John Quincy Adams (18 page)

With the massive retreat of French troops, central Europe grew safe for travel, and after Louisa had recovered from still another miscarriage, she and John Quincy left Berlin in mid-July for a three-month vacation in the Silesian countryside, with stops in Toplitz and Dresden along the way. John Quincy sent his brother Thomas an astonishing forty-three pages of beautifully written letters, which Thomas forwarded to a Philadelphia literary weekly,
Port Folio,
for publication. They later appeared in London as an elegant 387-page book titled
Letters from Silesia
, by “His Excellency John Quincy Adams.” Translated into French, they also appeared in Paris to great acclaim. Although John Quincy's literary ambitions centered on poetry, he suddenly emerged as a renowned author of magnificent prose.

When the Adamses returned to Berlin, they learned to their astonishment that Napoléon had returned from Egypt and landed at Saint-Raphaël on the south coast of France near present-day Cannes, setting off joyful street demonstrations in Paris. He marched into that city a week later to the cheers of tens of thousands, and the French army, its spirits revived by his return, forced the Anglo-Russian forces to withdraw. A month later, Napoléon masterminded a coup d'état that left him in sole control of the French government. He retained Talleyrand as foreign minister, ordering him to negotiate an immediate peace with the United States and restore trade relations. On September 30, 1800, the French and American governments
signed a new treaty of peace and amity that respected American rights—and independence—under the Neutrality Proclamation that George Washington had issued seven years earlier.

New England Federalists, however, were furious, having already geared up their shipbuilding facilities to build the new navy. War had generated wealth for New Englanders for nearly a century of perennial Anglo-French conflicts. When Secretary of State Pickering, already at odds with the President over other issues, added his voice to the cry for war, President Adams dismissed him for insubordination, and Pickering returned to New England harboring a bitterness for John Adams that would affect the entire Adams family for years to come—especially John Quincy. John Adams named Virginia's John Marshall to replace Pickering as secretary of state.

With little left to do on the diplomatic front in Berlin, John Quincy Adams and Louisa spent much of the winter dining and dancing at royal dinners and balls. John Quincy used his spare moments to plunge into translations of German literature, including the epic poem
Oberon
, a medieval legend about a fairy king, and the fables of Christian Gellert.
^m
Free of any tension-producing diplomatic obligations, the Adamses thrived in the relaxed gaiety of the winter social season, and when Louisa found herself pregnant again, she actually blossomed for a change—eating heartily at holiday dinners and often dancing into the morning hours at royal balls. For the first time ever, she joined her husband on his vigorous, five-mile walks each day. As she approached term, the king banned all traffic in the street in front of the Adams home to ensure quiet, and the queen sent a servant to wait on Louisa.

Until Louisa's pregnancy, John Quincy had seldom attended religious services, but in the winter of 1801, he added daily Bible reading to his routine after the sudden death of a young army officer at an otherwise joyful,
turn-of-the-century New Year's party on December 31, 1799. The young man fell to the floor in mid-sentence, without a final cry or gasp.

John Quincy feared the young man's death was an omen of worse things to come, and a few days later he learned that his nation's revered leader, George Washington, had died two weeks earlier, on December 14, 1799. For once, it was Louisa who had to calm and comfort her husband when the news arrived.

In the days that followed, John Quincy discovered and studied the sermons of John Tillotson, archbishop of Canterbury from 1691 to 1694 and advocate of simpler, more comprehensible terms that eschewed obscure metaphors. A contemporary of John Locke, he called for reconciliation between Christian faiths and emphasized morality. John Quincy embraced Tillotson's thesis, reading and rereading the ten volumes of Tillotson's sermons for the rest of his life. As he began to embrace religion, however, he had no idea that American Federalists, infuriated by federal property taxes, had split ranks and allowed Thomas Jefferson's Democrat-Republicans to strip his father of the American presidency.

With his former secretary of state, Boston's Timothy Pickering, calling for secession, New England Federalists had turned against the President. “The five States of New-England,” Pickering ranted, “can have nothing to fear . . . [from] instituting a new . . . nation of New-England, and
leav[ing] the rest of the Continent to pursue their own imbecile and disjointed plans, until they have . . . acquired magnanimity and wisdom sufficient to join a confederation that may rescue them from destruction.”
²⁶

After counting the Electoral College votes in 1800, Vice President Thomas Jefferson and former New York senator Aaron Burr Jr. had each won seventy-three votes, while John Adams had garnered only sixty-five. Ironically, Adams would have easily won reelection if Hamilton and Pickering had not divided the Federalists, shunting sixty-four Federalist votes to Pinckney. It was a politically fatal defeat for the President and suicide for the Federalist Party, which would never again field a viable candidate for national leadership.

The tie vote in the Electoral College sent the decision to the House of Representatives, which elected Jefferson President on the thirty-sixth ballot, on February 17, and relegated Burr to political obscurity as vice president. In two of his last acts in office, President John Adams named Secretary of State John Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Court, and to prevent possible dismissal and humiliation of his son when the Republicans took control of the Department of State, he recalled John Quincy from Berlin, ending his seemingly unobstructed rise to national leadership.

When he learned of his father's defeat, John Quincy wrote to console him, adding, “I hope and confidently believe that you will be prepared to bear this event with calmness and composure, if not with indifference; that you will not suffer it to prey on your mind or affect your health.”

On March 4, Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office as America's third President at the first inauguration to be held in the new, permanent federal capital of Washington City, as it was called at first. In his inaugural address, the new President appealed for an end to the bitter conflict between Anglophiles and Francophiles and between Federalists and Republicans. “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle,” Jefferson asserted. “We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans; we are all federalists.”
²⁸

In the written transcript of his address that he sent to Congress, he purposely left the words “republicans” and “federalists” uncapitalized. The election campaign, however, had left John Adams too bitter to attend the inauguration, and he never heard Jefferson's speech. In any case, few Federalists believed Thomas Jefferson could halt the secessionist fever infecting the nation. The death of Washington in 1799 had left the young republic without a strong leader to unite vastly different, conflicting regional interests across the continent, and Congress had become a battleground for those interests instead of a center of collegial mediation, compromise, and unification.

On April 12, 1801, after four miscarriages, Louisa Adams gave birth to John Quincy's first child. “I have this day to offer my humble and devout thanks to almighty God for the birth of a son at half-past three o'clock in the afternoon,” he prayed as he wrote in his diary.
²⁹
Three weeks later, the infant was baptized George Washington Adams, and John Quincy prayed for “the favor of almighty God that he may live and never prove unworthy of [the name].”
³⁰
By then, John Quincy had received his letter of recall, and the following day he presented it to his friend King Frederick, then went to say farewell to Louisa's friend the queen. “In less than half an hour, all was over.”
³¹

On June 17, Louisa and John Quincy Adams sailed from Hamburg, Germany, with their infant son, and after an uneventful Atlantic crossing, they disembarked in Philadelphia, where brother Thomas Boylston Adams awaited with the shocking news that their middle brother, twenty-nine-year-old Charles, had died of alcoholism. Several days later, Louisa and
John Quincy separated for the first time since their marriage, with John traveling northward for a reunion with his parents and relatives, while Louisa took the baby to Washington, where her parents had settled after fleeing London. All but penniless when they arrived, they had turned for help to their son-in-law's family, and John Adams had not only loaned them money but appointed Joshua Johnson superintendent of the Treasury Stamp Office, drawing enormous political flak for his generosity. By the time Louisa arrived, however, her father had died, and the rest of the family was living in the home of one of her married sisters.

After a joyful reunion with his family, John Quincy suddenly found himself without prospects for a job in the public sector. Republicans controlled government, and his mother and father could only suggest his “applying yourself solely to your own private affairs” by reestablishing a law practice.
³²

John Quincy bought a house in Boston, then traveled to Washington for the first time to escort Louisa and baby George back to Massachusetts. While in the capital, he dined with Thomas Jefferson, his friend from his adolescence in Paris and now third President of the United States. When he took office, Jefferson promptly fired most of his predecessor's appointees, including Joshua Johnson. Jefferson apologized, saying he had not known that Johnson was John Quincy's father-in-law.

After meeting with the President, John Quincy took Louisa to Mount Vernon to visit Martha Washington and show her the baby boy who had joined legions of newborn American boys bearing her husband's name.

The Adamses arrived in Massachusetts in late November in time for Louisa's formal induction into the huge Adams clan at her first Thanksgiving in America. After settling in their home in Boston, John Quincy set up his embryonic law practice and soon found it as boring as he had on his first try a decade earlier. Boston, however, reeked of politics, and the scent quickly lured him from his office—to the firehouse, for example, to become a volunteer fireman and to the influential congregation of the Old Brick Meeting House, where he purchased a pew. He also joined organizations that generated speaking opportunities before audiences of prominent Bostonians.

In April 1802, he won election to the state senate on the Federalist ticket and started two years of what he called “the novitiate of my legislative labors.” He spent most of his time tilting at political windmills—as he would the rest of his life. In one sortie, he tried unsuccessfully to strip the legislature of its control over the judiciary; in another he tried just as unsuccessfully to block legislators from using public funds to underwrite a new bank “whose shares were reserved to . . . members of the legislature.”
³³
About his futile political battles, he wrote,

Because Federalists often shared the same beds of corruption with opposition Republicans, they soon found John Quincy's campaigns against corruption as much a threat to their own political health as it was for their political foes. “A politician in this country must be a man of a party,” he lamented. “I would fain be the man of my whole country.” Then, with a malicious grin, he added, “I have strong temptation and have great provocation to plunge into political controversy.”
³⁵

At the time, each state legislature elected two of its own members to the U.S. Senate. To remove John Quincy from its midst without alienating powerful Adams family supporters in Boston, the Massachusetts legislature pretended to honor John Quincy by electing him to the U.S. Senate and sending him off to Washington in the hope that it would not hear from him again for at least six years. John Quincy, however, was about to shock the Massachusetts legislature and the nation's entire political establishment with what became a courageous, lifelong crusade against injustice.