John Quincy Adams (20 page)

 

President Thomas Jefferson found Senator John Quincy Adams a valuable ally in consummating the Louisiana Purchase, but an implacable foe in efforts to pack the Supreme Court.
(LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

John Quincy was quite prepared for the attacks, writing in his diary that he had fully expected “the
danger
of adhering to my own principles.

Federalist Timothy Pickering, the other Massachusetts senator, responded to the Louisiana Purchase by stepping up efforts to unite New England states with New York—and perhaps Nova Scotia—in a Northern Confederacy that would secede from the Union under the aegis of the British Empire. “I gave the first warning to Mr. Jefferson,” John Quincy asserted, “to be upon his guard against the intrigues of the British government through the governor of Nova Scotia with the disaffected party in New England.”
¹⁴

John Quincy's father also learned of the Pickering conspiracy. “Mr. P[ickering],” John Adams wrote to his former political opponent Thomas Jefferson,

John Quincy compounded Federalist outrage by attending with Louisa President Jefferson's private family dinners at the presidential mansion—and then joining seventy congressional Republicans at a dinner the President hosted with his cabinet to celebrate the Louisiana Purchase. “Scarcely any of the Federalist members were there,” John Quincy noted. “The dinner was bad and the toasts too numerous.”
¹⁶

But just as Jefferson thought he had lured John Quincy into the Republican fold, the New Englander proved him wrong by voting with Federalists against giving the President power to tax the people of Louisiana and appoint territorial officials. John Quincy argued that both bills violated the Constitution by depriving the people of Louisiana of their right to self-determination, and he introduced three resolutions—“which produced a storm as violent as I expected”:

“After a debate of about three hours,” John Quincy shook his head sadly, “the resolutions were rejected.”
¹⁷

Despite his defeats on the Senate floor, John Quincy remained a consummate constitutional scholar and applied to become, and was sworn in as, an attorney and counselor in the U.S. Supreme Court. He made a point of spending an hour or two a day listening to court proceedings, and, a week after his swearing in, on February 16, 1804, it was his turn to stand and argue his first case—and lose.

Notwithstanding his status as a constitutional lawyer, John Quincy continued outraging both Republicans and Federalists at every turn. He even opposed an inoffensive resolution for senators to wear black crepe arm bands for a month to memorialize the deaths of three patriots, including his father's cousin Samuel Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

“I asked for the constitutional authority of the Senate to enjoin upon its members this act,” Adams wrote in his diary. Told it was not binding upon its members, “I then objected against it as improper in itself, tending to unsuitable discussions of character and to an employment of the Senate's time in debates altogether foreign to the subjects which properly belong to them. This led to a debate of three hours.” Adams lost not only the debate but the goodwill of most of his Senate colleagues, who now viewed him as an unconscionable turncoat and chronic malcontent.

“The agency of party is so organized in our country,” he groaned, “that the undertaking to pursue a course altogether independent of it as a public man is perhaps impracticable. However this may be, I do not regret having made the attempt and, whether in public or private life, it is my unalterable determination to abide by the principles which have always been my guides.
¹⁸

John Quincy even aroused the ire of his chess mate, Secretary of State Madison, by opposing a new treaty with Britain fixing the boundary between Canada and the United States from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean. Left open by the 1783 treaty of peace ending the Revolutionary War, the line, by convention, had run along the Forty-ninth Parallel. Madison's treaty would have dropped it southward and ceded Britain a strip of land about 150 miles wide, including Lake of the Woods in northern Minnesota and Puget Sound in northwestern Washington. Adams roared his opposition and cowed the Senate into rejecting the treaty, leaving the lands in the so-called Adams Strip in the United States.

Despite the friction John Quincy's unpredictably independent voting engendered, Senate membership was too small, the number of committees too large, and John Quincy Adams's knowledge of the law and the foreign world too vast to ostracize him. He soon found himself on more than a dozen committees, conducting himself on each with total disregard to party. On one he revised the articles of war, on another he helped acquire books for the Library of Congress, and on a third he helped revise Senate rules. His work on one committee included writing legislation for the Louisiana Territory and laws for the District of Columbia; on still another,
he proposed building a network of roads across the Appalachian Mountains to connect Atlantic coast ports with the Ohio River valley—a scheme originally proposed by George Washington when the states were still a confederation.

 

Washington's—and Adams's—scheme would have allowed western crops, pelts, furs, and ores to travel directly to Atlantic sea-lanes to Europe instead of following the circuitous route down the Mississippi River and across the Gulf of Mexico.

Deemed by most senators to be an unconstitutional federal intrusion in state prerogatives, Adams's proposal for domestic improvements went down to defeat without even a word of debate. “I have already seen enough,” he responded, “to ascertain that no amendments of my proposing will obtain in
the Senate as now filled.”
²⁰
He believed Senator Pickering and other Federalists “hate me rather more than they love any principle.”
²¹

John Quincy proved far more popular at the President's House than he did in the Senate. His language skills and overseas travels as a diplomat combined with his erudition to make him a favorite among diplomats who dined with Jefferson. And whenever ladies attended such functions, Louisa attracted as much attention as her husband or more, being as fluent in French as he but far more extroverted.

Despite her son's status in Washington, Abigail Adams was far less able than her husband to accept him as other than her little boy. “You must not let the mind wear so much upon the body,” she warned her thirty-seven-year-old senator-son as Christmas approached in 1804. “You eat too little and study too much.”
²²
And fully two years later, as he approached his thirty-ninth birthday, she cautioned,

Over the winter, the Adamses learned of the failure of a London bank where John Quincy had placed a sizable portion of his father's European accounts, and to prevent his parents from sustaining any losses, John Quincy filled “the chasm created by this circumstance.”
²⁴
To compensate for his loss, he looked for ways to cut his own spending and decided that moving the family back and forth between Washington and Quincy twice a year had become a luxury he could no longer afford. In a bitter confrontation with Louisa, he told her she and the boys would have to stay put the year around—either in Washington or Quincy; her choice. When the Senate adjourned in the spring of 1804, John Quincy was ready to
leave for his parents' home in Quincy, and after an angry exchange with her husband, Louisa chose to stay with the boys in Georgetown at the comfortable home of her sister and brother-in-law. If they were to be separated half the year during each of the six remaining years of his Senate term, she told John Quincy she “preferred passing the summer months with my family to living alone in Quincy through five dreary winters.”

When John Quincy accused her of disloyalty, she snapped back, “I do not think, my beloved friend, you do me justice. I prefer a separation from you rather than separation from them. I don't think my affection for you admitted of doubt.” To add to his guilt after he had left, she wrote to him that three-year-old George “is very angry with you. He says you are very naughty to go away and leave him. . . . John calls everybody Papa he sees. Poor little fellow was too young when you left us to remember you.”

Without his father, however, George, at three, became ungovernable, chasing the chickens and ducks unmercifully whenever he was left to himself. And Louisa grew miserable without her husband. “Life is not worth living on such terms,” she admitted. She was wretched in Washington and realized that without him, “I must be wretched everywhere.”
²⁵

Their separation left him equally distressed. He missed his children and longed for the comfort of Louisa by his side at night. True to form, he turned to poetry to effect a reconciliation, sending her some playful eroticism from John Donne's
To His Mistress Going to Bed
(1669):

John Quincy promised to dip into capital if necessary to end their separation and prevent their ever again being apart. Before he returned to Washington, Harvard's overseers invited him to stand for the college presidency, but he was too intent on rejoining his wife and children and declined
in favor of returning to Washington. He arrived in time for the presidential election.