Monroe was at the window now, looking out over the darkened city. Not that he could actually see it. With the lamp in the corner shining against the windowpane, he could see only his own reflection.
Fortunately, it was always possible to ask about women. “How is Mrs. Monroe doing, sir?”
“Not well, as you might imagine,” the president replied softly. “Her health has not been good for some time, as you know. This…”
He drew in a long deep breath. “This was as bad as anything that could have happened. Fortunately, Eliza is with her, and bearing up well.”
Adams nodded. As was true of most people, he didn’t much care for the president’s oldest daughter—only daughter, now—but she was certainly a woman of strong character.
“And Mr. Houston?”
Monroe took another long deep breath. “I’m more concerned about Sam, immediately.”
“Is he…”
Monroe shook his head. “No, John. He isn’t drunk. I don’t believe he’s done so much as glance at a bottle of whiskey. He’s spent most of the past day with his son, trying to explain to a four-year-old that he’ll never see his mother again.”
There might have been a slight catch to Monroe’s voice, right there at the end. A very subtle thing, though, if it had been there at all.
Adams frowned. “Then…What’s the nature of your concern, if I might ask?”
Monroe’s head turned, half facing Adams. “Never forget that Sam Houston is Scots-Irish, John. Perhaps the most warmhearted and good-natured Scots-Irishman who ever lived, true. But he’s still of that stock. Which is one that is given to rage, and dark furies, and forgives very little—and that slowly if at all.”
“Ah. You think he’ll take out after the murderer?” A worse possibility occurred to Adams. Andrew Jackson wouldn’t be the only man who’d think to lash out at a political opponent as detested as Henry Clay.
Monroe might have smiled slightly, then. If so, the smile came and went almost instantly.
“No, John. Don’t underestimate my son-in-law. I’ve come to know him quite well, these past years. He’s a man who thinks…very large thoughts. No, he’ll not seek his revenge on the man who murdered his wife. Should he happen to encounter him, of course, he’d certainly kill him. But he’ll let the law handle it, otherwise.”
He was silent for a moment: “But I’m much afraid, in the mood he’s in, he will seek revenge on the
nation
he holds responsible for Maria Hester’s death in the first place.”
Adams’s eyes widened. “But how…Ah.”
That, too, suddenly brought many things into focus. “He’s right, actually, Mr. President. In a way, at least.”
Monroe took yet another one of those long slow breaths. “Yes, I know he is.” For the first time, a genuine sadness entered his voice. “He most certainly is. Only a nation—a republic, to make it worse—that was mad enough to place slavery at its foundation could produce such a monster as Andrew Clark. And the madness is growing, John, year by year. Fueled by greed: the greed glowing hotter as more and more cant and hypocrisy is piled upon it, the flames then fanned by men like John Calhoun. With, now, even men like Henry Clay aiding and abetting the madness, for no purpose more sublime than personal ambition.”
Another long slow breath. Then, quietly, sadly: “I have often wondered if my mentor and friend Thomas Jefferson was right when he foresaw a terrible vengeance by a just God. Now I know he was. I saw the proof of it yesterday, in my daughter’s bloody corpse.”
There might have been a slight tremor in the last few words. Perhaps not. Monroe’s stoicism was truly exceptional.
“And yet…” The president shrugged. “And yet it continues, since very few men—and I am not included among them—have the courage to stand squarely against it. And, again, for no better reason than greed.” His lips twisted a bit. “Well, perhaps that’s too harsh. Economic and financial strain, more often—but is that really any better than naked greed?”
He’d had his hands clasped behind his back. Now he brought them to the fore and looked down upon them. “I can see my daughter’s blood on my own hands if I look closely enough. I am in debt, as I’m sure you know. Most Southern gentlemen are, especially if they’ve spent as many years in public service as I have.”
Adams had known that of Monroe’s personal situation, although he didn’t know any of the details. Public office was not very remunerative in the American republic, even in high posts, and many of the expenses had to be borne by the officeholder out of his own purse. Unless a man was an outright thief—which Monroe himself was certainly not, though some of the men who’d risen to prominence with him might be so accused—he’d soon enough find his personal finances badly strained.
Adams himself suffered from the problem, despite the frugality of his Puritan New England upbringing. Almost no Southern slave-owning gentleman ever managed to get out from under a small mountain of debt, even if he devoted himself entirely to his plantation. The manner of the Southerners’ lives, their habits, their customs—not to mention the vagaries of any agriculture, and their dependence on English financiers and brokers—made it effectively impossible.
A few managed. George Washington had gotten completely out of debt and had turned away from plantation agriculture as the source of his sustenance, to make sure that he’d remain debtless. So, he was one of the very few slave-owners who’d freed all his slaves in his will. A few others had done so, here and there. At least one of them had freed all his slaves and then moved to Ohio so he could get away from slavery altogether.
But such were a rarity. Most Southern gentlemen were in debt from the time they reached their maturity to the day they were lowered into their graves—and the debts were then inherited by their offspring. Which meant that the same profligate, wasteful, slave-based plantation economy that had placed them in lifelong debt to begin with would continue, generation after generation. So long as a man retained his plantation and his slaves, he could, at the very least, find a creditor willing to lend him more money.
“So,” Monroe continued, “I shall no more be able to free my own slaves upon retiring from this office than Thomas was before me. Once you set Mammon upon your shoulders, ridding yourself of the demon becomes impossible. Unless you’re prepared to become a pauper, at least, which few men are. Certainly I am not one of them.”
There was more of fatalism in Monroe’s tone than Adams had ever detected before. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given that the man was coming to the end of many decades of a life given over to the service of the republic. In four months, James Monroe would become a private citizen and, now at the age of sixty-five, would almost certainly remain one for the rest of his life. Whatever he could do, he had done. Whatever he had failed to do, he could not do now. Whatever he had harmed, he could no longer repair.
None of which was true of John Quincy Adams himself.
And so, now, it was time. As difficult as the task might be for a man like Adams. But he would not shirk his duty.
“Do you think I would make a good president?” he asked abruptly. Then, raising his hand sharply: “Please, James. I know it’s an uncivil question. But I really need your opinion. I can’t think of any man who’d know better. Certainly not one who no longer has any personal stake in the issue.”
Monroe turned from the window to face Adams squarely. His hands, as if by automatic reflex, clasped behind his back again.
“Yes, I understand.” He thought for a moment. Not, obviously, to ponder the question, but simply pondering the right words for an answer.
“You’d not be a bad one, John. In some respects—foreign affairs, for a certainty—an excellent one. But, overall…Let me put it this way. I do not think you’d make the president that the republic needs in this time, this place in our history. You’re too much the intellectual, too much the executive, too much the manager.”
Adams grimaced ruefully. “I’m certainly not much of a politician.”
“No, you’re not. Although—” Monroe smiled for the first time since entering the room. “I do recommend you spare yourself your usual Puritanical self-condemnation, John. Consider, rather, that your many other fine qualities—superb ones, to speak frankly—have allowed you to reach a position of influence in our nation that precious few politicians have ever achieved, regardless of their skill. That is hardly something to sneer at.”
Adams issued a soft grunt. As it happened, he’d been thinking much the same thoughts this past hour. The sole consolation for what was coming.
“But that’s not even the point,” Monroe continued. “What the republic needs now is not another politician, either. Henry Clay is the most accomplished and talented politician in the nation. But—being as frank and open as I can—I’d far rather see you sitting in that chair for the next four or eight years than see Clay sitting there.”
Monroe looked aside for a moment, now studying the whale-oil lamp sitting on a small table in the corner of the office. There was nothing remarkable about the lamp itself except for being finer than most, with a decorative glass base and an attractive pear-shaped font. It seemed more as if he were simply trying to extract the light from it.
“You would make a fine president, John, if we lived in a time when the nation simply needed to be steered a course through the inevitable fog of public affairs. So would Henry Clay, being fair to the man. He’s not a brute, after all. A very fine man, in a number of ways, and many of his views are ones I share myself. The problem is simply that he can’t—never could—control his naked ambition. But if we lived in different times, his talents would probably make up for it, once that ambition was satisfied. But we don’t live in such a time. I had hopes—delusions, perhaps—that we did, when I came into this office. But I know now, eight years later, that we are entering turbulent waters, not simply foggy ones. And the turbulence will get worse before it is all over. Much worse, I fear.”
Adams nodded. Being a rather accomplished poet, he’d have used less pedestrian metaphors himself. But perhaps that lay at the heart of the matter. Monroe was an excellent politician, and Adams was not. If the president’s imagery was mundane, so was the nature of politics, in the end. Prosaic as it might be, the language was apt.
“Jackson, then,” he stated.
Monroe turned back to look at him. “You’ve read Jackson’s speech of yesterday by now, I’m sure.”
It was not a question. The chance that John Quincy Adams wouldn’t have, within a day, read—no, studied—a major speech by a major political figure was so small as to be laughable.
In fact, Adams did laugh. Once, softly. “Oh, yes. Of course.”
“And your opinion?” The president jerked his head. “Leaving aside that perhaps grotesque coda.”
Adams scowled. “Grotesque, indeed.”
But he forced himself away from that comfort. It was time for the heart of the truth, and that alone.
“It was a magnificent speech, Mr. President. In the main. But what else really matters now?”
“Nothing,” Monroe stated flatly.
“Yes. Truly magnificent. In fact…” It was Adams’s turn to take a slow, deep breath. “I shall not be surprised—not that I’ll live long enough to know—if posterity records it as the most important speech given in the United States in this entire decade.”
Monroe looked away again, pursing his lips. “I hadn’t thought of it, in those terms. But you could well be right.”
He turned his head back, his expression suddenly very stern. “Enough, John. It’s time for you to give me your opinion. Simply to say it out loud, if nothing else.”
Adams nodded and levered himself out of the chair. There was no reason to stay in it any longer.
“What I believe, Mr. President, is that we are entering Jackson’s time. For good or ill—or both, most likely. Truth be told, I’ve had that sense for some years now. Resenting it deeply, to be honest, but still sensing that it was probably true. Now I see it cannot be avoided at all. The difference the speech makes is very simple. On the eve of that time, the man who is best suited to lead the nation through has revealed himself to be, in every important particular, a man of deep and abiding principle. Even when those principles bring him to a distasteful conclusion, and one that requires him to stand against many—perhaps most—of his own followers.”
He took one of those slow deep breaths that seemed, that night, to be a requirement for occupying the office. “That being the case, for me to continue to oppose his entry into this very chamber, would be—in the end, when all is said and done—no more sublime a deed than whatever Henry Clay is plotting tonight.” Harshly: “Ambition, nothing more.”
Monroe cocked his head a little. “That’s very well said, John. And let me take this moment to tell you that you are a man I much respect and admire.”
Adams jerked a little nod of the head. “Thank you, sir.”
“Will you allow me to put it in my own terms?” Monroe issued his second smile of the evening. Like the first, it was a thin and fleeting thing, with more than a trace of sadness in it.
“Yes, of course.”
“I’ve had years—decades—to ponder the matter. The last eight of them, as the nation’s chief executive. In the end, just as our Roman forebears knew, republics stand or fall on virtue. Simply that, nothing else. Policies might be wrong, but policies can be corrected. Let virtue fail, the republic fails. Yes, it’s Jackson time, for good or ill—so let Jackson take his rightful place. Help him or oppose him on any particular issue or question, as you will. But I can foresee no worse disaster than if, by clashing, the two principal men of virtue in today’s American republic allow another man to slide by them and take this office. I disagree with many of Jackson’s opinions and views, as you know. But I can live with Jackson. The republic can live with Jackson. Right, wrong, indifferent, or just plain mad, Jackson always has virtue. Henry Clay has none at all.”
Adams jerked another little nod. Then, smiled. “You understand, Mr. President, that after Senator Jackson’s speech yesterday, it is very likely that Henry Clay will slide by us anyway.”
Monroe shook his head firmly. “No, John. He won’t
slide
by you. He’ll win enough votes, and thus, by the rules established by our Constitution, come to occupy this office. But the Constitution does not embody the nation’s virtue, simply its political principles. So long as you and Jackson stand against him—clearly, sharply—then the nation will not be confused, except momentarily.”