John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams as secretary of state, an office considered “the stepladder to the presidential chair.” (AFTER THOMAS SULLY AND GILBERT STUART, NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE, ADAMS NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)

By the time John Quincy was ready to return to America, he and Lord Castlereagh had grown closer and learned to trust each other enough to discuss most remaining issues between their two nations—and both were eager to reach agreement. Britain wanted to focus on European affairs without fear of friction with the Americans, and the United States, in turn, needed to deal with the Spanish menace in the south without fear of a British attack in the north. After several months of complicated give-and-take on both sides, John Quincy Adams and Richard Rush, the new American minister in London, finally worked out an agreement with the British that solved a few things, postponed others, and, most importantly, produced lasting peace between the two nations.

Under the agreement signed in 1818, the British agreed to ban impressment for ten years, restore American inland fishing rights along the Canadian coast, and allow Czar Alexander I of Russia to mediate the slave-compensation issue.^s The historic treaty also fixed, for the first time, the American-Canadian frontier from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains, giving the United States undisputed sovereignty over the so-called Adams Strip. By extending the boundary line along the Forty-ninth Parallel westward from the northwesternmost tip of Lake of the Woods in northern Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains, the Americans acquired a 150-mile-wide strip across northern Minnesota, North Dakota, and Montana. (See map on page 134.) Recognition of the Adams Strip as American territory established a precedent for eventually extending the northern border line to the Pacific Ocean, giving the United States sovereignty over Puget Sound and the mouth of the Columbia River. In the meantime the Oregon Territory west of the Rockies would remain open to both English and Americans, to trade with each other freely and come and go as they pleased, with neither nation claiming sovereignty over them or their lands.

In a subsequent discussion with John Quincy, however, Stratford Canning, the British minister to the United States, seemed to dismiss the agreement by claiming British ownership of the mouth of the Columbia River. When John Quincy disagreed, Canning replied sharply, “Why? Do you not know we have a claim?”

“I do not know what you claim nor what you do not claim,” John Quincy snapped back. “You claim India, you claim Africa—”

“Perhaps,” Canning interrupted, “a piece of the moon.”

“No,” John Quincy replied angrily. “I have not heard that you claim exclusively any part of the moon; but there is not a spot on this habitable globe that I could affirm you do not claim, and there is none which you may not claim with as much color of light as you can have to Columbia River or its mouth.”

“And how far would you consider this exclusion of right to extend?” Canning asked.

“To all the shores of the South Sea [Pacific Ocean],” John Quincy asserted.²

In the end, the British Foreign Office disavowed Canning’s claim of British sovereignty at the mouth of the Columbia River, thus ensuring peace along the U.S. frontier with Britain. Free to turn its attention to the conflict with Spain, the Monroe administration ordered Secretary of War John C. Calhoun to organize two military expeditions—one to crush pirates on Amelia Island and another to pursue and attack Indians and renegade slaves in Florida.

Two weeks later, General Edmund P. Gaines led troops to Amelia Island, while Tennessee militia commander General Andrew Jackson led a campaign into northern Florida, with President Monroe exhorting Jackson that “great interests are at issue, and until our course is carried through triumphantly . . . you ought not to withdraw your active support from it.”³ The President made it clear that he considered acquisition of the Floridas essential to the security of the United States. With the Spanish army attempting to suppress wars of independence in Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama, President Monroe did not believe Spain would be able to spare enough troops to defend the Floridas.

Aware that his mission was a de facto declaration of war, Jackson at first refused to violate the Constitution by warring against another nation without a congressional mandate. Before setting out for Florida, he demanded a letter from the President clarifying his mission, but he never received one and invaded Florida without it. After seizing Spanish posts at St. Marks, about forty miles south of the Georgia border, he and his men swept eastward to the Sewanee River, where he captured the Seminole village of Bowleg’s Town and burned three hundred houses. He then marched his force westward across the panhandle, leveling every Seminole fort and black village he could find. To terrify the population into submission, he hanged two captured Creek chieftains.

“They will foment war no more,” Jackson declared.⁴

On May 24, Jackson’s troops marched into Spanish-controlled Pensacola, on the Gulf of Mexico near the Alabama border, effectively taking control of the entire Florida panhandle. He also captured two British traders, one of them a shipowner, and accused them of aiding the enemy. He hanged the shipowner from the yardarm of his own ship in front of a group of terrified Indians and ordered a firing squad to execute the other. On June 2, Jackson sent a message to Monroe that he had won the Seminole War, and if the President would send him the Fifth Infantry, he would march his men eastward to deliver Fort St. Augustine. “Add another regiment and one frigate,” he boasted, “and I will insure you Cuba in a few days.”⁵

“The President and all the members of the cabinet except myself,” John Quincy was surprised to find, “are of opinion that Jackson acted not only without, but against his instructions; that he has committed war against Spain. The question is embarrassing and complicated, not only as involving an actual war with Spain, but that of the executive power to authorize hostilities without a declaration of war by Congress.” John Quincy stood alone in disagreement, arguing that Jackson’s actions were “justified by the necessity of the case and by the misconduct of the Spanish commanding officers in Florida.” John Quincy insisted that Jackson “was authorized to cross the Spanish line in pursuit of the Indian enemy” and that the Constitution authorized the executive to wage “defensive acts of hostility” without notifying Congress.

Although John Quincy failed to convince the rest of the cabinet, he convinced the President that Jackson had actually strengthened America’s international standing by demonstrating a will to defend national interests. Switching to John Quincy’s position, Monroe rewarded Jackson by naming him governor of Florida—to the cheers of the overwhelming majority of Americans. The Spanish king, of course, protested, as did English and European government leaders and newspapers, all condemning Jackson’s invasion of Florida as brutal, runaway imperialism.

On June 13, Speaker of the House Henry Clay added his voice to the chorus of criticisms, charging Jackson with undermining the constitutional authority of Congress to declare war. “Efforts were forthwith made in Congress,” John Quincy explained, “to procure a vote censuring the conduct of General Jackson, whose fast increasing popularity had, in all probability excited the envy of politicians . . . but the President himself, and Mr. Adams . . . warmly espoused the cause of the American commander.”⁶

With President Monroe now giving him free rein on the Florida issue, John Quincy sent instructions to the American minister in Madrid to present the Spanish government with an ultimatum: cede Florida or act decisively to prevent further attacks on American territory by Florida-based renegades. John Quincy then called Spanish minister Don Luis de Onis y Gonzales to the State Department. He did not like the fifty-five-year-old Spaniard, called him “wily Don” in private, and disparaged him as “cold, calculating . . . supple and cunning . . . overbearing . . . careless of what he asserts or how grossly it is proved to be unfounded.”

I had an hour’s conversation with him. . . . I mentioned the hostilities of the Seminole Indians upon our frontiers, and I urged that if we should not come to an early conclusion of the Florida negotiation, Spain would not have the possession of Florida to give us.⁷

President Monroe then prepared to go before Congress for his second annual address, in which he planned to answer his critics. He instructed John Quincy to prepare a single policy statement that would respond to the king of Spain, to critics in England and Europe, and to the American Congress. John Quincy had no sooner started working on a draft, however, when a letter arrived from his son John II that left him all but prostrate with shock and grief: Abigail Adams had died on October 28, 1818, two weeks short of her seventy-fourth birthday.

“Oh, God!” he cried out, tears streaming down his face. “Oh, God! My mother, beloved and lamented more than language can express, yielded up her pure and gentle spirit to its creator.”

Oh, God! Never have I known another human being the perpetual object of whose life was so unremittingly to do good. . . . There is no virtue in the female heart . . . [that] was not the ornament of hers. . . . She had been, during the war of our Revolution, an ardent patriot, and the earliest lesson of unbounded devotion to the cause of their country that her children received was from her.⁸

After recovering his composure, he wrote to his “Ever Dear and Revered Father”:

By a letter from my son John, I have . . . been apprised of that afflictive dispensation of Providence which has bereft you of the partner of your life; me of the tenderest and most affectionate of Mothers. . . . How shall I offer you consolation for your loss when I feel that my own is irreparable? . . . Let me hear from you, my dearest father, let me hear from you soon. And may the blessing of that God whose tender mercies are over all his works still shed rays of heavenly hope and comfort over the remainder of your days.

He signed it, “Your distressed but ever affectionate and dutiful son.”⁹

Although President Monroe was deeply sympathetic, only a few days remained before he would have to justify the attack and seizure of Florida to the world and obtain retroactive approval from Congress. As Thomas Jefferson had predicted of the Monroe-Quincy relationship, John Quincy’s “pointed pen”—despite the sorrow of its holder—prepared a response that articulated the President’s thoughts better than the President could have done himself. Using John Quincy’s carefully considered words, the President hailed Jackson’s attack as “an act of patriotism, essential to the honor and interests of your country.” Brushing aside constitutional issues, Monroe declared that

the United States stand justified in ordering their troops into Florida in pursuit of their enemy. They have this right by the law of nations if the Seminoles were inhabitants of another country and had entered Florida to elude pursuit. It is not an act of hostility to Spain. It is the less so, because her government is bound by treaty to restrain . . . the Indians there from committing hostilities against the United States.¹⁰

The message scoffed at the Spanish king’s portrayal of Jackson’s assault as an outrage and Jackson himself as lacking “honor and dignity.” Monroe then quoted a letter from a survivor of one of the Indian attacks on settlers.

There was a boat that was taken . . . that had in it thirty men, seven women, and four small children. There were six of the men got clear, and one woman saved, and all the rest of them got killed. The children were taken by the leg and their brains dashed out against the boat. . . . Should inquiry be made why . . . after this event the savage Hamathli-Meico [the Creek chieftain] upon being taken by the American troops was by order of their commander immediately hung, let it be told that that savage was the commander of the party by whom those women were butchered and those helpless infants dashed against the boat.¹¹

President Monroe went on to cite the law of nations [le droit des gens] as drafted by Swiss jurist Emmerich von Vattel, who wrote, “When at war with a ferocious nation which observes no rule and grants no quarter, they may be chastised by the persons of them who may be taken.”¹² As for the Englishmen that Jackson ordered hung, John Quincy’s response for the President called them “accomplices of savages, and, sinning against their better knowledge, worse than savages.”

General Jackson, possessed of their persons and of the proofs of their guilt, might, by the lawful and ordinary usages of war, have hung them both without formality of a trial. . . . He gave them the benefit of trial by a court-martial of highly respectable officers. . . . The defense of one consisted . . . of technical cavils at the nature of part of the evidence against him, and the other confessed his guilt.¹³

John Quincy’s text then addressed Henry Clay’s criticisms: “The President will neither inflict punishment nor pass a censure on General Jackson for that conduct, the motives of which were founded in the purest patriotism . . . and the vindication of which is written on every page of the law of nations as well as in the first law of nature—self-defense.”

And finally, the presidential address referred to John Quincy’s negotiations with Don Luis de Onis, saying that the restoration of Florida to Spanish sovereignty was based on the President’s confidence that Spain would

restrain by force the Indians of Florida from all hostilities against the United States . . . that there will be no more murders, no more robberies . . . by savages prowling along the Spanish line, seeking shelter within it to display in their villages the scalps of our women and children and to sell with shameless effrontery the plunder from our citizens in Spanish forts and cities. . . . The duty of this government to protect the persons and property of our fellow citizens on the borders of the United States is imperative. It must be discharged. And if, after all the warnings Spain has had . . . the necessities of self-defense should again compel the United States to take possession of the Spanish forts and places in Florida . . . restoration of them must not be expected.¹⁴

Faced with revolts across South America and terrified of again confronting the man they called “the Napoléon of the woods [Jackson],”¹⁵ the Spaniards capitulated. In the negotiations that followed, John Quincy let the Spanish government save face by asking the secretary of war to withdraw American troops from Florida and restore nominal sovereignty over the Florida panhandle to Spain. Spain then ceded both East and West Florida to the United States and renounced all claims to both territories. The United States, in turn, renounced all claims to Texas and used the $5 million owed to Spain for the Florida acquisition to settle claims of American citizens against Spain for Indian depredations. In addition to ceding the Floridas, the Adams-Onis agreement, or Transcontinental Treaty, defined the western limits of the Louisiana Territory, with the Spanish ceding all claims to the Pacific Northwest and extending nominal U.S. sovereignty to the Pacific coast.

Cowed by the President’s annual address, Henry Clay and the Senate approved the Adams-Onis treaty. Together with the rest of the Louisiana Purchase and the Florida conquest, the treaty expanded the small, East Coast nation that George Washington had governed into a vast, rich, and powerful empire, within a relatively impregnable wall of natural defenses.

On February 22, 1821, George Washington’s birthday, John Quincy Adams effected the exchange of treaties ceding Florida to the United States—a transaction he called “the most important of my life . . . an event of magnitude in the history of this Union.”

Let my sons, if they ever consult this record of their father’s life . . . remark the workings of private interests, of perfidious fraud, of sordid intrigues, of royal treachery, of malignant rivalry, and of envy masked with patriotism . . . all combined to destroy this treaty. Under the petals of this garland of roses . . . Onis had hidden a viper . . . and all the calculations of my downfall by the Spanish negotiation has left me with credit rather augmented . . . by the result.¹⁶

Stung by their attempts to censure him, Jackson rode over the mountains to Washington City to confront his congressional challengers. An adoring public intervened. “Whenever the General went into the streets,” one newspaper reported, “it was difficult to find a passage through, so great was the desire of people to see him. . . . Among the people . . . his popularity is unbounded—old and young speak of him with rapture.”¹⁷ Congress responded to the public euphoria by overwhelmingly defeating Clay’s proposed censures, and when Clay went to Jackson’s hotel to apologize, the general had already left for New York.

In addition to silencing Clay, John Quincy’s masterful policy statements silenced the British press and government. Jackson’s execution of two British subjects would, a few years earlier, have provoked a British naval attack, but after reading John Quincy’s paper, Lord Castlereagh agreed, “It is impossible not to admit that the unfortunate sufferers . . . had been engaged in unauthorized practices of such a description as to have deprived them of any claim on their own government for interference in their behalf.” He ordered the British minister in Washington not to take “any further step in the business.”¹⁸

In the fall of 1819, John Quincy and Louisa returned to Quincy to visit John Adams—only to find that John Quincy’s beloved brother Thomas Boylston’s occasional drinking had become chronic. Not only had his law practice deteriorated, he had allowed John Quincy’s affairs to fall into disarray. Although Thomas promised to reform, John Quincy had no choice but to transfer his estate to another firm. By 1820, its attorneys had restored enough order to his investments for him to buy a large new double-house in Washington—on present-day F Street at Thirteenth, at the time within view of the White House. It came with a second-floor ballroom for Louisa’s huge Christmas assemblies, and its proximity to the Potomac allowed John Quincy to add a swim to his regular regime of daily walks. Bathing suits having not yet been invented, he simply left his clothes on a rock at the shore and waded in stark naked—and no one paid attention.

To break the routine of diplomatic paperwork, John Quincy returned to his old reading habits—Tacitus, Alexander Pope, scientific journals, and, of course, the Bible. He became president of the American Bible Society and, in 1820, president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which his father had helped found.

To John Quincy’s dismay, the Adams-Onis treaty he had negotiated created almost as many problems as it solved. Although it opened the West to settlement and promised an unprecedented period of growth and prosperity, it also extended the problem of slavery far beyond the confines of southern slave states. At the end of 1819, the Missouri Territory applied for statehood, provoking a motion in Congress to exclude slavery from new states. Although John Quincy had despised slavery since his first encounter with it in Germany as a youngster, he had never before involved himself politically in disputes over the issue because it was virtually nonexistent in his native New England and seldom a topic of discussion there—certainly not in Quincy.

“I take it for granted,” he now realized, “that the present question [of slavery] is a mere preamble—a title page to a great tragic volume.” As he further studied the issue, he concluded, “This is a question between the rights of human nature and the Constitution of the United States. Probably both will suffer by the issue of the controversy.”¹⁹

The controversy divided Congress—and, indeed, the nation—for political and economic reasons as well as moral. The North feared Missouri’s entry into the Union as a slave state would alter the free-state/slave-state balance in the Senate, where a succession of northern vice presidents had invariably tilted tie votes in favor of northern interests. When Alabama—a slave state—won admission as the twenty-first state, the admission of Illinois—a free state—restored senatorial balance. There was no semblance of balance in the House of Representatives, however. In the years since ratification of the Constitution, the population of the North had grown faster than that of the South. Free states counted about 5.2 million people, with 105 House votes, by 1819, while the population of slave states totaled about 4.5 million, with only 81 House votes. With Missouri’s admission, the South saw the opportunity to gain a one-state majority in the Senate to compensate for its minority status in the House of Representatives.

Monroe had formed his cabinet with members from each region, and he ordered them not to involve themselves—or him—in the controversy. The dispute over slavery in the Missouri Territory, however, grew too widespread to ignore, and the more John Quincy heard cabinet members from the South defend slavery, the more convinced he became that it was “false and heartless.” Slavery, he asserted, made “the first and holiest rights of humanity depend upon the color of the skin.”

It perverts human reason . . . to maintain that slavery is sanctioned by the Christian religion, that slaves are happy and contented in their condition, that between master and slave there are ties of mutual attachment and affection, that the virtues of the master are refined and exalted by the degradation of the slave; while at the same time they vent execrations upon the slave trade, curse Britain for having given them slaves, burn at the stake Negroes convicted of crimes for the terror of the example, and writhe in agonies of fear at the very mention of human rights as applicable to men of color. . . . The bargain between freedom and slavery contained in the Constitution of the United States is morally and politically vicious, inconsistent with the principles upon which alone our Revolution can be justified.²⁰

Cabinet members William H. Crawford, from Georgia, and John C. Calhoun, from South Carolina, were both slaveholders, as was the President. Hardly a champion of manumission, Monroe steered clear of the issue—not because of indifference but because the Constitution gave only Congress jurisdiction over the admission of states, and it gave territories the right to become states without restrictions or preconditions. As for his personal views, Monroe had no strong objections to slavery, saying only, “The God who made us, made the black people, and they ought not to be treated with barbarity.”²¹

Apart from morality, both sides used the Constitution to press their arguments. Although its power to regulate interstate trade gave Congress the right to prohibit interstate traffic in slaves, the Constitution did not give either Congress or the states powers to abolish slavery in states and territories where it already existed or to establish slavery in states where it did not exist. Although it was not his purview as secretary of state, John Quincy had enough standing as a constitutional scholar to step into the debate to help the President and Congress resolve the issue as it affected Missouri. While admitting he despised slavery as “a sin before the sight of God,”²² he said his role was not to debate the pros and cons of the institution but solely to determine whether the Constitution gave the federal government power to abolish it without a constitutional amendment. Clearly, it did not.

“For the admission of a state where no slavery exists,” John Quincy explained, “Congress may prescribe as a condition that slavery shall never be established in it, as they have done to the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. But where it exists, as in Missouri and Arkansas, the power of extirpating it is not given to the Congress by the Constitution.”²³

John Quincy’s pronouncements, like those of a judge on high, silenced the debaters for a while, and before the end of the year, an opportunity for compromise materialized with a petition from Maine to separate from Massachusetts and join the Union as a new state. When the Sixteenth Congress met in mid-February 1820, it needed only two weeks to admit Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state. It then drew a line across the rest of the Louisiana Territory, excluding slavery in all new states above latitude 36°30’ and permitting slavery in new states below that line. (See map on page 214.)

The Missouri Compromise solved the problem of admitting new states but postponed the question of abolition for nearly a decade, at which time John Quincy Adams would have no choice but to confront it head-on. “Slavery,” he declared presciently,

is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union, and it is a contemplation worthy of the most exalted soul whether its total abolition is or is not practicable: if practicable, by what means it may be effected . . . at the smallest cost of human sufferance. A dissolution, at least temporary, of the Union as now constituted would be certainly necessary, and the dissolution must be upon a point involving the question of slavery and no other. The Union might then be reorganized on the fundamental principle of emancipation.²⁴

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 estabilished a dividing line between free territory and slave territory,with slavery illegal in any new states in the lands above the line and legal states formed below the line.

The Missouri Compromise seemed to settle America’s future, and when James Monroe stood for reelection at the end of 1820, no one opposed him. Of 235 electoral votes, Monroe received 231, with three abstentions and only one elector casting a dissenting vote to prevent Monroe from matching George Washington as the only President to have won unanimously. “And that vote, to my surprise and mortification, was for me,” John Quincy Adams recounted with embarrassment. He was, however, pleased with the election results. “Party conflict has performed its entire revolution,” he said with satisfaction, “and that unanimity of choice which began with George Washington has come around again in the person of James Monroe. In the survey of our national history, this latter unanimity is much more remarkable than the first.”²⁵

Monroe’s unopposed reelection, however, marked the end of the Federalist Party and left his own Republican Party in disarray, with leaders in each state casting greedy eyes on the President’s chair if and when Monroe decided to vacate it. John Quincy warned the President that “as the first term . . . has hitherto been the period of the greatest national tranquility . . . it appears to me scarcely avoidable that the second term will be among the most stormy and violent. I told him that I thought the difficulties before him were thickening and becoming hourly more and more formidable.”²⁶

In 1821, a rising tide of populist sentiment swept in from the West, where, in a monumental clash of generations, frontiersmen and settlers rejected property ownership as a qualification for voting and holding office in the new states they founded. A concept that dated back to eighteenth-century colonial rule, when land ownership depended on royal grants from Britain, property qualifications for voting were alien to young, free-spirited, nineteenth-century frontiersmen. Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and other western states, therefore, rejected the concept in writing their constitutions, providing instead for white manhood suffrage. Although New Jersey had expanded suffrage in 1807 and Maryland in 1810, Connecticut waited until 1818 to eliminate property requirements for voting, with Massachusetts following in 1820 and New York in 1821.

In addition to demands for greater democracy at home, western populists embraced the spread of democracy abroad, with Speaker Henry Clay asking Congress in 1818 to recognize the growing number of revolutionary governments in Spanish America. The House expressed its sympathy with the Latin Americans and pledged to support the President if he recognized any of the new regimes. Inspired by America’s Revolutionary War, South America’s wars of independence had broken out in 1810, but James Madison’s administration, and Monroe himself during his first term in office, had treated the conflicts as civil wars and, in the tradition of George Washington, kept the United States neutral.

In March 1822, President Monroe was ready to assert America’s voice as a world power and asked Congress to recognize Latin American republics that had declared independence from Spain. It was, he said, “manifest that all those provinces are not only in the full enjoyment of their independence, but . . . that there is not the most remote prospect of their being deprived of it.” The new governments, he asserted, “have a claim to recognition by other powers” and the United States “owe it to their station and character in the world, as well as to their essential interests,” to recognize them .²⁷ Led by Speaker Henry Clay, Congress supported the President, and the United States recognized Colombia and Mexico as independent nations.^t

Although Monroe believed Spain unable “to produce any change . . . in the present condition” of its former South American colonies, French king Louis XVIII led an alliance of absolute monarchs in pledging to send troops to his Bourbon cousin, Spanish king Ferdinand VII, to help him recapture his rich South American colonies. After decades of war against Napoléon to prevent French expansion, Britain threatened to resume her war with France rather than tolerate French military expeditions to South America—and asked the United States to join her.

When they learned of the European threats to suppress South American independence movements, former Presidents Jefferson and Madison intruded into the political picture by urging President Monroe to accept England’s invitation, as did Secretary of War Calhoun and Speaker of the House Clay and his legion of congressional war hawks. John Quincy stood alone, arguing against any American ties to England or entangling alliances with any other foreign nation, for that matter. Like his father, he believed that even the slightest subservience to a foreign power represented a loss of independence—symbolically if not materially, but probably both. Still the champion of George Washington’s policies, John Quincy called “the principle of neutrality in all foreign wars fundamental to the continuance of our liberties and of our Union.”

So far as [South Americans] were contending for independence, I wished well to their cause, but I have seen and yet see no prospect that they would establish free or liberal institutions of government. They are not likely to promote the spirit either of freedom or order by their example. They have not the first element of good or free government. Arbitrary power, military and ecclesiastical, was stamped upon their education, upon their habits, and upon their institutions.²⁸

Proclaiming a policy the President would later claim as his own, John Quincy urged the President to disclaim any intention of “interference with the political affairs of Europe” so that the United States could hold the “expectation and hope that European powers will equally abstain from the attempt to spread their principles in the American hemisphere or to subjugate by force any part of these continents to their will.”²⁹

No sooner had he spoken than his friend Russian czar Alexander I extended his nation’s claims along the Pacific coast of North America to the Fifty-first Parallel in the middle of the Oregon Territory and closed the waters of the Bering Strait to commercial fishing by other nations. John Quincy urged the President to “contest the right of Russia to any territorial establishment on this continent” and to “assume . . . the principle that the American continents are no longer subjects for any new European colonial establishments.”³⁰

Just at that time, John Quincy learned that Britain intended claiming Graham Land, an island rich in seals that American hunters had discovered off the northern section of the Antarctic Peninsula. At John Quincy’s urging, President Monroe ordered a U.S. Navy frigate to sail around Cape Horn to claim Graham Land before the British. With the Russian attempt to claim the Oregon coast, he ordered a second warship to join the one at Graham Land and sail to Oregon. Although Monroe once again flirted with an unconstitutional de facto declaration of war, the Russians relented and agreed to move the boundary of the lands they claimed three hundred miles to the north and to remove all maritime restrictions on the surrounding seas. In effect, President Monroe successfully extended the United States’ sphere of influence beyond its western boundaries into the rich Pacific Ocean fisheries.

With American warships showing the flag in all parts of the world—from the Mediterranean coast of North Africa to the Pacific coast of North America—the President decided to explain America’s intentions to the world. He asked cabinet members for written and oral suggestions for a policy statement that he would include in his annual message to Congress. “The ground I wish to take,” he told them, “is that of earnest remonstrance against the interference of the European powers by force with South America, but to disclaim all interference on our part with Europe, to make an American cause, and adhere inflexibly to that.”³¹

John Quincy submitted a proposal that “the American continents by the free and independent condition which they have assumed, and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subject for future colonization by any European power.”³² The President included it verbatim in his annual message, later called the Monroe Doctrine.

In his two-hour address—aimed at foreign leaders as well as Congress and the American people—Monroe embraced John Quincy’s political philosophy and formally closed the Western Hemisphere to further colonization. He explained that America’s political system differed substantially from Europe’s and that the United States would consider any European attempts to extend its system anywhere in the Western Hemisphere as a threat to the United States. From its origins, he said, the United States had sought nothing but peace—for its citizens to fish, hunt, and plow their fields unmolested. The United States had never interfered in Europe’s internal affairs and would not do so—indeed, it wanted no part of Europe’s incessant wars. To that end, he pledged not to interfere with Europe’s existing colonies in the New World. But he declared it to be “a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved” that “the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” He warned that the United States would view “any interposition . . . by any European power . . . as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States”—in effect, a declaration of war.³³

Monroe’s new “doctrine” drew universal acclaim across America. Although much of the European press and some European leaders condemned it, few European powers had not learned the lessons of the British in the American Revolutionary War and, more recently, of the French in Russia. As the Duke of Wellington had warned, no nation on earth was powerful enough to sustain military supply lines long enough to challenge American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. With the Monroe Doctrine, most European leaders realized it would be far less costly to trade with Americans than to try to subjugate them.

“I went to the President’s,” John Quincy described the hours following delivery of the Monroe Doctrine, “and found Gales, the half-editor of the National Intelligencer, there. He said the message was called a war message and spoke of newspapers from Europe announcing that an army of twelve thousand Spaniards was to embark immediately to subdue South America.”

John Quincy all but laughed in the half-editor’s face, calling the reports absurd. “The same newspapers,” John Quincy scoffed, “announced . . . the disbanding of the Spanish army.”³⁴

As the Monroe Doctrine quelled European ambitions for new conquests in the Americas, it also dispelled American fears of imminent attack by foreign powers and unleashed a surge of popular energy that strengthened the nation economically and militarily. State governments worked with builders and visionaries to cover the Atlantic states with networks of canals, free roads, and toll roads, or turnpikes, that generated revenues from user fees to pay the costs of maintenance and expansion. The Lancaster Pike tied Philadelphia to Gettysburg; the Boston Post Road connected Worcester to Springfield and Boston to Providence; and work began to extend the great Cumberland Road—then often called the National Road—from Baltimore to the Mississippi River. Speaker Henry Clay envisioned its eventual extension to the Pacific Ocean. In New York State, continuing construction on the great Erie Canal extended the link between Rome and Utica westward to Seneca Lake. Already tied to the Atlantic Ocean by the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers, the canal’s western tip stood only 120 miles from Buffalo and the entrance to the Great Lakes. Plans for other roads, turnpikes, and canals were legion. One proposed canal was to stretch from Boston to Savannah, while a turnpike out of Washington was to reach New Orleans.

Economic expansion spurred advances in the arts and education, as well as industry and agriculture. The works of American writers—Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and others—replaced English literature as the most widely read in the United States. In addition to female academies, free schools open to all children sprouted in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Boston opened the nation’s first “high school” in 1821, and Massachusetts passed a law requiring every town of five hundred families to establish a high school for their children. Institutions for adult education appeared as well, with 3,000 “lyceums” in fifteen states offering adult education and self-improvement courses.

The apparent end to threats from abroad and the boundless opportunities at home left the Monroe administration with few major projects to pursue in the time it had left in office, thus freeing cabinet members to pursue personal ambitions. In the naive assumption that his cabinet and other government leaders would serve the nation as selflessly as he, Monroe emulated his presidential predecessors and announced early in his second term that he would limit himself to two terms in office. With the exception of John Quincy, cabinet members all but renounced their oaths of office and personal pledges to the President and launched a bitter struggle for political power that left the President impotent—and ended what a Boston newspaper had labeled the “Era of Good Feelings.”³⁵

The frenetic activity of the Monroe years had left John Quincy exhausted and without the physical, let alone emotional, energy to seek the presidency himself. Although based in his native country after so many years overseas, his time as secretary of state had left him few moments to spend with his wife and family, and he was simply too tired and, in effect, lonely for family life to concern himself with the forthcoming elections. Not so the other cabinet members and presidential aspirants.

When budget restrictions forced a reduction in the number of army officers, Treasury Secretary Crawford pressed Monroe not to dismiss any Crawford confederates. When the President ignored the request, Crawford went to the White House in a rage, calling the President an “infernal scoundrel” and raising his cane as if to assault him. According to Navy Secretary Samuel L. Southard, who witnessed the confrontation, “Mr. Monroe seized the tongs and ordered him instantly to leave the room or he would chastise him, and he rang the bell for the servant.”³⁶ Realizing how closely he had flirted with treason, Crawford left and never again set foot in the White House during Monroe’s presidency.

In Florida, meanwhile, Andrew Jackson, whom President Monroe had appointed governor, embarrassed the administration by violating the outgoing Spanish governor’s diplomatic immunity and arresting him for failing to surrender documents needed in a legal proceeding. The arrest caused a furor in the press, which assailed Jackson as a would-be dictator. Jackson resigned in a rage, went home to Tennessee, won election as senator, and returned to Washington to wreak havoc on his political enemies.

As cabinet members and other presidential aspirants turned on the President or on each other, the vicious rhetoric created political schisms in Congress not seen since the days of the Confederation of American States. “I have never known such a state of things,” Monroe lamented to his predecessor in office, James Madison, “nor have I personally ever experienced so much embarrassment and mortification.”

Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford of Georgia had ambitions to succeed James Monroe as President but suffered a paralytic stroke before the elections. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

Where there is an open contest with a foreign enemy . . . the course is plain and you have something to cheer and animate you to action, but we are now blessed with peace. . . . There being three avowed candidates in the administration is a circumstance which increases the embarrassment. The friends of each endeavor to annoy the others. . . . In many cases the attacks are personal, directed against the individual.³⁷

Only one candidate remained silent and above the fray. John Quincy, the most obvious and logical choice to succeed President Monroe, refused to state whether he even wanted the office. Raised in a society where the ignorant deferred to the educated propertied class, he hewed to what his grandson Henry Adams would later call “the Ciceronian idea of government by the best,” selected by an elevated class of educated, propertied professionals who “chose men to represent them because they wanted to be well represented and they chose the best they had.” Those selected did not accept “pay” for their services but “honoraria.” Those who accepted public office were “statesmen, not politicians; they guided public opinion but were little guided by it.”³⁸

Clearly alarmed by John Quincy’s reticence, former congressman Joseph Hopkinson, a close family friend and prominent Philadelphia lawyer, wrote to Louisa,

I think our friend Mr. A. is too fastidious and reserved on a certain subject as interesting to the country as it is to himself . . . . His conduct seems to me, as it does to others, to be calculated to chill and depress the kind feeling and fair exertions of his friends. They are discouraged when they see a total indifference assumed on his part. . . . Now, my dear madam, this won’t do. The Macbeth policy—“if chance will make me king, why chance may crown me”—will not answer where little is left to chance or merit. Kings are made by politicians and newspapers, and the man who sits down waiting to be crowned, either by chance or just right, will go bareheaded all his life.³⁹

Louisa, of course, showed Hopkinson’s letter to her husband and urged him to campaign more aggressively. “Do for once gratify me,” she pleaded. “Show yourself if only for a week . . . and if harm comes of it I promise never to advise you again.”⁴⁰ But John Quincy was adamant, insisting that the presidency “is not in my opinion an office to be either solicited or declined. . . . The principle of the Constitution in its purity is that the duty shall be assigned to the most able and the most worthy.”

The law of friendship is a reciprocation of good offices. He who asks or accepts the offer of friendly service contracts the obligation of meeting it with a suitable return. He who asks or accepts the offer of aid to promote his own views necessarily binds himself to promote the views of him from whom he receives it. . . . Between the principle . . . that a President of the United States must remember to whom he owes his elevation and the principle of accepting no aid on the score of friendship or personal kindness to him, there is no alternative. The former . . . I deem to be essentially and vitally corrupt. The latter is the only principle to which no exception can be taken.⁴¹

For one of the few times in their marriage, Louisa decided to ignore her husband and take matters into her own hands. Aware of his ambitions and fearful of the effects of a loss on his spirit, she decided to compete with wives of other candidates by expanding the scope of her popular Tuesday evening receptions. “My Tuesday evenings appear to have some attractions,” she realized.

At least they afford the probable certainty of giving opportunity for amusement throughout the winter and in this consists the charm. . . . If Mr. A instead of keeping me back when I was a young woman had urged me forward in the world I should have better understood the maneuvering part of my situation. But instead of this I find myself almost a stranger to the little arts and intrigues of the world in which I move.⁴²

Louisa learned quickly, however, realizing that “wine maketh the heart glad” and gradually enlarging the number of guests she invited. One party drew one hundred guests; another, “one hundred and thirty odd persons all very sociable and good humored. The young ladies danced, played, and sang and were very merry. . . . I am very willing to show that I am the public servant.” As she enlarged her parties, she hired the Marine Band for a fee of “five dollars to each performer plus wine and supper.” She then organized a party for 252—“ladies being a much larger proportion than we have had this winter.” Although William H. Crawford’s wife, Susanna, sent six hundred invitations to a ball she sponsored, Louisa, not surprisingly, found it “dull and uncomfortable, and we left before ten o’clock.”⁴³

Consciously or unconsciously, John Quincy refused to help Louisa plan the parties she hosted for his campaign, acting disinterested at times and even failing to appear at some events. She, in turn, suppressed her growing irritation at her husband and simply threw herself into organizing her entertainments. Her ambitions seemed to surpass those of her husband. “My whole morning was occupied with visits and writing cards of invitation,” she smiled. “We have had forty or more members of Congress already here and all who call I invite to my evenings. If I can help it I will invite only those who call, lest it should be said I am courting them to further a political purpose.”⁴⁴

With the approach of summer, Louisa curtailed her campaign work, and John Quincy left for Cambridge to enroll their youngest son, Charles Francis, in Harvard—and to attend the graduation of his oldest son, George Washington Adams. Once at his beloved alma mater, however, he met with nothing but disappointment. Although George did graduate, he finished only thirtieth in his class of eighty-five. Then, to John Quincy’s dismay, he learned that his middle boy, John II, in his next-to-last year at the school, ranked even lower—forty-fifth in a class of eighty-five. To compound John Quincy’s disappointment, fourteen-year-old Charles Francis did so poorly on his Latin entrance examination that the college granted him only a conditional admission. He had spent years teaching Charles Francis his Latin and erupted in anger, storming into President John Kirkland’s office charging that his son had been unfairly treated. In no mood for a confrontation with the man likely to be the next President of the United States, Kirkland ordered Charles Francis retested, and to every one’s relief, the boy passed and gained unconditional entry into his father’s alma mater.

John Quincy sensed, however, that his troubles with the boys were just beginning. “I find them all three coming to manhood with indolent minds, flinching from study whenever they can.”⁴⁵ He could not and would not allow what he deemed the indolence of the boys to go unpunished and told them they could not return to Washington for Christmas. Instead of enjoying holiday balls and lavish White House dinners, they would have to spend Christmas and New Year’s in the somber mansion of their grandfather in Quincy—studying. Not until they ranked among the top ten students in their classes would he allow John II and Charles Francis to enjoy holidays with their parents. In the meantime, he sent George to study law with Daniel Webster in Boston.

A few months later, John Quincy’s discipline produced the opposite of its intended effects: John II joined a student riot, Harvard expelled him, and he returned to his parents in total disgrace. The boy could not have returned home at a worse time. The Adamses were already caring for Louisa’s sister’s three orphaned children—two boys, Johnson and Thomas, who were proving more difficult than the Adamses own sons, and the flirty Mary Catherine. John Quincy had paid for Thomas to attend Phillips Academy at Exeter, New Hampshire, then Harvard, but he dropped out and returned to Washington to loaf in the Adams home—without a degree, a skill, or a job. His older brother, Johnson, did not even bother enrolling in Harvard. From the first, he preferred loafing.

Young Charles Francis, meanwhile, fell in love with Mary Catherine, but the two were both too young to marry, and when Charles Francis went off to Harvard, their relationship cooled. When George Washington arrived for a visit, however, he took his brother’s place in Mary Catherine’s heart. John Quincy put a quick end to the relationship, sending George back to Boston to finish his legal studies with Daniel Webster.

Depressed by his sons’ failure at Harvard, John Quincy resigned himself to failure in the presidential race and returned to his boyhood home in Quincy to spend time with his aging father and to look at farming as a possible occupation after he retired from public office. Not only his father but three previous generations of the Adamses had farmed the land in Quincy successfully, and he concluded that, once out of government, he might have to do the same. He soon realized, however, that a life in diplomacy had not prepared him for the physical demands of farm life. His only skills lay in the law, but he feared he had made too many political enemies in Boston’s powerful Federalist community to ensure much success.

A run for the presidency was clearly the most logical next step in his career, but he stubbornly refused to demean himself, the American people, or the office of the presidency by actively campaigning. He believed that merit alone, not party or political campaign rhetoric, should determine the choice of the American people—a unique concept voiced only once before, by George Washington, but never since.

“My career,” John Quincy proclaimed, “has attached no party to me precisely because it has been independent of all party . . . and the consequence has been that all parties disown me.”

I have followed the convictions of my own mind with a single eye to the interests of the whole nation. . . . If I am to be a candidate, it must be by the wishes . . . of others, not by mine. If my countrymen prefer others to me, I must not repine at their choice. Indifference at the heart is not to be won by . . . the loudest trumpet. Merit and just right in this country will be heard. And in my case, if they are not heard without my stir, I shall acquiesce in the conclusion that it is because they do not exist.⁴⁶

As his opponents resorted to every ruse they could invent to win votes, John Quincy refused to compromise his values and political beliefs—even if, as seemed likely, those values doomed him to defeat in his lifelong quest for national leadership.