Like Louisa, John Quincy would also brood about his unsettled and divided life, but with resignation. Still, it was his core belief that he had discharged his duty to his country and therefore the existing administration “in every measure that my impartial judgment could approve.”1
And there was much to approve and also disapprove in these early days that would lead to the War of 1812, which concluded officially with the Treaty of Ghent. By stirring coincidence, John Quincy as ambassador to Russia would help to forge that treaty in 1814.
“Full of sound and fury against the foreign nations,” “unqualified submission to France and unqualified defiance of Great Britain, are indeed the two pillars upon which our measures,” that is, the country’s fate, rested, John Quincy had reported to his brother and father. In his view, his country was trapped between the trade restrictions of Napoleon’s Continental System and the British Rule of 1756 that fostered the impressment of American seamen.2
Given the momentous issues at stake, John Quincy was nearly evangelical in the cause of his nation and union. As a member of the committee on the president’s message, after dinner the evening of February 1, John Quincy had drawn up two resolutions for consideration by the Senate committee.
Resolved: That the capture and condemnation of American vessels and their cargoes under the orders of the British government on the pretext of their being engaged in a trade with the enemies of Great Britain not permitted before the war is an unprovoked aggression upon the citizens of these United States. . . .
Resolved, That the President of the United States be requested to instruct the minister of the United States at the court of Great Britain to demand and insist upon the immediate restoration of the property of the citizens of the United States. . . .3
The first had been adopted unanimously; the second, after debate, was adopted in a vote of 23 to 7. The success of his bills, he would claim, had taught him something: “In taking a lead, a man must rely only upon himself.” There were lessons very decisively to be learned “when the character of a leader was to be acquired.” And ones to which he would remain sensitive, sometimes in painful bewilderment, for his entire career.4
By mid-March 1806 John Quincy barely had time to get home and back to the Capitol, the workload was so tremendous. Agonizing over the violent outrages of the foreign nations, both houses were crammed with motion upon motion “for everything that can exhibit temper against the British.”5
Added to all this “was opposition from reasonable quarters—all the quakerish members of both Houses” who were averse to anything that looked even by a squint like taking drastic steps, for they were only for peace the world over. Besides fear of offending Great Britain, negotiation was the only course to pursue. In addition, members from the southern states were reluctant to agree to anything that might obstruct the freedom of their trade in foreign ships and affect the exportation of their cotton.6
Added to all this was the burden of domestic issues, including bills on naval appropriations, roads spreading from the Atlantic to the Ohio, Georgia land claimants, an amendment favoring free navigation of Britain’s St. Lawrence River, as well as the somewhat secret and extremely delicate “Two Million Dollar Act” (debated and passed in February 1806) to cover expenses of negotiations and purchase of Florida from Spain.
Still more radically contentious, what John Quincy referred to as the Slave Prohibition Bill had provoked a long debate on January 15, 1807, in which he most deliberately took no part. Nor did he comment further on its passage just ten days later, convinced as he was that the infinite discrepancies in the new law would impede its honorable execution and that, at root, the Constitution did not give Congress the power to prohibit slavery.
On further analysis John Quincy had concluded that “the bargain between freedom and slavery contained in the Constitution of the Unites States is morally and politically vicious, inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution.” By considering slaves as property and thereby nearly doubling their masters’ voting privileges, “this slave representation has governed the Union.”7
Among the evils of slavery—the “great and foul stain upon the North American union”—he continued, was that “it taints the very sources of moral principle, established false ideas of virtue and vice, for what,” he wondered, “can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?” Indeed, he wrote in his diary years later, he found the subject “a mere preamble to a title page to a great tragic volume.”8
Obviously, John Quincy had thought long, hard and passionately on the subject and fundamentally and repeatedly questioned the judgment of anyone who kept people of color in bondage. And at the top of his list he especially included the judgment of Thomas Jefferson, who had been a slave-holder all his life, even while publishing opinions blasting the very existence of slavery.
More than a dozen years later, on March 2, 1820, the Senate admitted Maine as a free state and admitted Missouri to the Union as a slave state while outlawing slavery in the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36°30'. The condition inserted by the House of Representatives that slavery should first be prohibited by the Missouri state constitution was abandoned.9
At the time of the 1820 debate on the Missouri Compromise, John Quincy said that he had favored this compromise, believing it to be all that could be effected under the present Constitution, and also because he was extremely unwilling to put the Union at hazard. But he allowed that perhaps it would have been a wiser as well as bolder course to have persisted in the restriction on Missouri until it concluded in a state convention to revise and amend its state constitution. Such a course would have produced a new Union of 13 or 14 states unpolluted with slavery, with a great and glorious object: that of rallying other states to accept universal emancipation of their slaves. Then again, on second thought, if the Union must be dissolved, slavery was “precisely the question upon which it ought to break.”10
Congress broke up Monday, April 21, 1806, “under a variety of unpleasant and unpromising circumstances.” John Quincy would leave Washington on April 25 and looked forward, he wrote his brother-in-law, Colonel William Smith, to seeing him in New York City on his way to Quincy. Louisa would remain in Washington for the present, probably through the summer. He did not mention that Louisa suffered violent headaches, was bled on occasion and was unable to make the trip as she was pregnant and the baby was due that summer of 1806.11
After he arrived at New York’s City Hotel on May 1, he visited the colonel and his wife, his beloved sister Nabby. He was so distressed to find them planning to move that same day into a cottage on the prison grounds—possibly Newgate in Greenwich Village—that “I cannot dwell upon it,” he wrote Louisa.12
Actually, he had little choice but to be critically involved: His entire family counted on his help in “the mysterious project and expedition of Miranda.” The scandal made for riveting newspaper coverage, considering the celebrity of the accused, the husband of the former president’s daughter, the questionable involvement of President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison and of a Spanish general with the alias of George Martin who had “very imprudently represented” a hero in the United States for the past 20 years.13
William Stephens Smith, Revolutionary War hero, son-in-law of John and Abigail Adams, and recently replaced and disgraced as surveyor of the Port of New York, had been charged on April 7 with “high misdemeanor” for violating the Neutrality Act of 1794 by providing means for a military expedition against a nation with which the United States was at peace. More specifically, Colonel Smith had supported his “very intimate friend” General Francisco de Miranda’s quest to liberate his native Venezuela and other Spanish colonies in the western hemisphere from Spanish rule. In the cause, the colonel had helped supply ammunition and mercenaries—among them his son William Steuben Smith whom he had secretly encouraged to leave Columbia College—and chartered the merchant vessel Leander from Samuel Ogden, along with several other vessels to set sail the past February 22, 1806.14
Shortly, two of the schooners met with disaster and William was mistakenly reported to be imprisoned in Caracas and threatened with a death sentence unless his father would reveal to the Spanish Minister Carolos Martinez de Yrugo everything he knew of Miranda’s plans, including the names of the Spaniards with him. The Spanish minister wanted to discover everything that could be confessed by a criminal under sentence of death to save himself. The colonel’s trial was scheduled for mid-July 1806. If convicted, he faced three years in prison. Defending himself, supported by a team of prominent lawyers, Colonel Smith had testified that Miranda’s expedition “was set on foot with the knowledge and approbation of the President.”15
To the family’s immense relief, the colonel would be acquitted in July, but obviously the involvement of the president and secretary of state remained suspect in John Quincy’s thoughts. He had personally lost trust in Jefferson, scorned his “itch for telling prodigies.” And though he understood that the gloomy case of the colonel’s future and that of his family was “only the natural consequence of the principles and practices which have for many years been in unceasing operation,” his sympathies remained with his brother-in-law, the erratic entrepreneur of extravagant success and abysmal failure. In any case, in his opinion, having removed him from the office of surveyor, the president had already done enough. He had “ruined him as completely as his heart could wish. More is unnecessary,” he told Louisa.16
With untold sympathy, John Quincy remained protective of his sister’s family. He had hoped Nabby would leave the prison’s premises to join him in Quincy, but she had preferred to stay with her husband. He had, however, with Louisa’s permission, offered support for her son John Smith while he studied law after his recent graduation from Harvard.
On the whole, for John Quincy, the summer of 1806 was one of privilege but also shattering sorrow. He was in Cambridge about to be inducted professor at Harvard. Louisa was in Washington in great pain, suffering abscesses in the back of her throat and ear, swelling legs, waiting out the birth of their baby. John Quincy thought, he told Louisa, of an alternative to their separate way of life. Though resigned to filling out his term with little more than two years to go, he was tempted to resume the practice of law and renounce his “official character.” But Louisa responded that, though she felt unqualified to advise him, she wholly supported his public duties, in which he would shine in real and essential service to his country, self and family. Comfort, she added, must sometimes be sacrificed for the general good, and though she was conscious of how much this sentiment might cost her, she still felt an ardent desire to see at least some men of respectability and talents adorning public stations. But ultimately, he must act as he thought proper.17
On Thursday, June 12, John Quincy was officially installed as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. The academic procession was followed by a prayer, an anthem, various addresses and culminated in John Quincy’s address to the “Sons of Harvard” whose “generous thirst for useful knowledge, honorable emulation of excellence” distinguished the students of the university.18
While all along John Quincy had faithfully reported to Louisa on his daily ventures, he had also made sympathetic inquiries about her health and well-being. Increasingly anxious, on June 30, John Quincy read what he termed “a message of misfortune,” the most tragic letter he had ever received. It was from Louisa, telling him that their child was born dead. Shattered mentally and physically—“I had given up my heart to hope, and joy in the hope of a third. It is gone”—when he was able to hold his pen steadily, he wrote to urge her most earnestly to come to Quincy. Readily accepting his invitation, Louisa, with her sister Caroline, arrived on August 10, but once again the couple faced separation as she chose to remain throughout the winter in Boston with her children while John Quincy departed for Washington in November 1806, not to return till the end of the Ninth Congress’s session in March 1807.19
Living apart once again, their renewed correspondence was affectionate in tone and even flirtatious. Louisa longed for his return, but, she concluded, “I can neither live with or without you.” In answer, though he had not fully understood the last paragraph of her letter of November 25, he would say “I can neither live with you or without you but in this cold weather I should be very glad to live with you.” To which Louisa replied: “I will only say that I think I never will part with you.”20
Before quitting Washington for Quincy, John Quincy predicted that the termination of Congress in March 1807 would leave public affairs in a singular situation, “threatened with war on all sides, external and internal.” His prophecy was fulfilled on Tuesday, June 30. He was working on his lecture for Harvard when he heard what he described as “an occurrence of very gloomy complexion,” an understatement at the least. Henry Adams would call it “a moment without a parallel in American history since the battle of Lexington.” For John Quincy it was the beginning of “the really important period of my life.”21
Eight days earlier, on June 22, the British Leopard, a 50-gun ship, had fired on the American frigate Chesapeake sailing from Norfolk for service in the Mediterranean, killing 3 seamen and wounding 18, including Commodore James Barron. The British removed four seamen alleging they were deserters from the British navy, and of the four tried at a naval court-martial in Halifax, three of them were native Americans who had been impressed into British service. One was hanged, one died after undergoing his sentence of flogging, two others were returned to the Chesapeake on June 13, 1812. Recounting this incident 22 years later, “will my countrymen forgive the emotion” John Quincy asked, that he could not suppress? It was the last step in a gradation of outrages his country would endure from foreign insolence and oppression.22
In reaction to the immediate tragedy, John Quincy had hoped to rally an all-inclusive town meeting embracing both parties, but his Federalist friends had declined. Only the Republicans saw the need of the meeting at the State House on July 10, and John Quincy was the only Federalist to work in a committee of seven to draft and report resolutions in support of the administration. According to the fourth of these resolutions:
Resolved unanimously, that, though we unite with our government in wishing most ardently for peace on just and honorable terms, yet we are ready cheerfully to cooperate in any measures, however serious, which they may judge necessary for the safety and honor of our country, and will support them with our lives and fortunes.23
Discussed, edited, unanimously adopted, signed by all the members of the committee, including John Quincy, the meeting had “adjourned in perfect order.”24
The backlash was immediate, ugly and widespread, but not surprising. The day before the meeting, on March 9, John Quincy had “a debate somewhat warm” (actually “painfully animated”) with Federalist John Lowell who sided with the British naval officers, said they had a right to seize and carry away from an American ship-of-war any deserter from the British navy. The day after the meeting, John Phillips, an intimate friend, had told him, he noted in his diary: “I should have my head taken off for apostasy by the Federalists.”25
He would pay a steep price for his refusal to conform. When the essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson read John Quincy’s first lectures in 1806, he wrote, “not only the students heard him with delight, but the hall was crowded by professors and by unusual visitors.” A number of coaches brought his friends from Boston to hear him. On his return in the winter to the Senate in Washington, he took such grounds in the debates of the following session that he lost the sympathy of many of his constituents in Boston. When he resumed lectures in Cambridge, his class attended, but the coaches from Boston did not come and “indeed many of his political friends deserted him.”26
Family arrangements for the fall 1807 session of Congress—meeting on October 27, six weeks earlier than usual—included plans for their sons George and John to remain in Boston while Louisa returned to Washington with John Quincy and “by the blessing of God, a third son born at half past eight o’clock in the morning” of August 18, 1807. Named Charles Francis in memory of his deceased brother and as a token of honor to his old friend and patron Judge Dana, the infant was very large—possibly weighing as much as George and John together had weighed at birth—and remarkably hearty and strong. An elated John Quincy wrote of “the first moment of self-possession,” to Louisa’s mother, and carried the letter himself at noon to the post.27
In a second letter he reported that Louisa was as well as could be expected under the circumstances, he was doing very well and “the little gentleman likely to do so too,” and added presciently “he is born to be lucky.” Accompanied by the maid Sarah Alexander, the foursome had arrived in Washington at dusk on October 24, and thus John Quincy noted that he had, for the third time, “accomplished a long journey and voyage with an infant less than three months old.”28
Back in Washington only five days, John Quincy took time on October 30 to review the Senate journals from the start of his membership. Having had problems enough for having signed the Non-Importation Act of April 15, 1806, which banned the import of certain British goods in an attempt at economic sanctions to compel Great Britain to respect American neutrality on the seas, he was not insensitive to further retribution when he voted for the Embargo Act. President Jefferson had proposed this new act on December 18 in response to increasing dangers to American vessels, seamen and merchandise. “This measure will cost you and me our seats, but private interest must not be put in opposition to public good,” he had cautioned his colleague Stephen Row Bradley.29
Yet more grievous, the last straw in his betrayal of the Federalist position, he had accepted Bradley’s invitation to attend the meeting of the Republican members of both houses to consult on the next presidential election, at which he witnessed the vote of 83 for James Madison for president, three for James Monroe and three for George Clinton. From this moment his “apostasy was no longer a matter of doubt with anybody,” a Federalist congressman wrote John Quincy’s once amiable friend, Rufus King. “Would you suppose it possible, the scoundrel could summon impudence enough to go to their caucus? I wish to God the noble house of Braintree had been put in a hole, and a deep one, too, twenty years ago.”30
But in terms of exacting punishment most dramatically and decisively, it was Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering who “hurled a firebrand upon the stage” already crowded with John Quincy’s enemies. The maverick leader of the Essex Junto, a separatist movement, he had sent a 16-page letter to Governor James Sullivan “denouncing the president and Congress for passing the embargo,” and sent his formal answer to leading Federalist Harrison Gray Otis two weeks later. New England Federalists were against these acts because they knew such embargos would damage the New England economy.31
The title of Pickering’s letter, “exhibiting to his Constituents a View of the Imminent Danger of an unnecessary and Ruinous War” said it all, as far as John Quincy was concerned, although there was no mention of his name: “When one of the senators from a state proclaims to his constituents that a particular measure, or system of measures which has received the vote and support of his colleagues, are pernicious and destructive to those interests which both are bound by the most sacred of ties, with zeal and fidelity to promote the denunciation of the measures amounts to little less than a denunciation of the man.”32
But it was not only the content but the timing that proved ruinous to John Quincy. On June 3 in the afternoon, the House of Representatives had chosen James Lloyd to serve starting the next March when John Quincy’s term expired; the vote was 248 to 213 confirmed. In the Senate, the vote was 21 for Lloyd and 17 for John Quincy. The insult was further compounded by the Senate’s adoption of the anti-embargo resolution on June 7. John Quincy submitted his resignation on June 9, “not without a painful sacrifice of feeling.”33
Worse, his father had written, “you have too honest a heart, too independent a mind; and too brilliant talents to be sincerely and confidentially trusted by any man who is under the domination of party axioms or party feelings.” Furthermore, John advised, “You ought to know and expect this and by no means to regret it. . . . Devote yourself to your profession and the education of your children.”34
Fortunately, perhaps miraculously, John Quincy had maintained a cordial relationship with the Republican Governor James Sullivan, who wrote urgently to Jefferson on his behalf on June 3, 1808. In effect, the Federalists had chosen a senator to succeed John Quincy Adams and their principal object at present appeared to be his political and even personal destruction. It was a matter therefore of grave consequence to the interest of Mr. Adams and to that of the Jefferson administration to rescue him from their “triumph,” though he did not know how this could be done “otherwise than finding him a foreign appointment of respectability.”35
Whether Jefferson forwarded Sullivan’s letter to Madison is unknown. But what is documented is the newly inaugurated President Madison’s meeting with John Quincy on March 6, 1809, and his proposal to nominate him as ambassador to Russia. The commercial relations between the two countries were important, and there might be other valuable advantages. Madison was apologetic about giving him short notice, but he had to send in the nomination within the course of half an hour.
John Quincy thanked Madison for his confidence and asked for more details about his assignment and departure. On the confirmation of his nomination on June 27, he was flattered but also aware of the “stormy and dangerous career” on which he embarked. He was torn about leaving his parents and his very young children. His departure from Harvard was another wrench. He would never cease to feel, he said, the warmest attachment to the interests and welfare of that seminary. But, he reasoned, it was after all an appointment of great trust and importance confirmed by almost every voice in the Senate. It also afforded him the “vague hope of rendering to my country some important service.” And while he painfully but truthfully acknowledged it to be an escape, “an exile from [my] native land,” he and his friends agreed it was after all “an honorable exile.”36
John Quincy gave his twenty-fourth and last lecture at Harvard on June 28. He addressed his students with unusual warmth and had privately come to think of them as his “unfailing friends” as they had never forsaken him. A poignant reflection of his bitter experience of the past two years, he advised that “In a life of action however prosperous, there would be seasons of adversity and days of trial but at no hour of your life will the love of letters ever oppress you as a burden or fail you as a resource. . . . Seek refuge, my unfailing friends . . . in the friendship of Laelius and Scipio; the patriotism of Cicero, Demosthenes, and Burke.”37
He would also caution them that their duties as a citizen took precedence over those of the individual and that a call to public service could not be negated by personal or private considerations. And reinforcing one of his family’s eternal commitments, he was confident, he said, that Harvard’s students would feel the moral obligations that a liberal education imposes upon those to whom it is given, that science is only valuable as it expands the heart while it enlarges the mind.38
On Saturday afternoon, August 5, John Quincy left his house at the corner of Boylston and Nassau streets with Louisa, their infant Charles Francis, Louisa’s sister, Catherine Johnson, his nephew and private secretary William Steuben Smith, chambermaid Martha Godfrey and a valet named Nelson. Crossing over the Charles River Bridge bound for William Gray’s wharf in Charlestown, they boarded the Horace. At 1 p.m. precisely, to the chorus of bells ringing from Boston to Charleston, they sailed down the harbor, bidding farewell to the faithful Dr. Welsh and Thomas, who had come to see them off.
John Quincy remained on deck until he lost sight of land. It was the fourth time he had sailed from Boston for Europe. But this seemed the most painful separation of all, given his parents’ ages and the uncertainty of meeting up with them again and his having left two of his children behind. He received a letter from his mother “which would have melted the heart of a Stoic.” “My dear Children,” Abigail had written: “I would not come to town today because I knew I should only add to yours, and my own agony. My heart is with you, my prayers and blessing attend you. The dear children you have left,” a decision made by Abigail and John Quincy, “will be dearer to me from the absence of their parents.”39
John Quincy felt no less wrenched. Writing at sea to his dearest mother, “often as it has been my fortune in the course of my life to be parted from my parents, and dearest friends, as well as from my country, upon no occasion has the separation been so painful as at the present time.”40