American Experiment (50 page)

His hopes and goals he deeply felt. Rising above party and faction, he would serve as the steward of the people in an effort to enact and administer a program carefully designed to bring economic progress and political and social unity to the nation. His goals were founded squarely on his moral and political principle of personal liberty and property to be protected not merely from government but through government. This government would include the federal government, which Adams did not fear and which he liked to term the National government, always with a capital
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. Echoing some of Hamilton’s ideas, his program was an extension of Monroe’s and Clay’s—internal improvements, wise use of federal lands in order to pay for those improvements, the fostering of science and education, “cautious” tariff protection of industry as a means of safeguarding the nation’s independence. After winning the reluctant support of his Cabinet for this program, the President wrote in his diary that the “perilous experiment must be made.”

Perilous it was, largely because Adams lacked the political resources for a positive program. Amid heavy pressures from all sides he tried to create a broad-based Cabinet, but Gallatin would not return to Treasury because he preferred State, Jackson would not accept the War Department, and the new Vice-President, John Calhoun, attacked the new Cabinet as not sufficiently representing the South. Highly dependent on congressional support, Adams was pleased that his supporter John W. Taylor of New York was elected Speaker to succeed Clay, but in the Senate Calhoun gained influence over key committees and busied himself jockeying for a future Calhoun presidency rather than the existing Adams administration. Then, at mid-term, Taylor lost the Speakership to Andrew Stevenson, a Virginian unfriendly to the President. A negative and ungainly leadership coalition of Calhoun, Van Buren, Jackson, and others, united only by their
distaste for Adams and eagerness to succeed him, dominated Washington’s politics.

It soon became apparent that Adams had only the intentions of a good steward, not the qualities of a great leader. He was, for one thing, a true son of Puritan Boston—and of John Adams—when it came to political pleasantries. It was hard to make conversation with him as he presided at a White House dinner, and he had a genius for putting politicians off—and his foot in his mouth—on his brief trips into the country. He was inept at communicating his hopes and proposals to Cabinet and Congress, much less the voting public. But his personal failings were the lesser problem. Like Monroe, he lacked the foundation of party leadership and followership that might have helped him at crucial moments, and Adams possessed neither the desire nor the means of strengthening his party. Indeed, he was so profoundly anti-party that he refused even to use patronage to strengthen his position. And he had not developed the personal backing of party leaders throughout the country—the kind of leaders that Madison and Jefferson had converted into a new and powerful political organization. Rather, a new party was forming against him. Adams was also defeated by his theory of government. He knew that leadership must be a collective enterprise, but he also believed in the constitutional checks and balances designed to thwart such leadership. Never a transforming leader, neither was he skillful as a transactional one.

All Adams’ difficulties came to a head during the last two years of his term, in the congressional effort to enact tariff legislation. A moderate measure had been passed in the final year of Monroe’s administration; now the protectionists were back, eager to boost levies on iron, hemp, flax, and other commodities. Meetings of wool growers and manufacturers in Harrisburg, Poughkeepsie, and elsewhere reflected rising protectionist feeling in the country. Adams was so apprehensive about tariffs—“Beware of Trap doors,” he said of them to a son taking a seat in the Massachusetts legislature—that he gave his Secretary of the Treasury, Richard Rush, the job of defending them. But even the suspicious Adams could hardly anticipate what lay ahead. Van Buren and the group of Jacksonians who dominated the House Committee on Manufactures concocted a tariff bill full of provisions that favored the agrarian Northwest and Middle States, while giving short shrift to the manufacturing interests of New England. If Adams signed it, he would alienate the South and strain his own credibility, and if he vetoed it, he would antagonize both agrarian and manufacturing interests in the rest of the country. Either way, the crucial Middle States would be drawn into the Jacksonians’ camp.

With shrewd bargaining by Van Buren, the bill passed Congress, as New Englanders like Webster salvaged what they could for industrial interests, and Adams signed the “abominated” tariff, though he knew full well that he was jeopardizing his southern support. He detested the squalid legislative deals that produced such a bill, but could he object to such cynical brokerage when he had made his own political deals to win the White House?

So the administration of the lofty John Quincy Adams came to an end in the wake of a wild free-for-all, a scramble for special advantages, a legislative battle whose main relevance to manufacture, as John Randolph said, was the “manufacture of a President of the United States.” This “democratic” nationalism of popular interests was a far cry from Adams’ planned, rational, centralized, collective, “economic” nationalism. “Nothing could be less in keeping with the custodial philosophy of President Adams,” Dangerfield said, “or less adjusted to the centralizing system of Henry Clay” than the “Tariff of Abominations.” Still, he signed it.

He signed it because, by early 1828, the tariff, and Adams’ own political fortunes, had been swallowed up in the gathering battle over the presidency. He signed it, knowing that the South would denounce it to the point of murmuring about seceding. His “perilous experiment” of presidential stewardship and collective national effort had given way to the haphazard, competitive play of economic and sectional interests. And these interests in turn both reflected and generated powerful economic forces changing the face of America in the 1820s and 1830s—forces that one day would hold many a politician in their iron grip.

“Ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto you.” Americans were happy to obey the biblical admonition in celebrating the half century of the Declaration of Independence. As he entered his second year in office, John Quincy Adams had taken pleasure in plans for a celebration in Washington—and even more for a jubilee in Boston, to which his father would be invited. And it was hoped that another signer of the Declaration—indeed, the drafter of it—could journey from Monticello to the festivities in the nation’s capital.

For John Adams and Thomas Jefferson still lived, the one in his ninety-first year, the other in his eighty-third. A few years earlier Jefferson had broken his arm and wrist in a fall at Monticello, and a stiffened hand combined with other ills of old age left him in severe pain for months on
end, but he had recovered enough to ride several miles a day. Adams was failing. “I am certainly very near the end of my life,” he wrote in January 1826. Whether death would simply mean the end, which he did not believe, or transit to life under a constitution of the Universe, “I contemplate it without terror or dismay.”

Adams had shared these private thoughts with his old adversary. For fourteen years the two heroes of the Revolution had been writing each other in what turned out to be a magnificent correspondence. Before that the two men had been politically so estranged that it took the best diplomatic efforts of intermediaries to persuade each that the other wished to restore the friendship of Revolutionary days. The correspondence had started awkwardly when Adams wrote Jefferson that he was sending him separately a packet containing “two Pieces of Homespun,” since the Virginian was a “Friend of American Manufactures.” Jefferson responded with a long letter about the relative lack of machinery in Virginia, except for the “Spinning Jenny and loom with the flying shuttle” that could be managed in the family. When the “homespun” arrived, it turned out to be a copy of John Quincy Adams’ lectures on “Rhetoric and Oratory” while he was a Harvard professor. Jefferson found them a “mine of learning and taste,” he wrote the proud father.

From there the correspondence took off, ranging across religion, history, Indians, the essence of aristocracy, Napoleon’s character, the influence of women, the perfectibility of human nature, and soaring into the realms of philosophy and theology. The two men refought old battles, straightening out history, each to his own satisfaction. Jefferson did not take sharp issue with Adams, however, and he was wise in this, for the latter was extremely defensive about his place in history. Years before, when Mercy Warren published her account of the Revolution, Adams had been outraged by her conclusion that his revolutionary principles had been corrupted by his long stay in London, and that he leaned toward monarchy and was inordinately proud and ambitious. Angry exchanges had followed for weeks, terminated only, by the intervention of Elbridge Gerry and the exchange of loving letters and locks of hair. Adams still had the last word, observing to Gerry, “History is not the province of the ladies.”

But now John Adams had mellowed, and he professed his affection for Jefferson even while debating him. There was much talk of family and friends—especially of old comrades dead or dying. Adams was inordinately proud of his numerous progeny, even though he granted that children have “cost us Grief, Anxiety, often Vexation and sometimes humiliation.” Abigail Adams occasionally added a friendly line, until she died of typhoid fever in her seventy-fourth year. Words were in vain,
Jefferson wrote the inconsolable Adams, but they both could look forward to “an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again.”

And so the two men, constantly professing their friendship, wept and sparred and totted up historical accounts together, Adams with his palsy hardly able to write, Jefferson laboriously penning his gracious but spirited letters. Nothing lay outside the play of their minds. Adams was still unyielding on matters of prime importance—and to him this included how governments were constituted. His experience with the Constitution had not changed his old views of the arrangement of powers. “Checks and Ballances, Jefferson, however you and your Party may have ridiculed them, are our only Security, for the progress of mind, as well as the Security of Body.” There had always been party differences, Jefferson argued, and there always would be, for “every one takes his side in favor of the many, or of the few, according to his constitution, and the circumstances in which he is placed.…” Yes, replied Adams, it was precisely because parties had always existed and fought each other with ridicule and persecution that the Science of Government was the least advanced of all the sciences.

They argued briefly about the nature of liberty, but with no more acuteness or imagination than their fellow Americans. The principles of liberty were unalterable, Adams said. Then later he wondered, “Is liberty a word void of sense?” If it was, there could be no reward or punishment. Perhaps at “the bottom of the gulph of liberty and necessity” there might be the key to unlock the universe, but only God held the key. One thing was clear, though: without virtue there could be no political liberty. Jefferson was discreetly reserved on questions of liberty and equality, so enkindling were they to his friend.

The correspondence faltered as the Jubilee year neared. In June 1826 a committee of Bostonians waited on John Adams to invite his honored attendance at the celebration, but he was too weak to make the carriage ride. Instead, he wrote a letter in tribute to the Declaration of Independence, adding that despite man’s folly and vanity he could see hope for improving the condition of the human race. Though Jefferson was eager to go to Washington, he knew he could not; he wrote that the Declaration would be “the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government…the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion.…”

In Washington, on the Fourth of July 1826, President John Quincy Adams and Vice-President John Calhoun rode in their carriage amid a
grand parade along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. There a Revolutionary War veteran read the noble words of the Declaration. A plea was made to subscribe money to keep Monticello from being put up for sale. In New York, Governor Clinton put on a feast of roast, oxen and ale for ten thousand guests. Bostonians so crowded into Old South Church that they were “squeezed to a hot jelly,” except in the galleries reserved for women. Philadelphia, where it had all happened, contented itself with a parade and a program in Independence Hall. In Charlottesville a student at the University of Virginia read the Declaration of Independence.

Its author was not there. On his hilltop nearby, he had awakened from a long sleep the night before to ask only, “This is the Fourth?” and he died around midday, as the celebrations were under way. About this time in Quincy, John Adams awoke as from a coma, muttered “Thomas Jefferson survives,” and died before the setting of the sun.

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OUNGERS ON A LOWER
Manhattan pier in the fall of 1792 might have noticed a well-dressed, elegantly spoken young man board a sailing vessel for Georgia. This was Eli Whitney. A Yankee tinkerer, inventor, and jack of all trades, Whitney had learned mechanical skills growing up on a Massachusetts farm. In this, his first trip South, he found himself in the company of Catherine Greene, the young widow of the Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene. She was traveling to her rice plantation, Mulberry Grove, twelve miles outside of Savannah, Georgia, while Whitney was drifting into his first job as a tutor to children on a neighboring plantation. Reserved, serious, churchgoing, young Whitney was dazzled on the long trip by the flirtatious Mrs. Greene; when she invited him to visit Mulberry Grove, he accepted. Her world of carefree parties and gay entertainments was beyond his understanding and experience. The “moral world,” he said, “does not extend so far south.”