John Quincy Adams Frontpage
American President Frontpage
John Quincy Adams
Reared for public service, John Quincy Adams became one of the nation's preeminent secretaries of state, but he proved to be the wrong man for the presidency. Aloof, stiff-necked, and ferociously independent, he failed to develop the support he needed in Washington, even among his own party. Faced throughout his term with organized opposition from the Democrats -- who were committed to limiting Adams to a single term and replacing him with Andrew Jackson -- Adams refused to forge the political alliances necessary to push his ideas into policy. His father, President John Adams, had also ignored the political side of the office, and he served only one term. History repeated itself with his son: John Quincy Adams lost his reelection bid to Jackson in 1828.
John Quincy Adams was born on July 11, 1767, the son of a father who served in the Continental Congress and helped draft the Declaration of Independence. When the boy was ten, John Adams was posted to Europe as a special envoy of the Revolutionary American government, and John Quincy accompanied him.
Worldly Upbringing
For the boy, it was an incredible introduction to the courts of Europe and the practice of diplomacy. For seven and a half years, John Quincy lived in Paris, Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, and London. He was a student at the University of Leiden for about a year when, because of his excellence in French, he was asked to serve as secretary and translator for Francis Dana, posted as emissary to St. Petersburg from 1781 to 1783. Young Adams returned to Paris to serve as secretary to his father through the negotiation of peace ending the American Revolutionary War and, in 1785, returned home to complete his education at Harvard College. He graduated two years later.
Admitted to the bar in 1790, Adams practiced law in Boston -- with surprisingly little success, considering that his father was vice president of the United States. In 1794, President Washington appointed him minister to the Netherlands, where he served with distinction. He also reencountered the woman he would marry, Louisa Catherine Johnson, the daughter of an American merchant living abroad. Adams had first met her in France when he was twelve. For months, Adams visited her family nightly, always leaving when the daughters sat down at the piano to play and sing -- he hated the sound of the female voice in song. Despite his taste in music and the reservations of his father, the President, who did not think his son should have a foreign-born wife, the two were married in 1797.
Political Trials and Tribulations
After an assignment as the minister to Prussia, Adams returned home and won election to the Massachusetts legislature. In 1803, the legislature appointed him to the United States Senate -- Senators were not chosen by popular vote until 1913. As a senator, he supported Thomas Jefferson in the Louisiana Purchase and was the only Federalist in either house to do so. In 1808, the Federalist-dominated Massachusetts legislature repaid his independence by declining to return him to the Senate. He then switched his allegiance to the Republican Party.
Adams's loss of his Senate seat launched the first great phase of his career. President James Madison named him the first U.S. minister to Russia, after which he was assigned to head the five-person delegation empowered to negotiate a peace agreement ending the War of 1812. The treaty, universally seen as a victory for the young American nation, was signed on December 24, 1814, and Adams was posted to the English court for two years.
With the election of James Monroe to the presidency, Adams came home to become secretary of state. He played a major role in formulating the Monroe Doctrine, which warned European nations not to meddle in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. During his eight years as secretary of state, he built a powerful and efficient American diplomatic service.
Bitter Fight for the White House
Four men campaigned for the presidency in 1824: former Secretary of War William H. Crawford of Georgia, House Speaker Henry Clay of Kentucky, Tennessee's General Andrew Jackson, and John Quincy Adams. Crawford won the Republican congressional caucus nomination. This was a landmark election, the first in which popular vote actually mattered. Sixteen states had moved to choose presidential electors by popular vote while six still left the choice up to the state legislature. After a fierce campaign, Jackson took a plurality in the popular vote, followed, in order, by Adams, Clay, and Crawford. In the electoral college, however, Jackson had thirty-two votes fewer than he needed to prevail. Acting under the Twelfth Amendment, the House of Representatives met to select the President. Speaker of the House Clay threw his support behind Adams and gave him the election by a single vote. Soon thereafter, Adams named Clay secretary of state. It was a bad beginning. Jackson resigned from the Senate and vowed to unseat Adams in 1828.
Adams believed strongly that it was constitutional and appropriate for the federal government to sponsor broad programs to improve American society and prosperity. He backed Henry Clay's proposed "American System," envisioning a national marketplace in which North and South, town and country were tied together by trade and exchange. To realize this vision, Adams proposed to Congress an ambitious program involving the construction of roads, canals, educational institutions, and other initiatives. Lacking congressional allies, Adams was unable to maneuver most of these programs into law. Congress also blocked many of his foreign initiatives. His support of the so-called Abominable Tariff of 1828, which protected American interests but caused higher prices, cost him popularity among the voters.
By 1828, Andrew Jackson had been campaigning for three years. He characterized Adams's election as a "corrupt bargain" typical of the elitist eastern "gamesters," such as Adams and Clay. Following a campaign marred by vicious personal attacks -- Jackson's wife was called an adulteress) -- Jackson won in a landslide.
Post-White House Career
After his defeat, John Quincy Adams ran for Congress from his home district. He accepted the nomination on two conditions: that he would never solicit their votes and that he would follow his conscience at all times. He served nine consecutive terms in the House of Representatives, earning the nickname "Old Man Eloquent" because of his extraordinary speeches in opposition to slavery. Historically, Adams has won more acclaim for this long congressional career than for his earlier presidency. He suffered a stroke on the floor of the House on February 21, 1848, and died two days later.
John Quincy Adams was born on July 11, 1767, in the village of Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts, located a few miles from Boston. There the young John Quincy Adams lived the first nine years of his life learning mathematics, languages, and the classics from a doting father and affectionate mother. In his ninth year, however, Adams's life abruptly changed: he became a child of the American Revolution. His father, John Adams -- who would become the second President of the United States (1797-1801) -- helped draft the Declaration of Independence and served with Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, and George Washington as a leader of the First Continental Congress.
In the first year of war, young John Quincy Adams feared for the life of his father and worried that his family might be taken hostage by the British. Indeed, when John Adams signed his name to the Declaration of Independence, he had committed an act of treason against England, an offense punishable by death. For young John Quincy, his tenth year was actually the beginning of his manhood, and he recalled later in life feeling responsible -- as the eldest son -- for protecting his mother while his father attended to the business of revolution.
Grooming for the World Stage
From ages ten to eighteen, Adams experienced an incredible European adventure that prepared him for his later career in the foreign service of his country. Shortly after the beginning of the American Revolution, John Adams was posted to Europe as a special envoy, and his son accompanied him, living in Paris, the Netherlands, St. Petersburg, and England for the next seven years. The young Adams experienced his first formal schooling at the Passy Academy outside of Paris, where -- together with the grandsons of Benjamin Franklin -- he studied fencing, dance, music, and art. The father and son remained in France a little over a year and returned home for some three months. When John was reassigned to Amsterdam, he returned with his sons John Quincy and Charles Francis, arriving in Europe again in November 1779. While unhappy Charles was sent home after a year and a half, John Quincy attended classes at Leiden University and was formally enrolled there in 1781. This education was interrupted when Francis Dana, the newly appointed emissary to St. Petersburg, asked that young John Quincy, then fourteen years old, accompany him as translator and personal secretary. A year later, John Quincy traveled alone for five months by train from St. Petersburg to The Hague, the Dutch seat of government, to rejoin his father. When he returned to America in 1785, Adams enrolled in Harvard College as an advanced student, completing his studies in two years.
After college, John Quincy Adams studied law and passed the Massachusetts bar exam in the summer of 1790. While preparing for the law exam, he mastered shorthand and read everything in sight, from ancient history to popular literature. He especially enjoyed the humorous novel Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, which he deemed "one of the best novels in the language." Always in awe of Thomas Jefferson, a close friend of his father and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Adams considered Jefferson's Notes on Virginia a brilliant piece of writing.
As a young man, Adams stood apart from his age group. He took no part in the usual college pranks, nor did he think much of his teachers. But he did have an appreciative eye for young women. His first love, at age fourteen, was a French actress, whom he never met personally but dreamed about for years after seeing her stage performance. In 1785, while at Harvard, he had a casual romance with a young woman who lived in the same boarding house. He admired her dazzling smile and good figure. A few years later, at age twenty-two, John fell deeply in love with a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman whom he met in Newburyport, where he was studying law. The romance lasted for several months before John's mother, Abigail Adams, persuaded him to put off marriage until he could afford to support a wife. John agreed, and the two drifted apart. It was a parting that he always regretted, but it demonstrated a character trait in Adams that accompanied him throughout his life: he always took seriously the opinions of his parents.
From 1790 to 1794, Adams practiced law with little success in Boston. Not even the fact that his father was now vice president of the United States seemed to bring him many clients. When not practicing law, Adams wrote articles in support of the Washington administration and debated the political issues of the day with his fellow lawyers. Finally, in 1794, President George Washington, appreciative of the young Adams's support for his administration and aware of his fluency in the Dutch language, appointed him minister to the Netherlands. It was a good time for the young diplomat. He carefully managed the repayment of Dutch loans made to America during the American Revolution and sent official reports to Washington on the aftermath of the French Revolution.
A Moody Suitor
While traveling in France as a young boy age twelve, John met the four-year-old daughter of Joshua Johnson, an American merchant who had married an Englishwoman and was then living in Nantes, France. Years later, in 1797, when the child, Louisa Catherine Johnson, had grown into a pretty twenty-two-year-old woman, she again met Adams, only now he was a thirty-year-old diplomat and the son of the President of the United States. She was living in London, where her father served as the American consul. Adams had decided that it was time to find a wife for himself, and the three Johnson daughters seemed eminently suitable to him. He regularly visited the Johnson household, carefully looking over the girls before settling his attentions on Louisa, the middle sister. For months he visited the family nightly for dinner, always leaving when the girls began to sing after the evening meal -- Adams detested the sound of the female voice in song. Louisa found herself intrigued by her moody suitor. The two were married on July 26, 1797, over the initial objections of Adams's father, who did not think it wise for a future President to have a foreign-born wife.
Soon after their marriage, John was appointed as minister to Prussia, where he remained until his father lost his bid for a second term as President in 1800. Adams then returned to the United States and threw himself into local politics, winning election to the state senate and then appointment by the Massachusetts legislature to the U.S. Senate in 1803.
Career in Diplomacy
As the U.S. senator from Massachusetts, he shifted from his nominally Federalist position to support the Democratic-Republican administration of President Thomas Jefferson. He supported the Louisiana Purchase, the only member of his party in either house to do so, and the imposition of the Embargo Act of 1807 against foreign trade. In 1808, the Federalist-controlled state legislature was infuriated by Adams's pro-Jeffersonian conduct. Because in those days U.S. senators were appointed by the legislatures of each state, Massachusetts state lawmakers removed Adams from the Senate. He subsequently changed his party affiliation from Federalist to Republican.
Shortly after the loss of his Senate seat, President James Madison appointed Adams the first U.S. minister to Russia. Although Adams had previously expressed negative feelings about Russia as a nation of "slaves and princes," he soon developed a strong personal attachment to Czar Alexander, whom he admired for his willingness to stand up to Napoleon. While in Russia, Adams persuaded the Czar to allow American ships to trade in Russian ports, and when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, Adams's dispatches home provided Madison with detailed and perceptive accounts of the war.
In 1814, President Madison appointed Adams to head a five-person delegation to negotiate a peace agreement ending the War of 1812 with Great Britain. It was an auspicious group of Americans who met in Ghent, Belgium: Special Envoy John Quincy Adams, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, Senator James A. Bayard of Delaware, Speaker of the House Henry Clay, and the U.S. minister to Sweden, Jonathan Russell. The treaty negotiations took five months, resulting in an agreement to end the fighting and to restore all territory to the status quo at the beginning of the war. No mention was made of the issues that had started the war, such as the impressment of American seamen or the rights of neutral commerce. Still, the treaty was understood to be a significant victory for the United States: the young nation had engaged the greatest military power in the world without conceding anything in return for peace. The treaty was signed on December 24, 1814, two weeks prior to the great victory of U.S. forces over English Redcoats at the Battle of New Orleans -- word did not reach America of the treaty until mid-February, and it was ratified unanimously by the Senate on February 17.
President James Madison then posted Adams to England for two years. With the election of James Monroe, Adams accepted appointment as his secretary of state, serving from 1817 to 1825. During his long tenure as head of the State Department, he compiled an impressive record of diplomatic accomplishments. At the top of the list stands his role in formulating the Monroe Doctrine, which warned European nations not to meddle in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. Although Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had advised President Monroe to issue the proclamation in a joint statement with Great Britain, Adams -- understanding the diplomatic symbolism involved -- persuaded Monroe to make a unilateral and independent statement as a mark of U.S. sovereignty in the hemisphere.
Secretary of State Adams also successfully negotiated U.S. fishing rights off the Canadian coast, established the present U.S.-Canadian border from Minnesota to the Rockies, formulated a pragmatic policy for the recognition of newly independent Latin American nations, and achieved the transfer of Spanish Florida to the United States in the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819. This treaty also fixed the southwestern boundary of the United States at the Sabine River (in present-day Texas) and removed Spanish claims to Oregon. He also halted Russian claims to Oregon. Within the department, Adams appointed staff on the basis of merit rather than patronage, and upon his election as President in 1824, he left behind a highly efficient diplomatic service with clear accountability procedures and a system of regularized correspondence in place.
The Campaign and Election of 1824
Although John Quincy Adams should have been the heir apparent to the presidency as Monroe's secretary of state, 1824 was a political turning-point year in which none of the old rules applied. Four other men also wanted to be President, each with substantial regional backing. The politically ambitious and able William H. Crawford of Georgia enjoyed the support of party regulars in Congress -- especially New York politico Martin Van Buren -- as well as substantial footing in Georgia. Crawford had served as secretary of war and of the Treasury Department in the two previous administrations. His main drawback stemmed from his explosive temper, which had alienated a number of fellow political leaders including President Monroe. The two men had almost engaged in a fistfight in a cabinet meeting before Crawford gathered his wits enough to apologize. Thereafter, the two men seldom spoke to one another.
The most visible candidate was House Speaker Henry Clay. A leading War Hawk during the War of 1812, Clay had a Kentucky power base and oratorical support for his so-called American System of protective tariffs and federally sponsored internal improvements. His high-profiled advocacy of these issues made him a household name in much of America. Though he was well known, his clear identification with the war and nationalism weakened his roots in the South, which was beginning to fear supporting anyone for President who was not a slave owner or a supporter of states' rights.
Then there was General Andrew Jackson from Tennessee, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans. Jackson's reputation as an Indian fighter and western expansionist, owing to his military escapades in Spanish Florida (see Jackson biography, Life Before the Presidency section), gave him national standing above all other candidates. It also helped that Jackson could enter the race as an outsider, a defender of the Republic who had been willing to risk his life in service of his nation. In fact, his supporters talked about him as another George Washington. Few experienced politicians, however, expected Jackson to win if any of the opposing candidates could broker a cross-regional coalition that would unite either the West or the South with the New England or mid-Atlantic states.
Such a coalition was no easy task to achieve. After all, the 1824 election occurred in a day and age when a new political electorate composed of regionally focused voters had only recently been empowered with the franchise. John Quincy Adams's bid for the presidency was hampered not only by the ambitions of the above contenders but also by the new political climate, much of which worked against him. Since 1820, the old political caucus method by which the congressional leaders nominated presidential candidates had fallen into disrepute. This was principally because the old caucus system failed to connect with the wishes of the new voters, the tens of thousands of males who had been enfranchised by the removal of property ownership as a criterion for white male suffrage. This new climate looked to regional endorsements of candidates by state conventions or state assemblies, which meant that regional popularity, rather than congressional intrigue, would drive the nomination process.
Also, although Adams was a centrist politician of sorts -- a Jeffersonian-Federalist, to coin a new term -- many Americans still identified him as a New Englander and as the son of the old Federalist leader John Adams. Additionally, many staunch Democratic-Republicans blamed Adams and his supporters for having transformed the party of Jefferson into a disguised form of Federalism. Southerners, moreover, objected to Adams because of his moral opposition to slavery. They remembered his criticism of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as a proslavery conspiracy, and they suspiciously recalled Adams's efforts to include language opposed to the international slave trade in the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812.
Four "Democratic-Republican" Candidates
In the summer of 1824, an unoffical caucus of less than a third of the congressmen eligible to attend nominated Crawford for President. Supporters for Adams denounced the caucus bid for Crawford, and the Massachusetts legislature followed suit by nominating Adams as their favorite-son candidate. The Kentucky legislature did the same for Clay. Both nominations followed the pattern set by the Tennessee legislature, which had nominated Andrew Jackson two summers earlier in 1822. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina had thought about entering the race but then dropped out by announcing his bid for the vice presidency, a move that both Adams and Crawford endorsed. Because all four candidates were nominal Democratic-Republicans -- the Federalist Party had disintegrated by this point -- the election would be decided without reference to party affiliation.
As the campaign progressed, Jackson emerged as the man to beat. The size of his rallies in key swing states -- Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, New York, and New Jersey -- far surpassed or rivaled those for Clay and Adams. In this first election in American history in which the popular vote mattered -- because sixteen states chose presidential electors by popular vote in 1824 (six states still left the choice up to their state legislatures) -- Jackson's popularity foretold a new era in the making. When the final votes were tallied in those sixteen states, Jackson polled 153,544 popular votes (43.1 percent) to Adams's 108,740 (30.5 percent); Clay won 47,136 votes (13.2 percent), and Crawford won 46,618 (13.1 percent). The electoral college returns, however, gave Jackson only 99 votes, 32 less than he needed for a majority of the total votes cast. Adams won 84 electoral votes followed by 41 for Crawford and 37 for Clay.
Jackson was the only candidate to attract significant support beyond his regional base. He carried eleven states: Alabama, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Adams won all six of the New England states plus New York. Crawford and Clay carried only three states each -- Delaware, Georgia, and Virginia (for Crawford) and Kentucky, Missouri, and Ohio (for Clay).
Acting under the Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution, the House of Representatives met to select the President from among the top three candidates. Henry Clay, as the candidate with the fewest electoral votes, was eliminated from the deliberation. As Speaker of the House, Clay was still the most important player, however, in determining the outcome of the election. The election in the House took place in February 1825. With each state having one vote, as determined by the wishes of the majority of each state's congressional representatives, Adams emerged the winner with a one-vote margin of victory. Most of Clay's supporters, joined by several old Federalists, had switched their votes to Adams in enough states to give him the election. Soon after his inauguration as President, Adams appointed Henry Clay as his secretary of state.
A "Corrupt Bargain"?
Jackson could barely contain his fury at having lost the election in what he claimed was a "corrupt bargain" between Adams and Clay to overturn the will of the people. To most Jackson supporters, it looked as if congressional leaders had conspired to revive the caucus system, whereby Congress greatly influenced -- if not determined -- the selection of the President. Jackson laid the blame on Clay, telling anyone who would listen that the Speaker had approached him with the offer of a deal: Clay would support Jackson in return for Jackson's appointment of Clay as secretary of state. When Jackson refused, Clay purportedly made the deal with Adams instead. In Jackson's words, Clay had sold his influence in a "corrupt bargain."
Clay denied the charges, and while there certainly had been some behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Clay to push the vote to Adams, it most likely reflected Clay's genuine doubts about Jackson's qualifications for President. In assessing the odds of successfully forwarding his own political agenda, Clay questioned Jackson's commitment to the "American System" of internal improvements. On the other hand, Clay knew that Adams had supported it consistently over the years. Also, the loss of several states, due to the defection of congressmen to Adams, that Jackson had won in the popular vote -- Illinois, Maryland, and Louisiana -- suggests that more was involved in the outcome than the political maneuvering of one man. Enraged, Jackson resigned his seat in the Senate and vowed to win the presidency in 1828 as an outsider to Washington politics.
The Campaign and Election of 1828
Within months of Adams's inauguration in 1825, the Tennessee legislature nominated Jackson for President. Over the next three years, Jackson put together a highly disciplined, grassroots campaign with one intention in mind: to defeat John Quincy Adams in a rematch that would pit "the people" against Adams. Jackson issued so-called memorandums (a misuse of the word that endeared him to his growing western constituency), in which he outlined the erosion of representative power over the last decades at the hands of "gamesters" like Clay and Adams. In Jackson's mind, the "corrupt bargain" was just one of a number of such schemes. They included his betrayal by members of Monroe's cabinet in the raid into Florida. Furthermore, Jackson claimed that the Panic of 1819, which was a devastating economic collapse, had resulted from (1) conspiracy of disreputable creditors and the Bank of the United States, (2) the unpaid national debt, (3) the political swindlers in office from Madison through Adams -- schemers who would be turned out with a Jackson victory -- and (4) the backstairs dealings of "King Caucus" to select a President in defiance of popular opinion.
While Jackson issued his statements and traveled the nation rounding up support, his most brilliant lieutenant, Martin Van Buren of New York, assumed the duties of a modern campaign manager. Van Buren had switched allegiance from Crawford to Jackson shortly after the election of 1824. His efforts thereafter were focused on giving Jackson a victory in the popular vote. Van Buren's strategy was to portray Jackson as the head of a disciplined and issue-oriented party that was committed to states' rights and the limited-government ideology of the old Jeffersonian Republicans.
In the year before the 1828 election, Van Buren's organizational efforts began to create a new political organization that came to fruition in the 1830s. For the 1828 election, Van Buren focused on linking the opponents of Federalism in the North and South into a coalition that he envisioned as the heir to the old Jeffersonian-Republican Party. In his mind, victory for this new movement would protect slavery in the South, ensure the legitimacy of majority rule based upon direct voting for candidates by the electorate, and guarantee preservation of the Union, with states' rights as the fundamental basis of American liberty. When he won the support of Vice President John C. Calhoun and powerful Virginia political leaders, Van Buren effectively laid the basis for a party system that would endure until the Civil War. (Calhoun was moving away from his postwar ideology of nationalism to a states' rights conservatism that was more reflective of his region's fear of abolitionism, costly internal improvements, and high protective tariffs.)
And while Jackson and Van Buren organized, Adams diligently carried out the duties of the presidency, refusing to prepare himself or his supporters for the coming contest. Adams did not remove even his loudest opponents from appointive office. When the election campaign officially began, Adams's supporters adopted the name National Republicans in contrast to Democrats, trying thereby to identify themselves accurately with the link between old-style Federalism and a new nationalistic republicanism. Jacksonians, on the other hand, argued for a new revolutionary movement that rested on a firm faith in majoritarian democracy and states' rights -- ideas that were not always mutually compatible.
Personal Campaign Battles
Although issues clearly separated the candidates along lines more distinct than any since the election of 1800, the campaign itself was highly personal. Indeed, it was the first campaign in history to use election materials such as campaign buttons, slogans, posters, tokens, flasks, snuffboxes, medallions, thread boxes, matchboxes, mugs, and fabric images so extensively. Almost all of these campaign trinkets depicted some aspect of the candidate's popular image. For Jackson, his status as a war hero and frontiersman played far better in comparison to Adams's stiff-looking elder statesman stance.
Neither candidate personally campaigned in 1828, but their political followers organized rallies, parades, and demonstrations. In the popular press, the rhetorical attacks reached a level of cruelty and misrepresentation not seen since the election of 1796. Jackson was accused of multiple murders, of extreme personal violence, and of having lived in sin with his wife, Rachel. Adams, on the other hand, was attacked for his legalistic attitudes and reportedly for having procured young American virgins for the Russian czar as the primary achievement of his diplomatic career. Adams's critics referred to him as "His Excellency" while Jackson came under attack as an ill-mannered, barely civilized backwoods killer of Indians.
In a masterstroke of popular politics, the Jacksonians made good use of the general's nickname, Old Hickory. He had earned the name because he was reputed to be as tough as hickory wood. To publicize his image, Jackson supporters put hickory poles all over the country, distributed hickory toothpicks and canes, and served up barbecues fired by hickory chips.
The branding of Jackson's wife as an "American Jezebel" and convicted adulteress -- because she had married Jackson before her divorce had been finalized -- surprisingly backfired as an election strategy. It unleashed a backlash against Adams for humiliating a woman who had lived for forty years as the devoted wife of General Jackson, for grossly violating the general's privacy and honor, and for applying narrowly legalistic pronouncements in place of common sense. To countless Americans, Jackson's duels, brawls, executions, and unauthorized ventures represented the victory of what was right and good over the application of stiff-minded and narrowly construed principles. The attacks simply enhanced Jackson's image as an authentic American hero who had drawn upon his natural nobility and his powerful will (much like every frontiersman in the land) to prevail against unscrupulous political foes, educated elitists, the pride of the British army, and "heathen savages" -- often at the same time.
The campaign turned out twice the number of voters who had cast ballots in 1824 -- approximately 56 percent of the electorate. Jackson won the election in a landslide, which would not be matched until the twentieth century, and by a wide margin of 95 electoral votes. Adams carried New England (Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut), Delaware, New Jersey, most of Maryland, Rhode Island, and sixteen of New York's electoral votes -- nine states in all. Jackson carried the remaining fifteen states of the South, Northwest, mid-Atlantic, and West. Incumbent Vice President John C. Calhoun won 171 electoral votes to 83 for Richard Rush of Pennsylvania, Adams's running mate.
The "American System"
John Quincy Adams wholeheartedly supported the role of the federal government in the sponsorship of projects and institutions designed to improve the conditions of society. He had no constitutional doubts about the authority of the President and Congress to construct a system of internal improvements, ranging from roads and canals to harbors and rivers. In this, he supported the "American System" first proposed by Henry Clay while Clay was Speaker of the House. The general plan rested upon the notion of a self-sufficient, but regionally specialized, national economy. Both Adams and Clay believed that a factory-based northern economy would provide markets for southern cotton and western foodstuffs. In exchange, the South and West would purchase northern manufactured goods. Alexander Hamilton had proposed a similar idea in the 1790s, only to be blocked by southern opponents who believed that such a national economic network of interdependent parts would enhance the power of the federal government.
In his first annual message to Congress, Adams presented an ambitious program for the creation of a national market that included roads, canals, a national university, a national astronomical observatory, and other initiatives. Many congressmen, even his supporters, had trouble with his proposals. His critics challenged the arrogance of a President who had been narrowly elected by only one vote in the House. In their minds, Adams was not entitled to act as though he had received a national mandate for action. They mockingly criticized his observatories as Adams's "lighthouses of the skies." Others pointed out that the President's internal improvements would benefit specific parts of the nation over other parts and bring the federal government into regional affairs. Nevertheless, through the use of military engineers for survey and construction operations, public land grants, and governmental subscription to corporate stock issues, the administration achieved considerable progress in support of harbor improvement and road and canal development -- specifically the extension of the Cumberland Road into Ohio with surveys for its continuation west to St. Louis, the beginning of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the construction of the Delaware and Chesapeake Canal and of the Portland to Louisville Canal around the falls of the Ohio, the connection of the Great Lakes to the Ohio River system in Ohio and Indiana, and the enlargment and rebuilding of the Dismal Swamp Canal in North Carolina.
The Tariff of Abominations
Henry Clay's ardor in support of protective tariffs was well known, but there was considerable uncertainty regarding Adams's views. His New England constituency was divided between long-standing concern for promotion of foreign commerce and newly developing interest in protection of domestic industry. A further complication was the fact that administration supporters had lost control of Congress in the election of 1827. Martin Van Buren, a senator from New York, had supported William H. Crawford for the presidency in 1824, opposed Adams's election, and remained hostile to the administration throughout Adams's tenure. By 1828, Van Buren was a leader of the opposition and an ardent supporter of Andrew Jackson. Recognizing the divisions which marked the administration's position on the tariff, he led a campaign shaped to set high tariffs to protect mid-Atlantic and western agricultural interests -- levies on raw wool, flax, molasses, hemp, and distilled spirits.
The new rates were particularly restrictive of textile imports and damaging to a market of British manufacturers upon whom southern planters were dependent. One southern legislature after another denounced the tariff as unconstitutional, unjust, and oppressive. The Virginia legislature called it the "Tariff of Abominations." (See Jackson biography, Domestic Affairs section, for a more detailed discussion of this tariff, which required implementation after Adams's term of office had ended.) It prompted Vice President Calhoun to condemn the tariff and to draft the South Carolina Exposition, asserting the right of a state to nullify federal laws that were obviously harmful to state interests.
For a man who ranks among the most accomplished of America's diplomats, John Quincy Adams achieved little of consequence in foreign affairs as President. Part of the explanation for this poor record lies with the determined opposition of Adams's rivals in Congress to deny him any mark of success that might help him in the election of 1828. For example, when the new Latin American republics, which had formerly been Spanish colonies, convened a congress in Panama to promote cooperation in the Western Hemisphere, it was logical for them to ask for delegates from the American President who had authored the Monroe Doctrine. When Adams requested funding to send two delegates, southern congressmen strongly objected. The new Latin American nations had outlawed slavery, and southerners feared that the conference might call for a united stand in favor of emancipation everywhere in the hemisphere. Others did not like the idea of American ministers meeting with black and mixed-race foreigners on equal terms. Jacksonian supporters in Congress eagerly joined with southerners to withhold funding for the delegation until the convention had ended.
On the other hand, the very success of Adams as Monroe's secretary of state had resolved many of the issues in foreign affairs that might have engaged Adams as President. Disarmament of the Great Lakes had been established, fishing rights off of Canada had been restored, the U.S.-Canadian boundary had been defined, Florida was safely procured, and the U.S.-Spanish border west of the Mississippi was resolved in ways that gave America strong claim to the Pacific Coast in the Northwest. These were all issues that previously had brought the nation into open conflict with England. In essence, not much was left for the State Department to tackle in the mid-1820s, other than routine damage claims for wartime depredations and commercial treaties with Scandinavian countries and the new Latin American nations -- most of which were accomplished by Secretary of State Clay.
After his defeat by Jackson in 1828, Adams refused to attend the victor's inauguration, just as his father had boycotted Jefferson's in 1801. He wrote in his diary that, "The sun of my political life set in the deepest gloom." Filled with sadness for the nation, Adams stayed in Washington for a few months before returning to his hometown, Quincy, Massachusetts. When neighbors asked him to run for Congress from his Massachusetts district, the former President agreed under two conditions: he would never solicit their votes and he would follow his conscience at all times. His election (on the Anti-Masonic Party ticket, a new third party opposed to Jackson) was one of the greatest satisfactions in Adams's life.
Antislavery Congressional Career
Adams served nine post-presidential terms in Congress from 1830 to 1848, usually voting in the minority. He supported the rechartering of the Bank of the United States, opposed the annexation of Texas and the war with Mexico, and struggled for eight years to end the House's notorious "gag" rule to table without debate any petition critical of slavery. Adams attempted to read into the record at every opportunity the hundreds of antislavery petitions which abolitionists around the country sent him on a regular basis. The House finally relented and repealed the rule in 1844.
As one of the House's most articulate and forceful spokesmen opposed to slavery, Adams earned the nickname of "Old Man Eloquent." Whenever he rose to speak, especially in his twilight years, silence swept over the chamber as the congressmen turned their attention to the former President. In 1841, Adams argued successfully before the Supreme Court to win freedom for fifty-three slave mutineers aboard the Spanish ship Amistad. The Africans had mutinied against their Spanish captors on the high seas and were then captured by an American warship off Long Island. The court ruled that the mutineers were free men because international slave trade was illegal under British and U.S. law.
Keeping in character with Adams's devotion to education and the sciences, he championed the bequest of James Smithson of England, who willed $500,000 to the U.S. for the creation of an institution dedicated to knowledge -- later called the Smithsonian Institution. At the age of seventy-six, in 1843, Adams also traveled to Cincinnati to officiate at the laying of the cornerstone of the Cincinnati Observatory.
On February 21, 1848, a severe stroke hit John Quincy Adams just minutes after casting a loud "No!" vote against a motion to decorate certain Army officers serving in the Mexican War. It happened on the House floor in the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Two days later, he slipped into a coma moments after uttering these last words: "This is the end of earth. But I am content." On February 25, 1848, at the age of eighty, the former President died. For two days, mourners filed by his open casket in a House committee room. His body was buried next to his parents, John and Abigail Adams, beneath the Congregational church in Quincy. The man whom many historians consider the most learned person ever to have served as President left his 8,500-volume library and personal papers, as well as his home and lands, to his surviving son, Charles Francis Adams. He divided the remainder of his estate between his wife, daughter-in-law Mary Helen Adams (widow of his son John Adams II), granddaughter Mary Louisa Adams, and son.
During their years in the White House, President Adams and the First Lady seldom spent much time together. Except for breakfast and an occasional dinner, during which they both read papers and seldom talked, they often went for weeks without much communication. And by their second year in office, they began taking separate summer vacations. For John Quincy Adams, regularity in life was lifted to obsession. He wrote in his diary every day of the year from his twenty-ninth birthday until his death. As President, he rose precisely at five a.m. (4:15 in the summers), made his own fire, read his Bible, and then took a morning walk or a nude swim in the Potomac. His biographer, Paul C. Nagel, reports one notable instance when, while swimming, Adams and his man servant found an old boat tied at the bank. Adams suggested that they row across the river and swim back. Halfway across, the boat capsized and the men jumped overboard, losing their clothing. The servant donned soaked garments and returned to shore for help. Adams, unclad, sat on a rock to wait. Five hours passed before the servant came back. Afterward, Louisa scolded him, and Adams's physician advised less hazardous exercise; but the swimming continued, only somewhat moderated by John Quincy's developing interest in botanical research in the White House gardens.
Besides swimming, Adams enjoyed shooting billiards (he installed the first billiard table in the White House), reading, observing nature, domesticating wild plants, walking, horseback riding, the theater, and fine wines. He hosted wine samplings and prided himself on his ability to identify rare spirits.
Perhaps the most cultivated and educated man to serve as President up to that time, Adams was not especially religious. He formally joined the Unitarian branch of the Congregational Church once he became President, and he attended church every Sunday. But he doubted the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and the Bible as divine revelation. For him, Christ was a savior sent by a supreme being to preach peace on earth and the natural equality of all mankind.
Although no new states entered the Union between the admission of Missouri in 1821 and the admission of Arkansas in 1836, the four years of the Adams presidency witnessed an upsurge of voter participation in presidential elections. In 1824, some 365,000 popular votes were cast; in 1828, the number tripled, exceeding a million people. Although the nation's population had grown from 10.9 million people in 1824 to 12.2 million in 1828 -- a jump of not quite 12 percent -- the new electorate reflected much more than an increase in population.
Within the four year span, this dramatic surge in voter participation -- in 1824, one in thirty people voted, and in 1828, one in eleven voted -- accompanied the emergence of a new, more democratic definition of republican citizenship. Prior to the 1820s, the concept of citizenship was linked to property ownership, which granted political rights to men who headed households. This notion reinforced the patriarchal model that saw responsible citizens as fathers, husbands, and independent proprietors.
Between 1824 and 1828, almost all the remaining property qualifications for white males were eliminated, quadrupling the size of the eligible electorate. And all states except South Carolina adopted the system of direct election of presidential electors, thus making the presidency a truly popular office.
Sociopolitical Changes
Beginning in 1790 with Vermont, state after state moved away from the Founding Fathers' patriarchal republic toward mass democracy by eliminating property and tax qualifications for suffrage. These changes also reflected other shifts in the character of the social order: No longer did the average white American male show the same reverence for parental authority as in days past. The French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville, traveling through America in the 1830s, noted that paternal power was largely absent in the typical American family. He probably exaggerated the issue, but it is likely that he saw far less respect for authority in America than in Europe.
Other examples indicate the extent of the change away from the property-based patriarchy to a more democratic and wide-open society: Most states had abolished primogeniture laws, which passed property wholly from the father to the eldest son. The level of alcohol consumption per capita rose from three gallons in 1790 to five gallons by 1830. The number of pregnancies outside of marriage reached 30 percent in the 1820s, suggesting a significant decline in parental authority in the household. Literacy among adult white males had increased to nearly 100 percent in New England and to 70 to 80 percent among white males elsewhere in the mid-Atlantic states -- a move upward from 85 percent and 60 percent in 1790. An explosion of print material available to the reading public accompanied this jump in literacy (the number of newspapers had increased from 90 in 1790 to 370 in 1830). New democratic churches -- unencumbered by a trained clergy or a traditional authority structure -- swept over the land. The new Baptist and Methodist religious sects, which placed power in the hands of a lay clergy, numbered 5,200 churches, compared to 1,522 Congregational and Episcopal Churches in 1820. The dynamic transportation revolution associated with steamboats and the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 made Americans more geographically mobile than ever before.
Shifts in the Political Scene
These changes in the social order underlaid and contributed to the appearance of a new party system. Briefly told, with the emergence of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren on the political scene in the 1820s, a new way of viewing politics settled upon the nation. Thousands of Americans responded to Jackson's new republican order, one which was based less on the virtuous, property-owning citizen and more on the principle of majoritarian democracy. For him, the will of the people, as expressed directly with their ballots, would provide an unselfish and incorruptible political mandate. Jackson's chief lieutenant, Martin Van Buren, translated Jackson's concept of majoritarian democracy into a disciplined and well-organized national party machine. Van Buren's efforts succeeded in electing Jackson in 1828 and again in 1832. In the process, a new political party, the Democratic Party, emerged.
In essence, the new laws of suffrage, the shift from classical republicanism to majoritarian democracy, and the new party discipline drove the surge in voter participation. Once the National Republicans -- the party name adopted by John Quincy Adams in 1828 -- learned the lesson of party discipline as the anti-Jacksonian Whig Party in the 1830s, the percentage of the electorate voting jumped dramatically. Eighty percent of the nation's electorate voted in the presidential election of 1840.
Within this new party system, there was not room, however, for free African Americans, women, or Native Americans. Indeed, free property-owning blacks lost their suffrage rights by 1820 in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland, Tennessee, and North Carolina -- all states in which they had previously voted as propertied males. A similar story can be told for women. The rush to tear down the barriers to white male suffrage was accompanied by laws that disfranchised women in the few places where they had been allowed to vote prior to 1807 -- New Jersey being the prime example. By 1828, no state in the Union allowed women to vote. In other words, the move away from class distinctions for white male suffrage was accompanied by hardened sexual and racial boundaries that prevailed well into the twentieth century.
Although a great secretary of state and a man eminently qualified for executive office, John Quincy Adams was hopelessly weakened in his leadership potential as a result of the election of 1824. Most importantly, Adams is considered to have been a failure as a President principally because he was such a poor politician in a day and age when politics were beginning to really matter again. He spoke of trying to serve as a man above the "baneful weed of party strife" at the precise moment in history when America's "second party system" was emerging with nearly revolutionary force. Also, his idea of the federal government setting a national agenda, while a lofty and principled perspective, was the wrong message at the wrong time. As a great visionary, Adams was out of touch with political reality. And he seemed incapable or unwilling -- if one believes his wife -- of learning anything from defeat. He impressed people as a man more in step with the Federalist past than with the majoritarian attacks on elitism that were so powerfully expressed by Andrew Jackson. Adams's defeat in 1828 was one of the most devastating losses sustained by an incumbent in American history.
Fortunately for Adams, he had a public career both before and after his White House years. As a diplomat, most historians credit him with having set the essential marks of American foreign policy for the next century: freedom of the seas, a halt to further European colonization in the Western Hemisphere, a Manifest Destiny to expand across the continent, and isolationism from European affairs. They credit his formidable skills as an international diplomat with ushering in two generations of peace with Europe.
As the only President to serve in an elected office after his presidency (outside of Andrew Johnson's brief tenure), Adams is viewed as the embodiment of the partisan but highly principled politician who focused on antislavery as the means of challenging Jacksonian democracy. The same high-minded and rigidly uncompromising stance on moral issues that so weakened his effectiveness as a President served him well as a representative in Congress from 1830 to 1848. In taking up the battle against slavery, Adams greatly redeemed himself in the eyes of history for his failure as a President to shape or to reflect a national consensus.
