John Quincy Adams (31 page)

John Quincy's text then addressed Henry Clay's criticisms: “The President will neither inflict punishment nor pass a censure on General Jackson for that conduct, the motives of which were founded in the purest patriotism . . . and the vindication of which is written on every page of the law of nations as well as in the first law of nature—self-defense.”

And finally, the presidential address referred to John Quincy's negotiations with Don Luis de Onis, saying that the restoration of Florida to Spanish sovereignty was based on the President's confidence that Spain would

Faced with revolts across South America and terrified of again confronting the man they called “the Napoléon of the woods [Jackson],”
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the Spaniards capitulated. In the negotiations that followed, John Quincy let the Spanish government save face by asking the secretary of war to withdraw American troops from Florida and restore nominal sovereignty over
the Florida panhandle to Spain. Spain then ceded both East and West Florida to the United States and renounced all claims to both territories. The United States, in turn, renounced all claims to Texas and used the $5 million owed to Spain for the Florida acquisition to settle claims of American citizens against Spain for Indian depredations. In addition to ceding the Floridas, the Adams-Onis agreement, or Transcontinental Treaty, defined the western limits of the Louisiana Territory, with the Spanish ceding all claims to the Pacific Northwest and extending nominal U.S. sovereignty to the Pacific coast.

Cowed by the President's annual address, Henry Clay and the Senate approved the Adams-Onis treaty. Together with the rest of the Louisiana Purchase and the Florida conquest, the treaty expanded the small, East Coast nation that George Washington had governed into a vast, rich, and powerful empire, within a relatively impregnable wall of natural defenses.

On February 22, 1821, George Washington's birthday, John Quincy Adams effected the exchange of treaties ceding Florida to the United States—a transaction he called “the most important of my life . . . an event of magnitude in the history of this Union.”

Stung by their attempts to censure him, Jackson rode over the mountains to Washington City to confront his congressional challengers. An adoring public intervened. “Whenever the General went into the streets,” one newspaper reported, “it was difficult to find a passage through, so great was the desire of people to see him. . . . Among the people . . . his popularity is unbounded—old and young speak of him with rapture.”
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Congress responded to the public euphoria by overwhelmingly defeating Clay's proposed censures, and when Clay went to Jackson's hotel to apologize, the general had already left for New York.

In addition to silencing Clay, John Quincy's masterful policy statements silenced the British press and government. Jackson's execution of two British subjects would, a few years earlier, have provoked a British naval attack, but after reading John Quincy's paper, Lord Castlereagh agreed, “It is impossible not to admit that the unfortunate sufferers . . . had been engaged in unauthorized practices of such a description as to have deprived them of any claim on their own government for interference in their behalf.” He ordered the British minister in Washington not to take “any further step in the business.”
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In the fall of 1819, John Quincy and Louisa returned to Quincy to visit John Adams—only to find that John Quincy's beloved brother Thomas Boylston's occasional drinking had become chronic. Not only had his law practice deteriorated, he had allowed John Quincy's affairs to fall into disarray. Although Thomas promised to reform, John Quincy had no choice but to transfer his estate to another firm. By 1820, its attorneys had restored enough order to his investments for him to buy a large new double-house in Washington—on present-day F Street at Thirteenth, at the time within view of the White House. It came with a second-floor ballroom for Louisa's huge Christmas assemblies, and its proximity to the Potomac allowed John Quincy to add a swim to his regular regime of daily walks. Bathing suits having not yet been invented, he simply left his clothes on a rock at the shore and waded in stark naked—and no one paid attention.

To break the routine of diplomatic paperwork, John Quincy returned to his old reading habits—Tacitus, Alexander Pope, scientific journals, and, of course, the Bible. He became president of the American Bible Society and, in 1820, president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which his father had helped found.

To John Quincy's dismay, the Adams-Onis treaty he had negotiated created almost as many problems as it solved. Although it opened the West
to settlement and promised an unprecedented period of growth and prosperity, it also extended the problem of slavery far beyond the confines of southern slave states. At the end of 1819, the Missouri Territory applied for statehood, provoking a motion in Congress to exclude slavery from new states. Although John Quincy had despised slavery since his first encounter with it in Germany as a youngster, he had never before involved himself politically in disputes over the issue because it was virtually nonexistent in his native New England and seldom a topic of discussion there—certainly not in Quincy.

“I take it for granted,” he now realized, “that the present question [of slavery] is a mere preamble—a title page to a great tragic volume.” As he further studied the issue, he concluded, “This is a question between the rights of human nature and the Constitution of the United States. Probably both will suffer by the issue of the controversy.”
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The controversy divided Congress—and, indeed, the nation—for political and economic reasons as well as moral. The North feared Missouri's entry into the Union as a slave state would alter the free-state/slave-state balance in the Senate, where a succession of northern vice presidents had invariably tilted tie votes in favor of northern interests. When Alabama—a slave state—won admission as the twenty-first state, the admission of Illinois—a free state—restored senatorial balance. There was no semblance of balance in the House of Representatives, however. In the years since ratification of the Constitution, the population of the North had grown faster than that of the South. Free states counted about 5.2 million people, with 105 House votes, by 1819, while the population of slave states totaled about 4.5 million, with only 81 House votes. With Missouri's admission, the South saw the opportunity to gain a one-state majority in the Senate to compensate for its minority status in the House of Representatives.

Monroe had formed his cabinet with members from each region, and he ordered them not to involve themselves—or him—in the controversy. The dispute over slavery in the Missouri Territory, however, grew too widespread to ignore, and the more John Quincy heard cabinet members from
the South defend slavery, the more convinced he became that it was “false and heartless.” Slavery, he asserted, made “the first and holiest rights of humanity depend upon the color of the skin.”

Cabinet members William H. Crawford, from Georgia, and John C. Calhoun, from South Carolina, were both slaveholders, as was the President. Hardly a champion of manumission, Monroe steered clear of the issue—not because of indifference but because the Constitution gave only Congress jurisdiction over the admission of states, and it gave territories the right to become states without restrictions or preconditions. As for his personal views, Monroe had no strong objections to slavery, saying only, “The God who made us, made the black people, and they ought not to be treated with barbarity.”
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Apart from morality, both sides used the Constitution to press their arguments. Although its power to regulate interstate trade gave Congress the right to prohibit interstate traffic in slaves, the Constitution did not give either Congress or the states powers to abolish slavery in states and territories where it already existed or to establish slavery in states where it did not exist. Although it was not his purview as secretary of state, John Quincy had enough standing as a constitutional scholar to step into the debate to help
the President and Congress resolve the issue as it affected Missouri. While admitting he despised slavery as “a sin before the sight of God,”
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he said his role was not to debate the pros and cons of the institution but solely to determine whether the Constitution gave the federal government power to abolish it without a constitutional amendment. Clearly, it did not.

“For the admission of a state where no slavery exists,” John Quincy explained, “Congress may prescribe as a condition that slavery shall never be established in it, as they have done to the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. But where it exists, as in Missouri and Arkansas, the power of extirpating it is not given to the Congress by the Constitution.”
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John Quincy's pronouncements, like those of a judge on high, silenced the debaters for a while, and before the end of the year, an opportunity for compromise materialized with a petition from Maine to separate from Massachusetts and join the Union as a new state. When the Sixteenth Congress met in mid-February 1820, it needed only two weeks to admit Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state. It then drew a line across the rest of the Louisiana Territory, excluding slavery in all new states above latitude 36°30' and permitting slavery in new states below that line. (See map on page 214.)

The Missouri Compromise solved the problem of admitting new states but postponed the question of abolition for nearly a decade, at which time John Quincy Adams would have no choice but to confront it head-on. “Slavery,” he declared presciently,

 

The Missouri Compromise seemed to settle America's future, and when James Monroe stood for reelection at the end of 1820, no one opposed him. Of 235 electoral votes, Monroe received 231, with three abstentions and only one elector casting a dissenting vote to prevent Monroe from matching George Washington as the only President to have won unanimously. “And that vote, to my surprise and mortification, was for me,” John Quincy Adams recounted with embarrassment. He was, however, pleased with the election results. “Party conflict has performed its entire revolution,” he said with satisfaction, “and that unanimity of choice which began with George Washington has come around again in the person of James Monroe. In the survey of our national history, this latter unanimity is much more remarkable than the first.”
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