John Quincy Adams (32 page)

Monroe's unopposed reelection, however, marked the end of the Federalist Party and left his own Republican Party in disarray, with leaders in each state casting greedy eyes on the President's chair if and when Monroe decided to vacate it. John Quincy warned the President that “as the first term . . . has hitherto been the period of the greatest national tranquility . . . it appears to me scarcely avoidable that the second term will be among the most stormy and violent. I told him that I thought the difficulties before him were thickening and becoming hourly more and more formidable.”
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In 1821, a rising tide of populist sentiment swept in from the West, where, in a monumental clash of generations, frontiersmen and settlers rejected property ownership as a qualification for voting and holding office in the new states they founded. A concept that dated back to eighteenth-century colonial rule, when land ownership depended on royal grants from Britain, property qualifications for voting were alien to young, free-spirited, nineteenth-century frontiersmen. Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and other western states, therefore, rejected the concept in writing their constitutions, providing instead for white manhood suffrage. Although New Jersey had expanded suffrage in 1807 and Maryland in 1810, Connecticut waited until 1818 to eliminate property requirements for voting, with Massachusetts following in 1820 and New York in 1821.

In addition to demands for greater democracy at home, western populists embraced the spread of democracy abroad, with Speaker Henry Clay asking Congress in 1818 to recognize the growing number of revolutionary governments in Spanish America. The House expressed its sympathy with the Latin Americans and pledged to support the President if he recognized any of the new regimes. Inspired by America's Revolutionary War, South America's wars of independence had broken out in 1810, but James Madison's administration, and Monroe himself during his first term in office, had treated the conflicts as civil wars and, in the tradition of George Washington, kept the United States neutral.

In March 1822, President Monroe was ready to assert America's voice as a world power and asked Congress to recognize Latin American republics that had declared independence from Spain. It was, he said, “manifest that all those provinces are not only in the full enjoyment of their independence, but . . . that there is not the most remote prospect of their being deprived of it.” The new governments, he asserted, “have a claim to recognition by other powers” and the United States “owe it to their station and character in the world, as well as to their essential interests,” to recognize them .
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Led by Speaker Henry Clay, Congress supported the President, and the United States recognized Colombia and Mexico as independent nations.
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Although Monroe believed Spain unable “to produce any change . . . in the present condition” of its former South American colonies, French king Louis XVIII led an alliance of absolute monarchs in pledging to send troops to his Bourbon cousin, Spanish king Ferdinand VII, to help him recapture his rich South American colonies. After decades of war against Napoléon to prevent French expansion, Britain threatened to resume her war with France rather than tolerate French military expeditions to South America—and asked the United States to join her.

When they learned of the European threats to suppress South American independence movements, former Presidents Jefferson and Madison intruded into the political picture by urging President Monroe to accept England's invitation, as did Secretary of War Calhoun and Speaker of the House Clay and his legion of congressional war hawks. John Quincy stood alone, arguing against any American ties to England or entangling alliances with any other foreign nation, for that matter. Like his father, he believed that even the slightest subservience to a foreign power represented a loss of independence—symbolically if not materially, but probably both. Still the champion of George Washington's policies, John Quincy called “the principle of neutrality in
all
foreign wars fundamental to the continuance of our liberties and of our Union.”

Proclaiming a policy the President would later claim as his own, John Quincy urged the President to disclaim any intention of “interference with the political affairs of Europe” so that the United States could hold the “expectation and hope that European powers will equally abstain from the attempt to spread their principles in the American hemisphere or to subjugate by force any part of these continents to their will.”
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No sooner had he spoken than his friend Russian czar Alexander I extended his nation's claims along the Pacific coast of North America to the Fifty-first Parallel in the middle of the Oregon Territory and closed the waters of the Bering Strait to commercial fishing by other nations. John Quincy urged the President to “contest the right of Russia to any territorial establishment on this continent” and to “assume . . . the principle
that the American continents are no longer subjects for any new European colonial establishments.”
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Just at that time, John Quincy learned that Britain intended claiming Graham Land, an island rich in seals that American hunters had discovered off the northern section of the Antarctic Peninsula. At John Quincy's urging, President Monroe ordered a U.S. Navy frigate to sail around Cape Horn to claim Graham Land before the British. With the Russian attempt to claim the Oregon coast, he ordered a second warship to join the one at Graham Land and sail to Oregon. Although Monroe once again flirted with an unconstitutional de facto declaration of war, the Russians relented and agreed to move the boundary of the lands they claimed three hundred miles to the north and to remove all maritime restrictions on the surrounding seas. In effect, President Monroe successfully extended the United States' sphere of influence beyond its western boundaries into the rich Pacific Ocean fisheries.

With American warships showing the flag in all parts of the world—from the Mediterranean coast of North Africa to the Pacific coast of North America—the President decided to explain America's intentions to the world. He asked cabinet members for written and oral suggestions for a policy statement that he would include in his annual message to Congress. “The ground I wish to take,” he told them, “is that of earnest remonstrance against the interference of the European powers by force with South America, but to disclaim all interference on our part with Europe, to make an American cause, and adhere inflexibly to that.”
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John Quincy submitted a proposal that “the American continents by the free and independent condition which they have assumed, and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subject for future colonization by any European power.”
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The President included it verbatim in his annual message, later called the Monroe Doctrine.

In his two-hour address—aimed at foreign leaders as well as Congress and the American people—Monroe embraced John Quincy's political philosophy and formally closed the Western Hemisphere to further colonization. He explained that America's political system differed substantially
from Europe's and that the United States would consider any European attempts to extend its system anywhere in the Western Hemisphere as a threat to the United States. From its origins, he said, the United States had sought nothing but peace—for its citizens to fish, hunt, and plow their fields unmolested. The United States had never interfered in Europe's internal affairs and would not do so—indeed, it wanted no part of Europe's incessant wars. To that end, he pledged not to interfere with Europe's existing colonies in the New World. But he declared it to be “a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved” that “the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” He warned that the United States would view “any interposition . . . by any European power . . . as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States”—in effect, a declaration of war.
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Monroe's new “doctrine” drew universal acclaim across America. Although much of the European press and some European leaders condemned it, few European powers had not learned the lessons of the British in the American Revolutionary War and, more recently, of the French in Russia. As the Duke of Wellington had warned, no nation on earth was powerful enough to sustain military supply lines long enough to challenge American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. With the Monroe Doctrine, most European leaders realized it would be far less costly to trade with Americans than to try to subjugate them.

“I went to the President's,” John Quincy described the hours following delivery of the Monroe Doctrine, “and found Gales, the half-editor of the
National Intelligencer,
there. He said the message was called a war message and spoke of newspapers from Europe announcing that an army of twelve thousand Spaniards was to embark immediately to subdue South America.”

John Quincy all but laughed in the half-editor's face, calling the reports absurd. “The same newspapers,” John Quincy scoffed, “announced . . . the disbanding of the Spanish army.”
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As the Monroe Doctrine quelled European ambitions for new conquests in the Americas, it also dispelled American fears of imminent attack by foreign powers and unleashed a surge of popular energy that strengthened the nation economically and militarily. State governments worked with builders and visionaries to cover the Atlantic states with networks of canals, free roads, and toll roads, or turnpikes, that generated revenues from user fees to pay the costs of maintenance and expansion. The Lancaster Pike tied Philadelphia to Gettysburg; the Boston Post Road connected Worcester to Springfield and Boston to Providence; and work began to extend the great Cumberland Road—then often called the National Road—from Baltimore to the Mississippi River. Speaker Henry Clay envisioned its eventual extension to the Pacific Ocean. In New York State, continuing construction on the great Erie Canal extended the link between Rome and Utica westward to Seneca Lake. Already tied to the Atlantic Ocean by the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers, the canal's western tip stood only 120 miles from Buffalo and the entrance to the Great Lakes. Plans for other roads, turnpikes, and canals were legion. One proposed canal was to stretch from Boston to Savannah, while a turnpike out of Washington was to reach New Orleans.

Economic expansion spurred advances in the arts and education, as well as industry and agriculture. The works of American writers—Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and others—replaced English literature as the most widely read in the United States. In addition to female academies, free schools open to all children sprouted in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Boston opened the nation's first “high school” in 1821, and Massachusetts passed a law requiring every town of five hundred families to establish a high school for their children. Institutions for adult education appeared as well, with 3,000 “lyceums” in fifteen states offering adult education and self-improvement courses.

The apparent end to threats from abroad and the boundless opportunities at home left the Monroe administration with few major projects to pursue in the time it had left in office, thus freeing cabinet members to pursue personal ambitions. In the naive assumption that his cabinet and
other government leaders would serve the nation as selflessly as he, Monroe emulated his presidential predecessors and announced early in his second term that he would limit himself to two terms in office. With the exception of John Quincy, cabinet members all but renounced their oaths of office and personal pledges to the President and launched a bitter struggle for political power that left the President impotent—and ended what a Boston newspaper had labeled the “Era of Good Feelings.”
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The frenetic activity of the Monroe years had left John Quincy exhausted and without the physical, let alone emotional, energy to seek the presidency himself. Although based in his native country after so many years overseas, his time as secretary of state had left him few moments to spend with his wife and family, and he was simply too tired and, in effect, lonely for family life to concern himself with the forthcoming elections. Not so the other cabinet members and presidential aspirants.

When budget restrictions forced a reduction in the number of army officers, Treasury Secretary Crawford pressed Monroe not to dismiss any Crawford confederates. When the President ignored the request, Crawford went to the White House in a rage, calling the President an “infernal scoundrel” and raising his cane as if to assault him. According to Navy Secretary Samuel L. Southard, who witnessed the confrontation, “Mr. Monroe seized the tongs and ordered him instantly to leave the room or he would chastise him, and he rang the bell for the servant.”
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Realizing how closely he had flirted with treason, Crawford left and never again set foot in the White House during Monroe's presidency.

In Florida, meanwhile, Andrew Jackson, whom President Monroe had appointed governor, embarrassed the administration by violating the outgoing Spanish governor's diplomatic immunity and arresting him for failing to surrender documents needed in a legal proceeding. The arrest caused a furor in the press, which assailed Jackson as a would-be dictator. Jackson resigned in a rage, went home to Tennessee, won election as senator, and returned to Washington to wreak havoc on his political enemies.