John Quincy Adams

John Anderson, who is running as an Independent for the presidency of the United States, made a now famous remark, 'the American voters are not faced with choice; they are faced with a dilemma'. His low opinion of the official party candidates, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter led Anderson to intervene in the race for president. The result of the three-cornered fight this month might be close; it could even be inconclusive and then Congress would be called upon to elect the President of the United States. There was a precedent for this in the election of 1824. A four-sided contest produced no candidate with an electoral majority, and under the terms of the American Constitution the House of Representatives was required to choose a president. Their choice was John Quincy Adams.

John Quincy Adams' administration marked a watershed in American presidential politics. Adams was the last president to be chosen in Congress and then, after one term, became the first to fall victim to a new, more popular, style of electioneering. Between 1800 and 1824 nominations for the presidency had been made by secret Congressional caucuses, a procedure which gave control to an inner clique of Washington politicians. The caucus system, attacked as undemocratic as early as 1816, broke down eight years later when the Republican Party, no longer confronted by Federalist opponents, could not agree on a nominee. By 1832 'King Caucus' given, way to a system of national nominating conventions in which the party rank and file were represented where, at least In theory, they had some say in the choice of candidates. It was Adams’ misfortune to have been temperamentally incapable of coping with the products of a rising egalitarianism But while his presidency was in consequence an unmitigated disaster, his career as a whole produced a solid record of achievement that few presidents have since been able to match.

The Adamses are beyond doubt the most celebrated of American political families, John Quincy Adams' father, John Adams, was the second President of the United States, John Quincy himself succeeded to the office in 1825; his son, Charles Frances Adams, was the vice-presidential candidate of the Free Soil party in 1848 and an outstandingly successful Minister to London during the American Civil War, the next generation produced distinguished historians rather than statesmen (Charles Frances, Jr, Henry Adams and Brooks Adams) but political continuity was restored when yet another Charles Frances Adams, the great-grandson of John Quincy, served as Secretary of the Navy in Hoover’s Cabinet, 1929-33.

John Quincy Adams was perhaps the ablest member of this remarkable clan with the towering exception of Thomas Jefferson, more variously gifted than any other American president He knew several languages, including Greek, Dutch and Russian, translated Juvenal's Satires and the German poet Wieland's Oberon, wrote poetry himself, practised law, held the Boylston chair of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard, 1806-09, pursued a variety of scientific interests, produced an authoritative report on the standardisation of weights and measures and kept an incomparably revealing diary, begun in childhood and continued until a few days before his death.

Born in 1767 at Quincy (then part of Braintree), Massachusetts, he was in a special sense a child of the American Revolution. As a boy of eight, he watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from a vantage point above the family farm; at nine he was carrying despatches for Washington's Continental Army; at fourteen he made a precocious entry into public life as secretary to the American Minister to Russia. Then in 1783, still only sixteen, he went to Paris to become his father's secretary during the peace negotiations. By the time he returned to the United States in 1785 he had had – besides a remarkable experience of diplomacy - a varied if somewhat interrupted education in Paris, Amsterdam and the University of Leiden. After graduating from Harvard in 1787 he established a law practice in Boston, but in 1794 he began his diplomatic career proper when Washington appointed him Minister to the Netherlands. He was transferred to Berlin in 1797 but returned home when his father was swept from office in the presidential election of 1800.

Elected to the United States Senate as a Federalist in 1803, Adams exhibited the independence which was to be his political trademark. Flouting the views of his party, whose willingness to placate Britain for the sake of commercial advantage he found increasingly distasteful, he supported the Administration's efforts to defend American rights at sea, even voting for the Jeffersonian embargo that was to cripple New England's trade. Massachusetts Federalists were outraged at his apostasy and in 1808 forced him to resign his Senate seat.

The ostracism he encountered on his return to Massachusetts extended even to a partial boycott of his Harvard lectures. It was thus with relief that he seized the opportunity, afforded by President Madison in 1809, to resume his diplomatic career. The next eight years he spent abroad, first as Envoy to Russia from 1809 to 1815, then as Minister to Great Britain, from 1815 to 1817. He was also one of the American commissioners who negotiated the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, which brought the war of 1812 to an end.

In 1817 President Monroe brought Adams back to the United States to become Secretary of State, an office for which his wide-ranging diplomatic experience had ideally qualified him and which he filled with enormous distinction for the next eight years. His first step was to settle a number of controversies with Great Britain. The Rush-Bagot agreement of 1817, by limiting American and British warships on the Great Lakes, averted a threatened arms race. A second agreement, the Convention of 1818, established the forty-ninth parallel as the northern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase and provided for joint Anglo-American occupation of the disputed Oregon country. As the Convention showed, Adams' eyes were firmly fixed on the Pacific north-west. A thoroughgoing expansionist, he was among the first to express the belief that Providence had intended the United States to possess the whole of the North American continent. The Adams-Onis treaty of 1819 was intended to promote this vision. It did far more than transfer Florida from Spain to the United States: by defining the Spanish boundary all the way to the Pacific and pushing it as far south as possible, it paved the way for American expansion into the Far West. This was also the object of the noncolonisation principle – the idea that the New World was not to be regarded as an area for future European colonisation embodied in the Monroe Doctrine, announced in 1823. Adams had as much to do with formulating that celebrated pronouncement as its nominal author. Certainly it was he who rejected Canning's proposal of a joint Anglo-American protest against rumoured European intervention to help Spain recover its South American colonies. It would be more candid and more dignified for the United States to act unilaterally, he felt, than 'to come m as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war'. It has been suggested that in taking this line Adams was seeking to establish his anti-British credentials – otherwise suspect because of his Federalist past in preparation for his bid for the presidency in 1824. But his Anglophobia was no passing phase: it was bred in the bone, the obverse of his fierce nationalism.

As the election of 1824 approached it was evident that nomination by a congressional caucus could no longer be guaranteed to ensure the presidential succession. For one thing, there was no consensus among Republican Congressmen on the nominee: rather had there emerged a multiplicity of candidates, each the favourite of particular states or regions. For another, the advance of political democracy argued that the electorate as a whole was entitled to a direct voice in choosing the president. Thus when a caucus meeting attended by less than a third of the Republicans in Congress nominated the Secretary of the Treasury, William H. Crawford, supporters of other Republican aspirants refused to accept the decision and secured rival endorsements from state legislatures and mass meetings. Thus three other candidates entered the race: John Quincy Adams; Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House; and Andrew Jackson, whose victory over the British at New Orleans in 1814 had made him a national hero.

The four-sided contest proved inconclusive. Jackson gained ninety-nine electoral votes, mainly from the South and West; Adams ran second with eighty-four, chiefly from New England and New York; Crawford carried three Southern states with forty-one electoral votes; and Clay three Western states with thirty-seven. The popular vote was: Jackson, 153,544; Adams, 108,740; Crawford, 46,818; Clay, 47,316. Since no one had an electoral majority, the House of Representatives was required under the Constitution to choose between the three leading candidates, with each state having one vote. Clay had been eliminated but, as Speaker and with thirty-seven electoral votes in his gift, he was in a position to sway the House election. After being eagerly wooed by friends of both the leading contenders he threw his support decisively to Adams. It was a logical choice since Adams supported Clay's programme of economic nationalism, whereas Jackson did not. But Jackson's followers were furious that their man should have been deprived of the presidency after having led in both electoral and popular votes; they claimed that the popular will had been thwarted. And when Adams appointed Clay as his Secretary of State – the traditional stepping stone to the presidency – the Jacksonians alleged that the two had struck a 'corrupt bargain'. There was no evidence for the charge, but the Jacksonians made it the basis for the campaign they launched to unseat Adams in 1828.

From the start of Adams' administration his opponents combined to obstruct him. In his first annual message he presented a far-sighted plan for national improvement: it included federal support for literature and the arts, the financing of scientific expeditions, a national university, an astronomical observatory and a network of roads and canals. He thus revealed a spirit not to be displayed again in the White House until the days of John F. Kennedy. But the President's proposals were ignored or derided. They offended states' rights sentiments, as did Adams' veto of a fraudulent treaty depriving the Creek Indians of their Georgia lands. Yet there were more fundamental reasons for Adams' failure. His long residence abroad had caused him to lose touch with his native land. He lacked warmth, tact, charisma and political skill – particularly of the kind needed in a democratic age. He would not court popularity or conceal his conviction that the people should be given what was good for them rather than what they demanded. Likewise he was too high-minded to use the 'spoils system' to build a personal following or win votes for his policies. Ignoring the pleas of well-wishers he left most of his enemies in office.

A sense of innate superiority accounted for Adams' seeming indifference to the efforts of the Jacksonians to build a popular party that would encompass his downfall. Such a trait was implicit in his appearance: 'a short, stout figure, with a bald head, and a cold, displeasing, repulsive countenance which, notwithstanding, beamed with an almost supernatural intelligence'. That was how an Austrian visitor would describe him in 1837. It was all of a piece with Adams' austere way of life. During his time at St. Petersburg, even in the depths of a Russian winter, he had generally started work at 3 am. Throughout the peace negotiations at Ghent his day had usually begun at the point when Clay and other bons viveurs were retiring after an evening of cards. As President he still made a habit of rising at dawn, reading his Bible, going for long, solitary walks or taking a nude dip in the Potomac before getting down to his papers.

During the 1828 election campaign issues were subordinated to personalities. It was an unprecedentedly vituperative contest, with the respective partisans seeking to outdo each other in scurrility. The Jacksonians represented Adams as an aristocrat corrupted by long contact with European courts, a parasite who had lived all his life at the public expense and, notwithstanding the President's well-known uprightness, accused him of having acted as a pimp for the Tsar while in Russia. Adams' supporters descended to the same disgraceful level, pillorying Jackson as a frontier brawler, a gambler, a cock-fighter, a murderer and a military tyrant; they also built on the fact that Jackson had married in the mistaken belief that his wife's divorce from her first husband had been finalised, denouncing him as a wilful adulterer.

This mud-slinging does not appear to have affected the result, which was an impressive, though not overwhelming, victory for Jackson. He polled 647,000 votes to Adams' 508,000, securing 178 electoral votes to 83. Apart from his own New England Adams carried only New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland; the rest of the country went for Jackson, whose supporters gleefully hailed the outcome as a triumph for the common man. Adams thus suffered the fate of his father in being denied a second term. And, as had happened in 1801, when John Adams had been ousted by Jefferson, his son could not bring himself to attend the inauguration of a successor he despised and detested. Virtually penniless, embittered by defeat and believing his political career to be over, Adams retired to Quincy to seek solace in his garden and his books.

Yet, though he could hardly have guessed it, his greatest renown lay in the future. In December, 1831, he embarked on a second active career as a member of the House of Representatives. It was an unprecedented and supposedly undignified course for a former president to adopt, and one that has been followed by none of his successors though Andrew Johnson served briefly in the Senate after leaving the White House. That a man of Adams' many-sided literary and scientific interests should have felt irresistibly drawn back to politics is proof that he was essentially a political animal. Emerson understood this, confiding to his Journal in 1843:

Mr. Adams chose wisely and according to his constitution when, after leaving the presidency, he went into Congress. He is no literary old gentleman, but a bruiser and loves the melee...

Adams was to represent his district in Washington for the remainder of his life, a period of seventeen years. As a Congressman he spoke and acted with the same independence he had shown throughout his career. Even during Jackson's presidency he never became a partisan. While still regarding his successor as an 'illiterate barbarian', he was not prepared to sacrifice the national interest to political expediency. In the Bank War, the political furore that followed the creation of a second national bank for the country, it is true, he was one of Jackson's severest critics. Yet in the other major controversy of Jackson's term of office, the nullification crisis – the right of a state to nullify a federal law – he conceived it to be his duty, though a protectionist, to work with the administration to frame a tariff measure that would lower duties sufficiently to appease the South and avert the danger of secession.

Debate revealed Adams at his formidable best. He was not an awe-inspiring orator like the consummate Daniel Webster, nor as polished a performer as Clay, but the fire and passion of his speeches packed the halls of Congress and earned for him the admiring sobriquet borrowed from Milton of 'Old Man Eloquent'. Admired he may have been, but never loved. A British diplomat had remarked of him in 1827:

Of all the men whom it was ever my lot to... waste civilities upon he was the most doggedly and systematically repulsive.... Many was the time that I drew monosyllables and grim smiles from him and tried in vain to mitigate his venom.

And while this verdict may perhaps be discounted as coming from a hostile source, it accords with many other references to his ungraciousness and contempt for the social niceties.

In Congress Adams employed his oratorical talents in a variety of causes, but increasingly he concentrated on the explosive question that Democrats and Whigs alike were eager to avoid in the interests of party unity slavery. In 1836, alarmed at the growing flood of abolitionist petitions submitted to it and determined to prevent debate of their contents, Congress adopted a 'gag rule' providing that all petitions relating to slavery were to be automatically laid on the table without being printed or discussed. Adams had not hitherto been sympathetic to abolitionism, Hut perceiving in the gag rule a direct threat to the freedom of speech and of petition guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, he placed himself at the head of a movement to repeal it. This made him the target of furious abuse, and not only from slaveholders. He was repeatedly threatened with expulsion from, or censure by, the House, as well as with lynching if he ever set foot in the slave states. Nonetheless he kept up the fight, becoming adept in finding ways of evading the ban on discussing slavery. His courageous stand made him in Northern eyes a symbol of constitutional liberty and gradually turned sentiment against the gag rule. Finally in 1844, after eight years' agitation, the House accepted Adams' motion to rescind it.

Though Adams disappointed abolitionists by refusing formally to join their ranks, he could not escape identification with the anti-slavery cause. His hostility to slavery was most explicitly expressed in the debate on Texan annexation which coincided with the first stages of the petition controversy. Although as Secretary of State he had looked forward to the extension of American boundaries to the Pacific, he denounced the movement to annex Texas as a slaveholders' conspiracy. Though the concept of an aggressive slavocracy plotting to bring about the spread of slavery has now been discredited, Adams persuaded the bulk of Northerners of its truth and thus advanced the anti-slavery cause. It was Adams, again, who took the initiative in challenging the findings of the 1840 census seized on by apologists for slavery but later invalidated that the rate of insanity among free blacks was about eleven times greater than that among slaves. Then in 1841, in the Amistad case, he persuaded the Supreme Court to release fifty-four slaves who had mutinied on board a Spanish schooner off Havana, killed the captain and some of the crew and sailed to American waters.

Fighting the Slave Power did not imply neglect of other interests. Adams' passion for science, for example, still burned brightly. In 1844, at the age of seventy-seven, he travelled to Cincinnati, sleeping on the deck of a canal-boat, to lay the foundation stone of an observatory. In 1846 he was largely responsible for the grant of a Congressional charter to the Smithsonian Institution, the earliest American foundation for scientific research. The respect in which he was held was demonstrated that same year when, after a stroke which kept him away from the House for several months, he received an ovation on his return. On February 21st, 1848, he suffered a second stroke – at his desk in the House and died two days later. A Congressional committee escorted the body back to Massachusetts and even the Charleston Courier , the organ of' South Carolina slave-holders, shrouded its columns in black.

The contradictions that surround Adams make him difficult to sum up. Short-sighted in some things, he was farseeing in others. He was a diplomat without tact, a politician impatient of party, a nationalist who cherished an abiding regional loyalty to his native New England. Dogmatic, censorious, devoid of charm, he was at the same time disinterested, courageous and painfully honest, not least with himself. He died believing his career a failure. But it was only so by the impossibly high standards Adamses were wont to set themselves. Though never fully comprehending the new forces at work in American life, John Quincy Adams' patriotism, vision and passion for freedom entitle him to be regarded as one of the luminaries of his age.

Maldwyn A. Jones is Professor of American History, University of London.