John Quincy Adams (33 page)

As cabinet members and other presidential aspirants turned on the President or on each other, the vicious rhetoric created political schisms
in Congress not seen since the days of the Confederation of American States. “I have never known such a state of things,” Monroe lamented to his predecessor in office, James Madison, “nor have I personally ever experienced so much embarrassment and mortification.”

 

Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford of Georgia had ambitions to succeed James Monroe as President but suffered a paralytic stroke before the elections.
(LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

Only one candidate remained silent and above the fray. John Quincy, the most obvious and logical choice to succeed President Monroe, refused to state whether he even wanted the office. Raised in a society where the ignorant deferred to the educated propertied class, he hewed to what his grandson Henry Adams would later call “the Ciceronian idea of government by
the best
,” selected by an elevated class of educated, propertied professionals who “chose men to represent them because they wanted to be well represented and they chose the best they had.” Those selected did not accept “pay” for their services but “honoraria.” Those who accepted public office were “statesmen, not politicians; they guided public opinion but were little guided by it.”
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Clearly alarmed by John Quincy's reticence, former congressman Joseph Hopkinson, a close family friend and prominent Philadelphia lawyer, wrote to Louisa,

Louisa, of course, showed Hopkinson's letter to her husband and urged him to campaign more aggressively. “Do for once gratify me,” she pleaded. “Show yourself if only for a week . . . and if harm comes of it I promise never to advise you again.”
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But John Quincy was adamant, insisting that the presidency “is not in my opinion an office to be either solicited or declined. . . . The principle of the Constitution in its purity is that the duty shall be assigned to the most able and the most worthy.”

For one of the few times in their marriage, Louisa decided to ignore her husband and take matters into her own hands. Aware of his ambitions and fearful of the effects of a loss on his spirit, she decided to compete with wives of other candidates by expanding the scope of her popular Tuesday evening receptions. “My Tuesday evenings appear to have some attractions,” she realized.

Louisa learned quickly, however, realizing that “wine maketh the heart glad” and gradually enlarging the number of guests she invited. One party drew one hundred guests; another, “one hundred and thirty odd persons all very sociable and good humored. The young ladies danced, played, and sang and were very merry. . . . I am very willing to show that I am the public servant.” As she enlarged her parties, she hired the Marine Band for a fee of “five dollars to each performer plus wine and supper.”
She then organized a party for 252—“ladies being a much larger proportion than we have had this winter.” Although William H. Crawford's wife, Susanna, sent six hundred invitations to a ball she sponsored, Louisa, not surprisingly, found it “dull and uncomfortable, and we left before ten o'clock.”
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Consciously or unconsciously, John Quincy refused to help Louisa plan the parties she hosted for his campaign, acting disinterested at times and even failing to appear at some events. She, in turn, suppressed her growing irritation at her husband and simply threw herself into organizing her entertainments. Her ambitions seemed to surpass those of her husband. “My whole morning was occupied with visits and writing cards of invitation,” she smiled. “We have had forty or more members of Congress already here and all who call I invite to my evenings. If I can help it I will invite only those who call, lest it should be said I am courting them to further a political purpose.”
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With the approach of summer, Louisa curtailed her campaign work, and John Quincy left for Cambridge to enroll their youngest son, Charles Francis, in Harvard—and to attend the graduation of his oldest son, George Washington Adams. Once at his beloved alma mater, however, he met with nothing but disappointment. Although George did graduate, he finished only thirtieth in his class of eighty-five. Then, to John Quincy's dismay, he learned that his middle boy, John II, in his next-to-last year at the school, ranked even lower—forty-fifth in a class of eighty-five. To compound John Quincy's disappointment, fourteen-year-old Charles Francis did so poorly on his Latin entrance examination that the college granted him only a conditional admission. He had spent years teaching Charles Francis his Latin and erupted in anger, storming into President John Kirkland's office charging that his son had been unfairly treated. In no mood for a confrontation with the man likely to be the next President of the United States, Kirkland ordered Charles Francis retested, and to every one's relief, the boy passed and gained unconditional entry into his father's alma mater.

John Quincy sensed, however, that his troubles with the boys were just beginning. “I find them all three coming to manhood with indolent minds, flinching from study whenever they can.”
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He could not and would not allow what he deemed the indolence of the boys to go unpunished and told them they could not return to Washington for Christmas. Instead of enjoying holiday balls and lavish White House dinners, they would have to spend Christmas and New Year's in the somber mansion of their grandfather in Quincy—studying. Not until they ranked among the top ten students in their classes would he allow John II and Charles Francis to enjoy holidays with their parents. In the meantime, he sent George to study law with Daniel Webster in Boston.

A few months later, John Quincy's discipline produced the opposite of its intended effects: John II joined a student riot, Harvard expelled him, and he returned to his parents in total disgrace. The boy could not have returned home at a worse time. The Adamses were already caring for Louisa's sister's three orphaned children—two boys, Johnson and Thomas, who were proving more difficult than the Adamses own sons, and the flirty Mary Catherine. John Quincy had paid for Thomas to attend Phillips Academy at Exeter, New Hampshire, then Harvard, but he dropped out and returned to Washington to loaf in the Adams home—without a degree, a skill, or a job. His older brother, Johnson, did not even bother enrolling in Harvard. From the first, he preferred loafing.

Young Charles Francis, meanwhile, fell in love with Mary Catherine, but the two were both too young to marry, and when Charles Francis went off to Harvard, their relationship cooled. When George Washington arrived for a visit, however, he took his brother's place in Mary Catherine's heart. John Quincy put a quick end to the relationship, sending George back to Boston to finish his legal studies with Daniel Webster.

Depressed by his sons' failure at Harvard, John Quincy resigned himself to failure in the presidential race and returned to his boyhood home in Quincy to spend time with his aging father and to look at farming as a possible occupation after he retired from public office. Not only his father
but three previous generations of the Adamses had farmed the land in Quincy successfully, and he concluded that, once out of government, he might have to do the same. He soon realized, however, that a life in diplomacy had not prepared him for the physical demands of farm life. His only skills lay in the law, but he feared he had made too many political enemies in Boston's powerful Federalist community to ensure much success.

A run for the presidency was clearly the most logical next step in his career, but he stubbornly refused to demean himself, the American people, or the office of the presidency by actively campaigning. He believed that merit alone, not party or political campaign rhetoric, should determine the choice of the American people—a unique concept voiced only once before, by George Washington, but never since.

“My career,” John Quincy proclaimed, “has attached no party to me precisely because it has been independent of all party . . . and the consequence has been that all parties disown me.”

As his opponents resorted to every ruse they could invent to win votes, John Quincy refused to compromise his values and political beliefs—even if, as seemed likely, those values doomed him to defeat in his lifelong quest for national leadership.

Although President James Monroe believed John Quincy was the most qualified candidate for the presidency, he remained silent. “He thought it incumbent on him to have nothing to do with party politics,” explained Egbert R. Watson, Monroe's private secretary. Watson said Monroe considered it “beneath the dignity” of an outgoing President and “unjust to the people . . . to throw the weight of his name and character on either side of any contest.”
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Having no organizational structure, political parties held no nominating conventions, leaving it to state legislatures to nominate presidential candidates—so-called favorite sons. To find qualified candidates, however, states often had to adopt sons of other states. The Tennessee legislature nominated Carolina-born Andrew Jackson, while Kentucky nominated Virginia-born Henry Clay. The Massachusetts legislature stood alone in nominating a true native son, John Quincy Adams. A group of rogue Republicans in Congress ignored the Georgia legislature and nominated that state's William H. Crawford, while John C. Calhoun of South Carolina snubbed his state legislature and nominated himself. With little national support, however, Calhoun withdrew from the presidential race and ran
for vice president—a post he knew no one else would seek. To ensure his securing the office, he ran on both the Adams and Jackson tickets.

 

Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, of South Carolina, recognized he lacked the support to contend for the presidency and ran for vice president instead.
(LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)