not fear and which he liked to term the National government, always with a capital N. Echoing some of Hamilton’s ideas, his program was an extension of Monroe’s and Clay’s—internal improvements, wise use of federal lands in order to pay for those improvements, the fostering of science and education, “cautious” tariff protection of industry as a means of safeguarding the nation’s independence. After winning the reluctant support of his Cabinet for this program, the President wrote in his diary that the “perilous experiment must be made.”

  Perilous it was, largely because Adams lacked the political resources for a positive program. Amid heavy pressures from all sides he tried to create a broad-based Cabinet, but Gallatin would not return to Treasury because he preferred State, Jackson would not accept the War Department, and the new Vice-President, John Calhoun, attacked the new Cabinet as not sufficiently representing the South. Highly dependent on congressional support, Adams was pleased that his supporter John W. Taylor of New York was elected Speaker to succeed Clay, but in the Senate Calhoun gained influence over key committees and busied himself jockeying for a future Calhoun presidency rather than the existing Adams administration. Then, at mid-term, Taylor lost the Speakership to Andrew Stevenson, a Virginian unfriendly to the President. A negative and ungainly leadership coalition of Calhoun, Van Buren, Jackson, and others, united only by their distaste for Adams and eagerness to succeed him, dominated Washington’s politics.

  It soon became apparent that Adams had only the intentions of a good steward, not the qualities of a great leader. He was, for one thing, a true son of Puritan Boston—and of John Adams—when it came to political pleasantries. It was hard to make conversation with him as he presided at a White House dinner, and he had a genius for putting politicians off—and his foot in his mouth—on his brief trips into the country. He was inept at communicating his hopes and proposals to Cabinet and Congress, much less the voting public. But his personal failings were the lesser problem. Like Monroe, he lacked the foundation of party leadership and followership that might have helped him at crucial moments, and Adams possessed neither the desire nor the means of strengthening his party. Indeed, he was so profoundly anti-party that he refused even to use patronage to strengthen his position. And he had not developed the personal backing of party leaders throughout the country—the kind of leaders that Madison and Jefferson had converted into a new and powerful political organization. Rather, a new party was forming against him. Adams was also defeated by his theory of government. He knew that leadership must be a collective enterprise, but he also believed in the constitutional checks and balances designed to thwart such leadership. Never a transforming leader, neither was he skillful as a transactional one.

  All Adams’ difficulties came to a head during the last two years of his term, in the congressional effort to enact tariff legislation. A moderate measure had been passed in the final year of Monroe’s administration; now the protectionists were back, eager to boost levies on iron, hemp, flax, and other commodities. Meetings of wool growers and manufacturers in Harrisburg, Poughkeepsie, and elsewhere reflected rising protectionist feeling in the country. Adams was so apprehensive about tariffs—“Beware of Trap doors,” he said of them to a son taking a seat in the Massachusetts legislature—that he gave his Secretary of the Treasury, Richard Rush, the job of defending them. But even the suspicious Adams could hardly anticipate what lay ahead. Van Buren and the group of Jacksonians who dominated the House Committee on Manufactures concocted a tariff bill full of provisions that favored the agrarian Northwest and Middle States, while giving short shrift to the manufacturing interests of New England. If Adams signed it, he would alienate the South and strain his own credibility, and if he vetoed it, he would antagonize both agrarian and manufacturing interests in the rest of the country. Either way, the crucial Middle States would be drawn into the Jacksonians’ camp.

  With shrewd bargaining by Van Buren, the bill passed Congress, as New Englanders like Webster salvaged what they could for industrial interests, and Adams signed the “abominated” tariff, though he knew full well that he was jeopardizing his southern support. He detested the squalid legislative deals that produced such a bill, but could he object to such cynical brokerage when he had made his own political deals to win the White House?

  So the administration of the lofty John Quincy Adams came to an end in the wake o
f a wild free-for-all, a scramble for special advantages, a legislative battle whose main relevance to manufacture, as John Randolph said, was the “manufacture of a President of the United States.” This “democratic” nationalism of popular interests was a far cry from Adams’ planned, rational, centralized, collective, “economic” nationalism. “Nothing could be less in keeping with the custodial philosophy of President Adams,” Dangerfield said, “or less adjusted to the centralizing system of Henry Clay” than the “Tariff of Abominations.” Still, he signed it.

  He signed it because, by early 1828, the tariff, and Adams’ own political fortunes, had been swallowed up in the gathering battle over the presidency. He signed it, knowing that the South would denounce it to the point of murmuring about seceding. His “perilous experiment” of presidential stewardship and collective national effort had given way to the haphazard, competitive play of economic and sectional interests. And these interests in turn both reflected and generated powerful economic forces changing the face of America in the 1820s and 1830s—forces that one day would hold many a politician in their iron grip.

  JUBILEE 1826: THE PASSING OF THE HEROES

  “Ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto you.” Americans were happy to obey the biblical admonition in celebrating the half century of the Declaration of Independence. As he entered his second year in office, John Quincy Adams had taken pleasure in plans for a celebration in Washington—and even more for a jubilee in Boston, to which his father would be invited. And it was hoped that another signer of the Declaration—indeed, the drafter of it—could journey from Monticello to the festivities in the nation’s capital.