John Quincy Adams (39 page)

Most House members responded to John Quincy's petitions for abolition with such hostility that he feared for the very future of the nation. He had entered Congress convinced “that this federative Union was to last for ages,” but after his presentation, “I now disbelieve its duration for twenty years and doubt its continuance for five.”
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In his self-appointed role as representative of the entire nation, John Quincy was determined to fulfill his obligation to his huge constituency by attending every session of Congress—from its first day on December 5, 1831, to its last, in March 1833—regardless of the weather or his own health. He threw his mind and soul into his new work, studying rules and proceedings of previous Congresses and reviewing his law texts and the language of laws. His work brought new joy into his life—and misery into Louisa's. Unlike his presidency, John Quincy's role as a congressman did
not generate the need to entertain at home, thus leaving Louisa with so little to do that she took up fishing—and poetry writing. Even when John Quincy returned home, his mind, his heart, his soul remained in Congress. The only joy in her life came from caring for her two granddaughters.

As much as, and even more than, anything he had ever done in his life, John Quincy's work in Congress seemed to him the ultimate patriotic service he could perform for his country. “The forms and proceedings of the House,” he exulted, were “a very striking exemplification of the magnificent grandeur of this nation and the sublime principles upon which our government is founded.”

As it had throughout his life, tragedy forced its way into his sublime existence when he returned to his home on F Street one evening to find John II in a drunken stupor, still another inheritor of the disease that had plagued his maternal forbears for generations. And then, on March 12, John Quincy's beloved younger brother, Thomas Boylston, died of the family affliction, leaving John Quincy the only surviving son of an American Founding Father. Thomas's death left John Quincy the sole support for his brother's spendthrift wife and their dysfunctional children.
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Before long, John Quincy realized that Congress had not transduced his petitions for abolition into legislative proposals; although he kept presenting them, he knew he would need his committee's support to produce actual bills for enactment into laws. He soon mastered all the intricacies of American economics and manufacturing—especially cotton and woolen goods manufacturing—and discovered the intricate ties between manufacturing and a broad range of other issues, including foreign affairs, tariffs, and slavery. He now knew the way to broaden the scope of his committee proceedings, using the most obvious issue first: tariffs.

For a while, high tariffs on imported English cotton goods had protected small New England manufacturers against competition from British imports, but the tariffs that protected New England mills against British competition hurt southern cotton growers, who shipped more of their crop to the big British cotton mills than they did to New England. As high U.S. tariffs cut British textile sales to America, British mills bought less cotton from the American South and left planters with too many slaves to support for the amount of cotton they picked.

John Quincy proposed—and Congress approved—a compromise tariff bill that reduced duties on British goods with a high content of southern cotton, but the British mills resented the selective tariffs, saying they would not submit to a foreign government's dictating their sales policies. Responding to their British clients, southern planters demanded an end to the tariffs, and South Carolina's governor called a special Nullification Convention in November 1832, which declared federal tariff laws null and void in South Carolina, prohibited collection of federal tariffs in the state, and threatened South Carolina's secession from the Union if federal officials tried using force to collect tariffs. A week later, the South Carolina legislature authorized raising a military force and appropriated funds for arms. Civil war seemed imminent.

The state's declaration and mobilization shocked the nation and left even President Andrew Jackson, a champion of states' rights, aghast. “The nation will be preserved,” he declared angrily. “Perpetuity is stamped upon
the Constitution by the blood of our fathers. Nullification therefore means insurrection and war, and the other states have a right to put it down.”
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South Carolinians responded with huge demonstrations in Charleston. South Carolina senator Robert Hayne resigned from the Senate to run for governor of his state and lead the fight for nullification. Vice President Calhoun resigned his post and won election as Hayne's replacement in the Senate, although rumors swept through Charleston that he intended returning to become first president of a Southern Confederacy.

On December 5, 1832, Jackson overwhelmed John Quincy's former secretary of state, Henry Clay, in the presidential election, with New York's Martin Van Buren winning the vice presidency. Former vice president Calhoun from South Carolina won reelection to the Senate. Five days after his reelection, Jackson issued a presidential proclamation declaring “the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one state, incompatible with the existence of the Union” and warning of “dreadful consequence” for the “instigators” of the South Carolina Nullification Act. “Disunion . . . is treason,” he told the people of South Carolina. “On your unhappy heads will inevitably fall all raw evils of the conflict you force upon the government of your country.”
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The summer recess postponed further congressional debate over nullification until fall, and during that time, Harvard University voted to grant President Jackson an honorary degree. Although firmly on Jackson's side in the battle against nullification, John Quincy refused to attend the ceremonies honoring the President. “As myself an affectionate child of our Alma Mater,” he explained, “I would not be present to witness her disgrace in presenting her highest literary honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.”
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Although the summer began disagreeably, it ended in joy, when Charles Francis and his wife realized what had become one of John Quincy's cherished dreams—the birth of his first grandson. They named him John Quincy Adams II and ensured the preservation of the legendary Adams name in the United States for at least another generation. “There is
no passion more deeply seated in my bosom,” John Quincy exulted, “than the longing for posterity worthily to support my own and my father's name. . . . There is now one son of the next generation.”
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John Quincy returned to Congress refreshed and ready to battle nullification, even if it meant strengthening ties to President Jackson. On January 16, 1833, with civil war threatening, Jackson asked Congress to grant him authority to use military force if necessary to crush the nullifiers and enforce revenue- and tariff-collection laws. Congress complied, with John Quincy voting in favor. Jackson signed the Force Bill into law on March 2 and frightened South Carolina's legislature into rescinding its Nullification Act.

After John Quincy had supported the President by voting for the Force Bill, he leaped back across the political fence to oppose efforts by Jacksonian Democrats to mollify the South by eliminating tariffs.

“Our slaves,” explained Georgia's Democratic congressman Augustus Smith Clayton in arguing for tariff cuts, “are our machinery, and we have as good a right to profit by them as do the northern men to profit by the machinery they employ.”
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John Quincy listened to Clayton's appeal in disbelief, the phrase “our machinery” resounding in his head until he exploded in outrage.

“That machinery,” John Quincy roared in response, “sometimes exerts self-moving power! ”
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With Nat Turner's insurrection still fresh in the minds of many northern as well as southern congressmen, the House all but shouted John Quincy down, while another South Carolina member, William Drayton, cried out, “The member from Massachusetts has thrown a firebrand into the hall.”

“It is not I who have thrown the firebrand,” John Quincy shouted back. “The Nullification Ordinance is the firebrand.”
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In the end, northerners capitulated by voting for further tariff cuts, as did Henry Clay, who had originally based his American System on high tariffs but was now licking his wounds from the presidential race and seeking to court southern votes for the next election.

Before the presidential election of 1834, tragedy struck the Adams family again. In the autumn of that year, John II suffered a series of seizures—a consequence of alcoholism—and lapsed into a coma. By the time his father reached his bedside, he was close to death, and indeed, he died the next day, October 22, without recognizing his father. Besides his wife and two daughters, he left debts of $15,000 (which John Quincy paid). John Quincy and Louisa turned to each other for comfort, with John Quincy calling his wife “the dearest partner of my life.” Both doted on their granddaughters, with John Quincy stopping at his dead son's house each day on the way to the Capitol to help the older girl learn her arithmetic. John Quincy would support his granddaughters and their mother as long as he lived.

In December 1835, President Jackson sent Congress a curious and unexpected message: an Englishman, James Smithson, had left a bequest of about $500,000 to the United States “to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”
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Son of the first Duke of Northumberland, Smithson had, ironically, been the half-brother of General Hugh Lord Percy, the British commander at the Battle of Lexington in 1775. Although both houses of Congress licked their collective chops at the possibilities for personal profits, the House acceded to John Quincy's fierce interest in science and named him chairman of the committee to determine how to disburse the money.

Besieged by schools and colleges for shares of the money, John Quincy ruled out disbursement of any of the principal, reserving it entirely to the government and limiting spending to interest generated. He intended combining George Washington's vision of creating “institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge” with his own vision of national astronomical observatories—the “lighthouses in the sky” that his political opponents had ridiculed when he was President. He called “the link between earth and heaven . . . the means of acquiring knowledge . . . therefore the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind.”
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He was now prepared to fight his opponents in ways that had eluded him when he was President.

South Carolina senator John Calhoun, the former vice president, assailed John Quincy's proposal as federal intrusion in an area the Tenth Amendment reserved for the states. He pointed out correctly that the Constitutional Convention had twice rejected efforts to give the government powers to establish a national university. John Quincy countered, however, that there were no constitutional restrictions on establishing research institutions—nor did the framers restrict the national government from establishing any kind of institution in the District of Columbia. John Quincy won the day, with both houses deferring to his constitutional scholarship and approving his bill to establish the Smithsonian Institution as a public institution that remains in the hands of the American people to this day.

Despite President Jackson's proclamation that nullification was tantamount to treason, nullification fervor continued spreading in the South, and northerners responded with stepped-up demands for abolition. Peering into the future, John Quincy warned that “a dissolution of the Union for the cause of slavery would be followed by . . . a war between the two severed portions of the Union. It seems to me that its result must be the extirpation of slavery from this whole continent and desolating as this course of events . . . must be, so glorious would be its final issue, that, as God shall judge me, I dare not say that it is not to be desired.”
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As petitions demanding an end to slavery increased, he found abolitionists as prepared as slavery proponents to dissolve the Union to further their cause. For several years, therefore, beginning with the debate over the Missouri Compromise, he had argued that the Constitution failed to give Congress any powers to interfere with slavery in any state or territory in which it already existed. It could prevent its establishment in states and territories where it did not exist but could not abolish it where it already did exist. Abolitionists argued, however, that Congress could at least eliminate slavery in the District of Columbia, where it had powers to legislate and govern, unrestricted by the Constitution.

In the wake of three House resolutions in 1836, however, John Quincy completely changed his stance on abolition. The first two resolutions declared Congress without constitutional powers to interfere in any way with
slavery in any of the states and that it “ought not” do so in the District of Columbia. John Quincy voted for both, conceding that the Constitution offered no clear guidance on abolition in the District of Columbia. The third resolution, however, stepped beyond the abolition issue by clearly abridging free speech, and John Quincy all but exploded with rage as he listened: