James Traub: John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit. New York: Basic Books, 2016.
Originally published in Law and Liberty, July 11, 2016. Republished with permission.
Founders of moral codes and their consequent political regimes say what they want citizens (or subjects) to do. By making certain actions habitual in us, they seek to nurture a certain kind of human being, a model or type embodying the code and the regime founded. This model of what a human being in this regime ought to be must then be imitated, inasmuch as the model will likely be perfect and therefore impossible to embody fully. A Christian will want to know Jesus, but also Paul, precisely because Paul is not the perfect man but the good citizen of the regime of the perfect man. Less-than-holy regimes follow the same logic. In 1946 two Soviet writers on pedagogy published a book translated into English under the title “I Want to Be Like Stalin.” One wants to know “Soviet Man,” the one embodied by the Man of Steel, but one also wants to know Soviet men and women of a lesser order, the successors, the ones who do indeed become like Stalin. What does it mean to perpetuate a given regime, to uphold the model and inducing the next generations to imitate that model?
In the United States, George Washington served as the model citizen of the republic founded upon the defense of natural rights. (One might add that Benjamin Franklin served as the model citizen-intellectual, which isn’t quite the same thing.) John and Abigail Adams (themselves no mean models) educated their son, John Quincy, to become the worthy successor of the founding generation of the new regime. What does a man formed to defend natural rights look like? James Traub gives us a carefully-drawn portrait of a man “who did not aim to please, and… largely succeeded”—both in not-pleasing and in defending natural rights.
The Adamses began by refusing to treat their child as childish. Jack and Jill may have gone up the hill to fetch a pail of water, but Mrs. Adams judged the tale devoid of moral content and consequently unworthy of her child’s attention. She kept little Johnny out of public school altogether, where such pointless rhymes were taught, preferring to educate him at home with such helps as Charles Rollin’s Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians and Grecians. When their beloved family physician died at the hands of the troops of “Pharaoh” at Bunker Hill, mother and son wept together, before turning to the task of melting down the family pewter for bullets.
As for father John, he interspersed his activities at the Continental Congress with reading recommendations for his son, Thucydides being just the thing for his ten-year-old. Traub rightly observes, “‘The classics’ was not a subject, like geography or history, but rather a lens through which to examine and understand the life around you.” A year later, Johnny accompanied Father on a diplomatic mission to Europe; after getting chased by a British ship and nearly capsized in a storm on the way over, he received one of Mother’s characteristically bracing monitions: “Dear as you are to me, I had much rather you should have found your Grave in the ocean you have crossed, or any untimely death crop you in your infant years, rather than see you an immoral profligate or a Graceless child.” No such misfortune ensued. Upon his return to Massachusetts at age 18, his aunt Mary reported to Abigail, “He is formed for a Statesman.”
Smartened up and toughened up, Adams proved ready to think about and act in the crises that arose in the aftermath of the American founding—quite literally until his death on the floor of the House of Representatives in February 1848. Traub helps his reader identify five such crises, all interrelated: The French Revolution; the Napoleonic Wars; conflicts leading up to and including the War of 1812 with the British Empire; the rise of New-World republicanism in the face of Old-World monarchism; and the consequences of sectional slavery under conditions of rapid continental expansion.
Adams’s first important intervention in public debate was the “Publicola” letters, a reply to Thomas Paine’s defense of the French Revolution. In 1791—that is, two years before the Jacobins took control of the French Republic and heads began to roll—Adams argued that the American Revolution was indeed justified on the basis of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, but that the same conditions did not prevail in France. Against Paine, he argued that the mere existence of aristocracy or monarchy did not justify revolution but only a long train of abuses and usurpations committed by such regimes, as suffered by the American colonists in the 1760s and 1770s. Further, no people unused to local self-government should undertake a republican revolution because they will likely commit excesses worse than the oppressions they suffer.
By the time the Jacobins did take over, President Washington had appointed the now 27-year-old Adams ambassador to the Low Countries; he arrived just as French troops rolled in. The Dutch had hoped for help from Great Britain and the Hapsburgs, in vain; this conquest demonstrated the necessity for military self-defense rather than dependence upon great-power protectors. It also demonstrated the poisonousness of the factionalism that follows such dependence upon foreigners, who play divide-and-rule politics in the countries they ostensibly protect. Traub suggests that Adams’s dispatches on these themes contributed to the thinking of Washington and Hamilton as they prepared his Farewell Address, the two themes of which are America’s need for political union and for well-defended neutrality.
Generally, the French Revolution reinforced in Adams what he had learned from his beloved classics and also from such experiences as the Shays Rebellion of 1786-87: democratization or equalization as a social phenomenon was a fact in non-slaveholding American states and a strong trend in aristocratic Europe, but in both cases it needed careful management. In the years following, the British aristocracy would prove better at governing this transition than the Continental aristocracies. In his preference for gradualism over violent revolution, and above all in his insistence that people think about democratization, he anticipated Tocqueville, whom he met a generation later, during Tocqueville’s journey through America.
The Napoleonic Wars that followed from the French Revolution saw Adams as our ambassador to Prussia under the administration of his father. The younger Adams saw what Tocqueville would see, later on: that social democratization could lead to despotism as easily as republicanism. He “viewed France as a revolutionary power bent on dominating the world” with a regime that combined atheism, social egalitarianism, and tyranny. First under the three-man Directory regime, which attempted not merely to master Europe but to gain a foothold in North America by trying to purchase the vast Louisiana territory from Spain, and then under the Napoleonic regime, which succeeded in making the purchase, Adams rightly supposed that France planned to establish a military garrison at the strategic chokepoint of New Orleans, thereby controlling the Gulf of Mexico and extending French control up the Mississippi River. This would have enabled France to set the rules for American commerce out of the rich farmlands of the Midwest and conceivably to contain American behind the Alleghenies. The plan died with the slave revolt in France’s colony on Santo Domingo, and although Adams called Thomas Jefferson’s eventual purchase of Louisiana from France a “direct violation of the Constitution (as Jefferson himself admitted, to a Senate ally), he agreed that the safety of the public is the supreme law. Constitutions exist to secure natural rights, not the other way around.
The second diplomatic assignment Adams secured from his father, at the Russian court of Alexander at Saint Petersburg, coincided with another crucial moment in European affairs. Adams and the Czar each saw the other country as a counterweight to Napoleonic France, and in the end Alexander broke with Napoleon’s “Continental System,” provoking the war that led to France’s defeat. Adams did everything he could to encourage Alexander’s inclination to independence, and although the Czar made his own calculations, Adams was able to gain Russian help with U. S. commercial shipping on the Continent—that is, with the one kind of foreign relations Washington and Adams had endorsed with respect to America’s dealings with the European powers, and the one most at issue throughout the Napoleonic Wars.
As a consequence of those wars, British policy aimed at impressing American sailors to service in the Royal Navy and at interference with American shipping to British enemies. Unable to match the Brits on the open seas, the Jefferson and Madison administrations adopted an embargo on British goods, which provoked New Englanders to talk of nullifying federal law and even seceding from the Union. Secession would have served British and general European interests by making North America more like Europe itself, and more like North America when the Indians ruled it: a congeries of dividable states vulnerable to rule from overseas. Fortunately, “the embargo gave way before the Union did,” as Southern senators saw that it wasn’t working.
That didn’t prevent the War of 1812, spurred by mutual U. S.-British underestimation. Adams participated in the negotiating team that eventually produced the Treaty of Ghent, ending the war, although not because the American negotiators proved especially persuasive. As usual, not diplomacy but the military facts on the ground settled matters; British defeat at Baltimore chastened British overconfidence, as did continued political unrest in France, where the reinstated Bourbons proved unpopular. This Second War of Independence, as many Americans called it, confirmed Adams’s conviction of the indispensability of constitutional union to the defense of natural rights, a conviction strengthened as Adams took charge of the State Department under President James Monroe, just as his friend Czar Alexander (unamused by France’s geopolitical proclivities) organized the Holy Alliance against godless republicanism. Spain was part of that alliance, and the Spanish Empire was by far the largest in the New World.
That empire and the regimes of the Americas were changing, and Adams’s conception of American geopolitical strategy changed accordingly. In the 1820s, Latin American nations began to throw off Spanish rule and to found republican regimes rather optimistically modeled on the United States. Adams responded with caution, preferring to delay formal recognition of the new republics so as not to provoke European and especially Holy-Alliance intervention in the hemisphere. This was the circumstance behind his famous declamation that the United States did not go abroad to seek monsters to destroy, but, while applauding republicanism in the defense of natural rights wherever it arose, vindicated only its own regime and the rights of its own people. He spoke against the policy of Senator Henry Clay, who advocated what amounted to a reverse Holy Alliance of New World republics to guard against the Holy Alliance. Adams questioned not whether Latin Americans were endowed with natural rights but rather whether they had yet developed the habits of mind and heart to sustain their newly-designed republican institutions. After all, Americans had governed themselves locally for a long time, and yet had found themselves riven by factionalism to the point of disunion. Latin Americans had enjoyed no such long experience in self-government.
Adams instead formulated what since became known as the Monroe Doctrine. Based on an understanding of the stark regime differences between the Old and the New Worlds, the Holy Alliance and the young republics, the Monroe Doctrine said in effect that we won’t set out to destroy what we take to be foreign monsters if you Europeans don’t set out to destroy what you take to be foreign monsters in the Americas. Traub perceptively remarks that this “marked an end to the fundamental defensiveness of Washington’s message,” inasmuch as it implied a spheres-of-influence division between the two hemispheres. Neither ‘idealistic’ in the Wilsonian sense nor a specimen of amoral Realpolitik, the Adams/Monroe policy guided the United States for the remainder of the century.
Adams attempted to extend his policy during his own administration, which followed Monroe’s two terms. Simon Bolívar proposed a Pan-American Congress for discussing trade and other hemispheric issues, and Adams advocated that we accept the invitation because Washington’s policy—like all policies, as distinct from moral principles—addressed the circumstances of its time and place. Those circumstances had changed with the regime changes in Latin America. The United States was no longer an isolated republic surrounded by territories ruled by imperial monarchies. But this position proved too much to sustain, given Adams’s rather weak political position in the U. S. (Traub calls it “Adams’s Waterloo”). In addition to continued strong reverence among all Americans for all things George Washington had propounded, Southern Congressmen objected that Haiti might attend, and of course discourse with former slave rebels was for them a possibility to dangerous to countenance. Adams’s advocacy of U. S. participation in the Pan-American Congress gave that great political operative, Martin Van Buren, an opportunity to form an alliance with General Andrew Jackson and Senator John C. Calhoun against Adams, making him a one-term president and establishing a new Democratic Party coalition that would dominate American politics for a generation.
This, in turn, precipitated the final crisis of Adams’s career, his finest hour as a natural-rights republican. Jefferson had understood American expansion across the continent as a new kind of imperialism: the “empire of liberty.” Unlike colonial empires, which subordinated the colonies to a distant, central government or ‘metropole,’ the American empire would consist of territories intended for organization as equal states within the American federal republic—all of them guaranteed a republican regime under Article IV, section 4 of the Constitution. Adams had supported U. S. territorial expansion to the Pacific as early as 1818, aiming to rid much of North America of Spanish and British imperial rule. However, from that time and for the next thirty years he would oppose the annexation of Texas because it could not enter the Union as fully republican but as a slave state—that is, a state (or worse, several states) dominated by plantation oligarchs. Although he sided with General Jackson in his drive to wrest Florida from Spain, which he regarded as too weak to control cross-border raids by the Seminole Indians, and he insisted on a clause in the eventual treaty with Spain in which the Empire would cede U. S. claims in the far West, Texas was another matter.
More subtly, in discussing the matter with Senator Calhoun, he learned that Calhoun imagined the principle of human equality enunciated in the Declaration of Independence applied only to “white men.” Knowing first-hand that the Founders meant no such thing, Adams concluded that the institution of slavery had clouded the minds of slave owners. Just as no one expected a man like George III to hold the truths of the Declaration to be self-evident, it now transpired that the new generation of slave owners (unlike the men Adams had known as a young man) no longer found those truths self-evident, either. This made Adams begin to think that the Constitution and the Union it codified contained a fatal flaw: the three-fifths compromise, whereby slave states gained extra representation in Congress based not on the population of citizens but of a proportion of slaves as well. This had seemed a reasonable compromise in 1787, for the sake of Union—that is, for the sake of defending natural-rights republicanism against the divide-and-rule strategies of its powerful enemies. But by the time of the 1820 Missouri Compromise, Adams judged that the terms of the constitutional union had reinforced anti-republican, oligarchic ideas and sentiments in the South, which then used its disproportionate influence in Congress to extend slavery to the territories—as it had not even wanted to do in the Northwest Ordinance territories back in 1787.
Adams made a startling, one might almost say prophetic, argument, which Traub wisely quotes in full, lest those unfamiliar with the record not believe it. In November 1820, this staunchest friend of the Union confided to his diary that the Union would and should one day dissolve. It should dissolve because the dissolution would prompt a slave rebellion in the South and a civil war between the Northern and Southern regimes. The republican, Northern states would win the war and then abolish slavery. This was the only way slavery would ever be abolished in the United States, given the entrenchment of oligarchy in the South.
When Adams recovered from his 1828 presidential defeat by Jackson and (so far uniquely among ex-presidents) returned to Washington as a Congressman in 1831,he dedicated the remainder of his life to attacking the plantation oligarchy—he called it the “slaveocracy”—of the South. By then, Southerners had begun to claim the right to nullify federal tariff laws, following the bad example of New England Federalists a generation earlier. On this, Adams supported President Jackson, who let it be known (quite believably, given his temperament) that he would deal harshly with any nullifiers who put their constitutional theory into practice. The eventual compromise on the tariff sacrificed Henry Clay’s “American System” of protective tariffs on manufactures, internal improvements, and the national bank, a price Adams judged too high.
But Adams saw another opportunity for much bigger moral and political stakes than the American System. Precisely because he could not envision disunion as a prelude to slavery abolition followed by reunion, he could reach out to the new Abolitionist movement which began in the early 1830s. Without going to the extremes of William Lloyd Garrison, he could side with the Abolitionists on many of the major issues relevant to abolition: Texas annexation; the right to petition Congress on the slavery issue; the gag rule, which forbade discussion of slavery on the floor of the House; and the celebrated Amistad case, in which Adams represented slaves who had liberated themselves while on board a ship transporting them from Africa by killing the captain.
Not only did Texas annexation invite the extension of slavery, it did so under unusual conditions. Most American territorial gains had come at the expense of Indian nations and tribes, many of which themselves owned slaves. But although Mexico had a corrupt and none-too-republican regime, it had abolished slavery in 1829; it was the ‘Texians,’ as they were called—the American settlers who had moved into the area and declared independence from Mexico in 1836—who had reintroduced slavery, which annexation by the United States would now perpetuate within the Union.
Adams enjoyed better luck in his other anti-slavery campaigns. Traub gives a fine and sometimes funny account of the old man’s ironclad stubbornness, as he bedeviled his slave-state colleagues with every procedural trick in and out of the book to bring the slavery debate to the House floor. And of course in the Amistad case he successfully argued the natural-rights foundation of the Constitution in front of a Supreme Court dominated by Southern justices, including Roger Taney, who would later write the infamous majority opinion in the Dred Scott case. Throughout, he publicly defended the Union while anticipating its eventual temporary and salutary demise.
By 1844, however, he decided to lay it on the line. At a meeting of black citizens in Pittsburgh, he said, “the day of your redemption… may come in peace or it may come in blood; but whether in peace or blood, LET IT COME.”
It was one thing for someone like Garrison to say that. For a former president and sitting Congressman to say it was quite another. Challenged to confirm or deny his statement by a Southern Congressman, Adams didn’t even bother to stand up from his seat: “I say now, let it come. Though it cost the blood of millions of white men, let it come! Let justice be done though the heavens fall.” Perhaps for the first time, the slaveholders began to see what they might be up against.
A few months later, back in his native state, Adams addressed a group of young Whigs: “Young men of Boston: burnish your armor, prepare for the conflict, and I say to you, in the language of Galgacus to the ancient Britons, Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity.” As many schoolboys then learned, the Scottish chieftain Galgacus rallied the Caledonians to fight Rome in A. D. 83, saying of his fellow Scots, “To all of us slavery is a thing unknown,” and of the Romans, “To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the name empire. They make a desert and they call it peace.” Not only was John Quincy Adams’s father a man worthy of thought, but his son, Charles Francis, headed the Young Men’s Whig Club of Boston, and would later serve as the U. S. ambassador to Great Britain during the Civil War. Thinking of his father and his son, asking his fellow citizens to think of theirs, Adams reminded Massachusetts men that they had fought one empire and might soon fight another—not the republican empire of liberty founded by their forefathers but an oligarchic, slave-based empire now extending into the deserts of the Southwest.
After Adams died in 1848, during the Mexican War he had argued against, one of the pallbearers at his state funeral, John C. Calhoun, could have no idea that the spirit of Adams would rise and the regime of the South would suffer the lasting burial, less than twenty years later. A member of the Committee of Arrangements charged with preparing the funeral was an obscure Illinois Congressman, Abraham Lincoln.
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