Adams, John Quincy (1767–1848)

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ADAMS, JOHN QUINCY (1767–1848)

John Quincy Adams served the nation in its earliest days, contributing as diplomat, secretary of state, President, and congressman to the development of constitutional government in America. Throughout his career he sought to be a "man of the whole nation," an ambition that earned him enemies in his native New England and in the South during a period of political sectionalism. As congressman from Massachusetts between 1831 and 1848, he played a decisive role in the development of the whig theory of the United States Constitution. His speeches in this period inspired a whole generation of Americans to resist the expansion of slavery and to defend the Union.

Adams's political career began at the age of fifteen, when he went as private secretary to his father, john adams, on the diplomatic mission that negotiated the Treaty of Paris (1783). In 1801 he was elected United States senator. He angered Federalists by his support of thomas jefferson's acquisition of Louisiana and by his cooperation with the administration's policy of countering English and French attacks on American shipping by economic means. This policy resulted in the Embargo (1807) and gave rise to a secession movement in New England (culminating in the hartford convention of 1814–1815). Eighteen months before his term ended, the legislature elected a replacement and Adams resigned his Senate seat. He returned to private practice of the law, supporting the Yazoo claimants before the Supreme Court in fletcher v. peck (1809). In the same year, President james madison appointed him minister to Russia. As secretary of state under james monroe (1816–1824), Adams secured American territorial claims to the Pacific Northwest and defended andrew jackson's conduct in Florida during the Seminole Wars. Adams was the principal author of the monroe doctrine, defending the Latin American republics from fresh incursions by European imperialism.

In 1824 Adams was elected President by the House of Representatives, none of the major candidates (Adams, Jackson, William Crawford, and henry clay) having achieved a majority in the electoral college. The 1824 election created a political enmity between Adams and Jackson that seriously undermined Adams's presidency. Jackson had received a large plurality of popular votes, and the general's supporters portrayed Adams's election as an antidemocratic "corrupt bargain" between Adams and Clay, whom Adams appointed as secretary of state. In spite of Adams's strong disapproval of partisan politics, his administration gave rise to the second party system: Jacksonian Democrats versus Whigs.

In addition to the conflict between "plain republicans" and "aristocrats"—a popular division recalling the rhetoric of the Jeffersonians—another conflict arising from Adams's presidency was that between partisans of " broad construction " and of " strict construction " of the constitutional powers of the federal government. This division arose from Adams's call for a vigorous program of nationally funded internal improvements—roads, canals, harbors, naval facilities, etcetera—a program that Henry Clay named the american system. But at bottom the division resulted from fundamental disagreements about the character of the Union.

Defeated for reelection in 1828, Adams seemed at the end of his career. In 1829 he wrote the least prudent, if most interesting, of his many essays and pamphlets, an account of the events leading up to the convening of the Hartford Convention, implicating many of New England's most famous men in treason. In writing this long essay (published posthumously as Documents Relating to New England Federalism, 1801–1815) he developed a theory of the union that constituted the burden of his speeches and public writings until his death in 1848, and that became the political gospel of the new Republican party and its greatest leader, abraham lincoln.

According to Adams, the Constitution was not a compact between sovereign states but was the organic law of the American nation, given by the American people to themselves in the exercise of their inalienable right to consent to the form of government over them. The state governments derived their existence from the same act of consent that created the federal government. They did not exist before the federal government, therefore, and could not have created it themselves by compact. What is more, the state governments, like the federal government, depended decisively on the truth of those first principles of politics enunciated in the declaration of independence for their own legitimacy.

This Whig theory of the Constitution was politically provocative. By it slavery was a clear moral evil. Adams, like Lincoln after him, justified the compromise with slavery as necessary in the circumstances to the existence of a constitutional union in America, but Adams vehemently maintained the duty to prevent the spread of what was at best a necessary evil. While he advocated a scrupulous care for the legal rights of slavery where it was established, he insisted that the government of the United States must always speak as a free state in world affairs. He believed it to be a duty of the whole nation to set slavery, as Lincoln would later say, on the course of ultimate extinction.

This theory guided his words and deeds in the House of Representatives from 1831 until his death. For fourteen years he waged an almost single-handed war against the dominant Jacksonian Democratic majority in the House, a struggle focused on the gag rule. The gag rule was actually a series of standing rules adopted at every session of Congress from 1836 on. In its final form it read: "No petition, memorial, resolution, or other paper praying the abolition of slavery in the district of columbia or any State or Territory, or the slave trade between the States or Territories in which it now exists, shall be received by this House, or entertained in any way whatever."

The gag rule was part of a policy followed by the Democratic party in this period, on the advice of john c. calhoun, among others, never in the least thing to admit the authority of Congress over slavery. Adams argued that the gag was a patent abrogation of the first amendment's guarantee of freedom of petition. His speeches against the gag became a rallying point for the growing free-soil and abolition movements in the North, though Adams himself was cautious about endorsing the program of the radicals.

Through a long and varied career, Adams's statesmanship was guided by the twin principles of liberty and union. As a diplomat and architect of American foreign policy, Adams played a large part in the creation of a continental Republic. He believed that the westward expansion of the country was necessary if the United States was to minimize foreign interference in its domestic politics. Yet expansion brought the most powerful internal forces of disruption of the Union into play and prepared the way for the civil war.

George Forsyth
(1986)