IN THE SLEEPY FLANDER town of Ghent, in the late summer and fall of 1814, five Americans met, quarreled with one another, parleyed with the enemy—and wrote a treaty that helped keep Americans and British at peace with each other for a century, and in close alliance for decades after that.
The Americans in Ghent made up a prodigious quintet. The most senior, though still in his early fifties, was Albert Gallatin, happy to be free of his long tour as Secretary of the Treasury, as sagacious, tactful, and reasonable as ever. The most famous was the young Speaker of the House of Representatives, Henry Clay, the Kentucky “war hawk,” as pacific now as he had been bellicose, but no less a spokesman of the West. There were two experienced diplomats, James Bayard of Delaware, still remembered for having helped Jefferson win the presidency in the crisis of February 1801, and Jonathan Russell, a New Englander. And there was the formal head of the delegation, John Quincy Adams.
Gallatin was the real leader of the delegation, and it took all his diplomacy to keep the diplomats together. The five men lodged in bachelor quarters in a genteel residence. They usually ate together, save for Adams, who arose early, dined at one, and morosely noted that the others did not fall to until four. “They sit after dinner and drink bad wine and smoke cigars, which neither suits my habits nor my health, and absorbs time which I cannot spare.” Finally Gallatin persuaded him to dine with the others. Sometimes Adams would be rising just as Clay came in from a night of drinking and card playing. The fact that Clay spoke for western interests, and Adams for New Englanders such as fishermen, while both had their eyes on the presidency, did not make for harmony, but Gallatin smoothed matters over with his plea, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, we must remain united or we will fail.…”
The Americans faced daunting circumstances. Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria were planning a Quadruple Alliance to protect the victorious allies against a resurgent France, which was described to Clay by the American minister in Paris as “a political volcano, ready to explode whenever the match shall be applied.” Napoleon had been packed off to Elba. The Royal Navy now ruled the seas, the Duke of Wellington bestrode Europe. His crack troops were already shipping out of Bordeaux and sailing toward America, where they could join the drives down the Hudson or into the mouth of the Mississippi. The confident English had allowed Adams & Co. to cool their heels for weeks before dispatching their delegation, which on arrival struck the Americans as a collection of nonentities. Even meeting in Ghent was on British sufferance, for the area was occupied by redcoats. “What think you of our being surrounded by a British garrison?” Clay wrote a friend.
Hardly deigning to conceal their sense of mastery, the British negotiators presented the Americans with stiff demands: the United States to be forbidden fortifications and armed vessels on the Great Lakes; a vast territory south of the lakes to be created for England’s Indian allies, and as a buffer against American expansion; the United States to cede lands in eastern Maine, northern New York, and west of Lake Superior. The Americans were staggered by these proposals, but especially by the notion that they should surrender the whole of the Northwest Territory, comprising the (present) states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois, and much of Indiana and Ohio, according to the calculations of Gallatin’s son James.
“Father mildly suggested that there were more than a hundred thousand American citizens settled in these States and territories,” son James noted in his diary. “The answer was: ‘They must look after themselves.’”
The Americans—all but the poker-playing Clay, who felt he knew a bluff when he saw one—prepared to pack their bags. But the parley did not end, for neither side was wholly happy with this ignominious war. Negotiations for peace had actually started within a few weeks of the commencement of the war, and had continued in various guises until Ghent. What each nation expected of a peace treaty had been closely affected by the turns of fortune on the battlefields.
Early in October news reached Ghent that Washington had been sacked, but then came the report of Macdonough’s brilliant victory on Lake Champlain. This repulse of the British thrust toward the Hudson, combined with Perry’s and other earlier naval victories, critically influenced the thinking of the pre-eminent English military leader, Wellington. Offered the command in Canada, the Iron Duke bluntly informed his political superiors that he could not promise much in the light of American naval power on the Lakes, and what’s more, they were in no position to demand territorial concessions from America. No ministry could ignore such advice from the hero of Waterloo.
Both sides at Ghent accordingly modified their proposals. The Americans long since had given up their key demand for the end of impressment, but this was made easier by the knowledge that the defeat of France made impressment no longer vital to the Royal Navy. The British dropped their claim of a huge buffer land—their Indian “allies” could hardly press them on this matter as much as their Canadian brothers could on others—and modified their call for territorial concessions. A last-minute hitch loomed when the British suddenly challenged long-held American fishing rights off Newfoundland. If New England mariners wanted to fish in Canadian waters, Englishmen should have the right to navigate the Mississippi. Clay was furious when Gallatin and Adams supported such a deal. He would sign no treaty, he proclaimed, that granted Mississippi navigation rights to the enemy.
“A dreadful day,” young Gallatin wrote in his diary. “Angry disputes on the contre-project. ” His father and Adams wanted the deal. “Mr. Clay would not hear of it.…Nothing arrived at.” By now, however, Gallatin knew that peace was likely, for he had received, according to his son, a private note from Wellington assuring him of the Duke’s good offices. When young James started to copy this note, his father snatched it from him and burned it.
By the day before Christmas 1814, all issues had been agreed on, or postponed. Essentially the parties settled for the status quo ante. It was, as Thomas Bailey later judged, a truce of exhaustion rather than of persuasion, with important boundary issues left for later arbitral commissions. The treaty was signed December 24, 1814. The Americans invited their late adversaries to a dinner at which Adams toasted “His Majesty the King of England!” The British did the honors on Christmas Day, inviting the Americans to a dinner that included roast beef and plum pudding straight from England. The band, young Gallatin recorded, first played “God Save the King,” followed by a toast to the King, and “Yankee Doodle,” with a toast to the President.
Three thousand miles away that President anxiously awaited word of the terms of peace. Madison need not have worried. News of the Treaty of Ghent arrived about the same time as reports of the triumph of New Orleans. The two events seemed to become mixed together in the popular mind. “GLORIOUS NEWS!” proclaimed Niles’ Weekly Register. “Orleans saved and peace concluded.” Bells were rung, guns fired, holidays proclaimed, pupils liberated from school. The public feeling of joy and happiness, reported the New York Evening Post, showed how “really sick at heart” people of “all ranks and degrees” were of the war. “Broadway and other streets were illuminated by lighted candles,” the newspaper reported; “the city resounded in all parts with the joyful cry of a peace! a peace!” Boston was reported to be in a “perfect uproar of joy.” Amid the euphoria the Senate ratified the treaty without a dissenting vote—one of the most popular ever negotiated by the United States.
But there was some ill feeling too. Bellicose Americans still wanted to attack Canada, especially after General Jackson had shown what could be done on the Mississippi. Some Federalists argued that the war should not have been fought in the first place. Many Canadians felt deserted by the English. And many Britishers felt sold out by their government; their sentiments found a voice in the Times of London, which saw the British as retiring from the combat with “the stripes yet bleeding on our backs,” and lamented that the treaty “betrays a deadness to the feelings of honour.”
Like all wars, that of 1812-15 extinguished some problems and heated up others. One of the latter was the border with Canada, which remained to be negotiated with London. The Great Lakes, where costly naval battles had been fought, were the critical area. For years American leaders—notably John Adams in Paris and John Jay in London—had dreamed of a permanent disarmament of the Lakes. Now the opportunity had come. The House of Representatives led the way, though partly out of reasons of economy, by authorizing the President to have the fresh-water navy laid up or sold, after first preserving their “armament, tackle, and furniture.” Would Britain follow suit? John Quincy Adams, now minister in London, sent word that the Cabinet was determined not only to maintain but to increase their naval power on the Lakes. Monroe instructed him to propose a mutual limitation of armed vessels.
With negotiations well under way, Madison could turn to pressing domestic problems. At war’s end, he had only two more years to serve. His annual message to Congress in December 1815 was the first he was able to devote mainly to domestic issues. It was a paradoxical occasion. Congress was ignominiously meeting in the Patent Office, the only major federal building spared by the British, but its leadership had never been more lustrous: Calhoun, Webster, Pickering, Clay. The Kentuckian had been re-elected to the Speakership the first day he returned to the House after his year and a half abroad as a peace commissioner. The secondary leadership was hardly less impressive: Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, William Lowndes of South Carolina, Samuel D. Ingham of Pennsylvania, all Republicans, and a small band of articulate Federalists. But most remarkable was Madison’s message.
It started out by claiming victory—not over the British, but over Algiers, where Captain Stephen Decatur had recently exacted a peace agreement from the Dey after a brilliant attack and had gone on to gain similar guarantees from Tunis and Tripoli. If this pleased the members of Congress, the mood swiftly changed as the President came to his proposals. He called for expanded defense, “both fixed and floating,” and for more skilled and disciplined state militias. He asked for tariff protection for young manufacturing establishments. He talked about the need for the “General Government” to build roads and canals, and to make rivers more navigable, provided that such steps were—or could be made—constitutional. And he said, in words that were as startling in substance as mild in form, “If the operation of the State banks cannot produce this result”—a uniform national currency—“the probable operation of a national bank will merit consideration.”
Stepped-up defense in peacetime? Tariffs? Internal improvements? A national bank? What heretical doctrine was this? And from the pen of James Madison, second only to Jefferson among Republican founding fathers? Then and later the “old Republicans” brought out their sacred texts. “The evil of the times is a spirit engendered in this republic, fatal to Republican principles; fatal to Republican virtue;”, cried John Randolph, “a spirit to live by any means but those of honest industry; a spirit of profusion;…a spirit of expediency not only in public but in private life.…There are very few who dare to speak truth to this mammoth. The banks are so linked together with the business of the world that there are very few men exempt from their influence.”
Only a few congressmen realized that they were witnessing a profound shift in the Republican party—a shift that would alter the nation’s politics for decades to come. In its many rooms, the mansion of Republicanism had always had a place for activist, mercantilist policies of government support for economic development. Gallatin, in a series of masterly reports in the last year of Jefferson’s presidency, had called for a national transportation and communications network as part of a ten-year plan that, William Appleman Williams has commented, “made Hamilton appear a fumbling amateur.” Then had come war, always the forcing house of economic change. The federal government had become deeply involved in raising and spending money, promoting industry such as iron foundries and ship manufacture.
Younger, more entrepreneurial Republicans like Henry Clay shucked off the old Republican bias against federal economic action. Madison himself, under the pressure of war, shifted his ground. “Altho’ I approve the policy of leaving to the sagacity of individuals, and to the impulse of private interest, the application of industry & capital,” he wrote a correspondent a few months after leaving the White House, “I am equally persuaded, that in this as in other cases, there are exceptions to the general rule, which do not impair the principle of it. Among these exceptions, is the policy of encouraging domestic manufacturers, within certain limits, and in reference to certain articles.”
Out of the old Republican party a new political force was arising, more nationalist, more entrepreneurial, more interventionist than the old. Politicians were switching sides. Madison, who had vetoed a bank bill in January 1815, signed, hardly fifteen months later, a measure creating the Second Bank of the United States, capitalized with the huge sum of $35 million. Calhoun had introduced the bill; Clay, who five years before had argued that such a bill was unconstitutional, left the Speaker’s chair to explain why he had changed his mind; and Federalists, advocates of the first United States bank only two decades before, largely voted against it. So many “old” Republicans joined Federalists against the bill as almost to defeat the measure in the House. The bank began operating at the start of 1817.
More was involved in all this than economic and political change. The very spirit and character of the nation seemed altered after the war. In part this was a matter of self-satisfaction and celebration. “I can indulge the proud reflection that the American people have reached in safety and success their fortieth year as an independent nation,” Madison said in his last message to Congress, in December 1816; “that for nearly an entire generation they have had experience of their present Constitution,” and “have found it to bear the trials of adverse as well as prosperous circumstances; to contain in its combination of the federate and elective principles a reconcilement of public strength with individual liberty, of national power for the defense of national rights with a security against wars of injustice.…”
The “reconcilement of public strength” and “individual liberty”—this was the essence of the political achievement. But the spirit of 1816 and 1817 went beyond this. It was a feeling of self-confidence, of having won—or so it was thought—America’s “second war of independence.” It was the boast that America now had established herself in the family of nations as a power that must be respected. It was the notion that at last Americans had achieved a sense of self-identity, of spirit, of earned esteem and hence of self-esteem. “A great object of the war has been attained in the firm establishment of the national character,” Clay told officials of the city of Washington on returning from Europe in September 1815.
Few Americans embodied this spirit more visibly than James Monroe, the heir apparent to the presidency. “The experiment” of war, he said, “was made under circumstances the most unfavorable to the United States, and the most favorable to the very powerful nation with whom we were engaged. The demonstration is satisfactory that our Union has gained strength, our troops honor, and the nation character, by the contest.” Now in his late fifties, Monroe, with his big strapping frame, erect bearing, and plain, deep-lined face, looked more like a leader of the Virginia gentry than of the “Virginia dynasty.” Less reflective, philosophical, or profound than his mentors Jefferson and Madison, he was known as a man of common sense, good judgment, and courage. He was deeply experienced, as Revolutionary officer, Continental Congressman, United States senator, diplomat, governor of Virginia, and Secretary of State doubling as Secretary of War during the final critical months of the war. Monroe’s thinking had changed considerably since the days when he opposed the Constitution because it vested too much power in the chief executive. Now he looked forward to being a strong President of a strong nation.
Not all supported this ambition. Even in Virginia, the foundation of Monroe’s support, “old Republicans” were hostile to his candidacy. Once again the party’s nomination would be decided by “King Caucus,” the traditional meeting of Republican members of Congress, but here Monroe faced formidable opposition in Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford. In turn senator from Georgia, Minister to France, and Secretary of War, before taking over Treasury, Crawford was almost as experienced as Monroe; even more, the tall, ruddy-faced Georgian was the kind of orator, superb storyteller, and genial handshaker that endeared a leader to politicians in both houses. He also benefited from a widespread feeling that it was time to curb the Virginia dynasty and Virginia influence. This feeling was strongest in the Empire State, which had provided the nation with neither President nor emperor, but New Yorkers were divided between supporters of the politico and reformer De Witt Clinton and of the rising young state politician Martin Van Buren.
The machinations of 1816 are still not wholly clear, but it probably was the Crawfordites who posted an anonymous notice calling Republican senators and representatives to a nominating session. Monroe’s supporters boycotted this rump caucus, which attracted so embarrassingly few members that it could only summon a second caucus. At this point Crawford seems to have experienced a failure of nerve. It was not easy to take on the senior member of the Cabinet; moreover, at the age of forty-four, the Georgian felt he could wait a presidential term or two and run again in 1824 at the latest. At the second caucus Monroe beat him by the unimpressive margin of 65 to 54.
The Federalist party was so weak in 1816 that Monroe’s nomination was tantamount to election. The party of Washington and Hamilton chose the veteran New York politician Rufus King, and then failed to unite its thin support even behind him. Monroe vanquished him in the electoral college, 183-34, with the shrunken Federalists monotonously clinging to their majorities in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware. The Virginia dynasty stood fast.
“The American people,” President James Monroe said in his Inaugural Address, “…constitute one great family with a common interest.” The government had been in the hands of the People. The People had built and sustained the Union. Only when “the People become ignorant and corrupt” did they become the “willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin.” Hence: “Let us, by all wise and constitutional measures, promote intelligence among the People, as the best means of preserving our liberties.”
To many, this paean to the People was so much Republican oratory. But Monroe was not just indulging in cant. He had a plan based on a hypothesis that, as he wrote Andrew Jackson, “the existence of parties is not necessary to free government.…” His plan was no less than to rid the nation of party rivalry. Inheriting Jefferson’s theoretical dislike (though actual utilization) of party, Monroe would go far beyond him. Whereas Jefferson proposed to win over moderate Federalists, isolate “monarchical” types, and build a new party, Monroe proposed to offer the Federalists the chance to “get back in the great family of the union,” thus to broaden the Republican ranks, and then to govern on behalf of the whole People, the American Family, the national consensus.
“The nation has become tired of the follies of faction,” Nicholas Biddle said after the election.
To raise his administration above party rivalry, to speak for the American family, to act on the national consensus, Monroe resolved on a glittering ministry, a Cabinet of all the talents, a leadership from all the sections. From the East, for Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams. From the West, for Secretary of War, Henry Clay. From the South, for Secretary of the Treasury, William H. Crawford. But not all the leaders were willing to crowd into the new President’s tent. In particular Henry Clay, sorely disappointed that he had not been proffered State, declined War. Unable to find for this post another Westerner of sufficient stature or caliber, Monroe appointed the brilliant young Southerner John Calhoun, who was rising to an eminence that would rival Clay’s. All these men were Republicans. Where were the Federalists in this non-party administration? Monroe said he wanted to give the opposition a chance for reconciliation but he appointed few Federalists, mainly out of fear of alienating Republicans. Federalists did not protest unduly. They could forgo Republican patronage, they calculated, as long as Monroe seemed to embrace Federalist policies.
If Americans were now to be one family with the President as their father, a grand tour seemed a fine way to demonstrate popular support for the new leader. Three months after his inauguration, Monroe, accompanied by a small party, set off for New England. He was greeted by friendly crowds and subjected to parades, reviews, and tours all the way up the eastern seaboard, but enthusiasm rose to a pitch in Boston. Was the old city making up for its long coolness to Virginia dynasts? Forty thousand persons, it was estimated, lined the streets and filled every window as the presidential party moved through the streets to Boston Common. Over the next few days Monroe inspected defenses, greeted delegations, reviewed troops, toured the Watertown arsenal and a Waltham cotton factory, heard Edward Channing orate in Faneuil Hall and William Ellery Channing preach a Unitarian sermon, visited Bunker Hill and “Old Ironsides,” and drove to Harvard, where he received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree amid much pomp and circumstance. Just as he hoped, Federalists—including even his old foe Timothy Pickering—greeted him warmly. Indeed, the main political problem was the unseemly jockeying between Republican and Federalist leaders to honor the President; even this kind of party rivalry disturbed the grand harmonizer.
So Monroe could reign; could he rule? Madison had bequeathed him some issues that did not admit of easy conciliation. One was the bank, which actually began operations only a few weeks before Monroe took office and generated controversy by its mere existence. Another was federally subsidized internal improvements, especially roads.
Westerners in particular had been clamoring for better connections with the market centers of the eastern seaboard. The typical inland road of the time was still a rough and meandering strip of rutted earth that often might turn into a bog that could swallow carriage wheels, or into a streambed that could break them. In his last annual message to Congress, Madison had favored a federally financed network of roads and canals, but he believed that a constitutional amendment was necessary before the federal government could undertake such a project. Calhoun, arguing that internal improvements were sanctioned by the general welfare clause of the Constitution, had helped push a bill through a closely divided House and Senate, only to see Madison veto it the day before he left the White House. Early in Monroe’s presidency George Tucker of Virginia presented a report by the House Committee on Internal Improvements affirming the power of Congress to construct roads and canals. Monroe anxiously consulted with ex-President Madison.
This time it was Henry Clay of Kentucky who took on a foot-dragging Virginia President. Rarely had “Harry of the West” so brilliantly commanded the floor of the House. Treating his foes with exquisite courtesy, mixing heavy constitutional arguments with stiletto thrusts, he touched on Monroe’s regal tour, with his loyal subjects rising to salute the “entrance of the sovereign,” and he sarcastically exploited Monroe’s inconsistencies and the inadequacies of his constitutional arguments. The President, he said, had given the House only “an historical account of the operations of his own mind.” Friends of the Administration rose to rebut him, but he brushed them off like so many flies. His constitutional arguments were hardly new; they were the Hamiltonian case for federal power. But Hamilton, the proponent of executive power, would hardly have accepted Clay’s attack on Monroe’s supporters for ascribing “imperial powers” to their chief.
Clay bluntly attacked Monroe’s idea of rising above party. “We are told,” the Speaker said acidly, “that in these halcyon days there is no such thing as party spirit; that the factions by which the country has been divided, are reduced to their primitive elements, and that this whole society is united by brotherly love and friendship.…Sir, I do not believe in this harmony, this extinction of party spirit, which is spoken of; I do not believe that men have ceased to be men, or that they have abandoned those principles on which they have always acted hitherto.”
The President hardly needed Clay to remind him of the difficulties of partyless government. It was soon clear that if men did not divide into two parties, they would divide into countless factions within parties. To govern without party support, moreover, meant that the President lacked allies when he needed them. And he needed them most when the going was rough—most notably after the Panic of 1819.
The causes of that panic were manifold—worldwide readjustments after the Napoleonic wars, overexpansion of credit, low prices of imports from Europe—but the debtors of Kentucky and South Carolina and other western and southern states did not look for remote sources of their troubles when their loans were called in or their mortgages were foreclosed. Nor did the tradespeople and laborers who lost their jobs. The culprit was tangible and visible—the United States Bank. Though the bank’s desperate efforts to save itself were a sign more of weakness than of strength, this was a time for hyperbole. “All the flourishing cities of the West are mortgaged to this money power,” said Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri later. “They may be devoured by it at any moment. They are in the jaws of the monster!” Someone else said: “The Bank was saved, and the people were ruined.”
An even harsher challenge to the “era of good feelings” came shortly—a flare-up over slavery. This issue, it was true, had not yet achieved formidable proportions, and even now it did not rise as an issue in itself, but was suddenly projected into Washington politics when the Missouri Territorial Assembly petitioned Congress for statehood. At this time the twenty-two states in the Union were equally divided between slave states and free. This was no coincidence, since the respective political weight of North and South had been carefully balanced by the alternate admission of free and slave states. Despite the three-fifths rule, the free states had 105 votes in the House, the slave states 81. But the Southerners counted on the equal vote in the Senate to sustain the political balance.
Maintaining that balance was the central thrust of the political efforts of 1820 that later came to be known as the Missouri Compromise. The legislative path to compromise was long and tortuous, as northern legislators tried to limit slavery in Missouri and to the west, and were beaten back by southern lawmakers. Representative James Tallmadge of New York sought to amend the Missouri statehood legislation by prohibiting the further introduction of slaves into the state and requiring that all children born of slaves in Missouri be freed at the age of twenty-five. The House passed this amendment; the Senate killed it. When the organization of Arkansas Territory came before Congress, John W. Taylor of Saratoga County, another New York congressman who shared Tallmadge’s moral objection to the extension of slavery, moved to prohibit its further expansion. This was defeated, and Congress admitted Arkansas with no curb on slavery. After Maine had freed itself of Massachusetts and petitioned for admission, Maine was used as a counter to Missouri. When the Senate coupled the admission of Maine and Missouri, Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois proposed an amendment providing that Missouri be admitted as a slave state but that, in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase, slavery be barred north of latitude 36º30?. This amendment the Senate passed, but the House balked. After considerable attitudinizing, confronting, foot dragging, and dickering, Maine was admitted as a free state, Missouri as a slave state, and the northern boundary of slavery was fixed at 36º30?.
This was the “Missouri Compromise,” but the compromising was not over. Missourians soon met in convention in St. Louis and adopted a constitution empowering the legislature to exclude free Negroes and mulattoes from the state. Feeling betrayed, the compromisers for the North, with the powerful help of Henry Clay, arranged the “Second Missouri Compromise,” stipulating that Missouri would not finally be admitted until the legislature promised that nothing in her constitution could be interpreted as sanctioning the abridgment of the privileges and immunities of United States citizens. On that basis Missouri was admitted. Later, the state repudiated this undertaking.
This trading and brokering took place amid a curious vacuum. Despite much editorializing, the country was not deeply aroused. Northern feeling against slavery had not developed strongly, nor did the slaveholders yet feel mortally threatened. Congress was less a scene of grand confrontation between the two sides than an arena for guerrilla warfare, as small factions clung to protected positions on the ideological battlefield. The compromise was not so much a solemn compact between North and South, as Glover Moore said, as “merely an agreement between a small majority of the Southern members of Congress and a small minority of the Northern ones.” Aside from a sweeping attack by Rufus King on the whole moral and philosophical case for slavery, debate was mainly legalistic. Any transcending moral issues fed into the fragmented machinery of Congress were divested of their ethical content by endless constitutional logic-chopping, then quietly enervated in the backstairs trading and brokering that produced the compromise.
The debate aroused no great confrontation between the two parties, because there were no longer two parties, only a bloated conglomeration of Republicans and a dying band of Federalists. The debates aroused no dramatic encounter between President and opposition party leader, for the latter did not exist and the former wanted things as they were. Monroe was essentially passive throughout the long course of the debates. He feared that the issue might get out of hand and intrude into his re-election campaign in 1820, but he won a second term with only a single elector in opposition, and some wondered whether he might have expended more of his political capital on such a major issue.
To Jefferson the debates came “like a fire bell in the night.” But the fire bell seemed to awaken few outside the politicians and the press, in part because the politicians mainly wanted it that way. Perhaps the fire bell aroused the Virginia conscience, but Jefferson used a more apt figure when he said, in noting the lack of considered measures for dealing with slavery, “We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”
Stretching two thousand miles to the west of the United States at the end of the War of 1812-15, and five or six thousand miles to the south, lay the vast possessions of Spain and Portugal. Rooted in the culture and heritage of Britain and northern Europe, most Americans had a poor and contorted understanding of the empire that flanked them from California along the Pacific shores of Mexico through the Caribbean, to the long shoulder of Brazil jutting far out into the Atlantic. Of heroic stories of Columbus and Cortes and Pizarro, North Americans learned in their infancy. Sailors and traders brought back tales of exotic and erotic adventures in great ports such as Havana, San Juan, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, of frightful tempests and endless storms off Cape Horn, of pleasant trading places like Acapulco and San Francisco. But little was known, outside the ranks of diplomats and a few scholars, of the Latin cultures that had begun to flourish in Central and South America during the sixteenth century while North America was peopled by native Indians and a few white settlers.
North Americans knew little of the glories of a Spanish America that was enjoying a kind of Indian summer in the early nineteenth century—of the creative patronage of the arts, of the brilliant circles of learning, of the astronomical observatory in Bogotá, of the already ancient university in Santo Domingo, of the school of mines in Mexico City. Most yanquis comprehended only dimly a polity of Spanish state rule from the Crown in Madrid through a great pyramid of viceroyalties, such as New Granada, Peru, New Spain (Mexico), down through presidencies, captain-generalcies, and audiencias. And even less did they understand or appreciate the Church that, now stern and now benign, spread its spiritual arms over Spanish and Indian alike and often, to a far greater extent than northern missionaries, made an effort not merely to convert the Indians but to understand and accommodate their language, customs, and needs. Nor did most Latin Americans know or care much about the small republic to the north, with its Protestant culture and often bumptious diplomacy.
The two cultures confronted each other along a hazy boundary from the northern reaches of the Floridas to Louisiana and then across the southwestern desert. The Administration ended the war with a good deal of ill feeling toward the Spanish. He had been looking at some official Spanish documents, President Madison told the chief clerk of the State Department, and they backed up all the earlier accounts “of the extreme jealousy & hatred of us prevailing in the Spanish Court, and prove that after the fall of Napoleon, there was a project entertained, for taking advantage of our war with England, and the expected succour of the latter to Spain, to settle all territorial matters with the U.S. according to Spanish wishes.” For years the Floridas had lain like a pistol aimed at the Mississippi, the central artery of American commerce, with East Florida the butt and West Florida the barrel, Samuel Flagg Bemis noted; now, with sections sliced off earlier by the United States, the pistol looked more truncated. But it was still dangerous, and must be muzzled.
Who would do the muzzling, and how? The military action was undertaken by Andrew Jackson, but the guiding hands were those of James Monroe, and especially of John Quincy Adams, in a brilliant display of American Realpolitik.
While Monroe was still Secretary of State, and Adams Minister to Britain, Adams in London had confronted the British Foreign Minister, Lord Castlereagh, with Washington’s suspicions that Spain had secretly ceded Florida to Britain.
“As to that,” Castlereagh said, “I can set you at ease at once. There is not and never has been the slightest foundation for it whatsoever. It never has been even mentioned.”
“I am sure the American government will receive with much pleasure the assurance given me by your Lordship that no such cession has been made,” Adams said.
“None whatever,” Castlereagh continued. “It has never been mentioned, and, if it had, it would have been decisively declined by us. Military positions may have been taken by us during the war, of places which you had taken from Spain, but we never intended to keep them. Do you also observe the same moderation. If we should find you hereafter pursuing a system of encroachment upon your neighbors, what we might do defensively is another consideration.”
“I do not precisely understand what your Lordship intends by this advice of moderation,” Adams said smoothly. “The United States have no design of encroachment upon their neighbors, or of exercising any injustice toward Spain.”
Castlereagh’s warning did not deter Monroe and Adams from taking a strong line toward Spain on Florida when they became President and Secretary of State in 1817. The United States held certain advantages. The Louisiana treaty had left quite vague the boundary west of the Mississippi. Spain’s military grip on Florida had weakened as she siphoned off troops to fight insurgents in South America. Florida had become a haven for privateers and runaway slaves; even more, Seminole Indians, harboring resentments against the Americans, had thrust across the border to “pillage, burn, and murder.” For its part, Madrid was less interested in keeping the disorderly settlements and treacherous swamps of Florida than in securing its holdings to the west. The Spanish minister in Washington, Don Luiz de Onís y Gonzales, was instructed to defer any cessions of the Floridas until Washington compromised on Texas. Onís was happy to drag his heels, but events would not permit this, for Americans in lower Georgia were clamoring for a punitive expedition into Florida against both the Seminoles and the Spanish.
Who could do the job better than Andrew Jackson, long a frontier nationalist and harrier of Indians and Spaniards, and already in place as commander of the Southern Division? All that was needed was an incident, and this had been conveniently provided when, in November 1817, American troops burned a Seminole border village and the Indians in retaliation ambushed an American hospital ship and killed forty-five soldiers, women, and children. Jackson urged on Monroe that the “whole of East Florida be seized and held as indemnity for the outrages of Spain upon the property of our Citizens.” The government need not be implicated, the general added. “Let it be signified to me through any channel…that the possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States, and in sixty days it will be accomplished.” Jackson received no direct reply to this letter; all he did receive was murky instructions from Washington that left him just where he liked to be: on his own.
Early in March 1818, Jackson crossed the border with about two thousand men. Acting with his usual dash and elan, in a few weeks’ time he chased Indians, seized Pensacola and other key Spanish posts in Florida, confiscated the royal archives, court-martialed and executed two British subjects suspected of aiding the enemy, deposed the Spanish governor, and declared in force the revenue laws of the United States. After howls of indignation in London and Madrid, he expressed regret only for failing to hang the Spanish governor.
Patriotic Englishmen reacted with predictable wrath to the “murder” of their fellow countrymen. The press, exhibiting Jackson in their street placards, denounced him as a tyrant, ruffian, and murderer, United States minister Richard Rush reported from London. There was even talk of war. Patriotic Americans responded to Jackson’s incursion with predictable delight. Public dinners offered toasts to the man who had vanquished Spanish, Indians, and British all in one stroke, and gained real estate to boot. Niles’ Weekly Register reported that the general’s popularity in the West was unbounded—at his call 50,000 warriors “would rise, armed, and ready for any enemy.” Tammany Hall resolved that the “manly” general was justified by the “law of nations” and approved of his teaching “foreign emissaries that the United States was not to be outraged by spies, traitors, and lawless adventurers.” New York awarded the hero the freedom of the city—in a golden box. In Washington, Onís demanded an explanation, while Congress, after wrangling over Jackson’s actions in a month-long debate, during which the galleries were crowded almost to suffocation and cuspidors overturned in the rush for seats, decisively defeated resolutions condemning the hero’s conduct.
The crucial move lay with President Monroe and his Cabinet. All seemed to agree that the general had exceeded his orders. Secretary of War Calhoun, stung by what he saw as Jackson’s defiance of his own orders not to challenge the Spaniards, wanted him court-martialed. Secretary of the Treasury Crawford joined in the condemnation. Both men had their eyes on the next election—and on Henry Clay, who was making capital against both Jackson and the Administration. The President as usual looked for a consensus, and he might have had one, except for his Secretary of State.
John Quincy Adams did not like Andrew Jackson; the Tennesseean was not his kind of man. Nor did he approve of the general’s excesses in Florida. But Adams saw an opportunity that transcended personalities, an opportunity to exercise American statecraft, to advance his dream of a transcontinental nation, and to promote his rising hopes of a second Adams presidency. Instead of allowing the Jackson incursion to be elevated to a moral issue forcing the United States on the defensive, he treated it as a fait accompli that put Washington in a stronger position in dealing with Madrid over the whole transcontinental border. “On the receipt of Genl. Jackson’s report of his proceedings there,” Monroe wrote ex-President Madison a few weeks after, “we had three great objects in view, first to secure the constitution from any breach, second to deprive Spain and the allies of any just cause of war, and third to turn it to the best account of the country.” The third responsibility was peculiarly Adams’. In his instructions to the United States minister in Madrid, Adams took the offensive. He charged Spain with having failed to restrain her Indians and in fact with encouraging them; he defended the execution of the two Britons; he demanded the punishment of the guilty Spanish officers and—audacity of audacities—he laid claim to an indemnity for the cost to the Americans of pursuing the Indians.
Having established a strong bargaining position, Adams proceeded to negotiate with Onís in Washington. They had long been discussing the western boundary; now they sought a total settlement. As a sweetener, Spain’s posts seized by Jackson were returned to her, though her demand that Jackson be punished was rejected. Week after week, Adams and Onís shuffled maps and haggled over territory, as large tracts of land hung on day-to-day agreements over tentative boundaries based often on vague information about the location of mountain ranges or the configuration of rivers.
Onís was no equal to Adams as a negotiator, in part because of inferior ability, in part because his king, the repellent Ferdinand VII, had a reputation for exiling his envoys to distant monasteries for exercising too much latitude in bargaining. In the end, after Monroe delivered a near-ultimatum to the foot-dragging Onís, the Adams-Onís treaty was signed in February 1819. Spain renounced all her claims to West Florida and ceded East Florida to the United States; the United States repudiated its claims to Texas; the western boundary was defined as running from the mouth of the Sabine River, then northwest along the Red and Arkansas rivers and the 42nd parallel, from which it proceeded due west to the Pacific. In essence, the Spanish claims to the Pacific Northwest were surrendered to the United States in exchange for the equally immense territory in the Southwest.
On February 22, 1819, Adams and Onís affixed their signatures to the treaty. “It was, perhaps, the most important day of my life,” Adams wrote in his diary. He had secured Florida. But he forbade exultation—it was the “work of an intelligent and all-embracing Cause.” Two days later, the Senate unanimously advised and consented to the treaty. Spain’s pistol to the south had been removed. Few asked whether its cannon had been entrenched two thousand miles to the west.
Even while Adams was negotiating with Spain, the old mobiles of international politics were beginning to shudder before the gusts of powerful forces that were bringing new groups to power in Latin America. By some common alchemy of the human spirit, people across the long reach of the Latin world were seeking to transform their lives by rebelling against autocratic rulers and ancient laws. The Holy Alliance, formed in part to put down the revolutionary spirit, suddenly confronted rebellions in Naples, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Long-fermenting unrest in Latin America swelled into liberation movements led by the spirited young Venezuelan Simón Bolívar, by the Mexican priest and patriot Miguel Hidalgo, by the Argentinian general José de San Martín, and many others. Two years before Adams signed the treaty with the old regime in Madrid, San Martín crossed the Andes to defeat the Spanish at the Battle of Chacabuco and thus helped bring about the liberation of Chile. Two years after that treaty, Bolívar won the last major battle of the war in Venezuela, and Mexico gained its independence; a year after that, the Brazilian Empire was declared independent under Pedro I.
Americans watched admiringly as patriots came to power who used the Declaration of Independence as sacred writ and George Washington as a model. Americans watched apprehensively as the Holy Allies agreed to mandate Austria to put down the republican revolution in Naples and in the Piedmont, as the allies approved French military intervention in Spain to suppress the new constitutional government there: The European leaders invited Britain to share these sacred responsibilities, but by now Castlereagh was frustrated by his involvement in the alliance. The servant of a dynasty that owed its throne to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, he could hardly embrace with passion an anti-revolutionary entente. Moreover, influential English opinion was turning away from the embrace of reactionary, absolutist regimes toward flirtation, at least, with political liberalism and a freer commerce. Beset by these and other pressures, Castlereagh went mad, cut his throat with a penknife, and thus made possible the succession to the Foreign Ministry of his fierce rival, George Canning, who also feared the reactionary power of the Holy Allies and sought to build a balance of power against them.
Why should not the “two chief commercial and maritime states of both worlds,” as Canning described Britain and the United States, be part of that counterbalance? Thus the swaying mobiles of the Western world could be brought back to an equilibrium. Canning broached the idea to Minister Rush, who passed it on to Washington. President Monroe treated the question as one of the gravest of his career. Would this be a departure from the doctrine of non-involvement in European affairs—a doctrine sanctified by Washington and engraved in his Farewell Address? Typically ambivalent in his own reaction, eager for a collective judgment, Monroe turned first to the bearers of the Virginia tradition. Both Jefferson and Madison counseled cooperation with Britain in what Madison called the “great struggle of the Epoch between liberty and despotism.” Reassured, Monroe called a meeting of his Cabinet. By the time it convened, the Russian minister had advised that the Tsar would not receive agents from any of the rebellious governments in America and congratulated Washington on its neutral attitude toward those governments. Were the Holy Allies planning some effort to restore his former colonies to Ferdinand?
At first, the Cabinet seemed to favor a joint declaration with Canning against interference in the Americas by the Holy Alliance, even if it should commit the United States never to take Cuba—long coveted by none other than Jefferson—or Texas. Britain had the power to seize both Cuba and Texas, Calhoun observed, and thus would be pledged equally with the United States against such action. Adams demurred. He wanted no action that would bind the Administration’s hands if Texas or Cuba wished to join the Union, or in case of emergency. He was averse, the President replied, to any course that would appear subordinate to that of Britain. Adams wanted to take advantage of the Russian note.
“It affords a very suitable and convenient opportunity,” he told the Cabinet, as he remembered the discussion, “for us to take our stand against the Holy Alliance and at the same time to decline the overture of Great Britain. It would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our principles directly to Russia and France, than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war.” All seemed to agree. As the meeting broke up, Adams cornered the President. The answers to the British, the Russians, and the French “must all be parts of a combined system of policy and adapted to each other. “
In meetings that followed, the Cabinet hammered out a policy, with Monroe and Adams taking the lead. The policy was the dual one of disclaiming any interference in the political affairs of Europe and declaring an “expectation that the European powers would equally abstain from seeking to spread their ideas in the American hemisphere,” or to take any part of it by force. The United States had already said “Hands Off” to further colonization of the New World; now it would say the same to further conquest or intervention.
It was an enormous step forward from non-colonization to non-intervention, but Adams was ready to accept the restraints required by this position. When Monroe proposed a message to Congress that would state these policies but would go on to reprove France for invading Spain and acknowledge the rebelling Greeks as an independent nation, Adams objected. This suggested entanglement in European affairs—why defy the powers? He finally brought the President around, but it was Monroe who decided to enunciate the doctrine in a message to Congress rather than in diplomatic communications to other capitals. Even so, he did not dramatize his message but rather embedded it in widely separated places in his message of December 2, 1823:
The “occasion has been judged proper for asserting…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.…
“We owe it…to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere.…
“Our policy in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the wars which have so long agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is, not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers.…”
Monroe’s doctrine hardly fell as a bombshell on Capitol Hill, but there was widespread satisfaction with it inside Congress and among the press and public outside. British and European conservatives generally were outraged. “Blustering”—”arrogant”—”monstrous”—were some of the words used. It merited only “the most profound contempt,” according to the tsarist government. Chancellor Metternich dismissed it as “indecent.” Liberal Europe was pleased. The aged Lafayette congratulated Monroe on his “manly message” and his bold stand against the “Hellish Alliance.” Across the South Atlantic, Latin Americans, including the great Bolívar himself, generally applauded Monroe. But they were not sure just what he meant, or just how the United States would carry it out. Would European imperialism simply be replaced by North American?
Or would both be replaced by an ascendant capitalism? After the dislocations of the Napoleonic wars and the postwar readjustments, the 1820s were bringing an enormous expansion of trade and manufacture in both the United States and Britain. Fundamental to Canning’s desire for Anglo-American political cooperation was his awareness of the need of British manufacturing interests for access to the growing American market. Free trade pressure in Britain was bursting the bonds of the old mercantilist system. Why quarrel with a huge source of customers? It was this need for commercial reciprocity with Washington that explains London’s refusal to respond aggressively to Monroe’s dictum. The United States in turn needed good trade relations with Britain because of the markets it controlled—and the great navy London could deploy along the trade routes of the world. And Washington’s interest in the new nations of Latin America was a commercial as well as a political and moral one.
In due course, Monroe’s dictum would be sanctified and converted into the Monroe Doctrine. Some Americans had reservations. The message was flamboyantly unilateral. Having cold-shouldered Canning, the President was not inviting any other nation to share the burden of preventing the hemisphere from being further tainted by Europe. No consultations were held with Latin American governments. Indeed, the doctrine called for self-restraint on the part of the United States, but in Europe, not in Latin America; presumably the yanqui could intervene to the south as much as he wished. Efforts by some Latin American representatives to convert the doctrine into a defensive alliance for American security were rebuffed in Washington. Facing Europe, the doctrine was isolationist; facing south, it could be deeply interventionist, allowing Washington to act against European intervention—and Latin American revolutions?—at will. It became apparent later that the Holy Allies lacked the means, and perhaps even the necessary will, to intervene effectively against Latin American revolutionaries.
In many ways the doctrine was simply a reassertion of old policies, such as Washington’s warning against “entangling alliances,” and the No-Transfer principle, which had forbidden the transfer, by one European power to another, of any possession in the New World. Yet it embraced new and even revolutionary potentials, both generous and ominous, especially in a revolutionary age, for it contained the seeds of future pan-Americanism and the recognition of the rights of revolutionaries. Much would depend on Washington’s interpretation, evolution, application, and enforcement of the doctrine. None could foretell all this, but it might at least have been possible for a Latin American critic to say in the 1820s what Salvador de Madariaga wrote in 1962: “I conclude that the Monroe Doctrine is not a doctrine but a dogma…not one dogma but two, to wit: the dogma of the infallibility of the American President and the dogma of the immaculate conception of American foreign policy.”
John Quincy Adams, of course, would have agreed with neither proposition. For him, foreign policy emerged not out of pure, ethical considerations, but out of the most hardheaded analysis of a nation’s true self-interest. And foreign policy making was not merely a presidential effort, but the product of intensive discussion and collaboration among cabinet members, congressmen, and diplomats—the product of collective leadership.
Even these precepts, however, were not enough to define the American way of peace in the 1820s. The founders of the American republic during the half century after the start of the Revolution had shouldered the double burden of organizing the constitutional foundations of a lasting republic and of developing a strategy for protecting the existence and future expansion of that republic in a predatory world. The first effort resulted in a written constitution, the second in a series of precedents, actions, laws, speeches, understandings, and diplomatic notes. By the 1820s these constituted a body of thought and action embracing the principles and practices of sovereign independence to protect the liberties of free peoples, abstention from the everyday alliances and collisions of European affairs, freedom of commerce and navigation on the high seas, self-determination of peoples, especially in Latin America, and non-intervention and other ideas contained in Monroe’s dictum. But leaders of American opinion—teachers, theologians, ministers, scholars, editorialists, assorted reformers and humanitarians, including some men in government—believed also in certain moral precepts, such as international arbitration, pan-Americanism, globalism, anti-imperialism, suppression of the international trade in slaves, and, above all, aid to people seeking liberation from tyranny.
The political dilemma for American policy makers was not in choosing between a hardheaded, “practical” strategy and a moralistic or idealistic one; it was all too easy for them to pursue policies of narrow national self-interest and clothe them in the rhetoric of benevolence and altruism, as Western leaders had done for centuries. Rather, the dilemma lay in how to follow narrow policies of self-protection when large sections of public opinion wanted not only to protect their nation but also to help other peoples—especially people apparently struggling for liberty—mainly out of altruism but also on the theory that in the long run such help might serve their own nation’s paramount interests. Jefferson was the very model of a President who spoke in moral terms, but he acted often on the basis of the most Realpolitik if not ruthless conception of national self-interest. Alexander Hamilton won an early and deserved reputation as a theorist and practitioner of Realpolitik, but even Hamilton had to allow for consideration of Americans’ values. Thus, in rebutting those who wanted to help revolutionary France against England because they felt that America should be faithful to treaty obligations, grateful to a country that had helped Americans gain independence, and helpful to French republicans and revolutionaries, Hamilton argued that nations help other nations mainly out of self-interest, that the rule of morality between nations was different from that between individuals, that nations should indulge the “emotions of generosity and benevolence” only within strict bounds. But even Hamilton had to grapple with the issue of “how far regard to the cause of Liberty ought to induce the United States to take part with France in the present war”—which he did by questioning whether the cause of France was truly the cause of liberty, and whether the liberty of Americans would truly be at stake in the event of the fall of France. Thus, the issue was not the value of national safety versus the value of liberty, but establishing priorities, institutions, mechanisms, and rationales in serving both the value of safety and the value of liberty.
It was the genius of John Quincy Adams, and to a lesser extent James Monroe, to know just where they stood on this issue. Adams’ great accomplishment lay not so much in shaping the essentials of what would become known as the Monroe Doctrine, for those essentials grew out of earlier American doctrine and practice, but in drawing the line between protecting the immediate national interest and intervening, if only rhetorically, in European affairs in defense of Greek, Spanish, and Italian rebels and liberationists. In Adams, as Hans Morgenthau later wrote, we are “in the presence of a statesman who had been reared in the realist tradition of the first period of American foreign policy, who had done the better part of his work of statecraft in an atmosphere saturated with Jeffersonian principles, and who had achieved the merger of these two elements of his experience into a harmonious whole.”
Still, Adams could resolve the apparent dilemma of realism versus moralism in part because he had a somewhat shrunken and attenuated concept of liberty; as Morgenthau said, between his “moral principles and the traditional interest of the United States there was hardly ever a conflict.” How would the American way of peace fare when men in power had a more generous view of the necessary dimensions of liberty, when continental and global expansion would bring the nation into closer involvement with the self-interest of other nations and the wants and needs and aspirations of other peoples, when the nation’s self-interest and self-esteem would become—not least in the eyes of leaders including Adams himself—entangled with the burning issue of the slave trade, and when many Americans sought, even under new conditions, to return to the “old” Virginians’ ample view of America as primarily the vineyard of liberty, as a decisive experiment for mankind?
James Monroe’s own venture in a government of harmony, far above the din of party combat, ended badly. Not only did the Republican party dissolve into numberless factions fiercely contending for power and pelf in the presidential elections of 1824; Monroe could not even keep the peace in his own official family. During his last weeks in office he had a visit from Treasury Secretary Crawford. Long ailing, and now bitter over his frustrated presidential hopes, the Georgian pressed Monroe hard over some customs officials Crawford wanted appointed in northern ports. Why was the President procrastinating? he demanded. When Monroe explained that members of Congress had asked for a delay in order to supply some information, Crawford erupted in accusations of presidential dilly-dallying and indecisiveness. The President heatedly demanded that Crawford treat him with respect. Crawford raised his cane as if to strike the President, crying out, “You damned infernal old scoundrel!”
Monroe seized tongs from the fireplace, holding Crawford at bay and threatening to have him turned out. The Secretary suddenly backed down, made his apologies, and departed. The two left office on March 4, 1825, without having spoken to each other again.
Evidently his Virginia birth had not made Crawford into a Virginia gentleman, but in any event the Virginia presidential dynasty ended that March day when Monroe left office. A few months later the pilgrimage to Monticello of General Lafayette, the Guest of the Nation, brought a final, and poignant rallying of the dynasty. Jefferson and Madison were there. Never having really retired, both had been feverishly involved in collecting a small but illustrious faculty for the new university in Charlottesville. Planning the architecture and pedagogy of the university had given Jefferson a brief golden autumn in his life. “He is now eighty-two years old, very little altered from what he was ten years ago, very active, lively, and happy, riding from ten to fifteen miles every day, and talking without the least restraint, very pleasantly, upon all subjects,” wrote a visitor, a young Harvard professor. Jefferson had become much feebler a few months later when he greeted Lafayette, Madison, and Monroe at Monticello, in the stifling Virginia heat of August, but the talk of American and French life and politics ran until late at night.
Perhaps the three Virginia ex-Presidents sensed that this was the last time they would meet, but they could hardly have known that the Virginia dynasty was at an end. For half a century or more, the Old Dominion had supplied cadre after cadre of luminous national leadership—from the earlier generation of Washington, George Mason, Patrick Henry, George Wythe to the last one of James Monroe and his contemporaries. During that half century the commonwealth had incubated not only four Presidents for a total of thirty-two years, and a Chief Justice who would last thirty years, but a host of secondary leaders—cabinet members, congressional luminaries, diplomats, scientists, generals, explorers, judges, political theorists, envoys—who expressed, politically and intellectually and culturally, the collective genius of Virginia both in the commonwealth and in the country. And undergirding this elite were, as Richard Beale Davis found, “at least several hundred” persons who developed “the political mind through which Virginia made herself felt.”
Suddenly this rich vein of creative genius came to an end. Never since, during the past century and a half and more, has a Virginia leader been elected President. Men from other states made up the new cadres of governance. How explain the Old Dominion’s sunburst of leadership during the nation’s founding years?
Intellectual leadership may flourish in cultures where at least a few persons enjoy enough leisure and enough security from economic harassment to allow the fruitful reading, conversing, corresponding, writing, and reflecting necessary for disciplined and creative thought. The plantation life of Virginia provided such a culture for the masters. Neither the long trips by horseback or jolting carriage nor the slowness of the post stopped the elite from exchanging ideas by mail or in meetings, or from striking sparks off one another. Intellectual leadership in Virginia was a collective enterprise. Not only the Jeffersons and Madisons but the run-of-the-plantation Virginia gentlemen took pains to be well educated and informed. Robert Carter III subscribed to British and American journals and built a library of 1,500 volumes, ranging in subject from music to religion to politics; he read avidly and lent his books to his friends. John Bernard, visiting the young republic in 1797, had found men “leading secluded lives in the woods of Virginia perfectly au fait as to the literary, dramatic, and personal gossip of London and Paris.” Wrote one planter to an English friend, better “never born than ill bred.”
The country lives of these gentlemen embraced a “curious contradiction,” as Louis Morton observed. Carter and his friends thoroughly enjoyed the rich offerings of Virginia’s rural life—hunting, racing, fishing, riding, drinking, gambling, cockfighting. But Carter’s Nomini Hall overflowed with the sounds of learned discussions and lively music, of polite socializing and stately dancing. There was a deeper contradiction. The sons of the Virginia elite grew up in gracious homes, accustomed to the services of slaves and to the finest imports: Irish and Scotch linens, Madeira wine, German beer, French silks, shoes, and hats. But tobacco, the underpinning of much of this wealth, was notoriously unstable in price and unpredictable in yield. Some planters relied on their Scottish stewards—“factors”—to handle their business affairs, but many others employed their own intellectual resources to meet the challenge. Tales of Jefferson’s scientific farming are commonplace—but Jefferson himself regarded Madison as Virginia’s best farmer. Robert Carter devoted long months to personal supervision of his sprawling estates, as did John Randolph, one of the few planters ever to clear himself of debt.
Perhaps the contradiction itself—the interest in intellectual pursuits and the need to master prosaic business matters—helps explain the full flowering of the cultural life and the political genius of the Virginia elites. The conflict between the two ways of life helped produce a brilliant hybrid, enabling the scientific minds and philosophical pens of Randolphs and Jeffersons and a host of less-known men to turn out treatises on animal husbandry and crop rotation, as well as on literature, government, and public affairs.
It took powerful feelings of duty, moral and religious responsibility, and self-efficacy and purposefulness to draw youths away from the diverse and diverting life style of the Old Dominion. Here their education often played a key role. These Virginians, said Henry Adams in an unusual tribute from the hub of the intellectual universe, “were inferior to no class of Americans in the sort of education then supposed to make refinement.…Those whom Liancourt called ‘men of the first class’ were equal to any standard of excellence known to history.” Colonial gentlemen believed in rigorously educating their sons in mathematics, classics, modern languages, perhaps some history and philosophy. The Virginia scion was favored with much individual attention; it was common, Edmund S. Morgan observed, for students to be educated up to the level of their particular needs and abilities. Sometimes planters would send their sons to small private schools—there were no public ones. Others would hire a young tutor to live in, sharing the family’s meals and social activities, and occupying an ambiguous position between social equal and mere employee. Some sons went abroad to study at Cambridge or Oxford; more often they went off to Harvard or Yale or Princeton, or to William and Mary, which gave its students considerable choice in their plan of study and rightfully boasted of its diverse and brilliant faculty. In the South as in the North, women had little share in such educational opportunity.
Perhaps the best school for young Virginians was the commonwealth itself. If great leadership emerges out of pervasive social and political conflict, Virginia was an ideal breeding ground for future Presidents and congressmen. Fierce battles had raged between burgesses and royal governors over local autonomy, but the conflict dividing most Virginians most sharply during the late eighteenth century was the status of the Anglican establishment and, after it was disestablished, that of its successor, the Protestant Episcopal Church. Following years of struggle and frustration the dissenters managed to get lands given to the Episcopalians reclaimed—others said confiscated—by the state. But the dissenters were by no means united, except against the common “Anglican” enemy. Old-line Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists genteelly proselytized unbelievers and competed for constituents. New-Light Presbyterians and Separate Baptists, opposing the “establishments” in their own denominations, ranged the valleys seeking to restore Christians to the literal reading of the Bible. Regional conflicts—especially between piedmont and tidewater—variously sharpened and cut cross the religious ones. Polemical and partisan newspapers amplified these and other voices of dissent. And a generation after the War of Independence echoes of the fierce Revolutionary disputes in Virginia had not wholly died away.
Exposed to an environment of conflict, these proud, educated, opinionated, and articulate men did not fit easily into two political and intellectual camps called Republican and Federalist. They divided, intersected, and overlapped to the degree that almost every Virginian politician-intellectual made up a party of one. But a rough four-party pattern emerged out of the bi-factional divisions within each party. The followers of Jefferson and Madison and Monroe dominated Republican politics and maintained a powerful base there for half a century, but this presidential and congressional leadership, modifying its ancient principles to meet day-to-day exigencies, faced mounting opposition from the “pure” Republicans headed by John Randolph, John Taylor, William Branch Giles, and many others. They felt pure because they had stuck to the ancient faith of minimal government as the means of protecting liberty, of strict construction of the Constitution, of states’ rights, of legislative supremacy over both executive and judicial branches and state militias over standing armies, all embedded in agrarianism as a way of life and anti-mercantilism as a way of thought. The Republican establishment in Virginia often feared the polemics of these adversaries, variously called the old Republicans, radicals, or the Quids or Tertium Quids, more than that of the Federalists.
Leader of the Quids was one of the most extraordinary figures in American politics, John Randolph of Roanoke. Having survived at nineteen a mysterious illness that left him impotent and beardless, with a rich soprano voice, he seemed to compensate with clothes of Revolutionary buff and blue, his superb aplomb as he swaggered through the halls of Congress booted and spurred and whip in hand, and above all his devastating oratory. “For hours on end his shrill but flute-like voice irritated and fascinated,” Dumas Malone wrote, “pouring upon his audience shafts of biting wit, literary allusions, epigrams, parables, and figures of speech redolent of the countryside.” His meteoric rise in the House of Representatives had been matched by a hard fall, as he turned against the Jefferson circle and later lost his seat to Jefferson’s nephew, John W. Eppes. Randolph was a man of contradictions: scion of a great aristocratic family but dwelling in a rather shabby house, possessor of several hundred slaves on 8,ooo acres but knowing in his heart that slavery was wrong, yearning for the land and home he loved but often lonely and miserable there, and sodden with drink. But on one matter Randolph was consistent: he took and clung to the most extreme view of liberty as personal independence and autonomy, as a jewel to be protected against power and corruption and the temptations of office, as a sacred right to be free of “all encroachment, State or Federal…” He summed up his philosophy in six words: “I love liberty, I hate equality.”
At the opposite end of the Virginia spectrum sat John Marshall, in the middle of the high bench. During the years after Marbury the Chief Justice assumed just the judicial posture that his Federalist mentors would have hoped for. Where Randolph virtually equated liberty with states’ rights, Marshall took a broadly expansive view of national power. In a long series of decisions he led the court to a broad construction of the Constitution. In M’Culloch v. Maryland in 1819, he not only struck down a Maryland law that taxed the Baltimore branch of the Second United States Bank; he proclaimed that the powers of the national government were derived from the people and were directly exercised on them, that the powers of the national government were supreme within the orbit assigned to it, and opined—echoing Hamilton years earlier—“Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional.” In Gibbons v. Ogden five years later, Marshall and his court voided a monopoly granted by New York for operation of steamboats between New York and New Jersey and broadly interpreted the nature and scope of congressional power under the commerce clause. That power, he said, “does not stop at the jurisdictional lines of the several states.” For Randolph and his fellow Quids the worst of it was that, while they had to throw themselves on the mercy of the voters every two years or so, John Marshall sat there blandly issuing these nationalistic decisions—and could do so for life.
On the whirling merry-go-round of American politics, sometimes a congressman could strike back at a President, only to be countered in turn by a Chief Justice. Such was the case with Randolph, Marshall, and Jefferson in the seamy affair of the Yazoo land fraud. In 1796 the Georgia legislature had revoked a grant of 35 million acres in its unorganized western territories along the Yazoo River, charging that the land companies receiving the land had bribed legislators into voting for it. After Georgia ceded the territories to the federal government, the Yazoo claims fell to President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison. The two Virginians preferred to settle with the politically powerful New England land companies that had bought the disputed titles; in the House, however, John Randolph rose in his wrath. Denouncing the pro-Yazooists as “unblushing advocates of unblushing corruption”—and privately relishing the slap he administered to Madison and, indirectly, to Jefferson—Randolph stopped bills to compensate the claimants in three sessions of Congress.
In desperation, the Yazooists turned to the third branch of the government. One of the claimants brought against another a suit so contrived as to test all the questions involved in Georgia’s repeal of the grant. A stellar lineup of Federalists argued this case of Fletcher v. Peck before the high Federalist Chief Justice Marshall. John Quincy Adams, Robert Goodloe Harper, and Joseph Story presented the Yazooist arguments; Luther Martin, tacitly in sympathy with his opponents, made a weak case for Georgia—and was so drunk, to boot, that the court had to be adjourned until he sobered up. But for all the atmosphere of contrivance and force, John Marshall handed down a marble-sheathed decision. The land grants were contracts between Georgia and the land companies, he ruled, and the legislature had reneged on its part of the bargain. As a “member of the American Union,” Georgia was bound by Article I, section 10, of the Constitution, which forbids the passage of laws impairing the right of contract. Georgia could not legally rescind the grants once they were made; the federal government would have to compensate the claimants. Defeated, Randolph could only rage—while Marshall, in ruling that states were bound by the contract clause of the national Constitution, erected another pillar of federal power in the temple of American law.
Standing at the extremes of Virginia’s political and ideological continuum, Randolph and Marshall had only small followings of their own. The tiny faction of disaffected men around Randolph shrank to an impotent remnant after their brief threat to party unity. John Marshall towered over his Federalist colleagues, who were successful mainly at winning minor offices when they won them at all. Far more potent in day-to-day Virginia politics were Jefferson and Madison’s combined followings, and the “Richmond Junto,” numbering such state and local leaders as William Wirt, Spencer Roane, Cary Nicholas, and Thomas Ritchie of the influential Richmond Enquirer. But the powerful appeals of Marshall and Randolph lived on far beyond them, and for generations constituted the heart of the debate about state versus national power.
The Virginia planter-politicians—much more than the activists in any other state—had taken a clear lead nationally in conceiving, framing, establishing, and inaugurating a radically new political system. They had tried an experiment in popular self-government, in “government by the people,” in republicanism—an experiment that inevitably turned into a series of particular experiments as new leaders took command in legislature, executive, and judiciary, and at various levels of governments. George Washington’s experiment in magisterial, consensual government, combined with executive leadership by an activist Cabinet, had been followed by John Adams’ venture in a government of presidential initiatives balanced by a gathering party opposition. Jefferson’s experiment in combined executive, legislative, and party leadership had given way to Madison’s frustrating experience with governmental and political checks and balances—an experience he had anticipated in his Federalist papers. Monroe had tried a strategy of subordinating party spirit, only to be swallowed up in the bitter politics of a divisive factionalism. The states had been trying out new constitutions of their own.
Convinced that scientific inquiry could be applied to politics just as much as to physics or astronomy, political leaders in Virginia and other states closely monitored the governmental experiments taking place in the numerous laboratories of American politics. After fifty years of experience with revolution and revolutionary governments, including a period of weak national government and then the adoption and implementation of a new federal Constitution and a dozen or so state constitutions, the time might have seemed appropriate for an assessment of this experience. Indeed, such a reassessment might have been deemed urgent because, on the eve of the nation’s fiftieth birthday, constitutional and political questions of profound importance remained unresolved.
The most obvious of these questions was the central one around which the convention of 1787 had revolved—state versus federal power. On several occasions powerful regional groups—most notably Virginians and Kentuckians in 1798 and waterside Yankees in 1814-15—had challenged federal authority in a dramatic, even menacing fashion, but the political issues had been mediated by moderate men without any resolution of the burning question of whether states could ultimately challenge the moral and constitutional authority of the central government. The Constitution had proved flexible enough to accommodate some broadening of federal power—as in the establishment of a national bank—at least as the Supreme Court had interpreted that charter. But the actual division between federal and state power remained clouded. Few doubted that the usual economic and sectional issues would continue to be worked out by the ordinary processes of bargain and compromise. But what if issues of unusual intensity arose, requiring extraordinary leadership and decision? Already South Carolinians were beginning to be restive enough about past and prospective tariff policy to question federal authority and even to raise the specter of secession and disunion. A few warned that slavery itself might become such an issue.
The other key question that the Framers had faced in 1787—the distribution of power among separated departments of government—was in an equivalent state of indeterminacy after fifty years of experience. Once again the Constitution had shown itself marvelously adaptable to the shifting patterns of congressional and executive influence and interaction, from the executive leadership of Washington and Adams to the party leadership of Jefferson and Madison and the non-party rule of Monroe. Certain constitutional provisions had been defined enough and agreed on enough to be foreclosed—for example, the absolute veto of the House and Senate over each other, and the power of the Supreme Court to invalidate congressional enactments signed by the President, as well as state legislation deemed unconstitutional.
But crucial questions remained open. The President’s veto power had hardly been used; was this to remain a weapon-in-waiting, to be employed only when the President’s own constitutional authority was threatened? The Supreme Court had long ago in Marbury vetoed an act of Congress and had got away with establishing this mighty precedent because the vetoed act gave minor power to the court; what would happen if the Supreme Court voided a major congressional act closely touching intensely flammable regional, economic, social, or political interests? Grave issues of checks and balances, moreover, often interacted closely with issues of states’ rights. What would happen, for example, if the power and prerogatives of a branch of the federal government, such as the Senate, were closely attached to the pride and interest of a major region?
Such issues had mainly been ignored. If the immediate reason for this evasion was political—the ability of politicians to defuse potentially explosive moral and constitutional issues by converting them into political and legal issues amenable to brokerage—the deeper reason was intellectual. The heirs of the 1820s to the creative political and constitutional leaders of the 1770s and 1780s were failing to live up to the intellectual vision of the founding fathers.
The main failure lay in the Jeffersonians’ reluctance to exploit the experience in actually running a republican government, in reassessing the theoretical and practical problem that had occupied them in framing the 1787 Constitution. That problem was the prevention of tyranny on the part of the rulers from within government and on the part of the people outside. “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective,” Madison had written in Federalist 47, “may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” He saw each problem as having a solution. Tyranny within the government could be curbed through putting pieces of governmental power—legislative, executive, and judicial—into separate hands: into Congress, the presidency, and the courts. Tyranny from outside the government—from aroused popular minorities or majorities—could be blocked by the social checks and balances resulting from “extending the republic” to cover a multiplicity of interests.
Under Jefferson the Republicans themselves had run an experiment that might well have resolved Madisonian fears of government and majority tyranny. For six years Jefferson had largely held legislative and executive leadership in his own hands; for six years a rough, inchoate popular majority had governed itself through that leadership. The constitutional heavens had not fallen; Jefferson, Madison & Co. had not indulged in tyranny within the government, nor had the popular majority used its control of government to suppress the liberty of minorities or individuals. John Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts were indeed a reminder that no government, even with checks and balances, was wholly safe. But the main lesson of the first fifty years was that government in an authentic republic need not be tyrannical. Pennsylvanians had even tried in their state an experiment in popular rule unbridled by checks and balances, with no apparent danger to their lives or fortunes.
The main lesson of those years, on the contrary, was quite different—that government could not long continue to be unresponsive to the basic needs of the great number of people—of white males, even aside from women, slaves, Indians, and the poor. But the thinkers of Virginia and other enlightened states could not see this because of their narrow and negative definition of liberty, and here lay the real—the ultimately moral—failure of the Virginians. American thinkers were still imprisoned in the old Lockean conception of liberty as an individual “natural right” to be protected against government—that is, against collective action by fellow human beings—rather than as an opportunity for mutual help in self-enhancement and self-fulfillment. The tragedy of the Virginians was that in their treatment of black people—and to a lesser extent white women—they violated even their own narrow conception of liberty.
The intellectual leadership cadre of the 1820s took an equally stunted view of the other great moral value of the era, equality, affirming abstractly the equal rights of all Americans, except slaves and perhaps women, to liberty and property without grappling with the questions of how, concretely, institutions could be devised in a republic, and measures passed, to help persons realize genuine social and economic and psychological equality, without putting undue strain on the republic. Expecting the second generation of thinkers to solve such problems, which still largely elude us today, would, of course, be unrealistic; but it was precisely the genius of the earlier generation of thinkers at least in conceptualizing moral and constitutional issues, and in shaping institutions to try to deal with such issues, that marked the difference between the 1780s and the 1820s.
If Virginia had led that earlier generation, it seemed most impoverished by the time of the second. Perhaps the end of the dynasty of the thinking gentlemen politicians of Virginia reflected underlying social and economic changes—the decline of the tobacco economy, the failure of Virginia to develop economically compared with the other middle states, the drift of potential leaders over the mountains to the West. Or perhaps that decline had long been fated. The incandescent glow of the Virginians had always been shadowed by their defense of the persisting system of social deference and hierarchy, the genteel subordination of women, the unavailability of schooling for great numbers of black and white children, and above all the blight of slavery. In these subordinate ranks lay concealed much of the potential social and moral and political grass-roots leadership of the Virginia of the next generation but that potential was left immobilized, and never to be realized, on the blind side of the leaders of the Old Dominion.
It had been clear for months, even years, that 1824 would bring no ordinary election. Monroe’s campaign effort in the previous presidential election had been such a tepid enterprise—fewer than 1 percent of the whites in his own state of Virginia bothered to go to the polls—that even at that time politicians were less excited by the current “race” than by the battle royal in prospect four years hence. The one elector who had voted against Monroe in 1820—William Plumer, of New Hampshire—had cast his ballot for John Quincy Adams as a way of publicizing Adams’ availability four years later. Monroe’s administration was hardly under way when Adams and the congressional politicians were busy electioneering.
Eagerly the press looked forward to the battle of the titans. Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford, widely considered the heir to the Virginia dynasty even though he was a Georgian, seemed an early front-runner, but for just that reason he attracted opposition from his rivals. Secretary of State Adams had reason to feel that he had rights of succession by virtue of holding the office that Madison and Monroe had used as a springboard to the White House. A “worm preying upon the vitals of the Administration within its own body,” was Adams’ reasoned view of Crawford’s role in the Monroe Cabinet. Henry Clay had quit the House of Representatives in order to concentrate on his lucrative law practice; he returned to the House in 1823, immediately won re-election as Speaker, and let his friends organize support for him in the states. As impressive as ever for his quick intelligence, compelling personality, and baffling combination of political daring and compromise, Clay calculated that he could win enough electoral votes to place among the top three candidates and then win election in Congress. John Calhoun was demonstrating, as Monroe’s Secretary of War, that his executive skills matched his parliamentary talents. Still at this point a nationalist who favored protectionism and internal improvements, Calhoun hoped that his support in the North, however spotty, combined with southern-backing, would at least gain him the magic circle of three. And Senator Andrew Jackson, an outsider temporarily inside, reckoned that his reputation as router of redcoats and redskins guaranteed him a personal popularity that could be converted into an electoral college majority.
None of these four men liked Adams, and the feeling was more than mutual. Adams feared his opponents too, to the point where he urged Monroe to give them diplomatic appointments that would take them out of the country—Clay to Colombia (or Chile, or Argentina), Jackson to Mexico, and De Witt Clinton, another possible rival, to wherever. All declined.
Soon the election race became a surly free-for-all, a far-flung game of King of the Rock—and a strident and ironic cacophony during the “era of good feelings.” Candidates’ followers spread spiteful whispers about their opponents. No candidate or party put out a program, or saw the need to. Every candidate ran on his record, though most voters were hardly aware of that record, save in the case of Adams and perhaps Clay. Each candidate organized, or at least attracted, a personal following that carried his message to state and local political leaders. Each candidate coped with the mélange of state or local party conventions, legislative caucuses, mass meetings, and of course the congressional caucus, and each argued for the special legitimacy of that portion of the electoral process that favored his own candidacy.
And that electoral process was slowly changing. The congressional caucus had come into increasing disrepute; those who took part usually had been elected at least two years earlier, and the states and districts not represented by a party in Congress perforce were not represented in its caucus. King Caucus was giving way to the mixed caucus, which did seek to be more representative, and then to party conventions designed to mirror the party constituency. And more and more persons were voting in party and state elections as the suffrage was slowly broadened.
Crawford fell victim to these changes when his supporters convened the congressional caucus and only sixty-six members showed up. Burdened also by ill health, Crawford slowly lost ground. Earlier, Calhoun had quit the presidential sweepstakes, and nimbly joined the vice-presidential, after he was beaten by Jackson forces in the Republican state convention in Harrisburg. The followers of Adams, Clay, and Jackson redoubled their efforts, especially in state legislative caucuses. Maintaining their posture of being above the battle, the candidates acted through their newspapers and circulars, committees of correspondence, and key state and party leaders to mobilize support. Soon it became evident that the more “popular” the selection process, the more evident was Jackson’s grass-roots support. Rivermen, miners, farmers, and mechanics endorsed Jackson in a Harrisburg mass meeting and sent their “nomination” in a letter penned by a local barkeep. A schoolteacher wrote from Cincinnati: “Strange! Wild! Infatuated! All for Jackson!…” It was like the “influenza,” and “I regard Mr. J. as the most independent of the southern gentry, one on whom they will be least likely to unite.…” If the influenza passed off soon, “the patients will vote coolly and dispassionately for the best man—Mr. Adams.”
The combat between Clay and Jackson was especially intense. Both “Harry of the West” and the Hero of the West protected their state turfs while eyeing each other’s. Jackson flared up when he heard that the governor of his own state of Tennessee was conniving with Clay. Conceding New England to Adams, the Speaker and the general fought for support in the middle states. Inevitably they were entangled in the local rivalries of politicians who were more intent on controlling state patronage than the national presidency. In the imperial politics of New York State, Martin Van Buren and other chieftains of the Regency led “Bucktails” against De Witt Clinton. The Regency supported Crawford, but as the Georgian’s prospects declined, other candidates looked to the Empire State for support. Elsewhere the Republicans were even more fragmented, as followers mobilized around a congeries of state as well as presidential candidates. Federalists, with little to divide over, were hardly heard from; their party as an organization was defunct.
The electoral college results nicely mirrored the fragmentation of Republicanism: Jackson 99, Adams 84, Crawford 41, Clay 37. Jackson’s popular vote of about 153,000 almost equaled the combined vote for Adams and Crawford. Adams won all of New England’s electoral votes, most of New York’s, and a surprising degree of support in the South. Jackson picked up Pennsylvania’s solid block of 28 votes, plus an expected good share of the South. Crawford drew his strength mainly from the South, including Virginia, and Clay from the West. Once again the faulty presidential electoral system was to bedevil American politics, as the election was thrown into Congress, where each delegation, whether as large as New York’s (36) or as small as Illinois’ or Delaware’s (3), had the same single vote. And Henry Clay, the trailer in the electoral college, looked like a winner in the Congress, for he could now do some shopping about.
And that is evidently what he did. “The friends of Jackson, Adams, and Crawford watched him in dismay as—gay, insouciant, and somehow menacing—he wandered from boardinghouse to boardinghouse, from banquet to banquet, not a candidate but a kingmaker,” according to George Dangerfield. But Adams, if less mobile, was no less political. He neglected not a single opportunity to win over a state to his support, Bemis concludes. Jackson’s and Crawford’s supporters were also on the move. Who would make the winning deal with whom? In mid-December, Robert P. Letcher, a Kentucky congressman and intimate friend of Clay, had several talks with Adams. Long used to such negotiations, the Secretary of State offered some conciliatory remarks about the Speaker. But what Clay’s friends wanted to know was whether Adams would assure Clay of a central role in his administration. Adams gave the necessary assurances. Later he and Clay met for hours and talked about the future, on the premise of those assurances. Clay was satisfied.
No outright deal was made. No definite promise was given or contract signed. The two men traded in the soft currency of subtle implications and raised expectations, knowing that this currency was backed up by the hard political cash of agreed-on perceptions of shared interests. The effect on Clay’s thinking was magical. Having written to one friend on December 13, 1824, that he was not sure whether he would swing his support to Jackson or Adams—“And what an alternative that is!”—Clay was writing on December 28 to another friend that he had definitely decided for Adams.
“What I would ask,” Clay wrote, “should be the distinguishing characteristic of an American statesman? Should it not be a devotion to civil liberty?” He could not, he added, on principle support a military man.
On February 9, 1825, the House of Representatives, voting by states, elected John Quincy Adams President of the United States. He had done his work well. He won not only Clay’s three states (in the electoral college) of Kentucky, Ohio, and Missouri, but also Jackson’s states of Louisiana, Maryland, and Illinois. He won New York too when the longtime Federalist Stephen Van Rensselaer cast the delegation’s decisive vote either because Adams had promised him understanding treatment of Federalists, through the mediation of Daniel Webster, or because, as Van Rensselaer said later, he bowed his head in prayer when his turn came to vote and saw an Adams ballot on the floor.
Said John Randolph: “It was impossible to win the game, gentlemen; the cards were packed.”
Within two days President-elect Adams offered Clay the Secretaryship of State. “So you see,” Andrew Jackson wrote, “the Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver.”
Far north, the town of Quincy still awaited the election news. When the patriarch John Adams was awakened with a horseman’s report, his heart swelled with pride. He was sad only that Abigail had not lived to see her firstborn become “guardian of his country’s laws and liberties.” The father seemed far happier than the son. When Daniel Webster came to Adams’ F Street house and formally notified him of his election, it was said that Adams stood shaking, sweat pouring down his face, as if considering the specter of all the un-Adams-like deals and compromises he had made to get to the top of the greasy pole.
Well might Adams shake and sweat. Rarely has the character of a presidential election had such a direct impact on the presidency that followed—and perhaps on the President himself—as that of 1824.
His hopes and goals he deeply felt. Rising above party and faction, he would serve as the steward of the people in an effort to enact and administer a program carefully designed to bring economic progress and political and social unity to the nation. His goals were founded squarely on his moral and political principle of personal liberty and property to be protected not merely from government but through government. This government would include the federal government, which Adams did not fear and which he liked to term the National government, always with a capital N. Echoing some of Hamilton’s ideas, his program was an extension of Monroe’s and Clay’s—internal improvements, wise use of federal lands in order to pay for those improvements, the fostering of science and education, “cautious” tariff protection of industry as a means of safeguarding the nation’s independence. After winning the reluctant support of his Cabinet for this program, the President wrote in his diary that the “perilous experiment must be made.”
Perilous it was, largely because Adams lacked the political resources for a positive program. Amid heavy pressures from all sides he tried to create a broad-based Cabinet, but Gallatin would not return to Treasury because he preferred State, Jackson would not accept the War Department, and the new Vice-President, John Calhoun, attacked the new Cabinet as not sufficiently representing the South. Highly dependent on congressional support, Adams was pleased that his supporter John W. Taylor of New York was elected Speaker to succeed Clay, but in the Senate Calhoun gained influence over key committees and busied himself jockeying for a future Calhoun presidency rather than the existing Adams administration. Then, at mid-term, Taylor lost the Speakership to Andrew Stevenson, a Virginian unfriendly to the President. A negative and ungainly leadership coalition of Calhoun, Van Buren, Jackson, and others, united only by their distaste for Adams and eagerness to succeed him, dominated Washington’s politics.
It soon became apparent that Adams had only the intentions of a good steward, not the qualities of a great leader. He was, for one thing, a true son of Puritan Boston—and of John Adams—when it came to political pleasantries. It was hard to make conversation with him as he presided at a White House dinner, and he had a genius for putting politicians off—and his foot in his mouth—on his brief trips into the country. He was inept at communicating his hopes and proposals to Cabinet and Congress, much less the voting public. But his personal failings were the lesser problem. Like Monroe, he lacked the foundation of party leadership and followership that might have helped him at crucial moments, and Adams possessed neither the desire nor the means of strengthening his party. Indeed, he was so profoundly anti-party that he refused even to use patronage to strengthen his position. And he had not developed the personal backing of party leaders throughout the country—the kind of leaders that Madison and Jefferson had converted into a new and powerful political organization. Rather, a new party was forming against him. Adams was also defeated by his theory of government. He knew that leadership must be a collective enterprise, but he also believed in the constitutional checks and balances designed to thwart such leadership. Never a transforming leader, neither was he skillful as a transactional one.
All Adams’ difficulties came to a head during the last two years of his term, in the congressional effort to enact tariff legislation. A moderate measure had been passed in the final year of Monroe’s administration; now the protectionists were back, eager to boost levies on iron, hemp, flax, and other commodities. Meetings of wool growers and manufacturers in Harrisburg, Poughkeepsie, and elsewhere reflected rising protectionist feeling in the country. Adams was so apprehensive about tariffs—“Beware of Trap doors,” he said of them to a son taking a seat in the Massachusetts legislature—that he gave his Secretary of the Treasury, Richard Rush, the job of defending them. But even the suspicious Adams could hardly anticipate what lay ahead. Van Buren and the group of Jacksonians who dominated the House Committee on Manufactures concocted a tariff bill full of provisions that favored the agrarian Northwest and Middle States, while giving short shrift to the manufacturing interests of New England. If Adams signed it, he would alienate the South and strain his own credibility, and if he vetoed it, he would antagonize both agrarian and manufacturing interests in the rest of the country. Either way, the crucial Middle States would be drawn into the Jacksonians’ camp.
With shrewd bargaining by Van Buren, the bill passed Congress, as New Englanders like Webster salvaged what they could for industrial interests, and Adams signed the “abominated” tariff, though he knew full well that he was jeopardizing his southern support. He detested the squalid legislative deals that produced such a bill, but could he object to such cynical brokerage when he had made his own political deals to win the White House?
So the administration of the lofty John Quincy Adams came to an end in the wake of a wild free-for-all, a scramble for special advantages, a legislative battle whose main relevance to manufacture, as John Randolph said, was the “manufacture of a President of the United States.” This “democratic” nationalism of popular interests was a far cry from Adams’ planned, rational, centralized, collective, “economic” nationalism. “Nothing could be less in keeping with the custodial philosophy of President Adams,” Dangerfield said, “or less adjusted to the centralizing system of Henry Clay” than the “Tariff of Abominations.” Still, he signed it.
He signed it because, by early 1828, the tariff, and Adams’ own political fortunes, had been swallowed up in the gathering battle over the presidency. He signed it, knowing that the South would denounce it to the point of murmuring about seceding. His “perilous experiment” of presidential stewardship and collective national effort had given way to the haphazard, competitive play of economic and sectional interests. And these interests in turn both reflected and generated powerful economic forces changing the face of America in the 1820s and 1830s—forces that one day would hold many a politician in their iron grip.
“Ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto you.” Americans were happy to obey the biblical admonition in celebrating the half century of the Declaration of Independence. As he entered his second year in office, John Quincy Adams had taken pleasure in plans for a celebration in Washington—and even more for a jubilee in Boston, to which his father would be invited. And it was hoped that another signer of the Declaration—indeed, the drafter of it—could journey from Monticello to the festivities in the nation’s capital.
For John Adams and Thomas Jefferson still lived, the one in his ninety-first year, the other in his eighty-third. A few years earlier Jefferson had broken his arm and wrist in a fall at Monticello, and a stiffened hand combined with other ills of old age left him in severe pain for months on end, but he had recovered enough to ride several miles a day. Adams was failing. “I am certainly very near the end of my life,” he wrote in January 1826. Whether death would simply mean the end, which he did not believe, or transit to life under a constitution of the Universe, “I contemplate it without terror or dismay.”
Adams had shared these private thoughts with his old adversary. For fourteen years the two heroes of the Revolution had been writing each other in what turned out to be a magnificent correspondence. Before that the two men had been politically so estranged that it took the best diplomatic efforts of intermediaries to persuade each that the other wished to restore the friendship of Revolutionary days. The correspondence had started awkwardly when Adams wrote Jefferson that he was sending him separately a packet containing “two Pieces of Homespun,” since the Virginian was a “Friend of American Manufactures.” Jefferson responded with a long letter about the relative lack of machinery in Virginia, except for the “Spinning Jenny and loom with the flying shuttle” that could be managed in the family. When the “homespun” arrived, it turned out to be a copy of John Quincy Adams’ lectures on “Rhetoric and Oratory” while he was a Harvard professor. Jefferson found them a “mine of learning and taste,” he wrote the proud father.
From there the correspondence took off, ranging across religion, history, Indians, the essence of aristocracy, Napoleon’s character, the influence of women, the perfectibility of human nature, and soaring into the realms of philosophy and theology. The two men refought old battles, straightening out history, each to his own satisfaction. Jefferson did not take sharp issue with Adams, however, and he was wise in this, for the latter was extremely defensive about his place in history. Years before, when Mercy Warren published her account of the Revolution, Adams had been outraged by her conclusion that his revolutionary principles had been corrupted by his long stay in London, and that he leaned toward monarchy and was inordinately proud and ambitious. Angry exchanges had followed for weeks, terminated only, by the intervention of Elbridge Gerry and the exchange of loving letters and locks of hair. Adams still had the last word, observing to Gerry, “History is not the province of the ladies.”
But now John Adams had mellowed, and he professed his affection for Jefferson even while debating him. There was much talk of family and friends—especially of old comrades dead or dying. Adams was inordinately proud of his numerous progeny, even though he granted that children have “cost us Grief, Anxiety, often Vexation and sometimes humiliation.” Abigail Adams occasionally added a friendly line, until she died of typhoid fever in her seventy-fourth year. Words were in vain, Jefferson wrote the inconsolable Adams, but they both could look forward to “an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again.”
And so the two men, constantly professing their friendship, wept and sparred and totted up historical accounts together, Adams with his palsy hardly able to write, Jefferson laboriously penning his gracious but spirited letters. Nothing lay outside the play of their minds. Adams was still unyielding on matters of prime importance—and to him this included how governments were constituted. His experience with the Constitution had not changed his old views of the arrangement of powers. “Checks and Ballances, Jefferson, however you and your Party may have ridiculed them, are our only Security, for the progress of mind, as well as the Security of Body.” There had always been party differences, Jefferson argued, and there always would be, for “every one takes his side in favor of the many, or of the few, according to his constitution, and the circumstances in which he is placed.…” Yes, replied Adams, it was precisely because parties had always existed and fought each other with ridicule and persecution that the Science of Government was the least advanced of all the sciences.
They argued briefly about the nature of liberty, but with no more acuteness or imagination than their fellow Americans. The principles of liberty were unalterable, Adams said. Then later he wondered, “Is liberty a word void of sense?” If it was, there could be no reward or punishment. Perhaps at “the bottom of the gulph of liberty and necessity” there might be the key to unlock the universe, but only God held the key. One thing was clear, though: without virtue there could be no political liberty. Jefferson was discreetly reserved on questions of liberty and equality, so enkindling were they to his friend.
The correspondence faltered as the Jubilee year neared. In June 1826 a committee of Bostonians waited on John Adams to invite his honored attendance at the celebration, but he was too weak to make the carriage ride. Instead, he wrote a letter in tribute to the Declaration of Independence, adding that despite man’s folly and vanity he could see hope for improving the condition of the human race. Though Jefferson was eager to go to Washington, he knew he could not; he wrote that the Declaration would be “the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government…the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion.…”
In Washington, on the Fourth of July 1826, President John Quincy Adams and Vice-President John Calhoun rode in their carriage amid a grand parade along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. There a Revolutionary War veteran read the noble words of the Declaration. A plea was made to subscribe money to keep Monticello from being put up for sale. In New York, Governor Clinton put on a feast of roast, oxen and ale for ten thousand guests. Bostonians so crowded into Old South Church that they were “squeezed to a hot jelly,” except in the galleries reserved for women. Philadelphia, where it had all happened, contented itself with a parade and a program in Independence Hall. In Charlottesville a student at the University of Virginia read the Declaration of Independence.
Its author was not there. On his hilltop nearby, he had awakened from a long sleep the night before to ask only, “This is the Fourth?” and he died around midday, as the celebrations were under way. About this time in Quincy, John Adams awoke as from a coma, muttered “Thomas Jefferson survives,” and died before the setting of the sun.