John Quincy Adams (22 page)

Although most of the nation blamed Jefferson for the country's economic plight, Federalists and, it seemed, all of Boston blamed John Quincy Adams. “I would not sit at the same table with that renegade,” declared one Federalist.
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“Most completely was I deserted by my friends in Boston and in the state legislature,” John Quincy admitted. “I can never be sufficiently grateful to Providence that my father and my mother did not join this general desertion.”
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In January 1808, he added to Federalist anger by attending the Republican caucus in Congress to witness the nomination of his good friend from across the chessboard, Secretary of State Madison, to succeed President Jefferson. In the balloting for vice president, John Quincy received one vote, which effectively ended his ties to the Federalist Party. John Quincy, however, now viewed Federalists as the party of secession, disunion, subservience to Britain, and the end of American independence. “To resist this,” he declared, “I was ready, if necessary, to sacrifice everything I have in life, and even life itself.”
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In May 1808, Massachusetts Federalists met in Boston, their “principal object,” according to Republican governor James Sullivan, being “the
political and even the personal destruction of John Quincy Adams.”
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Then and there—nine months prior to the expiration of John Quincy's term—the Federalists elected his successor, then passed resolutions instructing their senators—Pickering and Adams—to vote to repeal the embargo. On June 8, 1808, John Quincy “immediately resigned what remained of my Senate term.”

As usual in times of distress, John Quincy turned to his father for advice and consolation. “Your situation you think critical,” the former President counseled his son.

His father had made it clear: John Quincy Adams's career in public service had come to an end, his dream—and the dream of his parents—to ascend to national leadership shattered.

Although Republicans urged John Quincy to run as their 1808 senatorial and even gubernatorial candidate, he was too disgusted with public service and chose to return to private life. At their request, however, he continued feeding his views on foreign relations to Republican leaders in Congress. Though a private citizen, he remained, after all, one of the nation's leading foreign affairs analysts, and his first advice went to his friend President Jefferson. With New England secessionists threatening armed insurrection, he advised the President to narrow the scope of the embargo to France and England; the President heeded John Quincy's advice, and the renewal of trade with noncombatant nations immediately improved the nation's economy.

Although Boston Federalists shunned him professionally and socially, enough Republicans found their way to John Quincy's law office to set him on the path to prosperity. Indeed, his legal and oratorical skills even earned him several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court—some of historic importance.

Early in March 1809, Boston land speculator John Peck retained John Quincy for what grew into a landmark case in contract law and, indeed, one of the most important cases in Supreme Court history. For $3,000, Peck
had sold Robert Fletcher 15,000 acres that Peck had obtained in a state grant from the 30-million-acre Yazoo land tract in Georgia. As it turned out, land speculators like Peck had bribed Georgia legislators—en masse—to make the grants. After the press exposed the scandal, a new legislature cancelled all Yazoo land sales, including Peck's sale to Fletcher. Fletcher sued to get his money back, but John Quincy argued that the legislature's cancellation of Fletcher's agreement to buy Peck's land violated Article I of the Constitution, which prohibits states from “impairing the obligation of contracts.” The Supreme Court stunned the nation by sustaining John Quincy's argument, ignoring the justice of Fletcher's claim in favor of the letter of the Constitution declaring the inviolability of contracts and reasserting the constitutional prohibition against state interference in the rights of Americans to acquire property. John Quincy's father had put it bluntly in an earlier pronouncement on the French Revolution: “Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist.”
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Now John Quincy had elicited a Supreme Court decision banning state interference in the rights of Americans to life, liberty, and property. Hailed by Americans across the nation, the decision raised John Quincy to the top of his profession.

On March 8, 1804, three days after James Madison had taken his oath as fourth President of the United States, Madison asked John Quincy to be American minister plenipotentiary to Russia and asked for an immediate reply. John Quincy accepted—without consulting his wife and engendering a furious response from her when he returned to Boston. He tried to explain his rash decision—as much to himself as to her:

John Quincy's explanation was an elaborate rationalization. As he himself admitted later, Federalists despised him so much they had pledged to prevent his ever again entering public service. It was James Madison's friendship and generosity that reopened the door just enough for Adams to slip back into government. “I was proscribed in my native state for voting for the embargo and resenting British impressment and commercial depredations,” he wrote to a friend years later. “Mr. Madison sent me for eight years to honorable diplomatic exile in Europe.”
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In his last lecture at Harvard, he issued a stirring encomium for his implacable embrace of neutrality: “Let us rejoice,” he cried out against Federalist Anglophiles, “that the maintenance of our national rights against Great Britain has been committed to men of firmer minds.”

Federalist attacks on John Quincy did not influence his students, who crowded about him after his lecture, many with tears in their eyes, inventing questions to keep him in their midst. “I called the students
my unfailing friends
,” he wrote to his brother a few days after his ship had put to sea on the way to Russia. He had asked his brother to have his two dozen Harvard lectures bound and published, and they later appeared in two volumes,
Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory
.
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He said his compliment to the students “was justly their due. For they had withstood a most ingenious and laborious attempt to ruin me in their estimation.”

John Quincy's decision to go to Russia without a word of warning, let alone discussion, devastated Louisa—left her angry, distraught, heartbroken. The boys were hysterical. The meager State Department budget—and the lack of an English-language school in St. Petersburg—would mean leaving nine-year-old George and six-year-old John II behind in Quincy. With John Adams too old and Abigail ill too often to cope with two growing boys, John Quincy boarded them with John Quincy's aunt and uncle. He put brother Thomas in charge of their education.

Fearful they would die before ever again seeing their son, John and Abigail Adams were too distraught even to come to shipside to say good-bye. “This separation from a dear son,” sixty-four-year-old Abigail wrote to one of her grandchildren, “at the advanced age both of your grandfather and me was like taking a last leave of him and was felt by us both with the heaviest anguish.”
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Although former Federalist friends stayed away, a crowd of Republicans cheered at dockside as the champion of union and independence boarded his ship with his wife and baby on August 5, 1809. Church bells rang out in Boston and Charlestown as the ship left the quay and sailed into the bay, and all the ships in the harbor sounded a salute—including the legendary
Chesapeake
. As darkness fell and he lost sight of his native land, John Quincy Adams retreated to a quiet corner of the ship with his God and penned,

John Quincy and Louisa were not without friends aboard ship. Louisa's younger sister Catherine had come as a companion to help mind Charles Francis, and William “Billy” Smith, Nabby's son, had come as John Quincy's secretary. Four young Harvard graduates each paid their own way to sit at the feet of and assist John Quincy—much as he had assisted Francis Dana when he was a youngster. Two were studying law with him in his Boston office and planned studying international law with him in Russia. A third was the son of Maryland senator Samuel Smith, brother of the new secretary of state, Robert Smith, while the fourth, Alexander H. Everett, planned making a career in the diplomatic service.

Despite the presence of friends and companions, John Quincy and Louisa missed their boys dreadfully, and John Quincy took to writing all but daily “Letters to My Children,” describing his and their mother's adventures. He also tried to impart—as his father had imparted to him—his deep sense of obligation to his country for the liberties he enjoyed and his passion for public service. “Take it, then, as a general principle to be observed as one of the directing impulses of life,” he wrote to his boys, “that you must have some one great purpose of existence . . . to make your talents and your knowledge most beneficial to your country and most
useful to mankind
.”
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John Quincy lightened the tone of some letters, noting in one that he had passed a night on the Grand Bank of Newfoundland “catching cod, of which in the interval of a six-hour calm, we have caught upwards of sixty.” He then posed a conundrum that he left unanswered, asking for the “links . . . in the association of ideas” between “cod fishing on the Grand Bank and the history of the United States.”
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After a pleasant Atlantic crossing, they approached a line of storms as they neared the Danish coast and put into port, where John Quincy “had
the mortification to find there upwards of four hundred of my countrymen, the masters and crews of the greater part of thirty-six American vessels, belonging with their cargoes to citizens of the United States captured and detained by privateers under Danish colors, and arrested for many months.”
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Without diplomatic credentials to show the Danish government, John Quincy had no authority to lodge a formal protest, but he displayed “a memorial” that he drew up, addressed “to the President of the United States,” hoping to intimidate Danish officials into releasing the Americans. He thrust it under the nose of every official he could find, before admitting in his report to the secretary of state, “My good offices may probably be of no avail to them.”
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On October 13, 1809, eighty days after they had left Boston, John Quincy's ship reached Kronstadt, on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland opposite St. Petersburg. A Russian admiral greeted them and sailed John Quincy and his entourage across to the Russian capital—only days before the Arctic winds surged in from the North Pole and wrapped the gulf—and all Russia—in an impenetrable deep freeze for the winter.

The map and political fortunes of Europe had changed radically in the eight years since John Quincy Adams had last set foot in the Old World. Napoléon had seemed on the run in 1801, having suffered humiliating defeats by a powerful English fleet in Egypt and raging mobs of hungry slaves in Haiti. After selling Louisiana and abandoning his territorial ambitions in the New World, he turned to consolidating his power at home—first, by restoring troop morale, then by ensuring the superiority of their arms and artillery, and finally, by setting them loose to assault the fragile defenses of Europe's tiny, divided nations. By the time John Quincy returned to Europe, Napoléon's armies ruled—directly or by proxy—the lands stretching from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and from the Straits of Gibraltar to Russia's western borders. Napoléon's boot had trampled over Portugal, Spain, Italy, Naples, the Vatican, Switzerland, western Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, the German states, Prussia, and Poland. Although French troops had stopped short of Vienna, they encamped so near that Austrian
officials feared shifting a leaf of official paper without a nod of approval by a French officer.