John Quincy Adams was the sixth President of the United States of America. The Presidency was arguably the least interesting and least successful part of his long political career.
The son of John Adams, John Quincy was, until relatively recently, the only child of a previous President to attain the office. He’s the only child of a Founding Father to do so. While to some this might seem to have made him unusually fit for the job, for others it made him appear to be “American royalty”.
John Quincy is also unusual in that he continued to serve in government for long after his Presidency, continuing in the House of Representatives for nearly three decades after losing his bid for re-election. Prior to the Presidency, John Quincy served as Secretary of State after several important ambassadorial postings, and so his name and activities were already entwined in the stories of his Presidential predecessors. His election was one of the most divisive and controversial in United States history, forestalling while also impelling the eventual election of Andrew Jackson.
John Quincy kept a journal, starting when he was still a boy. Daily entries, nearly his entire lifetime, provide historians with a regular primary source for decades of early American political history, along with John Quincy’s personal observations and private thoughts. He was an argumentative man, regarded today as pragmatic in his politics, and he had to fight perceptions and expectations laid on him by his birth. He was not the best husband, or father, lacking an ease of expression of his emotions or sympathy towards others.
Like his father before him, John Quincy Adams served only one term as President, but when combined with his decades of political service, the span of his career is one of the most consequential in American history.
I read James Traub’s “John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit”; compared to the American President Biography Press bios of his predecessors, this book was a breeze, much more engaging and holding back from dry political minutiae. Traub opens the book with a scene from John Quincy’s childhood, when his mother took him up a hill to view from afar the battle for Boston during the Revolutionary War. John Quincy was raised practically from birth to serve his country.
As a boy, John Quincy traveled overseas with his father during the Revolutionary War to promote the cause of the United States. He learned French fluently and grew accustomed to life overseas; this would prepare him well for his future diplomatic career. He also began keeping a diary, a habit he would maintain throughout his life.
As a young man, he graduated from Harvard University and began a legal apprenticeship. Young John Quincy was, like many young men, a bit angsty and depressed about his future. He feared a lifetime of filing papers and legal briefs, passively living a life that had been chosen for him, until he died.
While apprenticing in Newburyport, he fell in love with a woman named Mary Frazier. This eventually met with disapproval from his parents, generally on the grounds of him being too young to marry; he was expected to establish his career first and perhaps see other people. He did finally break off the relationship, and was miserable for months after; decades later, John Quincy would still write about this time of his life with regret.
John Quincy wanted to make a name for himself, and throughout his life hesitated to trade on his father’s name. He might have remained a “son of famous” Boston area lawyer but for some opinion pieces he authored, one in particular defending President Washington and the Constitution against some rabble-rousing by “Citizen Genet”, a diplomat from Revolutionary France who toured the nation seeking American support in their wars against England and Austria.
Genet was an especially problematic person for the first American President, and upon learning who had written a rousing defense, Washington nominated John Quincy to be minister to The Hague. Thus began his long career in the foreign service.
Foreign Service, Politics, and Personal Life
John Quincy served in several overseas posts under different administrations, first in Holland, and then later in Prussia and, eventually, Russia. Paused in London while en route, he began calling on the home of one Joshua Johnson, who had daughters, in particular Louisa, who would eventually become John Quincy’s long-suffering wife.
In the initial courtship, John Quincy dithered; if anything, this seemed to be a pattern in his inner emotional life, as opposed to his professional life in the world of diplomatic protocols and courtly gamesmanship. Louisa’s family was American but had been trading in England, went to France during the American Revolution, and returned to London after.
Throughout their relationship, John Quincy was generally cold and occasionally overbearing, unleashing his rhetorical prowess in spats as if they were great policy debates. On the other hand, he could care for Louisa when she was sick or unwell, which was frequent; she suffered several miscarriages, and one child died young while they were stationed in Russia, and the child was buried in Russia. Louisa might be easily portrayed as neurotic and high-strung, but I had great sympathy for her. She might have thrived in another culture, or married into a different family.
John Quincy continued in the foreign service after his father succeeded Washington, finishing up treaty work with Prussia near the end of his father’s term. He had some ideas about going into politics, and when Jefferson was elected to the highest office, he became motivated to throw his hat into the relatively empty ring for Massachusetts Senator.
As a Senator, John Quincy held a relatively unique position in that he did not reliably vote with one party or the other. Being from New England, by default he was a Federalist, and this would have been his tendency by way of opposing the anti-Federalist or Democrat-Republican faction nurtured by Jefferson, Madison, and later Monroe.
These were young days for the United States. In 1800, the Constitutional United States had only existed for about 12 years and had had only one President other than the one who’d been the wartime leader and hero of the Revolution. New territory would be taken and organized, new states would form, and a fractious Congress would debate topics that would grow in size and divisiveness over the decades. What was the role of the Federal government compared to the individual States? With whom would the United States trade, embargo, or make war? Would slavery be expanded or curtailed?
To say John Quincy was a principled man meant that we would argue and rely on a point regardless of outcome, which drove everyone around him quite mad. He was against slavery, but at the time did not believe Congress could overrule the states. He supported the Louisiana Purchase but believed that how it came about was unconstitutional. By the end of 1808, Adams was voted out of office, but he wasn’t out of Washington for long. President Madison submitted his name for Minister to Russia.
The challenge that the United States faced at this time was, essentially, Napoleon. Rising out of the bonfire of the French Revolution, Napoleon was a talented officer who became a general, who came to share power, and who eventually took all power, ruling France and conquering most of continental Europe. The British, with various sets of allies in several different wars, fought to contain Napoleon, and one consequence was that both sides would punish American shipping for attempting to trade with the other side. Russia sought to expand relations westward, and in so doing might provide a lifeline to American trade.
Adams connected well with Tsar Alexander and his wife; he and Louisa were rare among ministers in being a full family overseas in the foreign service. While posted in Russia, the Adams family experienced several family tragedies both near and far; on the diplomatic stage, Napoleon dominated, as well as the War of 1812 with Britain. Lousia delivered a baby girl, and their son Charles Francis was old enough for John Quincy to begin educating him. However, within a short period of time, news arrived of the death of John Quincy’s aunt and uncle Cranch, and Louisa’s mother and brother-in-law had also died. By the fall of that year, baby Louisa had died, and a week later, the French took Moscow. Less than a year later, John Quincy’s sister Nabby died from breast cancer.
Adams was able to improve relations between the United States and Russia, specifically with the premise that Russia wanted Britain’s full attention on Napoleon, and not distracted by a war with the United States. Russia offered to serve as a mediator between the Americans and the British, although the British initially turned down the offer, and eventually a treaty was negotiated in Ghent, which Adams attended. Notably, he worked with Henry Clay, Speaker of the House, who would later run for President against Adams as well as Andrew Jackson, and who served as Adams’ Secretary of State.
While he was away, Napoleon escaped from exile and was able to raise an army, threatening peace in Europe once again. As it happened, Louisa and the family were traveling westward, and encountered the carnage of several major battles, and had to slip past military checkpoints to rejoin her husband. I came away from this part of the story caring deeply for Louisa. Her life story alone is amazing.
The negotiations with the British lasted for months. I think it’s important to note here that one British demand was to cede territory to Native Americans, which the United States, Adams in particular, looked askance at. In their view this would have been ceding perfectly good land ready to be developed over to “savages” to “find wild beasts to hunt upon”. This is just to show that even the people in history you might admire can also exhibit beliefs and attitudes that are appalling by modern standards.
John Quincy finished the final year of the Madison administration as Minister to England, during which most attempts at improving relations fell on deaf ears due to Continental and internal British politics. Shortly after, Secretary Monroe was elected President, and John Quincy’s name was floated to become Secretary of State in the new Monroe administration. Ultimately, this came to pass, and the next phase of his career began with a return, permanently, to the United States.
Secretary of State
Then and now, the cabinet position of Secretary of State is often a stepping stone to the Presidency; to that point in American history, all Presidents after Washington had previously acted as Secretary of State. The role is America’s policymaker and face to the rest of the world; dealing primarily with treaties, making new friends and sometimes, indicating the willingness for war. It’s traditional international statecraft, often overshadowing domestic affairs in the imagination of politicians.
John Quincy was well-prepared for the role. He’d been an international traveler since he was a boy, was well-versed in French, and had experience in the courts of major European nations and great powers. For the Monroe administration, he was notably not a southerner or Virginian, which would have created political complexities Monroe wanted to avoid domestically. In short, John Quincy was uniquely qualified for the job.
His first major effort as Secretary of State was negotiating with Spain following the taking of Pensacola by Andrew Jackson. This was both a domestic and an international political crisis. Essentially Andrew Jackson had marched into Spanish territory and taken a fort, and therefore control of the territory, on the premise that Native Americans of the Seminole tribe had been raiding Americans from Spanish-held territory. The Spanish were not fully in control of that territory, and thus the United States had to assert control, or so the reasoning went.
In parallel, Spain’s colonies further south in the Americas were in revolt, and the myriad new post-colonial nations were asking for American recognition and support. Republican Democracies gotta hang together, right? However, the other great European powers supported Spain, and the view from John Quincy was that it was better to maintain neutrality, especially as the United States sought to expand trade relations.
That said, in negotiations with Spain, Adams was aggressive and assertive. He took the position of supporting Jackson’s action, though that put him in the minority position within Monroe’s cabinet. He negotiated for land running west from Louisiana down to the modern southern coast of Texas, and eventually for all territory stretching west from Missouri to the Pacific Coast.
As America expanded, so did the number of states, and along with them, the question of slavery in a nation built on the notion of freedom for all men. The Missouri Compromise came about during the Monroe administration, and it is at this point in his diaries that John Quincy begins writing about his feelings on slavery – he was profoundly against it and would admit in conversations that his was the abolitionist position.
He did not feel he could be the voice anti-slavery at this time, instead yearning for better orators in Congress to take that position. The British were proposing a ban on the slave trade and would end slavery in their country long before the United States did. While Adams was personally in favor, he had to represent that any limits on slavery were politically impossible in the United States at that time. He did, however, eventually bring the United States to agree that citizens who engaged in the slave trade were pirates, and thus boarding of their ships was allowed under international law.
Presidency
John Quincy was elected President in one of the most contentious elections in United States history. There is quite a bit of detail in the background of the election, in large part due to the machinations of future President Martin van Buren, who is credited for developing the two-party system we still have today. Essentially, the election was a four-way race between Adams, Speaker of the House Henry Clay, two other cabinet members, and Andrew Jackson, populist war hero.
One of the other cabinet members washed out, and as the votes were tallied, it came down to Adams, Henry Clay, and Jackson. This was a time when several states still chose their electors through their state legislatures, not popular vote, and in van Buren’s state of New York in particular, there was intense jockeying for votes; votes were also proportional in some states, so a candidate could get some of a state’s electoral votes, if not all.
Ultimately, and somewhat notoriously, the race was close enough that it went to the United States’ House of Representatives to decide. Here the truth gets murky, but Henry Clay, the Speaker, threw his weight behind Adams, who was elected to the cries of a “corrupt bargain” when Adams in turn appointed Clay to be Secretary of State. This electoral loss by Jackson was nursed over the coming years until Jackson’s victory in the next election.
Despite the fractious election, John Quincy set forth policies and actions based on his principles, generally ignoring opposition or general political concerns. On the one hand, if as a modern you support his principles, he’s easy to admire; on the other hand, by failing to reward political allies or account for the concerns of swing voters, and by not countering pro-Jackson activists, he set himself and his party up for failure.
In particular, Adams entreated with Native Americans in a dispute with the state of Georgia; he and his party were proponents of what we now call infrastructure, despite great skepticism of the Federal government’s role in financing things like canals and interstate roads; he took a firm stand against political patronage, which while laudable, was so firmly entrenched that it would be decades before it was fully addressed by Congress.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died, on the same day, July Fourth 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The event was both personal and political for John Quincy; he lost a father and took on fully the role of family patriarch, while the political divisions between the second and third Presidents had only sharpened since their time in the political sun. The Federalists would be replaced by the Whigs as the pro-Federal, business-friendly party associated with the educated elites; the Democrat-Republicans simply became the Democratic Party, and in short order would be specifically Jacksonian Democrats, the vox populi, favoring a small Federal government and more direct democracy, at least for white men.
During John Quincy’s term, a Pan-American conference was proposed for all nations in North and South America to attend; following the Bolivar Revolutions, newly independent nations were banding together, and sought the United States for support. There was also a tricky bit about Cuba, still nomically under Spanish control, but which various nations had designs on. John Quincy proposed to have the United States attend, but future President and Jackson-whisperer Martin van Buren used that as a wedge to chip away support for Adams; along with John Calhoun, Adams’ Vice President, he promoted the feeling in Congress that this executive decision was an usurpation of Congressional authority.
House of Representatives
John Quincy Adams is unique in that after his Presidency, he continued his political career in the House of Representatives. He would serve the rest of his life as a Congressman, and it is there that he cemented his legacy as an anti-slavery crusader.
The short version is that, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, across the nation, the issue of slavery pushed closer to the fore. Every territorial expansion of the United States renewed talks of slavery, every legal dispute raised the issue in public consciousness, and the anti-slavery movement grew and coalesced.
Congress held a right of petition, by which representatives could read petitions or notes from their constituents into the record. John Quincy used this to constantly bring up slavery, and boy howdy was that an epic battle.
During John Quincy’s political career, the anti-slavery movement had begun in the United Kingdom and spread to the United States. While in modern times we would say slavery ought to have been abolished immediately, in that period there was great debate over the means of abolishing slavery, as well as the pro-slavery argument from what Adams would later dub, “the slavocracy”, or institutional interests. Slavery was so intertwined with the global economy that the simple proposition, “slavery is wrong, and should not exist” seemed like an impossible ideal.
Some hoped for voluntary manumission. Some proposed a gradual approach as opposed to immediate abolition. The States were able to decide for themselves; could the Federal government ban slaveryin the District of Columbia?
Alongside these debates were what to do with so many people suddenly freed from bondage; many so-called enlightened slaveholders supported sending freed people back to Africa, which presented its own moral quandary, with so many slaves having been born and raised in the United States. When John Quincy was President, and well into his tenure in the House, abolitionism was the extreme position, and while he found himself personally drawn to it, he knew that many of his constituents were not.
Using the right of petition, various members of Congress would submit anti-slavery petitions from their constituents. Many of these were coordinated by the politician and anti-slavery leaders. In any case, as Adams and others presented their petitions, they would mix those that were against slavery with those that had nothing to do with the topic. Eventually, the slavocracy pushed back.
At first, there was a proposal that any petitions to do with slavery had to be routed through a committee, and there would be an agreement ahead of time that such petitions would not change anything to do with slavery – no motions, bills, etc. This was not enough for some Southerners. They demanded that such petitions be “laid on the table”, and South Carolina demanded a motion affirming that Congress had not right to legislate on slavery at all.
Here, John Quincy found his debate. He could debate the slavocracy on their gagging of debate without committing himself to the cause of abolition. John Quincy relished these debates. He would introduce petitions. He would continue to introduce petitions; he would phrase them in ways to seem inoccuous at first before bringing in an antislavery point. At one point a petition was introduced on the topic of slavery, to be blocked, only to elucidate it as a sarcastic petition from a former slave extolling the virtues of slavery. Who could block a petition with such a positive prima facie message?
Otherwise, Adams continued to hew a line short of the abolitionists but still very much in favor of a gradual elimination of slavery. Separately, he became involved in the case of the Amistad, a Spanish-flagged illegal slave trading ship which was taken over by the slaves it carried and later captured by the United States Coast Guard.
I am going to glide over the issues of the case; it’s worth its own full telling. A movie version was made in the early 2000s, if you want a quick and entertaining version of the story. Essentially, the slaves took over the ship, killing the captain and its cook; they forced another officer to navigate them back to Africa, but overnight he would secretly steer them back on a westerly course. The ship was in violation of international law regarding the slave trade, but once captured, the people who took over the ship were on trial in a legal system that seemed confused: were they cargo, or were they mutineers/pirates?
Adams argued that they could not be both. If they were cargo, they were cargo that had somehow freed itself from captivity. If they were mutineers, were they even slaves to begin with? This was a period when salvage rights could be claimed by the vessel that found the salvage ship. The “cargo” argument was at the behest of the Coast Guard skipper who was hoping to get money for the value of the cargo. That is, the enslaved people.
Eventually, the case reached the Supreme Court, where Adams argued on behalf of the Africans. The court ruled they could be set free, and after some fundraising by local anti-slavery societies to pay for passage, they returned to Sierra Leone.
Adams also held opinions on the annexation of Texas with respect to slavery. Mexico had previously abolished slavery; an independent Texas reinstated it. Former president Jackson favored annexation, and President Tyler also favored annexation. Adams became convinced that there was a conspiracy amongst the slavocracy to admit Texas as a slave state, and overall he felt that the United States had abdicated its role as a beacon of liberty, largely at the behest of the slavocracy. Eventually, under President James K. Polk, the United States did provoke a war with Mexico, from which it subsequently obtained most of the territory in the modern southwest United States.
Later Career
In the 1840s, Polk got his war and the US gained Texas, which was eventually admitted as a slave state. Adams found himself in demand to give speeches and write on politics, and he was able to indulge in travel and pursue his naturalist tendencies, that is to say, his love of science.
Adams, in his eighth decade, was now a venerable elder statesman; moreover, he was the last tangible connection in politics to the Revolution, to the founding (and re-founding) of the nation, to the sentimental past when everything seemed possible. Yet, in 1843, Adams was found sitting darkly at his desk, quoted as saying the government had become the most perfect despotism of the Christian world.
He introduced a suggestion from the state of Massachusetts to abolish the three-fifths clause; he also continued to fight the gag rule against discussing slavery, and came progressively closer to overturning it, until finally succeeding in December 1844.
According to Traub, Adams’ moralistic speeches against slavery did not move American politicians, but they did galvanize abolitionists in England, in turn supplying the moral strength to American abolitionists.
The issues of the day were the United States taking its place on the world stage, establishing trade relations, and the foreign policy to back those up. This includes slavery, with much of American industry reliant on the labor of enslaved people, and it includes tariffs, which were controversial on their own, and the initial prompt for “nullification”, the first stab as “states rights”. The Federal government’s size and its role in governing the country was up for as much debate as America’s place in the world.
John Quincy had very definite opinions on all of these things. When he was younger, he was sensitive to the politics of any debate; this is part of what made him a good statesman. As he grew older, however, he grew more assertive and vociferous about what he thought of as right and wrong – and nearly everything to him was either right or wrong.
John Quincy’s foreign policy carefully triangulated the conflict between the two superpowers of the time, England and France. Eventually he was able to bring Imperial Russia to trade with the US and act as a counterweight to European aggression in the New World. He supported neutrality with respect to the Bolivarian revolutions in South American, lest Europeans be tempted to war with the United States; this was an unpopular opinion, to not support fellow revolutionary nations, but probably wise at the time.
John Quincy firmly supported public works by the government. While there are many we take for granted today, the issue is still under debate. When James Monroe proposed building a great road through several states, to improve commerce, he faced considerable opposition; now we have the US Interstate highway system. If it were up to John Quincy, we would have had a national university and a Federal astronomical observatory
Could John Quincy Adams be elected today? Honestly I doubt it, but American politics have been swinging so widely the past few decades that anything is possible. John Quincy was not good at what we today call “retail politics”. He and his party were firmly in the “Big Government”camp, in support of improvements bought and paid for by Congress, not the States. He was of the establishment, though it’s important to remember he was not an old man when he attained the Presidency. Finally, let’s not forget that he won in a runoff decided by the House, by what very well may have been a “corrupt bargain” between himself and Speaker Henry Clay.
John Quincy Adams was an important President, often overlooked in American history. He is often overshadowed by his father, who is also often overlooked. However, despite his own Presidency being brief, he influenced several other Presidents, enacted a robust foreign policy, and nurtured the notion that slavery was wrong and should be abolished. They say the apple does not fall far from the tree. In his “militant spirit”, John Quincy proved to be heir to his father’s ideals, and his own man in acting on his ideals.