John Quincy Adams (37 page)

“Mrs. Adams, like her husband, had . . . a love of literature,” explained one observer of the social scene of that era. “The most scholarly woman who has presided over the White House, she possessed the adaptability of a French woman or of an American and could turn gracefully from her books or her family cares to inaugurate certain much needed reforms in official circles. By her grace, tact, and
savoir faire
, Mrs. Adams did much to neutralize the effect of the President's cold and often forbidding manner.”
²⁶

The President, of course, had no intention of being cold or forbidding—and, indeed, did not realize he was. He could not, after all, alter the lines, shadows, and shape of his face. Though his thoughts often contained a smile, it did not leak onto his face or into his words. “I am by nature,” he said repeatedly, “a silent animal, and my mother's constant lesson in childhood, that children in company should be seen and not heard, confirmed me irrevocably in what I now deem a bad habit.”
²⁷

On July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of America's Declaration of Independence from Britain, John Adams died in Quincy, Massachusetts—an hour after the death at Monticello of his onetime vice president and longtime friend, Thomas Jefferson. George Washington Adams was with his grandfather when he died. John Quincy arrived with John II in time for the funeral and burial at the local churchyard, after which he returned to his father's house and went into his father's bedroom. “That moment was inexpressibly painful,” he moaned.

His father's death gave John Quincy more work to do than his job as President. John Adams left a complicated will. For John Quincy to assume sole ownership of the ninety-five-acre property, the will required him to establish a trust for his brother, Thomas Boylston, who lived in his father's house with his wife but had grown too dependent on alcohol to support himself. Thomas's drunken orgies so disgusted Louisa that she refused even to visit the Quincy homestead with her husband, and when John Quincy left to spend the summer at his birthplace, she remained at the White House, neither writing letters of any consequence to the other.

Meanwhile, midterm congressional elections only added to the Jacksonian majority and further stifled John Quincy's efforts to serve the nation. Although the best-prepared chief executive in American history at the time, he was the least effective and least popular, and he did not understand why, given his deep love for his country. “I must await my allotted time,” he sighed. “My career is closed.”
²⁹

As the new, decidedly hostile Congress assembled in Washington, John Quincy's son John II provided the President and Louisa with a bright moment by marrying Louisa's niece Mary Hellen in the Blue Room of the White House.

“The bride looked very handsome in white satin, orange-blossoms, and pearls,” wrote John Quincy's niece, who said that she and the other three bridesmaids had “an amusing time . . . arranging flowers and ribbons.” They then “passed the cake . . . [and] cut slices to distribute among their friends.”
³⁰
Even the President joined in the festivities that followed the cutting of the cake by entering “with spirit into the mazes of the Virginia reel.”
³¹
After the wedding, Louisa's nephew Thomas, who had loafed about the White House after dropping out of Harvard, ran off with one of the young White House maids and, mercifully, left John Quincy with one less family member to support.

By spring of 1828, the President's daily activities were devoid of consequence for the nation:

The President's political inactivity triggered a barrage of scurrilous attacks by Jacksonian newspapers, which took aim at every member of John Quincy's cabinet as well as John Quincy himself. The attacks left Henry Clay so distraught he took a medical leave of absence. Although John Quincy did not want to allow his enemies to topple him from office without defending himself, everything he tried failed. Invited to preside at a July 4 groundbreaking for the heralded Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, a
symbol of the very national improvements he espoused, he addressed a friendly crowd of more than 2,000 spectators, then took a gilded spade to turn the first shovel of dirt—only to feel the shovel clang and rebound sharply, then slip from his hands after hitting a hidden tree stump. As murmurs of disappointment spread through onlookers, the President tried again—and again. Finally, he did something he had never done in public: “I threw off my coat and, resuming the spade, raised a shovelful of the earth, at which a general shout burst forth from the surrounding multitude, and I completed my address.”

It was the first time in months that an audience had cheered the President, and he left elated, inviting the officers who escorted him home to join him for drinks in the White House. Although it was too late, John Quincy had evidently learned a lesson about relating to the general public: “My casting off my coat,” he wrote later, “struck the eye and fancy of the spectators more than all the flowers of rhetoric in my speech.”
³³
He was, of course, a master at interrelating with czars, kings, counts, and courtiers, but had simply never had the chance to befriend ordinary citizens—at home or abroad.

Although eager for the first time to enter the election fray, it was all too new to him, and he let others do the electioneering. They attacked Jackson and his allies viciously, with Clay allegedly coaxing the editor of Cincinnati's
Gazette
to charge Jackson with having maintained an adulterous relationship with his wife, Rachel, before she had divorced her first husband. The Jacksonians fired back with equally vicious libels against the Yankee “aristocrat” with an “English wife,” who had spent public funds to purchase a billiard table for her husband's amusement in the White House.

In the end, election campaign rhetoric made little difference. The hero of the Battle of New Orleans was simply too popular, and the public was thoroughly convinced that the aristocratic New Englander from Harvard had ignored the will of the people and purchased his election by appointing Henry Clay as secretary of state. Unlike John Quincy, Jackson had
formed a new and well-organized political party that operated at both local and state levels and acquired consummate skills in obtaining newspaper publicity.

As the 1828 election approached, New England textile manufacturers set up a drumbeat of demand for higher protective tariffs. The War of 1812 had cut off cloth imports from England and given New England manufacturers a monopoly. After the war, however, renewed competition from larger, more-efficient British mills saw American markets flooded with less costly, high-quality British cloth, and Congress responded to complaints from New England mills by passing protective tariffs in 1816 and again in 1824. Agricultural interests in the South—especially cotton growers—protested, fearing that their best customers, the British cotton mills, would retaliate and curtail purchases of American cotton. Ignoring such protests, other raw materials producers and manufacturers demanded similar tariff protection—for wool, cotton, hemp, flax, iron, distilled spirits . . . the list grew endless—with the final bill called a “Tariff of Abomination” by its opponents. Passed by a huge veto-proof congressional majority, the bill left John Quincy no choice but to sign it into law. Southern states reacted with outrage, with South Carolina's legislature calling the tariff unconstitutional and blaming John Quincy for not having vetoed it. Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia followed suit and cost John Quincy the entire South in the 1828 election.

When the votes were counted on December 3, Jackson had humiliated John Quincy Adams—with 647,276 Americans voting for Jackson and 508,064 for Adams. In the Electoral College, Jackson captured 178 votes, more than twice John Quincy's 83 votes. “The sun of my political life sets in the deepest gloom,” John Quincy sighed, “but that of my country shines unclouded.” To ease the pain of his loss, he took “a ride of an hour and a half on horseback.”
³⁴

Louisa stepped forward to try to cheer her husband by organizing a huge party to celebrate his return to private life. “The defeated party . . . are more smiling and gracious and agreeable than they ever were before,”
Mrs. Samuel Harrison Smith, wife of the owner of the
National Intelligencer,
wrote to her son.

Shortly after the election results appeared in the newspapers, Rachel Jackson saw the story alleging her adulterous relationship with Andrew Jackson before she divorced her first husband. Shocked to the core as she read, she collapsed—a stroke, perhaps, or a heart attack. She died several days later and was buried on Christmas Eve without seeing her husband assume the presidency.

On March 4, 1829, Andrew Jackson was inaugurated as seventh President of the United States. Ignoring tradition, John Quincy refused to attend either the inauguration or the new President's White House reception afterwards. “I can yet scarcely realize my situation,” he shuddered in disbelief, saying, “posterity will scarcely believe . . . the combination of parties and of public men against my character and reputation such as I believe never before was exhibited against any man since this Union existed.” He continued:

Although the vast majority of American voters had rejected John Quincy and his vision for America, he refused to accept their judgment and vowed to continue his struggle to lead them and the nation to greatness. His only uncertainty was how to do it.

After his 1828 defeat, President John Quincy Adams prepared to return to his father's house in Quincy, Massachusetts, resigned to a life of semiretirement, puttering about the farm a bit, but focused on writing a biography of his father and practicing law part time. John Quincy and Louisa were waiting for George Washington Adams to arrive from Boston to help them move back to Quincy, when a messenger delivered a thunderbolt:

Their firstborn son was dead at twenty-eight.

George Washington Adams had been en route to Washington on a steamboat from Providence to New York. On April 30, at 3 a.m., after a night of heavy drinking, he turned irrational, demanding that the captain stop the ship to let him off. When the captain refused, he went topside by himself and either jumped or fell overboard, leaving only his cloak and hat on board—and no note. In the weeks before his death, his drinking and gambling had not abated, and his work had suffered. Still worse, a maid working for the family where he was living had given birth to his child and was blackmailing him.
^w

After learning of her son's death, Louisa decided to remain in Washington apart from her husband. She was too despondent to cope with her husband's moodiness and his brother's drunkenness. John Quincy bought a home two miles from the Capitol and left her there.

“The parting from my wife was distressing to her and to me,” he confided to his diary. “The afflictions with which we have been visited—especially the last—has so weakened us in body and mind that our dejection of spirit seems irrecoverable. We parted with anguish that I cannot describe.”
¹

Early in September, John Quincy's youngest son, Charles Francis—by then his and Louisa's brightest hope—married Abigail Brooks, whose sister had married Massachusetts congressman Edward Everett.
^x
Everett's brother Alexander had trained in the law with John Quincy and served in his St. Petersburg legation for a year. Although John Quincy attended his son's wedding, Louisa was still too distraught from the death of her oldest son to travel to Boston.