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  John Quincy Adams

  “James Traub’s new biography of John Quincy Adams is exceptionally strong. Adams was a complicated hero, a patrician visionary, but also, as Traub puts it, a militant spirit, one of the most important diplomats in all of American history and, finally, slavery’s greatest enemy in American politics. Traub does justice to both the man and his times, with a historian’s sense of complexity and a writer’s eye for drama and detail.”

  —Sean Wilentz, author of

  The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln

  “Certainly by modern standards, John Quincy Adams doesn’t seem like presidential material: all high seriousness and rectitude, uncompromising to a fault, precisely not a guy with whom you want to sit down and have a beer. But James Traub’s beautifully written, absolutely definitive biography is a surprising page-turner that made me admire this other President Adams as he finally deserves to be admired—and to wonder if the species of American civic virtue he embodied, always rare, always endangered, has not become extinct.”

  —Kurt Andersen, author of

  True Believers and host of Studio 360

  “In the crowded pantheon of politically glamorous Adamses, John Quincy has long been overshadowed. Here he has finally been given his due. James Traub, one of America’s most incisive journalists on foreign affairs, has crafted a moving biography of an unlikely hero—a tense, introspective man who had no gift for small talk and felt beleaguered by criticism from members of Congress as well as his own three sons. By capturing Adams’s unflashy brilliance and do-the-right thing convictions, Traub convinces us that our sixth president is as worthy of our affection and gratitude as any before or after him.”

  —Deborah Solomon, author of

  American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

  Copyright © 2016 by James Traub.

  Published by Basic Books,

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.

  Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  Designed by Cynthia Young

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Traub, James.

  John Quincy Adams: militant spirit / James Traub.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-465-09879-8 (e-book)

  1. Adams, John Quincy, 1767–1848. 2. Adams family. 3. Presidents—United States—Biography. 4. United States—History—1783–1865. 5. United States—Politics and government—1783–1865. 6. United States—Foreign relations—1783–1865. I. Adams, John Quincy, 1767–1848. II. Title.

  E377.T73 2016

  973.55092—dc23

  [B]

  2015030745

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To the memory of my father,

  Marvin Traub

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART I

  HE IS FORMED FOR A STATESMAN

  1 The Flame Is Kindled (1767–1778)

  2 His Thoughts Are Always Running in a Serious Strain (1778–1780)

  3 As Promising and Manly a Youth as Is in the World (1781–1785)

  4 You Are Admitted, Adams (1785–1788)

  5 Friend of the People (1788–1794)

  6 I Shall Be Much Mistaken If He Is Not Soon Found at the Head of the Diplomatique Corps (1794–1795)

  7 A Young Lady of Fine Parts and Accomplishments (1795–1797)

  8 President Adams’ Political Telescope (1797–1801)

  PART II

  WAR AND PEACE

  9 I Feel Strong Temptations to Plunge into Political Controversy (1801–1803)

  10 Curse on the Stripling, How He Apes His Sire (1803–1804)

  11 The Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory (1804–1807)

  12 If We Must Perish, Let It Be in Defense of Our Rights (1807–1809)

  13 A Bull-Dog Among Spaniels (1809–1812)

  14 Restoring the Peace of the World (1812–1814)

  15 A Card of Invitation to a Dress Party at the Prince Regent’s (1815–1817)

  PART III

  TERRITORIAL EXPANSION

  16 A Line Straight to the Pacific Ocean (1817–1819)

  17 The Bargain Between Freedom and Slavery Is Morally and Politically Vicious (1819–1820)

  18 She Goes Not Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy (1820–1822)

  19 If He Wishes for Peace with Me, He Must Hold Out the White Flag (1822–1823)

  20 The Most Important Paper That Ever Went from My Hands (1822–1823)

  21 Who Can Hold a Fire in His Hand by Thinking on the Frosty Caucasus? (1823–1824)

  22 I Tread on Coals (1824–1825)

  PART IV

  INTERNAL IMPROVEMENT

  23 The Spirit of Improvement (1825)

  24 An Arrow to the Heart (1825–1827)

  25 A Great Man in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time (1825–1826)

  26 Cultivating His Garden (1826–1827)

  27 The Sun of My Political Career Sets in Deepest Gloom (1828–1829)

  PART V

  THE SLAVOCRACY

  28 Stay Thy Hand, God of Mercy (1829–1831)

  29 Our Union: It Must Be Preserved (1831–1833)

  30 The Ark of Our God Is Falling into the Hands of the Philistines (1831–1835)

  31 Am I Gagged? (1835–1836)

  32 I Am Not to Be Intimidated by All the Grand Juries in the Universe (1837)

  33 Among the Most Illustrious of the World’s Benefactors (1837–1838)

  34 The Captives Are Free! (1838–1841)

  35 The Acutest Enemy of Southern Slavery That Ever Existed (1841–1842)

  36 The Sober Second Thought of the People (1842–1845)

  37 Let Justice Be Done Though the Heavens Fall (1843–1845)

  38 The End of Earth (1845–1848)

  39 Obsequies

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  JOHN QUINCY ADAMS WAS A PLAIN MAN. VISITORS WHO TRAVELED to Quincy, Massachusetts, to speak to the old man, the former ambassador to the courts of London and St. Petersburg, secretary of state to James Monroe, and sixth president of the United States, were taken aback by the austerity of his furniture and the simplicity of his frock coat, which seemed always to carry a fine layer of dust, as if from the old volumes he had been scrutinizing only a moment before. Adams was plainspoken, for all his immense erudition. There was no guile in his manner and little irony. He was a faithful Christian who never missed Sunday service and often attended two.

  Adams was also a hard man. He did not aim to please, and he largely succeeded. He drove away many of his old friends and offended most of his onetime allies. He frightened his children and exasperated his long-suffering wife, Louisa. He was that rare politician who is happiest alone. He knew this and perpetually rebuked himself for his bearish manner, but he did not really wish to be otherwise. He lived according to principles he considered self-evident. Others of his contemporaries did so as well, of course; what set Adams apart was that his principles were so inviolable that he eagerly sacrificed his s
elf-interest to them. As president he accomplished very little of his ambitious agenda in part because he refused to do anything to reward his friends or punish his enemies. Such inflexibility is a dubious virtue for a politician.

  It is, however, an estimable virtue for a man who needs to hold fast in the face of adversity. Though he never wore a uniform or saw battle, Adams was a figure of immense physical and moral courage. His bravery was a form of patriotism. So complete was his identification with the nation that came into being when he was a boy of nine that he did not flinch at either the prospect of death or—what may be harder for men of great ambition—the wreckage of his career, so long as he believed that service to the nation required it. When, starting in 1835, the “slavocracy,” as Adams called the Southern representatives in Congress, sought to silence debate over slavery by banning petitions on the subject, no man save Adams was prepared to face their overwhelming power in the House. Adams received, and blithely ignored, innumerable assassination threats over his role. Twice the Southern planters in Congress sought to bring down on him the grave punishment of censure; both times he left them furious and humiliated. Few things gave him more satisfaction.

  John F. Kennedy devoted a chapter of Profiles in Courage to Adams. Kennedy characterized political courage as the willingness to stand up for the nation’s best interests in the face of opposition from one’s own party or even constituents. He could have chosen many incidents from Adams’ career. The future president focused on the moment, in 1807, when Adams was serving in the Senate and his own Federalist Party rose as one to block the trade embargo that President Jefferson had imposed on Great Britain in response to its high-handed seizure of American ships and impressment of American sailors. The embargo threatened to wreck the economy of the Federalists’ native New England. Adams was the only party member to support the policy, though he knew it would end his career as a Federalist—which it did. Kennedy cites Adams’ defiant assertion that, “highly as I reverenced the authority of my constituents . . . I would have defended their interests against their inclinations, and incurred every possible addition to their resentment, to save them from the vassalage of their own delusions.”

  Thanks in part to his contempt for his own political prospects, in 1828 Adams was soundly defeated in his bid to be reelected president by Andrew Jackson, the populist hero. At that moment the essential meaning of Adams’ career appeared to be fixed: he was an old-fashioned New England republican, a Puritan, an elitist, who had been left behind in America’s new democratic age. And yet his unshakeable commitment to principle ultimately proved to be his salvation. In 1831 Adams agreed to stand for Congress, telling his friends that no office was too mean for one dedicated to public service—and admitting to himself that he could not live without the urgency of a life in politics. He had not expected to lead any crusades. But his hatred of slavery, his commitment to the right of petition, and his sheer vehemence placed him at the forefront of the burning issue of his day. And he succeeded: the prohibition on anti-slavery petitions was lifted in 1844, when Adams was seventy-seven. Finally, in his last years, Adams enjoyed what one newspaper editor called “the sober second thought of the people.” Upon his death in 1848 at age eighty, Adams was mourned, and revered, as the last remaining link to the heroic generation of the founders.

  ADAMS’ GREATNESS RESIDES ABOVE ALL IN WHO HE WAS. AND YET HE was also extraordinary in what he did, what he said, and what he wrote. Appointed minister to the Netherlands at the age of twenty-seven, Adams quickly became President Washington’s most prized and trusted source of intelligence in Europe. Returning to the United States in 1801 after serving in Berlin as well, Adams was elected to the Senate, where he might have come to play a dominant role had his own party not dismissed him for the heresy of his support for Jefferson. He then served as America’s first minister to Russia and a member of the delegation that signed the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812 on terms remarkably favorable to the United States. He returned in 1817 to become secretary of state. In that role Adams enunciated a new foreign policy for a restless but still peaceful nation, and wrenched from Spain not only Florida but also a line across the southwest all the way to the Pacific Ocean. He was elected president in 1825, serving one term in what was arguably the least successful stage of his career. He then became the only president, before or since, to serve afterwards in Congress. The apogee of his career came in 1841, when he persuaded a pro-slavery Supreme Court to free the African captives of the slave ship Amistad.

  Adams was a coherent and consistent thinker who adhered to his core political convictions across decades of public service. He was deeply imbued with the belief that the United States was the greatest experiment in government the world had ever known—and that such an experiment was, by its very nature, endangered in a world of aggressive and autocratic states. As a young diplomat, he was supremely, even hyperbolically, alert to the threat to American independence posed by the struggle for global supremacy between Britain and France. Neutrality was his watchword, and his letters from Europe helped shape Washington’s Farewell Address, which admonished Americans to stand apart from Europe’s inveterate rivalries.

  As America grew rapidly in size and strength, and the threat of foreign intervention receded, Adams worried that a self-aggrandizing nation would lose itself in imperial adventures. In his July 4 address in 1821 he famously said that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” and he went on to warn that a militarized nation “might become the dictatress of the world; she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.” Cold War “realists” like the diplomat-scholar George Kennan, who warned against a moralistic and militaristic foreign policy, acknowledged Adams as their intellectual fountainhead. Adams’ persistent argument for husbanding US diplomatic and military power is his single most lasting contribution to the corpus of the nation’s governing principles.

  At the same time, Adams believed, as the founders had, that the United States was destined, by God as well as by its favorable geographic position, to spread across the continent and become the most powerful nation in the world. It is to Adams, more than anyone, including President Monroe himself, that we owe the Monroe Doctrine, which simultaneously asserted a doctrine of noninterference in European conflicts and a self-confident demand that the European powers cease their meddling in both North and South America. His overall diplomatic goal was to maintain peace abroad in order to enable expansion at home—a doctrine that China, the rising power of our own age, calls “peaceful rise.”

  By both temperament and philosophy, Adams was a conservative, as was his father, John Adams. Like the elder Adams, he feared the mob and viewed strong government as the bulwark against unruly passions. He shared Edmund Burke’s horror at the wild convulsions of the French Revolution. The scholar Yuval Levin has divided Americans into followers of Burke and those of the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine. Adams lionized Burke and introduced himself to the reading public through a ferocious attack on Paine’s The Rights of Man. Like many other New England Federalists, Adams would have described himself more as a republican—a believer in representative government—than as a democrat.

  But a conservative of 1800 could be very much a liberal in our own terms. Adams believed not only in firm government but in active government. In his first address to Congress as president, in 1825, he declared that “the great object of the institution of civil government is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact.” This was heard, and intended, as a direct blow at the Jeffersonian faith in limited government, especially limited federal government. Along with his secretary of state, Henry Clay, Adams was a leading apostle of a policy that combined “internal improvements,” which today we would call infrastructure, with protective tariffs, designed to promote domestic industry by restricting foreign competition. A united opposition as well as Adams’ own political ineptitude doomed this ambitious vision. As with the abolition of slavery, Adams did
not live to see his hopes realized, though his vision of activist government would reemerge a generation later as the agenda of the Whigs and of the early Republicans, above all Abraham Lincoln. Adams was thus the living link between a long-defunct Federalism and an emergent nationalism. He was, again to use terminology Adams himself would not have recognized, a progressive conservative.

  Adams dedicated his life to preserving the union against both internal and external threats. His rhetorical assault on the slave forces in Congress, which deepened the divide between North and South, looks at first like a departure from his central path. In fact, it summed up the preoccupations of a lifetime. Adams had long understood slavery as a moral blot but not a political issue. The question did not really command his attention until the debate over the Missouri Compromise in 1820. Then he saw, as if by lightning flash, that the compromise between slave and free states that had kept the union whole was morally corrupt and politically unsustainable. As secretary of state, Adams stood apart from the debate. When he entered Congress a decade later and seized the role of chief tormenter of the slavocracy, he saw, far more clearly than the abolitionists did, that slavery could not be ended peacefully. He could not bring himself to call for abolition at the cost of civil war. Neither could he accept the endless perpetuation of slavery. Thus he was forced into the strange, lonely position of storming the barricades of slavery while refusing to support abolitionism. It was a spectacle that, characteristically, mingled heroism, isolation, and pathos.

  Adams’ moorings, both personal and intellectual, held him fast as his country changed unrecognizably. One historian has plausibly described Adams as the first American thinker to articulate a “comprehensive grand strategy” designed to further national interests at home and abroad.

  IT WOULD BE GOOD TO SAY THAT ADAMS COULD RELAX HIS GRIM visage in the company of his loved ones. His father, though thin-skinned and vindictive, was an adoring husband and a loving, if very overbearing, father. Alas, the son was a model of consistency. His wife, Louisa Johnson, had grown up in fine style in London, a shy creature of the parlor with a gifted singing voice and a sharp eye for human vanity. Adams was quite smitten by her, but even during their courtship he worried that she was too frivolous, and too delicate, for the public life he envisioned—and he bluntly told her so. Louisa never escaped the fear that she had been judged and found wanting. Though all of Washington attended her parties during her husband’s tenure as secretary of state, she was happiest in the company of friends and family, and she often withdrew to her bedroom with an unspecified nervous condition. Louisa viewed the White House as a vast prison cell and escaped whenever she could to the baths in upstate New York or to Quincy. John and Abigail Adams had been joined in mind and soul; John Quincy loved and admired Louisa, and yet at times he seemed to barely understand her.