—
“On the Edge of a Precipice Every Step That I Take”
AS JOHN QUINCY ADAMS PASSED HIS SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY, his determination and zeal in the antislavery cause did not flag. The petitions that had been so central retained their importance, but they did not stand alone. Becoming extensively involved in the Amistad case over the capture of alleged African slaves, he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. Here, as elsewhere, he extolled the justice and humanity propounded by the Declaration of Independence and the American founding while condemning slavery as immoral and un-American.
Even more consequential for him, however, was the frightening linkage between territorial expansion and slavery. Always a champion of American expansion, he viewed that likelihood as nothing short of calamitous. The prospect forced him to rethink and recast his outlook. He judged expanding slavery a desecration of the American founding and mission. And conscious of his intimate ties to the Founders, he had no doubt that he comprehended perfectly the purpose and goals of the nation his father and the other Founders had created.
His connection to the Founders gave him a unique place in his country. As Americans looked back with pride on their country’s history, they viewed the elderly gentleman from Massachusetts as a living symbol of that history. Even though not all agreed with his politics, all saw him as a living link, even their link, to their glorious past.
Adams’s championing of antislavery petitions never wavered. Each passing year seemed to bring increasing numbers to him. Across the antislavery North, from many locations other than his own congressional district or even state, he had become known as the flag bearer for their communication to Congress. In his diary he recorded the precise numbers that he received for presentation to the House and that he actually presented. The daily total that he cataloged varied, ranging from just over two dozen to almost one hundred. At times he grouped them prior to bringing them before the House; on February 12, 1838, he had 350 ready. They “flew upon me in torrents,” he observed. Managing this cascade took an enormous amount of time. When not at his desk in the House, he remarked, the arranging, assorting, and filing occupied him day and night, yet it was clearly something he did not mind, and beginning in 1835 he kept a docket listing every one that came to him.1
The capstone of these came early in 1843 with a document, designated the Latimer petition, for one George Latimer, an African American resident of Boston claimed as a slave by a Virginian. It contained 51,863 signatures by citizens of Massachusetts. Adams stated he had it in a frame on his desk in the House. A congressional ally described it standing “on a frame rolled around a shaft,” which gave it the shape of “a large cylinder some three feet in diameter.” Adams included it in a list of thirty-three petitions he delivered to the clerk of the House and demanded that they be entered in the House journal. He also had the list printed in a major Washington newspaper.2
Yet through all Adams’s unwavering efforts, the gag rule remained in place, kept in no small part to silence him. At the beginning of every session of the House, from its imposition until the early 1840s, he attempted to get it rescinded. He failed, but with his effort he intended to make a point, which he did. Initially it was a House resolution, which meant it had to be renewed at the commencement of each new session. In 1840 the House turned it into a rule, making it more secure because it would not have to be renewed separately when a new session convened. To eliminate it would require a positive vote. For Adams this transition from resolution to rule was a grave offense. He characterized the change as “the difference between petty larceny and highway-robbery.”3
Over time his struggle to abolish the hated rule gained strength. In 1842 he lost by only four votes, and the following year by just three. He could legitimately hope that in 1844 he could get it removed. Northern Whigs had been overwhelmingly supportive of his cause; after 1840 more and more northern Democrats joined the anti-gag forces. They were responding to the realization that their foes, the Whigs, were using the gag to win elections by drawing vigorous antislavery voters to their side. The congressional tally became less and less partisan and more and more sectional, reflecting the deepening geographical division that increasingly cleaved the nation into two parts. Through the fight the existence of the rule angered Adams. Yet his chief mortification came from his conviction that the gag epitomized “the disgrace and degradation of my country, trampling in the dust the first principle of human liberty.” Confronting that outrage molded the “iron that enters into my soul,” he declared.4
His prominence in this ongoing political combat brought him a recognition he had not heretofore known, a status in the North that had eluded him as president. Commenting on the flattery filling the multitudinous letters from those who supported his cause, he wrote, “I am in imminent danger of being led by them into presumption and puffed up with vanity.” Requests for autograph specimens multiplied. Responding to them, he worried that he spent too much time on what he termed “these trifles.” In the House, he noted in his diary, hardly a day passed without a northeastern or western colleague calling him from his seat for introduction to their friends and constituents.5
Nothing else so denoted his new status as the voluminous requests from across the free states that poured in for him to attend conventions, give lectures, and make speeches. Almost all he refused. But in this case as with the correspondence he could not hope to answer all. In order to address what he considered the impossibility of replying to each, he had published in a major Washington newspaper what he dubbed his “excusatory letter,” expressing his reluctant regrets. He chose his positive responses carefully and politically, with his congressional district foremost.6
He absolutely relished what he called “this extension of my fame,” admitting it was “more tickling to my vanity than it was to be elected President of the United States.” Still, it concerned him that the outpouring of praise would be greater “than my honest nature can endure.” More fearfully, he was anxious that it could augur “some deep humiliation awaiting me.” Meanwhile, he found himself perilously close to the sin of pride. “I pray to God to forgive me for it,” he wrote, “and to preserve me from falling in my last days into the dotage of self-adulation.”7
One invitation he did feel compelled to accept came from the New-York Historical Society. The society wanted him to deliver an address on the fiftieth anniversary of George Washington’s first inauguration as president, on April 30, 1839. He wrote that he simply could not repress his obligation to the society, which had repeatedly invited him. Nor could he resist the opportunity to use the commemoration of what he termed “a real epocha in our history” to proclaim his truth about the country’s past and future. The detailed and anguished discussion of his preparation in his diary underscored his conviction about the importance of what he had to say. Wrestling with his speech, which he decided to entitle The Jubilee of the Constitution, he bemoaned his inability to compress his thoughts. He had been allotted an hour and a half for his presentation. As a result he told himself he could use only about one-third of what he had written. Afterward, he noted that he had actually spoken for two hours. A printed version ran to 120 pages.8
He gave his address in the crowded Middle Dutch Church on the corner of Nassau Street in New York City, a most appropriate location. A church was an especially fitting site, for he basically preached a sermon expounding upon his interpretation of the truth of American history. Through the entire exposition ran a single theme—the whole predominated over the parts. He started with the Declaration of Independence, maintaining that the colonies united, not one or two of them, set out to build a new political entity. And those who signed that sacred document did so as representatives of all the colonies, not just the one in which they resided. Then, with the adoption of the Constitution, the people of the new United States legitimized the Declaration. In their “transcendent sovereignty” the people created a civil government to defend their principles and rights. Claims for state sovereignty he rejected as immoral, dishonest, and despotic. In his judgment neither the Declaration nor the Constitution countenanced that nefarious doctrine.
Bringing his remarks to the present, he denounced the theory of nullification as “too absurd for argument and too odious for discussion.” He located “the indissoluble links” between the people and the Union of the Constitution as not only in the right but also in the heart. In his view the Constitution simply retained the principles set forth in the Declaration, both holy writ and the work of “the ONE PEOPLE of the United States.”
As for George Washington, he often disappeared in Adams’s lengthy commentary. Still, no doubt can exist that for him Washington stood as the indispensable man, who embodied, carried forth, and ultimately glorified the holy principles Adams broadcast. He was certain that he simply followed where the first president had led. Washington as slaveholder did not appear. As in his earlier eulogies of Madison and Monroe, Adams made no mention of slavery. Trying to deal with that vexed and troubling subject would have bemired what he intended to be celebratory occasions.9
The letters filled with the accolades that caused Adams both delight and anxiety came from above the Mason-Dixon Line. While his mail did contain numerous missives from below that geographic boundary between free and slave states, they did not contain flattering phrases. In contrast, these writers castigated Adams as an enemy of their section and of their major economic and social institution, at times in vitriolic language. They regularly damned him as an abolitionist, which at that time was a loaded term. In his rejection of them, Adams employed an arsenal of negative adjectives: “treacherous, furious, filthy, and threatening.”10
Yet these southern detractors oversimplified and even exaggerated Adams’s ties to abolition and abolitionists. Without question no other political figure of his stature matched his leadership in the petitions war, in which he fought for the abolitionists’ right to present their position to the Congress and the country. Additionally, no doubt can exist about his detestation of slavery and his conviction that ultimately the institution would be overcome. He called the outcome “nothing more nor less than the consummation of the Christian religion.”11
At the same time Adams refused to back the central demand of abolitionists for immediate, uncompensated emancipation. To him the proposition of immediate emancipation was fanciful. He believed that only a gradual, ordered process could safely and satisfactorily accomplish the great mission of ending slavery. He made clear his position when in February 1834 he offered in the House a proposal for gradual emancipation by constitutional amendment. He would also ban the admission into the Union of any more slave states. As he anticipated, it went nowhere, but he had publicly brought forth the only way he judged that abolition could occur without violence. But even this proposition made no mention of compensation. It is not at all clear what he thought about it.12
Moreover, despite his submitting hundreds of petitions for emancipation in the District of Columbia, he declared he would vote against it. That he was convinced Congress had the power to act in the District but not in the individual states made no difference. Asserting that the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that the just power of government derived from the consent of the governed, he would not force emancipation when a great majority of the citizens of the District opposed it.13
Abolitionists understood that he was not one with them. He refused to attend any of their public meetings. Conversations with him left leading abolitionists disheartened because he declined to stand beside them. One described herself as “sick at heart of political morality.” For them morality dictated but a single duty—an immediate end to the sin of slavery. As a corollary, they blanketed all slave owners with the opprobrium of sinners, for anyone involved with the wicked institution could be nothing else.14
Many thought political expediency—his craving for office—kept Adams from going the distance with them. They charged he had nothing to fear from southerners who chastised him, for his brand of antislavery never seriously threatened them or their beloved slavery. Garrison was convinced that Adams’s interest in abolitionists extended no further than their ability to assist him in his struggle in the petition matter. Another major abolitionist spokesman, James G. Birney, was less charitable. Writing in 1844, Birney judged that Adams’s dealings with abolition had been “eccentric, whimsical, inconsistent.” According to Birney, Adams had defended himself “by weak and inconclusive, not to say, frivolous arguments.” He concluded that Adams’s cause was “unworthy of a statesman of large views and right temper in a great national conjuncture.” Garrison, Birney, and their comrades wanted a moralist, but Adams was not only a man with a moral view; he was also a political man.15
Adams fully comprehended his complex relationship with those he viewed as antislavery zealots. At times he used harsh words in describing them: “these raving abolitionists” and “crack-brained a set.” Still, by the mid-1830s his hatred of slavery matched theirs. And in 1843 in a public letter addressed to a gathering in Bangor, Maine, celebrating the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies almost a decade earlier, he pronounced in ringing terms the evil of slavery. Because “the law of nature and of God” forbade it, no human law could legitimize making any man the property of another man, he declared.
Asserting that slavery had baneful practical repercussions, he tore into an old target, the three-fifths clause of the Constitution, “this radical iniquity in the organization of the government,” which gave slave-owning southerners undue and unfair influence throughout the federal government. The free states for too long, he thundered, had allowed the noxious forces of the slave states to run over them. He closed with a prayer that his audience would live to witness universal emancipation. As for himself, he would join the jubilation if his voice could be heard from the grave. In his diary he left no doubt about his goal: “I meant it as a vote of defiance to all the slave-holders, slave-breeders, and slave-traders upon earth.”16
Still, he struggled with how closely he should align himself with the abolitionist cause. His heart and emotional impulse were with them. Countervailing arguments and forces held sway, however. He could never go all the way. He could not accept the charge that every American who possessed a slave was “a Man-stealer.” He had known and still knew, even respected, too many slave owners to accept that universal condemnation. Moreover, he recognized that his wife, Louisa, and son Charles Francis desired to divert him from all connection with abolitionists. Then he feared that his being identified too closely with abolition would weaken and possibly even ruin him politically. Struggling among what he defined as “these adverse impulses,” he repeated, “My mind is agitated almost to distraction.” No matter the direction, he predicted, “I walk on the edge of a precipice in every step that I take.”17
That last concern not only reflected his recognition of himself as a political man but also testified that he could go only so far in accepting radical solutions, whether intellectual, social, or political. Fundamentally a son of the eighteenth century, he retained its classical and rational outlook, which shunned the romanticism influencing diverse areas of American life, not just the zealous abolitionists. For example, the British social utopian Robert Dale Owen, who established in 1825 his ideal community in Indiana, Adams dismissed as “a nuisance to society.”18
He especially had little use for an intellectual and literary movement originating in the 1830s in Concord, Massachusetts, a village a few miles north of Boston and not far from Quincy. Transcendentalists, the appellation embraced by the faithful, envisioned themselves as transcending the old order of the universe and initiating a new direction emphasizing personal freedom and placing in harmony the human and the divine, basically nature.19
The luminary of this crusade was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Harvard-trained Unitarian clergyman. Emerson soon left the church, however, to begin a career as an essayist, poet, and lecturer. John Quincy saw Ralph Waldo, the son of a once dear friend, as trying to found a new sect. That effort only came, in his view, after Emerson had failed in regular avocations. In his opinion Emerson and his crowd had but one goal—to declare “all the old revelations superannuated and worn out,” while announcing the “approach of new revelations and prophecy.” He ranked transcendentalists with other dissidents “characteristic of the age” aiming “to unsettle all established opinions, and to put into perpetual question all the foundations of human society.” Change could come, and with slavery should, but it must be gradual, lest the foundations that upheld civil and religious society founder.20
Although Adams had a complex relationship with abolitionists, they found a common cause apart from petitions on one notable occasion. This joint effort originated in a court case involving an alleged mutiny on board a ship transporting Africans between two points in Cuba, the principal Spanish possession remaining on this side of the Atlantic. Slavery was still legal in the Spanish Empire, which made the institution legitimate in Cuba. Spain, however, had followed Great Britain and the United States in outlawing the slave trade from Africa. Thus, while slavery was lawful in Cuba, bringing in additional slaves from Africa was unlawful, identical to the situation in the United States.21
Yet the demand for new slaves to work on Cuban sugarcane plantations made trading in them highly profitable, though illegal. With considerable money available, Spanish colonial authorities on the island made little effort to enforce the ban on fresh imports of African people. In fact, many participated in aiding the slave traders to avoid it. These officials provided fake documents specifying that the persons just arrived from Africa had been born in Cuba, making them legally slaves.
Upon arrival in Cuba, the Africans were usually unloaded in secret, then marched to holding pens in Havana, the capital, where they awaited sale. After purchase, they journeyed to the sugarcane plantations of those who had bought them. This travel often occurred by ships that sailed along the Cuban coast.
In June 1839 one such coasting vessel, the Amistad, set out with fifty-three falsely authenticated slaves, their two owners, and a crew of three. The captain expected a voyage of three days along the northern shore of the island, but a storm intervened, delaying the trip. During the third night, an African given the name of Cinque freed himself from his lock and did likewise for his companions. Throughout he would be their leader. In the hold where they had been held, the captives discovered knives used for cutting sugarcane. Armed, they burst on deck, killing the surprised captain and one other crew member, but spared the two Cuban purchasers and a slave cabin boy.
In command of the Amistad, they ordered the Cubans to sail the ship back to Africa. During the daylight hours the Cubans did as directed, with the sun confirming for the Africans the eastward direction of the Amistad. But at night the Cubans steered as much as possible toward the northwest, hoping to strike land or meet a friendly ship. As weeks passed, food and water dwindled. Finally, in late August, with provisions desperately depleted, land was sighted. Cinque led a party ashore searching for supplies and prepared to pay with Spanish gold doubloons found on board. Unbeknownst to them, they had landed on eastern Long Island in New York State. The Amistad had ended its voyage in Long Island Sound, where it was seized by the U.S. Navy. The Africans were taken into custody and incarcerated in New Haven, Connecticut, until the courts could decide their fate.
The Spanish government, not unexpectedly, demanded the return of all persons and property to Cuba. Based on the documents issued in Cuba, Spain insisted the Africans were actually slaves; moreover, their taking over the Amistad was a slave rebellion. President Martin Van Buren’s administration hurried to accede to the Spanish claim. A presidential election would take place in 1840, and looking to his southern supporters, Van Buren wanted to demonstrate his opposition to anything akin to a slave revolt. That the United States and Spain agreed seemed to ensure the Africans would return to Cuba.
At this point a committee of abolitionists led by a wealthy New York City merchant, Lewis Tappan, intervened. This group assembled a talented legal team to defend the Africans, headed by Roger Baldwin of New Haven. After searching ports in Connecticut and New York, they even found an African-born sailor who could speak the language of the prisoners, facilitating communication. Despite the position of the two national governments, the defense attorneys believed they could succeed.
The trial began in the U.S. District Court in November 1839. Because it was an admiralty case, there was no jury. The federal attorney maintained that treaty provisions between Spain and the United States required the return of the vessel and all its cargo. Furthermore, he asserted that on their face the documents proved the legal enslavement of the Africans. In rebuttal the defense argued for the falsity of those documents. The testimony of Cinque and some of his fellows, provided through an interpreter, buttressed their effort. As a result, the defense maintained that those who prepared the papers had flouted Spanish law. In fact, they insisted the Africans had been brought into Cuba illegally.
In January 1840 the judge, who had been appointed by Van Buren, decided for the defense. In his ruling he declared not only that the Africans were free but also that their status of freedom justified their resisting their captivity. He ordered the government to return the Africans to their native land in western Africa.
Upon orders from President Van Buren, the U.S. attorney appealed to the federal circuit court, which in May 1840 affirmed the decision of the district court. Again, the federal government appealed, this time to the Supreme Court of the United States. That court agreed to hear the case in January 1841, after the presidential election had been decided. Meanwhile, the Africans remained in jail in New Haven, where they studied English and the Christian religion.
Adams took note of the Amistad affair shortly after the ship’s seizure. In his judgment the Africans had “execut[ed] the justice of Heaven” and vindicated their liberty by taking over the ship from men he termed oppressive murderers. He saw a clear-cut moral issue. Additionally, he refused to believe that the U.S. government would comply if Spain demanded the return of those held in captivity. The case, then, was not new to him when a member of the Africans’ legal team requested his opinion on the applicable law. Before giving his recommendations, he took pains to examine a number of legal authorities.22
About a year later, in October 1840, after the case of the Amistad captives had been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, Lewis Tappan himself along with a defense attorney called on Adams. They wanted him to become assistant counsel to Roger Baldwin, who had been selected to present the Africans’ side before the court. Initially Adams refused, pleading his age, his responsibilities in the House, and his not having argued a case in court for more than three decades; in fact, his last effort had been before that same court back in 1809. He would, he said, gladly continue to offer advice. His visitors would not be deterred, however. They pressed, asserting the criticalness of the case, emphasizing it was literally one of life or death, for the death penalty surely awaited the Africans if they ended up back in Cuba.
Facing such ardent pleading, Adams relented. He told the two men that with God’s blessing and his health permitting he would stand with Baldwin before the bar of the Supreme Court. When he contemplated the magnitude of this decision, he implored “the mercy of Almighty God” to manage his temper, enlighten his soul, and give him the voice so that he could prove himself up to the assignment he had accepted.23
He had almost three months to prepare, until the Supreme Court hearing set for January 1841. And prepare he did, filling his diary with accounts of his striving to absorb pertinent documents, legal treatises, and reports of germane court cases. First, however, in the company of Baldwin and others, he went to see the prisoners. Throughout the process he unsurprisingly questioned his ability to fulfill his role successfully. He moaned, “Oh, how shall I do justice to this case and to these men?” On the eve of his appearance in court, he still felt only partially prepared. On the actual day he described himself as almost unnerved.24
In the courtroom he was spared, at least for the moment. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a native of the slave state Maryland, postponed the proceedings because one justice had not yet reached Washington, and he wanted a full court to hear the case. Though relieved, Adams still reported himself agonizing over what he defined as an ordeal. He used the delay of several weeks for plunging himself “neck-deep” in more study.25
When the new hearing date of February 22 arrived, Adams walked from his home on F Street to the Capitol; the chamber of the Supreme Court was in the basement. Even with the extra time for preparation, his bewilderment prevailed—“so bewildered as to leave me nothing but fervent prayer that presence of mind may not utterly fail me at the trial I am about to go through.” Yet he spent that day observing. Baldwin went first for the defense, gaining high marks for his presentation from Adams. On the twenty-third more of the same, as Baldwin completed his remarks. Even though Adams had not directly faced the justices, he was nervous. He related his coping “with increasing agitation of mind, now little short of agony.”26
Adams’s turn finally came on the next day, February 24. Emotional distress and agitation consumed him until it was time for him to speak. Upon rising, however, he did not falter, recording his delight that “his spirit did not sink.” While he thanked his God for assistance, he still experienced humiliation because of what he sensed as “the weakness incident to the limits of my power.” He certainly overcame all doubts, for he spoke for no less than four and a half hours. At three-thirty the chief justice announced the court would recess until the next day, when Adams could resume.27
He gave a highly critical assessment of his performance. He decried his lack of acuteness and rigor in analysis and argument. Still, he satisfied himself that he had not failed totally. Both the justices and the spectators had paid attention while he spoke. His final words: “God speed me to the end!”28
The end would supposedly come on the next day. He indicated that the “agitation of mind” that had plagued him for weeks was finally subsiding. Now exhaustion troubled him, and he pointed to a restless night. Still, he reported waking encouraged and optimistic. When court opened, Chief Justice Taney announced that Justice Philip Barbour had died during the night. Out of respect, Taney said, the court would adjourn until Monday.
On March 1 Adams finally concluded his argument. Although he spoke for another four hours, he felt obliged to omit material he had intended to discuss because including it would have taken too long, as the hour of the Court’s usual adjournment was at hand. And he did not want to appear on a third day. Thus he made a brief summary of what he had said and closed on a personal note. Although he did not cover all the ground he had planned to, he would certainly have been pleased with the opinion of Justice Joseph Story, whom Adams knew and respected and who like him hailed from Massachusetts. Writing to his wife after Adams’s first day, Story termed Adams’s speech “extraordinary.” “Extraordinary, I say, for its power and its bitter sarcasm, and its dealing with topics far beyond the records and points of discussion.”29
Before the court Adams stressed two major, intimately related points—justice and injustice. He opened, however, with an apology, telling the justices he would likely reveal both “the infirmities of age and the inexperience of youth.” He then praised Baldwin for his able performance, which left him with little to say. But he moved on promptly to characterize the court as a “Court of JUSTICE,” and he trusted that justice would inform the court’s ultimate decision. He announced the only law he would present was the law expounded in the document hanging on a pillar in the courtroom, the Declaration of Independence. It extolled “the law of Nature and of Nature’s God on which our fathers placed our national existence.” Adams insisted that law made clear that in this instance justice mandated freedom for his clients.
In contrast to the holy concept of justice, he lambasted the U.S. government for its injustice. The government, he lectured the court, had rejected justice in favor of sympathy with Spain. That stance entailed affinity with whites and injustice for blacks. According to him, all the proceedings of the Van Buren administration had been wrong from the beginning. Considering the conduct of his own government, Adams had but one response, “I am ashamed!” He excoriated what he designated as “the servile submission” of the American president to the demands of the Spanish. He judged the government’s behavior “lawless and tyrannical.”
He concluded on a personal and quite religious note. He pointed out that he had last appeared before the court back in 1809, and his appearance this time surprised him. But this case had cried out to him. He went on to call the roll of the justices who had listened on that earlier occasion. They were all now dead, having rendered faithful service to their country. And he hoped they had gone to “the reward of blessedness on high.” He closed with a prayer to heaven that the men hearing him this day after their illustrious careers in this world had ended would be received in the next with the greeting—“Well done, good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”30
The court did not delay its decision. On March 9 Justice Story read the decision of an almost unanimous court. One justice did dissent, but he provided no written opinion. The court upheld the decision of the lower courts and ordered the Africans freed. In deciding for the Africans, the court did not follow Adams’s lead and talk about the grand theme of justice as propounded by natural law. Rather, it decided along strictly legal lines. Again, following the district and circuit courts, the decision declared the Africans were never legally enslaved. The Supreme Court did make one change, however. It did not order the government to return the blacks to Africa; it simply ruled for their freedom.
An anxious Adams was in the courtroom when Justice Story read the opinion. He described himself as waiting upon “tenter-hooks.” He was pleased, of course. And he gave thanks where he thought it due. To Lewis Tappan, he wrote, “Thanks! In the name of humanity and Justice to you.” At the same time he thought the government should cover the costs of returning the Africans to their homeland. He told Baldwin to have all friends write to the president and Congress urging that course. He certainly made every effort. Yet, before any final decision in Washington, private donations provided the funds to send the Africans home. They embarked from New York City in November 1841 and reached their homeland in Africa in January 1842.31
Shortly before their departure, Adams received “a splendidly bound quarto Bible” signed by Cinque and two of his comrades on behalf of all the remaining Africans. Their present delighted him. But he refused Tappan’s request for a public ceremony marking the gift. He declined, he said, “from a clear conviction of its impropriety, and invincible repugnance to exhibit myself as a public raree-show.” He continued to disdain a public display of himself in what today would be deemed a “photo op,” even when it would mean publicizing a cause in which he deeply believed and in which he had notably participated. His sense of the good public servant meant that acceptable publicity could derive solely from engagement in the struggle for what he would define as proper policy. Any occasion that could be seen as display he shunned.32
Before his connection with the Amistad case, Adams had already become deeply committed on another matter directly related to his growing concern about slavery—Texas. By the time he entered Congress, American settlers had been pouring into the region, a part of Mexico. And in 1835–36 with their numbers increasing, the Americans—Anglos to the Mexican authorities—led a successful revolt against Mexican control. The leaders of this newly independent Texas looked back to their homeland not only for support but also for incorporation in some form.33
Americans, chiefly from nearby southern and western states, began moving into Texas when Mexico was still in the Spanish Empire. Almost immediately, however, Mexico achieved independence from its colonial master. Newly independent Mexican officials were eager to populate the sparsely settled region adjoining the rapidly expanding United States. Accordingly, they offered to the immigrating Anglos generous incentives, such as cheap land and partial self-government. Because most of the settlers hailed from the slave states, many brought slaves with them. By 1830 the Anglos notably outnumbered the natives.
In 1829 and 1830, increasingly concerned about this swelling population, the government, in the far-distant capital of Mexico City, took two steps designed to stem the flood from its powerful northern neighbor. The first abolished slavery, and the second attempted to curb immigration. Neither had much effect; the government was simply too weak to enforce either. The numbers of both American settlers and their slaves increased markedly. By 1836 the Americans totaled some 35,000, a vastly larger figure than the native Mexican population.
The dominant Americans wanted to break free from Mexico. In 1835 fighting broke out between Texan and Mexican troops. It continued in 1836 until a decisive victory by the Texans over the major Mexican force ended the armed combat. Texas declared independence, though Mexico never recognized that status. The American press reported the conflict in detail. Much of the reported news originated in New Orleans, the closest American city to the scene. Newspapers there pressed the case of a slave Texas. Often the struggle was presented as white Americans against lesser Mexicans and Indians. The revolt drew thousands of enthusiastic young men from the South and West who went to Texas to join the fight.
During the military confrontation President Andrew Jackson had proposed official neutrality. Still, he never took steps to halt the surge of arms, men, and money into Texas, whose army was commanded by his longtime friend from Tennessee, Sam Houston. After Texas declared independence, Houston was elected the first president of the new country. Most Texans wanted to become part of the United States, as a territory, or even a state. Jackson was reluctant, however, doing nothing to advance that goal. He wanted no controversial issue to interfere with the election in 1836 of his chosen successor, Martin Van Buren. And Texas could be divisive because many northerners, even in his own Democratic party, questioned the incorporation of any form of a slave Texas. Yet, on Jackson’s last day in office, March 3, 1837, he officially recognized the independent republic of Texas and the government headed by Sam Houston.
Adams’s introduction to Texas came even before the first American colonists immigrated. In the negotiations with Spain that produced the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819, the boundary between the United States and Spanish Mexico was discussed. Anxious about a growing United States, Spain wanted to maintain the frontier of Texas, the portion of its Mexican colony actually contiguous with the United States, as far to the east as possible. In contrast, Americans pressing westward wanted to push back that boundary as far as possible, certainly farther than the Sabine River, the line separating Spanish territory from the state of Louisiana. In short, a number of Americans, Henry Clay prominent among them, desired at least much, if not all, of Texas. They were, however, unsuccessful. Despite those efforts the treaty retained the Sabine River as the separation point between the United States and Spanish Mexico. President James Monroe never countenanced acquiring any portion of Texas. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who did want the line set farther west, followed his president and settled for the Sabine. Afterwards he asserted that he was the last man in the Monroe administration to agree to that decision.34
As president, Adams strove to expand his country into Texas, but he had to deal with Mexico, the new owner of that territory. With presidential backing, Secretary of State Henry Clay made several attempts to obtain Texas by treaty or purchase, but because of missteps by American diplomats along with Mexican politics, he never attained his goal. When Adams left the presidency, Texas remained part of Mexico, though with a steadily increasing flow of American colonists.35
Thus, when the Texas issue burst on the American political scene in the mid-1830s, Adams had a record stretching back over a decade and a half of trying to obtain that territory, or at least part of it, for the United States. Yet the arrival of Texan independence with the new republic’s potential attachment to his country brought him to adopt a quite different posture.
Adams’s departure from the Executive Mansion did not mean that he jettisoned all thoughts of Texas. In fact, in the future Texas would become more important to him than it had heretofore been. He knew that his successor Andrew Jackson desired to acquire the territory. In conversation with a southern senator only a few weeks after he had become a congressman, Adams discussed the difficulties Jackson would confront. Based on his experience as president, he avowed that Mexico would never willingly consent to relinquish Texas by purchase or treaty. Yet he said that, as with Florida, force of circumstances might require Mexico to give it up, as Spain did Florida. That possibility existed because of the burgeoning American presence in Texas; Adams assumed those settlers would eventually prefer attachment to their homeland rather than to Mexico. At the same time he pointed out that Mexico had erected an onerous obstacle to acquisition by abolishing slavery. As a result, Texas could no longer be considered slave territory, but rather free, which told him that a significant opposition would arise against bringing in Texas.36
For Adams personally the abolition of slavery by Mexico made joining Texas to the United States an entirely different proposition. When critics attacked him for being for Texas until he was against it, they were correct. But rebutting them, he was also correct when he replied that the situation with slavery in Texas had shifted fundamentally, from legal to illegal. He had not opposed expanding in slave areas such as Louisiana and Florida where slavery had been legitimate. Additionally, his attempts for Texas when secretary of state and president occurred when slavery was permitted there, whether by Spain or by Mexico.
Yet turning a free territory into slave country he believed an abomination. He saw reinstituting slavery in Texas as moral regression and unchristian. In his eyes a slave Texas loomed like a tidal wave that could doom freedom and liberty. Appending Texas would besmirch what he regarded as the basic ideals and values of his country. While no doubt can exist about the sincerity of his stance, he brushed aside an equally undoubted reality. Had his endeavor for Texas been successful, the Americans already in residence there and those coming would have maintained slavery, just as they did in spite of the new Mexican law. Facing such determination, President Adams would have been no more successful in getting Texans to give up slavery than he was in preventing Georgians from taking Indians’ land.
Timing was also a factor. The possibility of taking in a slave Texas coincided with the ballooning of the petition controversy. The petitions and especially the vigorous southern antagonism to them had already heightened Adams’s sensitivity to the evil of slavery—not only the institution but also the political power its adherents wielded. Adding Texas to the slave column would, he feared, reinforce the power of slavery that imposed the gag rule. Slavery would be even more powerfully imprinted on his country, to its shame.
That conviction governed his reaction to the Texas Revolution and the possibility that Texas would become part of the United States. By the mid-1830s slavery was firmly fixed in Texas, and a vast majority of American Texans had no intention of giving it up. In a major speech before the House in May 1836, Adams spelled out where he stood and why. He depicted the Texas-Mexico conflict as a civil war between slavery and emancipation. And the Texans wanted to draw the United States in on the side of slavery. He denounced them directly, charging that the Anglos or Texans and their allies in the United States, the same people who had hated and destroyed Indians, now made an identical racial argument in portraying Mexicans as inferior to whites. He presented a straightforward explanation for the cause of the Texans: “aggression, conquest, and the re-establishment of slavery where it had been abolished.” He asserted that if the proponents of Texas prevailed with the territory’s becoming part of the United States, within a year they would mount a military movement against Cuba. According to this script that action might very well lead to war with Great Britain, and possibly even France.37
Although he could not directly influence events on the ground in Texas, he was determined to do all in his power to prevent Texas from becoming American. In the House, he asked whether the country was not “large and unwieldy enough already.” Size of the country, however, did not make up his chief argument. As with petitions he became the chief congressional spokesman for those, mostly northerners, adamantly opposed to making Texas part of the country. In a March 1837 public letter to his constituents he vilified his own government for attempting to hang “the millstone of Texas slavery” on their necks. Mexico had eliminated “that curse of God,” but now villainous people “usurping the name of freedom” designed to undo what the will of God had ordained.38
He urged both that anti-Texas prayers be attached to antislavery petitions and that singular anti-Texas petitions be forwarded. And they, like his fan letters, came in torrents. He willingly spent hours cataloging and listing them. Furthermore, he felt it his duty to provide those who entrusted their petitions with him an account of their disposal, writing a general notice to the first petitioner on every petition.39
Adams’s anti-Texas campaign had two key components. Denying that Texans were struggling for their liberty from Mexico, he proclaimed the exact opposite. In his scenario they fought to establish slavery. He disavowed any Texan claim for honor or glory; instead, Texans deserved condemnation for turning a land of free men into a land of slavery. Additionally, he insisted on a constitutional point, maintaining that the Constitution did not delegate either to the Congress or the executive authority to annex the residents of a foreign government to the Union. According to him that power was reserved for the people.40
The Texas matter so consumed him because he considered it “a question of far deeper root and more overshadowing branches than any or all others that agitate the country.” He made that statement in 1837, and in the very next year he repeated that conclusion. “I am oppressed,” he admitted, “by the magnitude and weight of the subject, and anxious, even to dejection, with regard to the mode of treating it best suited to the success of the cause.” He so wanted to demonstrate candidly and with moderation to his fellow citizens that Texas meant a future for freedom or slavery in his country. Yet he asked: could he or anyone else accomplish that task? He doubted that it could be done.41
Adams made his greatest effort on his most public stage, the House of Representatives. He demanded from the administration documents relating to Mexico and Texas. Informed there were none to forward, he commented, “There is a film of obscurity and a squint of duplicity.” In addition, he regularly presented petitions against Texas, and defended his position at every opportunity. Pro-Texas congressmen wanted those petitions placed under the gag, for they correctly saw them as fundamentally related to slavery. Opposing their tactic, in the spring of 1838, Adams successfully led an effort to get them, along with other resolutions on Texas, some from state legislatures, referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations with instructions to consider them and report back to the House. Dominated by members from the slave states and Van Buren loyalists, the committee did so with little delay, recommending in mid-June that the House take no action on them because technically Texas was not a subject before the House. The House should just lay them on the table. This dismissive response appalled Adams, who unsuccessfully attempted to get its members to provide specific reasons for the committee’s decision. Although he managed to publicize that the committee had not really discussed the contents of the petitions and resolutions, he did not move the House, which adopted the committee’s report.42
Yet Adams’s nonstop campaign did have a significant impact on the Van Buren administration, which did have diplomatic communications with Mexico and conversations with a Texas emissary. Even more than Jackson, Van Buren was wary of the political risk in a vigorous pro-Texas policy. And the outcry against Texas in the North, which Adams had pushed, influenced the always cautious Van Buren to hold back. He would take no pro-Texas initiative. This decision meant that the question of Texas’s becoming American was put aside, at least for the moment. Adams could claim much of the credit for that outcome.43
Although Adams expended considerable energy on matters like Texas and the Amistad trial that captured national attention and enhanced his own image among many northerners, he never forgot that a congressman who wanted to remain a congressman, even one who had been president of the United States, had to maintain contact with his constituents and heed their calls for assistance. And even though in 1837 he gave no indication that he wanted to relinquish his seat in the House, to ensure that voters in his Twelfth District were aware of his activities in Congress, he did not rely solely on newspaper accounts reaching them, although the press in Washington and Massachusetts regularly reported on what he was doing and often printed his speeches. Still, he penned public letters for distribution in the Twelfth. He also compiled and sent packets containing his addresses to his constituents.44
When voters came to him for assistance with federal agencies, they found a man who readily took up their cause. Many entries in his diary relate his visits to various offices on behalf of those who sent him to Congress. To the War Department he carried recommendations for applicants to West Point, and for appointments to the Annual Board of Visitors to the Military Academy. A claim for damage to a vessel chartered by the government also took him there. In support of a constituent who wished to become a lighthouse keeper, he went to the Treasury Department. The Pension Office also found him advocating cases. The triumph of the Whig party in the election of 1840 brought him numerous solicitations for office. He regretted that he did not have the power to gratify even 1 percent of the requests. He could, however, place them before the heads of the respective bureaus, which he did.45
The year 1840 brought not only a presidential contest but in Massachusetts also elections for the House of Representatives. That meant Adams would have to stand for reelection, should he desire another term. His approach to what would be his sixth appearance before voters did not change from previous ones. When asked whether he would once again become a candidate and attend public meetings, he answered typically that he would attend no meetings, and his candidacy would depend on the people in the district. He would neither offer himself nor in advance decline. Though flattered, he turned down a delegation to his house in Quincy inviting him to have all Whigs in the district gather in his hometown, where he would speak. He also refused the request of an abolitionist that he pledge to support the prohibition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. He would make no pledge, even though he would be facing energetic Democratic opposition, and he thought if the abolitionists backed the Democrat, he could lose.46
He did willingly accept his unanimous nomination for reelection by the Twelfth District Whig Convention. As he saw it, the people called. At the same time he informed the committee bringing him the news that he had not and would not take an active part in the presidential campaign. He stated that should he do so, he feared his exertion would be seen as promoting his own reelection. He made clear he would never promote himself in that fashion. Furthermore, he would never risk the perception that he was so engaged.47
He need not have worried; his constituents did not disappoint him. He won easily, with almost 55 percent of the vote. Even a well-organized Democratic party and unhappy abolitionists could not dislodge him. Despite the redistricting following the census of 1840 in which Massachusetts lost two seats, Adams still retained the loyalty of a majority. His district boundary changed a bit, though the core continued in place. He now represented the Eighth. In 1842 voters gave him a seventh term, though his margin narrowed.48
Adams’s appearance before voters in 1840 was but a small part of the biggest, noisiest campaign America had experienced, the presidential election of that year. For his nemesis, the Democratic party, the incumbent Martin Van Buren carried the banner, striving for a second term. The opposition Whigs, Adams’s political home, had new life. For the first time the party in 1839 had held a national convention and decided on and rallied around a single candidate, William Henry Harrison. Harrison’s adherents had prevailed over the attempt of the Whigs’ congressional leader Henry Clay to get the nod. The Virginia-born Harrison had moved west to Ohio, where he won fame as an Indian fighter. Additionally, from that state he had served in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
United, enthusiastic Whigs, aided by the slowdown besetting the economy, believed they could throw out Van Buren and the Democrats. Politicking and electioneering spanned the country. From Maine to the Mississippi River, it appeared that a campaign caravan never stopped rolling. The spectacle did not impress Adams, however. He thought it disgusting that thousands rallied to hear the interminable speechifying by luminaries like Clay and Webster and even lesser political lights. For himself he refused all invitations to attend such meetings, and he received them aplenty, from the East Coast to the Ohio Valley.49
About the election Adams was of two minds. He had little regard for Harrison, whom Adams had dismissed as a rabid office seeker while he was president. And he could barely bring himself to think the Democrats could lose. After all, a Democrat had been president since his leaving that office. But when early returns favored the Whigs, he began to hope, but cautioned himself not to become too optimistic. Yet the final outcome went far beyond his expectations.50
The Whigs won a resounding victory. Carrying states from New England to Louisiana, and from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes, Harrison swamped Van Buren in the Electoral College, 234 to 60. The popular vote was closer, 53 percent to 47 percent, still, however, a clear triumph. In addition, the Whigs would have a majority in both houses of Congress. For the first time since the rise of the Jackson or Democratic party, it would control neither the executive nor the legislative branch.
Though concerned about the durability of Harrison’s extraordinary popularity, Adams envisioned something he had not witnessed since entering Congress, “a liberal administration of the National Government.” The Harrison administration would not push territorial expansion, certainly not in Texas. Additionally a Whig Congress could be reasonably expected to pass a tariff that would aid manufacturers and create a new national bank that would stabilize the currency and contribute to economic growth. There was even the possibility of reversing the cheap public land policy of the Democrats in order to fund a proper internal improvements policy. And President Harrison would surely affix his signature to all such legislation. For Adams it was almost heady times.51
The Whigs had high hopes when Harrison called for a special session of Congress to meet in late May. They were short-lived, however. After only one month in office, Harrison contracted pneumonia, and on April 4 died. With his death all attention turned to his vice-president, John Tyler of Virginia. Tyler had been placed on the ticket to placate Clay’s southern supporters after the Kentuckian lost the nomination to Harrison. Though elected as a Whig, Tyler was not a Whig of the Adams-Clay school that advocated an energetic federal government, including a national bank and a protective tariff. Originally a Jacksonian, Tyler broke with Jackson over the latter’s claims for executive and national power. A confirmed states’ righter, he had never supported a national bank or a protective tariff. If the Whig Congress enacted the anticipated legislation, the question of how Tyler would react remained open. Should he refuse to accept the expected economic program and the congressional Whigs, with the influential Clay dominating the Senate, stand firm, a devastating political war could ensue.52
Although Adams would vigorously back that legislation, he had doubts about the new president. A little over six feet tall, Tyler was lean with a receding forehead, with his most notable facial feature a prominent, curved nose. Because a president had never before died in office, Tyler confronted an unprecedented situation. What title and role should he assume? A number of possibilities were floated, such as acting president. Tyler himself never hesitated. He declared himself president in name and fact. That claim appalled Adams, who felt Tyler should take the title vice-president acting as president. According to Adams, upon the death of a president the Constitution conferred upon the vice-president not the office but only the power and duties. In this instance he appeared to detect a distinction where none existed. If one had the power, one also had the office or title.53
His distaste for the title President John Tyler matched his denunciation of the man. He castigated Tyler as a devotee of “the slave-driving, Virginia, Jeffersonian school, principled against all improvement.” Furthermore, he asserted that a single root had generated both Tyler’s morals and politics, “the interests and passions, and vice of slavery.” When President Tyler visited Boston to participate in the celebration of the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument, Adams refused to attend any of the festivities, in the same manner that he had spurned an invitation to attend the ceremony in which Harvard awarded an honorary degree to President Andrew Jackson. He confided to his diary that he did so because he would not be associated with “the mouth-worship of liberty from the lips of the slave-breeder.” According to him, the presence of the slaveholding Tyler desecrated a holy shrine of liberty. Aside from that fatal flaw, Adams, by now never willing to moderate his views, regarded him as a mediocrity incapable of measuring up to the office that Providence had thrust upon him.54
For the new chief executive’s relations with Congress and for the well-being of his party, Adams feared the worst. His dread was soon realized. In the special session, which opened on the last day of May, the Whigs passed a bill creating a new national bank. Having opposed a national bank all his public life, Tyler had no intention of changing his mind because he had become president. Accordingly, he vetoed the bill sent to him by Congress. Through the summer attempts were made to find common ground between the president and the Clay-led Whigs in Congress. Members of the cabinet—Tyler had kept intact Harrison’s—with Secretary of State Daniel Webster taking a prominent role, led the effort. It came to naught, however. Creating a bank that both president and congressional Whigs would accept proved impossible. The latter demanded national authority, while the former insisted on state power in some form. In late summer Congress did pass another bank bill, hoping Tyler would sign it. He did not. With that second veto, which came on September 9, the entire cabinet resigned, except for Webster, who was engrossed in negotiations with Britain over the boundary between Maine and Canada. Two days later Whig congressmen caucused and read John Tyler out of the party.
With the convening of the Twenty-Seventh Congress in its regular session in December 1841, some Whigs, both pro-administration and pro-Congress, worked to restore harmony. The implacable opposition of Clay to any serious modification of his plan for a bank made impossible any meaningful reconciliation. Senate Whigs spurned Tyler’s recent appointments, and both houses dismissed his legislative proposals. Tyler, in turn, rejected legislation that he opposed.
In this bitter internecine warfare Adams sided with the Clay-led Whig majority. Acknowledging his loyalty, the Whigs in the House made him chair of a special committee created in August 1842 to consider the appropriate response to another presidential veto. A week later Adams presented a violently anti-Tyler report, even declaring that the president’s conduct merited impeachment. Political reality intervened, however. The committee recommended against initiating that process because the Democrats had the votes in the Senate to prohibit the president’s conviction on impeachment charges. But when an angry Tyler sent a written protest to the House, the Whigs on a party-line vote refused to include it in the House Journal.55
For Adams this disruption of the Whigs caused great distress. Within two weeks after Harrison’s death he had predicted the Clay-Tyler imbroglio and the party’s doom. In the aftermath of the special session he noted that he and numerous others “felt that the hour for the requiem of the Whig party was at hand.” He foresaw the vanquishing of the party throughout the nation. By the end of 1841 he could only see the Whig party “splitting up into a thousand fragments.” Regarding the government, he could envisage only dismal prospects for his country. The political difference over the twelve months was stark—1841 opened with unexpected brightness, only to close in enshrouding darkness. And the new year brought no illumination, a clear sign of things to come. Pondering the why of that bleak course, Adams not surprisingly turned to his religion. He speculated that God to reserve beneficence for Himself and “to baffle and disconcert all human exertion to promote its purpose” obliterated all plans for improving the country by taking Harrison’s life when fervent hopes for the right kind of government had been focused on him.56
No matter the political weather, Adams when in the capital maintained his active social life. The traditional New Year’s Day open house at his residence continued to draw large crowds, as many as five hundred. He remarked that he did not always know everyone congregating within his walls. And despite his vigorous anti-South politics, a number of southern congressmen and senators, Whigs of course, always attended. Their presence surprised an abolitionist acquaintance who had difficulty divining the social connection between them and Adams. Never a grudging host, Adams always provided bountiful fare, with wine from his cellar, which held hundreds of bottles.
These annual affairs proceeded even with the irregular appearance of Louisa Adams. Often ill, but perhaps also uninterested, she simply remained in her chamber. It became so uncommon for her to emerge that her husband would even make a notation in his diary when she joined him. And he also noted when she put on a dinner party to honor Henry Clay. Her social withdrawal included often not accompanying John Quincy when he accepted invitations from other Washington notables.57
He attended events at the homes of private citizens, diplomats, cabinet officers, and even presidents. They could be quite grand. One party, with some eight hundred attendees, he compared favorably to what in London would be designated “a rout.” He could thoroughly enjoy himself, remarking on the “dissipation of an evening” that resulted in an idle morning. At Executive Mansion dinners he joined in succession Van Buren, Harrison, and Tyler when the company could include such major figures of official Washington as Calhoun, Clay, and Webster. As usual, as long as they took the initiative, he willingly interacted socially with men whose politics, and at times presence, he detested.58
Occasions with President Tyler provided exemplary illustrations. During the politically fractious summer of 1841, he went to a performance of the U.S. Marine Corps Band held on a stage at the southern enclosure of the Executive Mansion. The president was observing from the south portico. He asked Adams to join him and his family. Adams accepted and was introduced to Tyler’s three grown daughters.
A year later, invited by the president’s son, Adams, this time with his wife, attended a reception at the mansion. He recounted that the courtesies shown to the guests by the president and his daughter-in-law acting as his hostess matched “all that the most accomplished European court could have displayed.” With an elegant supper and dancing the festivities stretched far into the evening. Adams related not getting home until midnight.59
In all this socializing Adams reported his special delight at his introduction to a non-Washingtonian famous man, Charles Dickens, the celebrated English novelist. He attended a dinner honoring Dickens. He also invited Dickens and his wife to dine with him and Louisa Catherine. Although the Dickenses had a prior commitment for dinner, they did come to the Adams house for lunch. To a historian’s disappointment, he said little in his diary about Dickens other than commenting on the swarming attention paid the Englishman. Aware of the social pressures on Dickens, Adams was flattered when he appeared. Even more flattering, Dickens requested his autograph, which he gladly provided and had delivered before Dickens left the city. Nowhere did Adams make any observations about Dickens’s writing.60
While Adams’s social life did not lapse during this period of political turbulence, his anxiety about maintaining his diary increased. For some time he had bemoaned the difficulty in keeping the record current. His advancing age, seventy-five in 1842, along with his congressional schedule often meant that he fell behind with his entries. He admitted that arrears were occurring more frequently, noting that it took him about two hours to write up a single day. And he acknowledged the physical impossibility of holding to that schedule despite his striving to do so. He did note when he managed to fill in the empty or incomplete days.
The diary was so critical not only because it provided him with a reference he could trust but also because it would be his legacy. He said that after his death he wanted his son Charles Francis to make use of it as he saw fit. Yet he contemplated its relevance beyond Charles Francis. With God’s mercy it could even be passed to a grandson who would be “worthy” of keeping it intact for handing down to future generations. In sum, he saw it as a notable chronicle of his and his country’s life, and as a valuable historical source. In his estimation the diary, along with his father’s manuscripts, could keep alive not merely the Adams name but also the contributions and values associated with it.61
His voluminous correspondence erected a major barrier to his spending the time on the diary he believed essential. His complaining about the quantity of mail and the lack of value in most of it was nothing new. Nor was his statement that he could never answer all of it. Yet the problem did not grow smaller; instead, as he aged, it got larger. Even though he replied to just a tiny percentage, he arranged and filed all, which occupied precious hours. Describing this tedious task, he employed nouns like “drudgery” and verbs like “groan.” What most distressed him, however, was the impact on his writing: the important letters, private and public, his addresses, and the diary. And as he told his diary, “writing is the only true labour of life.”62
In spite of this last assertion, Adams labored mightily to understand his Christian faith. To that end, as he grew older, attending a Christian worship service on Sunday became more and more important to him. As his constant references to the divine attested, he never questioned either the existence of God or His interventions in human affairs. That the resurrection of Jesus Christ was vital to the truth of Christianity he never doubted. He recorded that a powerful sermon he heard in the House chamber on that topic brought tears to his eyes.63
At the same time, he expressed difficulty comprehending the doctrine of the Trinity because he found it troubling to give the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit separate characteristics. He asked, if Christ be God, what can be the difference between the love of God the Father and the grace of Christ the Son? Unable to discern a distinction, Adams could only conclude that he venerated Christ as his redeemer and as he could best understand the redeemer of the world. But, he admitted, “this belief is dark and dubious.” In sum, he attributed the worship of God to “a tribute of the heart.”64
On two major tenets of Christianity he was mostly certain, though he had serious misgivings about one while he embraced the other. In a lengthy commentary on a sermon by a Presbyterian minister exhorting members of his congregation to provide for the working out of their own salvation, Adams defined himself as beset with sin, “perhaps by the depravity of the human heart, an unreclaimable sinner.” While he wanted to do as Christ did, his spirit was willing, but his flesh weak. Yet he also absolutely believed that God controlled man’s deeds, whether for good or evil, which meant that sin was God ordained. He asserted, however, that his reason and his sense of justice would not admit that God would punish a man because of his God-directed actions. Contemplating this theological journey, he decided he did not know whether or not he would be saved. But he avowed that neither did the preacher. Thus the sermon he had pondered did not distress him “nor depress my hopes of better things.”65
Even though doubt may have powerfully affected his conviction about salvation, he grasped the concept of an afterlife. In 1839, witnessing the agonies of a granddaughter’s mortal illness, he confided to his diary his conviction of life after death. For him she had been angelic while on earth, and he was certain about her postdeath existence. He could only pray that upon his own passing, which would surely soon follow, he would join her in “the world of spirits where there is neither sorrow nor mourning and where every tear shall be wiped from every eye.”66
An old comrade reinforced his commitment to the Christian religion. As had been the case throughout his life, the Bible was always close at hand. According to him no other book in the world spoke so effectively about human nature as did the Bible. In a letter to a literary society in Baltimore, he gave advice to members and students on what books they should read. Not unexpectedly, he gave the place of honor to the Bible.67
His own reading followed the priorities of that list. While the Bible reigned above all others, he assigned second place to histories. He often returned to the classics, and the works of his favorites among them. Immersed in a French translation of Plutarch, he described “the hours glid[ing] in liquid lapse away.” No matter his reverence for classical writers, he did not restrict himself to the ancients.68
He spent time on major works by two contemporary historians, William Prescott and George Bancroft, both like himself Harvard alumni and Massachusetts men. He read both in 1839 and 1840. Prescott’s study of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain he judged admirable and delightful. For the first volume of Bancroft’s history of the United States, he strung together an envious list of superlatives, including perceptive, imaginative, and entertaining, and praised the style as more fascinating than Prescott’s or perhaps even that of the best-known American man of letters of the time, the New Yorker Washington Irving. He finally lauded Bancroft for his “transcendent talents and indefatigable industry.” Despite such accolades he found Bancroft’s book morally defective, though he never specified why. One can speculate it could have been the historian’s lavish praise of colonial Virginians.69
He told himself, however, that he had to guard against the seductive power in a library of good books. He had to resist the temptation of overindulging in reading because he had so much he wanted to write. “I count all time lost that is not spent in writing,” he opined.70
Reading for him also, of course, provided relaxation. And though the years kept advancing, he clung to exercises and pursuits he had long favored. In winter he walked and in summer he swam. In Washington he spent hours in the waters of his “old bathing haunt,” the Potomac River. In Quincy fishing trips provided respite and his garden occupied much attention. Details about the trees and other plantings pervading the area around his house fill pages in his diary.71
Travel had never been central to Adams’s rest and recuperation from his political duties. In fact, since his return in 1817 to the United States from England, time away from Boston and Quincy and their environs consisted almost entirely of journeys to and from Washington. Although he had made brief excursions to the White Mountains of neighboring New Hampshire and the Canadian province of Nova Scotia just up the Atlantic coast, such outings were rare. But in the summer of 1843 an unexpected opportunity presented itself. For the health of Charles Francis’s wife, her father planned a private tour to Niagara Falls. According to Charles Francis, his father was invited along because he had never seen the falls. Nor had he been anywhere else in what was then designated the West. He readily agreed to join the party.72
On July 6 the travelers left by train. Riding through his own state, Adams marveled at the beauty of the countryside, extolling it as “the Garden of Eden.” Upon approaching the border with New York, he found the forested mountains delightful. Stopping in a hotel for several days, he toured the countryside. He visited a Shaker village where what most struck him were the astonishingly high prices charged in “a small shop of Shakerism.” He took a carriage ride to a tower stretching upward fifty feet atop the highest summit in the area. The view from it impressed him; he could see for fifty miles, including, he observed, the states of New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and Massachusetts.73
Arriving at Albany, New York, the travelers turned north and spent much time exploring historic sites. On July 12 Adams toured the battlefield at Saratoga, where American forces had gained a momentous victory over the British in 1777. A serious student, he had along a published account of the battle to help him identify troop positions on the ground. From Saratoga the group moved on to the ruins of the colonial and Revolutionary strong point Fort Ticonderoga. From there carriage and lake steamer took him across the Canadian border to Montreal.
From that city he took a steamboat down the St. Lawrence River to Quebec City. There he walked over the Plains of Abraham, location of the great English triumph over the French in 1759 during the French and Indian War. He deemed the old city, the core of French Canada, quite beautiful.
He returned up the St. Lawrence to Montreal, thence via Lake Ontario to Toronto, and then arrived back on American soil at Niagara Falls, New York. He noted that the distance from Montreal totaled 438 miles and required two days, nine hours to traverse. The falls stunned him, and he spent several days in the area viewing them from different perspectives. He was also taken to nearby battlefields where American and British soldiers had fought during the War of 1812.
While at Niagara Falls he received an invitation to visit Buffalo, just down the Niagara River from the falls at the entrance to Lake Erie. He agreed and boarded a steamer for the four-hour run to the city. A demonstrative crowd awaited him at the landing. From there he rode in an open barouche to a park where he heard a welcoming speech filled with compliments, to which he responded briefly. Then came a tour of the city and the pleasurable ordeal of shaking hands with hundreds of well-wishers followed by a firemen’s torchlight procession. The festivities ended with a splendid supper and evening party.
That reception heralded what Adams experienced as he journeyed by rail eastward across New York State. The railroad basically followed the route of the Erie Canal, which connected the Hudson River with Lake Erie. That had long been the path westward taken by New Englanders. In a fundamental sense this portion of western New York was an extension of New England. Dubbed “the burned-over district” because of the religious revivals that swept through it, it provided a congenial home for diverse groups who wanted to reform American life and institutions, including antislavery zealots and abolitionists. In no other part of the country, outside of New England, would Adams be more cordially received. Starting in Buffalo and continuing along the rail line, invitations from local dignitaries poured in, all desiring him to stop at their towns. He did so and encountered identical adulatory welcomes. His responses to the stream of praise generated some regret. All of his replies he criticized as “full of inanity and gratitude, shamefaced and awkward.” He was simply uncomfortable in the midst of such vocal praises, which required from him an impromptu reaction.74
Particularly stirring moments did occur. In Rochester he marveled at the procession in his honor that stretched for a mile with bells ringing and cannons firing. In Utica a committee representing the town’s African Americans requested permission to call on him to express their gratitude for his efforts to protect the right of petition and promote abolition. He consented. They came and one made brief remarks, “modest and well delivered,” in his assessment. With equal brevity he thanked them, saying he had only done his duty and in the future would gladly serve them to the best of his ability. He closed by commending their protection to the God he and they worshipped in common.75
And while in Utica he dropped by a female seminary, where admiring teachers and students greeted him. A trustee welcomed him by reading extracts from his mother’s published letters to his father and to him. Adams related that the occasion made him once again a child. Unable to suppress his emotions, the seventy-six-year-old congressman openly sobbed. Totally focused on his mother, he confessed to his diary, “My heart was too full for my head to think.” He admitted that he simply lost his presence of mind.76
The journey produced one setback. Just outside Schenectady, through an open window of his passenger car the wind deposited a small pebble in his left eye beneath the lower lid. Unaware of what had happened, Adams was soon suffering great pain from an inflamed eye. At a sumptuous dinner in the town, the anguish became so unbearable that he excused himself, went into a private chamber, and washed his eye with cold water, to no avail, however. Observing Adams’s extreme discomfort, a physician at the table followed him. Upon examining the eye, the doctor discovered the offending stone and removed it. Relief was immediate.
After Schenectady, Adams reached Albany and the last celebratory occasion, replete with the by now familiar speeches, city tour, handshaking, and festive dinner. Finally, on August 4, he crossed the Hudson River and boarded a train for Boston. Three days later an exhausted traveler was back home in Quincy. It had been a full month of new sights and experiences. The nonstop adulation from Buffalo to Albany was something quite new and totally unanticipated by the aged traveler. At least some of his fellow citizens saw him as a heroic figure worthy of high praise. While he surely enjoyed the attention, he always told himself he would have to keep up his guard, lest conceit overcome his good sense.
A weary Adams barely had time to settle in before his thoughts once more turned westward. While in Niagara Falls, he had accepted, which he rarely did, an invitation to make an address at the laying of the cornerstone of an observatory in Cincinnati, Ohio, an event set for early November. Shortly after returning to Quincy, he started to work on it. When he complained that the time he spent on his speech interfered with his reading, he had in mind what he had earlier termed his “rash promise” to speak at the Cincinnati event. At the same time he worried about how he would compress his topic, the history of astronomy, into a discourse of three hours. He expressed a definite objective: to turn the momentary enthusiasm for astronomy into a permanent pursuit, not just in Cincinnati but throughout the nation. While he perceived his opportunity as God-given, he was concerned that his performance would not measure up to his goal. He could only pray that the Almighty would provide him with the powers essential for him to succeed.77
On October 25 he took a train from Boston. On this occasion he would reverse his summer return from Albany, going west rather than east. Passing through Albany, he continued on to Buffalo. This time no cheering crowds lined his way, however. An early winter storm provided a snowscape for the entire distance across New York State.78
Adams reached Buffalo on the twenty-ninth and there boarded a lake steamer headed for Cleveland, Ohio. No public reception awaited him in Buffalo, though he did see a few men from July. Another snow event interrupted his voyage on Lake Erie, with his vessel forced to seek temporary shelter in a protected cove. When the tempest passed, the boat steamed on. It made an evening tie-up in Erie, Pennsylvania, where for the first time on this trip an assemblage turned out to greet him. There were the usual complimentary words given by a former member of Congress followed by a short response from Adams. Then, surrounded by a military escort, a band, and a firemen’s torchlight procession, he returned to the steamer, which immediately continued on to Cleveland.
He landed there on November 1, and his continuing journey provided testimony to the intricate network of canals and railroads that had transformed much of America by the 1840s, a network that had barely existed when he was president. Another round of public honors and salutations marked his short stopover. From Cleveland his road took him southward through the state to Cincinnati. For the initial segment to Columbus, his hosts urged him to go by the Ohio Canal rather than overland. Adams agreed. By this point he had acquired a range of maladies, including a cough, a sore throat, hoarseness, and a temperature. The wintry weather had clearly affected him for the worse.
He was ill when he went aboard, and the canal boat itself did not boost his spirits. It was small, just over eighty feet long and fifteen feet wide, and in that space it carried more than two dozen passengers and crew members. It had no private staterooms. Spared the dormitory where most men slept, the ex-president shared a compartment in which four men slept feet to feet on settee beds. Also, the windows were closed because of the outside cold, keeping the inside uncomfortably warm. Looking over the situation, he did not hold back: “my heart sunk.” He certainly did not look forward to the scheduled four days on board. Cramped into such a small space with so many people, he foresaw “a trial such as I had never before experienced.”79
The journey did not turn out, however, to be quite the horror he had feared. He discovered some interesting fellow travelers; moreover, along the way the boat docked at various locations where passengers could disembark, and at some towns small receptions for him took place. At Akron he went ashore for one such affair, with brief words spoken and some hands shaken. A woman coming through the receiving line, and indeed pretty according to Adams, planted a kiss on his cheek. “I returned the salute on the lip,” he reported and proceeded to kiss every other woman who came before him. Although his doing so caused some to make faces, he stated that none rejected his overture.80
Just short of Columbus he had to transfer to a stage for the final leg into Ohio’s capital city, There, though still ill, he met another round of public welcoming. After the festivities he got into a stage aimed for his final destination. En route, at Dayton and Lebanon, the elderly gentleman witnessed enthusiastic acceptances similar to those he had been shown from Erie onward.
Finally, on November 8, Adams arrived in Cincinnati. More of the same greeted him, only a much larger assembly had gathered to embrace him. After the unrestrained praise, in this case from the mayor, he uttered what he rated a disappointing response; he actually used the words “flat, stale, and unprofitable” in his diary. Even so, the crowd chanted its approval before dispersing. Still, a procession of visitors passed through his hotel room until late in the evening.81
The occasion for which he had been preparing for more than two months was finally upon him. Even though utterly worn out and still harboring the effects of his illness, as well as being filled with anxiety, he stayed up until one working on his intended opening remarks. And he was up at four applying the final touches. Yet the day turned out to be almost anticlimactic, for a massive rainstorm altered the plans. Despite the weather a procession did form and move forward through what Adams described as “a sea of mud.” Finally, his carriage reached the top of the hill—some 450 feet above the city—selected for the observatory. There he did lay the cornerstone. But when he looked out at the crowd to read his opening statement, he saw umbrellas rather than faces. Still, his reading from his rain-spattered manuscript brought forth three vigorous cheers. His major discourse was postponed until the next day, when his venue would be the largest church in the city.82
Before an audience that filled the edifice to overflowing, he spoke for two hours. Thankfully, he had no physical difficulty in getting through his lengthy oration. Beginning with a paean to his country and the unique patriotism it cultivated, he moved into his major theme. Historical in his thrust, he recounted in overwhelming detail his version of the progress humankind had made in observing the heavens. He began with the Greeks and Romans and moved on through the giants Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Sir Isaac Newton to his own era. Of course, he thought such efforts should continue, for they would advance knowledge and boost human enlightenment. Because God, he asserted, had given humans faces that looked toward the heavens, He also commanded them to raise their eyes toward the stars. Finishing, he was pleased, feeling that his address had been well received by an attentive audience.83
After much more socializing and adulation, he was informed that the summit on which the observatory would stand would henceforth be known as Mount Adams, in his honor. Receptions, meals, parties, and laudatory speeches lasted for two more days.
On November 13 he departed in a steamboat that would transport him up the Ohio River to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But before leaving late that afternoon, he went over to the south bank of the river for a celebration in Covington, Kentucky, where he received a hero’s welcome with a praiseworthy speech from the governor of the slave state. During the handshaking another pretty woman, according to Adams, took his hand and whispered in his ear, “The first kiss in Kentucky.” He did not turn away.84
On the way to Pittsburgh, he made an appearance at several different river ports where he heard still more expressions of gratitude and praise. A particularly grand affair took place in Maysville, Kentucky. Its splendor Adams attributed to friends of Henry Clay. Clay had, in fact, invited Adams to spend some days with him at his home in Lexington. Even before starting west, Adams had declined, citing Louisa Catherine’s health and his own infirmities. In his comments at Maysville, however, he praised the man who had served in his cabinet and now led his party.85
Pittsburgh provided a replica of the celebratory journey that had characterized Adams’s preceding three weeks. But on this occasion there was even a cornerstone for a second observatory, and again heavy rain marred the ceremony. Although he saw a disappointing event, he told himself that by participating he had performed his moral duty. Yet, by this time, almost a month on the road, he felt his stamina failing. As a result he declined some invitations. In truth, he now found all the festivities “inexpressibly irksome.”86
Leaving Pittsburgh on the twentieth, as the fall weather showed signs of yielding to winter, he traveled by stage and train to Baltimore and thence to Washington, getting to his home on F Street on the twenty-fourth. He made it through the final portion of his monthlong odyssey without the constant celebrating. It had been an eventful journey. The welcoming celebrations during his trek from Erie through Ohio to Pittsburgh matched those he had experienced back in July moving through western New York State. As they had, the more recent ones generated both gratitude and fear. Anxious that he was insufficiently grateful to Divine Providence for the outpouring of kindness and honor shown him, he dreaded even more “the danger of being pampered and elated into vanity by them.”87
No matter Adams’s brooding, thousands of his fellow citizens had trumpeted their delight in his coming among them. For a number, especially in the burned-over district, the rejoicing stemmed in part from his stalwart support of their political positions on expansion, petitions, and slavery. In their eyes no other political figure matched him.
There was more, however. While no polls reveal public opinion on these issues in all the territory through which Adams traveled, it stretched credibility that the huge numbers who turned out to cheer him totally agreed with him, or even with each other, on politics. Yet, for both those who did and those who did not, he represented substantially more than an advocate for political causes. Rather, in him they saw the continuity of their country. This septuagenarian was not only the literal son of a major Founding Father; he had also actually known and spoken with George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe—Founders all. Moreover, Washington, Madison, and Monroe as well as his own father had appointed him to office. No other living political figure possessed such a lineage. All those who came out knew they would never again have the chance to see and hear a man whose public career spanned the life of the nation.