John Quincy Adams

D

1

The Purchase of Florida

In 1817 Adams was called back to the United States to become secretary of state in the Cabinet of President James Monroe. Adams took up the post at a turning point in American history. The country had begun a period of expansion and development, and for the first time since its founding, the United States was not involved in European struggles, because Europe itself was at peace.

There were, however, difficult problems facing the new secretary of state. One that immediately confronted him was a conflict with Spain over its colony of Florida. Spain had confined its troops in Florida mainly to garrisons at Saint Marks, Pensacola, and Saint Augustine. The remainder of the territory was inhabited by the hostile Seminole people, runaway slaves, and outlaws. Spain was required by treaty to prevent these people from raiding across the U.S. border, but failed to do so. When U.S. troops entered Florida in late 1817 and burned a Seminole village, killing some of the residents, the Seminole retaliated by ambushing a U.S. hospital ship and killing 42 people. This act led to the First Seminole War (1817-1818). General Andrew Jackson was sent to subdue the Seminole.

Jackson not only drove the Seminole back into Florida, but marched into Spanish territory and occupied Saint Marks and Pensacola. He captured, courtmartialed, and executed two British subjects who had encouraged the Seminole. As a result of Jackson’s forceful action, Spain and Britain filed strong protests with the U.S. government.

Adams was the sole member of Monroe’s Cabinet to support Jackson. Insisting that Jackson had not exceeded his orders, Adams argued that the blame should be placed on Spain for its weak administration of Florida. He persuaded Monroe to accept his view and then instructed Spain either to govern Florida more effectively or cede it to the United States. Already troubled by revolts in its South American colonies, Spain, after long negotiations, agreed to the demands of Adams, and Florida was ceded to the United States.

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In the negotiations, Adams secured another important concession from Spain. The western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase had never been agreed on. Acting completely on his own, Adams persuaded Spain to agree that Louisiana ran all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The boundary began at the mouth of the Sabine River, ran northwest to the 42nd parallel (the northern boundary of California), and then extended directly west to the ocean. There still existed British and Russian claims to the Oregon country that could cut off this western ocean access; but the Spanish agreement removed the major obstacle to America’s sea-to-sea expansion.

D

2

Monroe Doctrine

Perhaps the most important event of Monroe’s administration was the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine. The doctrine resulted from two problems. Adams was concerned over moves by Russia to establish colonies in the Oregon country. At the same time, Britain feared that the Holy Alliance, consisting of Austria, Prussia, France, and Russia, was ready to help Spain recover its colonies in Latin America. The British had obtained trading advantages in the new Latin American republics, and these very profitable arrangements would end if the republics were restored to Spanish rule. The British foreign secretary, George Canning, proposed that the United States join Britain in warning the Holy Alliance not to intervene in the western hemisphere.

Adams had a firm reply to the Russian threat. As he reported later, he told the Russian diplomatic representative in Washington, D.C., that “we should contest the right of Russia to any territorial establishment on this continent, and that...the American continents are no longer subjects for any new European colonial establishments.” Thus, Adams stated one principle of the Monroe Doctrine more than a year before Monroe stated it himself.

His answer to Britain was equally forceful. President Monroe at first was willing to go along with Canning’s proposal, but Adams argued against it. Adams believed that the United States should determine its own policy. “It would be more candid,” he said, “as well as more dignified, to avow our principles explicitly to Russia and France, than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war.”

Monroe was persuaded that Adams’s stand was right, and in 1823 the president announced the Monroe Doctrine. The doctrine contained two important principles. First, North and South America were no longer open to European colonization. Second, Europe must not “interfere in the internal concerns” of any nation in the western hemisphere. The first of these principles came directly from Adams.

E

The Election of 1824

Adams ran for president in 1824. Opposing him were General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, Speaker of the House Henry Clay of Kentucky, and Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford of Georgia. None of the candidates received a majority of electoral votes. The vote was: Jackson, 99; Adams, 84; Crawford, 41; and Clay, 37. Adams’s chief support came from New England and New York. Jackson carried most of the South and West.

The 12th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States requires that if no candidate for president receives a majority, the election is decided by the House of Representatives from among the three candidates with the highest electoral votes.

In the House, Clay’s support gave Adams the necessary majority, and he was elected president with John C. Calhoun as his vice president. When told of his election, Adams stated that if it were possible to call an immediate popular election to give the president a clear mandate to rule, he would do so. Since the Constitution did not provide for such an election, he accepted the presidency. Later, when Adams chose Clay to be his secretary of state, the supporters of Jackson angrily accused the new president of having entered into a corrupt bargain with Clay. The cry of “Corrupt Bargain” was to haunt Adams throughout his presidency, and it contributed to his defeat in 1828.

F

President of the United States

The presidency proved to be a frustrating and disappointing experience for Adams. He tried to be the leader of all the people, but he was confronted by hostile criticism of his policies from the Congress of the United States. Jackson’s supporters, still bitter over the “corrupt bargain,” consistently worked to thwart and embarrass the president.

Adams was also hindered by his cold and aloof personality. He did not enjoy mingling with crowds. He and his wife did only as much entertaining and receiving of guests as was strictly required of them. Their son Charles Francis Adams noted: “I never saw a family which had so little of the associating disposition.”

Adams was not a “political” president. He was concerned with a man’s competence, not his political affiliation. Adams even appointed political enemies to important offices, and he remained so free of partisanship that one of his supporters later declared: “Mr. Adams during his administration failed to cherish, strengthen, or even recognize the party to which he owed his election, nor... with the great power he possessed did he make a single influential friend.”

In his first annual message to Congress, Adams proposed a program to strengthen the nation and bind it more closely together. He advocated using federal funds for new canals, highways, harbor improvements, a stronger navy, military schools, and a national university. States’ rights advocates in Congress opposed the federal government’s assuming these responsibilities and refused to support the president. His request for funds to promote the arts and sciences, specifically to support scientific research and to build astronomical observatories, was especially criticized. Adams was far ahead of his time in believing that the federal government should finance projects that would serve and benefit the people and the nation as a whole.

Adams met frustration even in his foreign policy. Although the president was the most experienced diplomat in America, only one important measure dealing with foreign policy was presented during his administration. In 1826 the United States was invited to attend a Pan-American Conference at Panama City, Panama (then part of Colombia). Adams sought the Senate’s approval for two U.S. delegates and asked Congress to appropriate money for their expenses. Congress finally gave grudging approval and appropriated the necessary funds. But Adams’s success turned into failure. One delegate died of fever on the way to the conference, and the other’s departure was delayed so long that the meeting adjourned before he arrived.

Early in 1828, Congress passed the so-called Tariff of Abominations, which placed high import duties on manufactured goods and raw materials. The tariff was intended to protect developing industries in the North from cheap foreign competition. But the South was hurt because it depended on those imports to produce cotton, its major export. Although Adams disliked the tariff, he signed it into law. He had the power to kill it by veto, but at that time no president used this power unless he thought the bill was unconstitutional. As his opponents had intended, the tariff was an embarrassment to Adams. Jackson’s supporters used it to discredit the president, calling him the spokesman of the wealthy. Jackson, in contrast, was pictured as the friend of the common people.

In 1828 Adams ran for reelection against Jackson. The enemies of Adams united to campaign vigorously for Jackson, appealing especially to the new voters in the Western and Southern frontier areas. Adams was supported only by a new, loosely organized party of National Republicans. The campaign of 1828 was one of the most bitterly contested in American history. Both sides spread malicious slanders against each other. Adams was decisively defeated, receiving 83 electoral votes to Jackson’s 178. His support was limited to the New England states, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland. His defeat reflected the expansion of voting rights to all white adult males in many states. The new voters readily identified with Andrew Jackson. Adams was so bitter at his defeat that, like his father, he refused to remain in Washington for his successor’s inauguration.

IV

Later Life

After his defeat, Adams returned to Massachusetts, expecting to spend the remainder of his life in political retirement. He planned to supervise his farm and to write. However, in 1831 conservative Massachusetts political leaders persuaded him to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. To critics who believed that an ex-president should not humble himself by seeking election to Congress, Adams answered, “No person could be degraded by serving the people as a representative in Congress.” He overwhelmingly defeated his Jacksonian opponent in the election.

As a congressman, Adams followed an independent course. In 1833 he tried unsuccessfully to stop President Jackson from moving federal funds from the Bank of the United States into selected state banks, called “pet banks.” Adams stated that the use of the pet banks would result in a financial depression, and he believed his prediction was borne out by the economic crisis that came to be known as the Panic of 1837.

In 1832 Adams helped formulate a new tariff that lowered several of the high import duties imposed by the Tariff of Abominations. Although substantial concessions were made to the South, they were not enough to please Southern planters. Northern manufacturers, in turn, were outraged at the tariff reductions. A compromise bill that gradually lowered rates over a ten-year period was eventually worked out in 1833.

In 1836, when the question of annexing the independent republic of Texas first arose, Adams opposed annexation. He feared that Texas would be made into one or even several slaveholding states, since it had been given the right to divide into as many as five states.

Adams became further involved in the slavery issue in his long struggle to revoke the so-called gag rule. The gag rule was adopted in 1836 to stop an ever-increasing flow to Congress of petitions demanding the abolition of slavery. Such petitions, many of which were presented by Adams, were to be tabled in the House without discussion. Adams regarded the gag rule as a violation of the constitutional right to petition, and for eight years he used every parliamentary technique he knew to discredit it. Finally, in 1844, Adams rallied enough support to force repeal of the rule.

Adams again acted on his anti-slavery convictions when he helped argue the Amistad case before the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1839 two planters in the Spanish colony of Cuba purchased a group of about 50 Africans who had been transported there in violation of bans on international slave trading. After obtaining false identification papers in order to establish their status as legal slaves in Cuba, the planters placed the Africans on the ship L'Amistad and joined them on a voyage to another part of Cuba. After several days at sea the Africans killed the captain, took over the ship, and ordered the planters to sail to Africa. Instead, the planters secretly navigated toward the United States. When the U.S. Coast Guard seized the ship off the coast of Long Island, New York, the planters accused the Africans of murder and sought to have them returned to Cuba as slaves.

After a trial court concluded that the Africans had never legally been slaves and should be returned to Africa, the U.S. government appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. Due to his alignment with a proslavery faction of the Democratic Party, president Martin van Buren favored the return of the Africans to the planters. However, the Supreme Court, after hearing lengthy arguments by Adams, agreed with the trial court and ruled that the Africans were free. With money raised by abolitionists, 35 of the survivors returned to West Africa in 1842. The others had died at sea or while waiting trial.

When President James Polk asked Congress to declare war on Mexico in 1846, Adams voted against it. He believed that Polk, a Tennessee slaveholder, had deliberately schemed to start the war to obtain territory from Mexico for the creation of new slave states. He criticized Polk for sending troops to disputed territory on the U.S.-Mexican border. Adams believed that by his action Polk had already declared war on Mexico in fact if not in name, and had thus overridden the constitutional provision that gave this power only to Congress. However, when Congress declared war on Mexico, Adams voted for the necessary military appropriations.

Adams was not concerned solely with political and diplomatic matters. He had long been interested in scientific research, and mainly through his efforts the bequest of British chemist James Smithson was used to establish the Smithsonian Institution.

Late in 1846, Adams suffered a stroke. He recovered enough to resume his seat in Congress a few months later. One year afterward, on February 21, 1848, he responded to a roll call of his name in the House chambers, then fell forward on his desk. It was a second stroke. He was carried to the Speaker’s room in the Capitol. Adams died two days later, on February 23rd.

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