Adams

             This is a preview of a new project I'm working on. Tentatively titled Leading by Example, its about my eight favorite presidents and how they remained true to themselves before and after the presidency. The following deals with a very underrated president: John Quincy Adams.

                      The second generation of leaders began as Monroe left office on March 4, 1825: the outcome of the election being decided only a few weeks before.

John Quincy Adams 1825-1829

Monroe’s successor would be one who had been groomed from birth to ‘serve his country,’ John Quincy Adams.

            It wasn’t as if Adams wasn’t qualified: we have seldom had a candidate with more credentials. By 1824 Adams had a total of almost thirty years working in the public sector, including teaching, as a diplomatic minister, and Secretary of State for eight years. However, as has been proven repeatedly in elections, the best qualified are not always chosen.    

            John Quincy’s pre-presidential forays into politics show that he was, indeed, his father’s son. John Adams’ Federalist Party constantly maligned and attacked him his entire political career with the help of party leader Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton’s constant conspiratorial maneuverings, which was based a great deal on jealously, would lead to such as a fracture of the party it would cost the Federalists not only the election in 1800, but the end of the party itself, the elder Adams would be the last Federalist to hold high office.

            John Quincy’s years in the senate were to be a prelude for his presidency. Although elected as a Federalist, he voted almost equally for both parties and was the lone New Englander who supported Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. His support caused one Republican newspaper to predict that the “Hon. John Quincy Adams will certainly be denounced and excommunicated by his party.” This was to prove prophetic for he would be elected in 1803 and even though his term was to expire in 1809, the Massachusetts Legislature picked a replacement for Adams in 1808, which had the desired result of angering him and causing him to resign. “The agency of party is so organized in our country,” he would write in his diary, “that the undertaking to pursue a course altogether independent of it as a public man is perhaps impracticable. However this may be, I do not regret having made the attempt and, whether in public or private life, it is my unalterable determination to abide by the principles which have always been my guides.”

Howevermuch he was hated politically, he had made some powerful allies. President Madison appointed him nominal head of the peace commission that would eventually end the appointed him nominal head of the peace commission that would eventually end the second war with Great Britain. This was Adams’ first encounter with Henry Clay, who was one of the other four members. Clay was at that time Speaker of the House of Representatives and was everything Adams was not, slaveholder, gambler, a drinker and normally the life of whatever party he attended. The two statesmen would interact with each other politically until Adams’ sudden stroke on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1848. Adams, with his stern looks and curmudgeon personality, was initially not impressed in the least by the Kentucky legislator. Clay spent part of his free time playing poker, which was then called ‘brag.’ The game of chance would not have been enjoyed in the least by Adams, who spent his free time studying the Census of1810 and would in the 1820’s make a study on standardizing weights and measures. Adams would complain that Clay would “brag a million against a cent.”

After the signing of the treaty, Adams got rewarded by becoming the eighth Secretary of State under newly elected James Monroe. After his tenure at State, he waited in the wings for the presidency, assuring himself he would not campaign.

The presidential election of 1824 was one unlike one before or ever again. There are indeed similarities to other contests; the election of 1800 was possibly more vitriol with the candidates’ partisans lambasting the opponent. It was also not unique in the respect that a party other than the electorate chose the winner as was the case in 2000. It was unique in the fact that one candiadate became responsible for the election of the other. There were four candidates, two of them Adams and Clay. When the election was thrown into the House because no one had gotten enough of a majority to win, Speaker Clay, who was out of the running at that point, threw his weight behind Adams and made him president. Adams then offered Clay the State department position, thus putting him in position to win eight years hence. This led to the ‘corrupt bargain’ charge from Andrew Jackson, another of the candidates. The charge would follow Adams and Clay the rest of their lives.

Adams would be different from those that followed him in many ways. Although he had won office as a Federalist as a young state senator in 1803, and elected president as a Democratic-Republican, he saw himself as man of all parties, or no party. He set himself a goals to accomplish that would benefit the entire nation, including “the construction of fortifications as for purposes of internal improvement, the continuation of the Cumberland road, operation of the laws relating to the Revolutionary pensioners,” as well as “a national university and a military academy.”
     Adams had also wanted a truly united cabinet-a representation of the entire country. He wanted to keep much of Monroe’s cabinet. He wanted to make only two replacements, himself with Clay, and Calhoun who had gone from war Secretary to the Vice Presidency, he wanted to replace with Jackson. His goal was admirable and showed even though he had spent his life in and around politics, he really was politically naive. He felt that a public servant should do his duty for his country regardless of personal feelings or ambitions and was always shocked when others didn’t feel the same.

He would also follow his moralistic teachings throughout his public career. Adams began keeping a journal at age 13 in 1779 and would faithfully scribe pages each day of the places, people and thoughts that would become part of our history. He would continue this until after his first stroke in 1846. It was in this pages that Adams became more than the dead historical figure, or the unfeeling, uncaring aloof aristocrat. Adams’ true self would appear in his writings as he wrote poetry such as

“O that the race of men would raise

Their voices to their heavenly King,

And with the sacrifice of praise

The glories of Jehovah sing!”

or in his letters to his son, John II, “so great is my veneration for the Bible, and so strong my belief, that when duly read and meditated on, it is of all books in the world, which contributes most to make men good, wise, and happy.”

Adams’ detractors would so poison the political atmosphere he would find it impossible to promote and pass his ambitious agenda and when he ran for re-election in 1828, he lost to Andrew Jackson.

Adams’ greatest legacy, his greatest achievement did not come while he was president. His fight would begin shortly after his defeat in 1828 and would allow him to be a thorn in the side of all those who had opposed him. Adams would become the only president to serve in the House of Representatives after his term as president. 

It would happen in 1831, in which Massachusetts would elect their favorite son for every term until his death in 1848. He would become the greatest opponent of slavery for his seventeen years of service. In the House, Adams found his voice early when he noticed all the petitions from anti-slavery groups were being ignored: it was here with his argument of the right of the people “‘to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” The more often Adams read the petitions, the angrier the pro-slavery representatives became, which made Adams more anxious to bring more before the house. In 1836, the ‘Gag Rule’ would be adopted by a vote of 117 to 68. The Gag Rule stated that any business relating to slavery would not even be discussed on the floor. The rule was first debated on December 16, 1835 after a laundry list of petitions was read. In what would probably have been arranged through back room dealing, the motion was raised to automatically table any slavery debate. Speaker of the House James K. Polk recognized several members of the House who argued strongly in favor of such a rule, then shut down all discussion on it.

This led to a six week screaming match as each side tried to shout down the other: when it came time for a vote on the resolution, the Massachusetts congressman didn’t mince words. “I hold this resolution to be a direct violation of the constitution of the United States, of the rules of this House, and the rights of my constituents.”

It was here he put his legal training to use and on multiple instances and with a variety of parliamentary tricks, he would keep slavery before the house.

One of the tactics used was to submit a petition from his Massachusetts constituents who requested that since the two sides of the Union couldn’t get along, they requested it be peacefully dissolved.

For bringing this petition before the House, Adams was charged with treason in his aiding to the enemies of the nation. Upon hearing this, Adams demanded a trial: and since the house was considering a charge of treason, it circumvented the Gag Rule.

The trial began with Adams asking the clerk to read the opening passages of the Declaration of Independence: after this was done, he ranted against the slave masters who were crushing “the liberation of the free people.” The charges were dropped as his opponents realized that the longer Adams was on trial, the longer he would talk about the ‘peculiar institution,’ as slavery had come to be called.

At first, Adams was in the minority of those who opposed the rule, but as the years progressed, there was a shift in support to the side of ‘Old Man Eloquence,’ as he came to be called. Even the congressmen who had no opinion on slavery came to oppose the Gag Rule as they saw that silencing a voice was a road they did not want to go down. When the rule was overturned on December 3, 1844 Adams remarked, “Blessed, forever blessed, be the name of God.” However by the end of 1844, his sights would be fixed on a final target as former Speaker James K. Polk was now President-Elect Polk.

Adams did find a legal case during this time that interested him as well. He had never enjoyed the drudgery of the legal profession and he would spend but a few years as an attorney, preferring instead the more exciting world of politics. However, just as John Adams’ defense of the British soldiers in 1770 had combined politics and law, John Quincy had found such a case when he became the defense council for the slaves in the United States v The Amistad. The Amistad was a slave ship in which the crew had illegally taken free Africans and was on its way to sell them when the slaves broke their shackles and, by killing several of the crew, took control of the ship. When the slaves were apprehended near Long Island, NY, the legality of the slave’s purchase did not seem to matter and in 1841 when the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court, Adams would argue that the case was ‘anomalous,’ or inconsistent with the laws of justice. “It is indeed anomalous,” Adams would argue, “and I know of no law, . . . no law, statute or constitution, no code, no treaty, applicable to the proceedings of the Executive or the Judiciary, except that law, (pointing to the copy of the Declaration of Independence, hanging against one of the pillars of the courtroom,) that law, two copies of which are ever before the eyes of your Honors. I know of no other law that reaches the case of my clients, but the law of nature and of Nature's God on which our fathers placed our own national existence. The circumstances are so peculiar, that no code or treaty has provided for such a case. That law, in its application to my clients, I trust will be the law on which the case will be decided by this Court.”

Adams’ loss to Jackson was a wound to his ego. But as a final testament to his character, in the 1830’s Clay was pushing a censure of Jackson through Congress. Jackson would remain Clay’s mortal enemy until his death in 1845, and had Clay still been in the House of Representatives, he would have pushed for impeachment, however as he moved to the Senate side, censure was all he could accomplish. There is no constitutional authority or guidelines for censures, which means they are not legal and are strictly political. Clay’s censure was seen as either a response to Jackson’s illegal dismantling of the Bank of the United States, or Clay’s presidential loss, depending on which party you belonged to. The Bank had been the central issue of the Clay’s 1832 election against Jackson, which Clay lost by a large percentage. When the censure passed the senate and moved into the house, John Quincy “would not support the censure, much as he hated Jackson, because it was the kind of harassment he himself had experienced as chief executive.”

With John Quincy’s death in 1848 and Polk leaving office in March 1849, the second generation of Americans left the spotlite and unknowingly prepare for the greatest conflict in American history.

For more information on John Quincy’s and Clay’s relationship, Clay’s views on slavery, the presidential process of the 1800’s, check out my book Henry Clay: Compromise and Ambition available here www.outskirtspress.com/henryclaycompromiseandambition