What Hath God Wrought (36 page)

DeWitt Clinton, on the other hand, leader of the People’s Party, was an authentic but largely forgotten hero of American democracy. His Erie Canal liberated many farm families from commercial and political isolation. The public schools he supported provided the basis for mass literacy; his Savings Bank mobilized the thrift of small savers for investment capital. The infrastructure he worked to create would transform American life, enhancing economic opportunity, political participation, and intellectual awareness.

VI

Late in 1833, a twenty-seven-year-old French engineer named Michel Chevalier arrived in the United States. American canals, bridges, steamboats, and railroads fascinated him. During his two-year tour of the country, he concluded that improvements in transportation had democratic implications. In former times, he remarked, with roads rough and dangerous, travel required “a long train of luggage, provisions, servants, and guards,” making it rare and expensive. “The great bulk of mankind, slaves in fact and in name,” had been “chained to the soil” not only by their legal and social status but also “by the difficulty of locomotion.” Freedom to travel, the ability to leave home, was essential to the modern world and as democratic as universal suffrage, Chevalier explained:

As Chevalier realized, improved transportation and communications facilitated not only the movement of goods and ideas but personal, individual freedom as well. Americans, a mobile and venturesome people, empowered by literacy and technological proficiency, did not hesitate to take advantage of the opportunity provided (as he put it) to turn the globe to their account.

In traditional society, the only items worth transporting long distances had been luxury goods, and information about the outside world had been one of the most precious luxuries of all. The transportation and communications revolutions made both goods and information broadly accessible. In doing so, they laid a foundation not only for widespread economic betterment and wider intellectual horizons but also for political democracy: in newspapers and magazines, in post offices, in nationwide movements to influence public opinion, and in mass political parties.

On the Fourth of July 1826, Americans celebrated their nation’s Golden Jubilee, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. They observed the occasion with a holiday, speeches, toasts, and cannon salutes. Most remarkably, however, the day was hallowed by an unforeseeable combination of events. At fifty minutes past noon Thomas Jefferson, eighty-two-year-old author of the Declaration and third president, died at Monticello, his home in Albemarle County, Virginia. His last words had been, “Is it the Fourth?” Five hours later ninety-year-old John Adams, congressional advocate of the Declaration and second president, likewise died at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. Friends in youth, the two men had become political adversaries, only to resume their friendship in old age and engage in a philosophical correspondence. Adams’s last words were “Thomas Jefferson still survives,” though in fact he was mistaken. Couriers traveling by steamboats and relays of galloping horses carried the news of the deaths north from Virginia and south from Massachusetts. Compounding the coincidence, the riders bearing these tidings met in Philadelphia, where it had all started at Independence Hall fifty years before. In Washington, John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States, learned of Jefferson’s death on the sixth; he learned of his father’s on the ninth in Baltimore, having started north to visit the old man. The president pronounced the juxtaposition of events a “visible and palpable mark of Divine favor” to the nation, and most of his countrymen agreed.
¹

With the deaths of Jefferson and Adams, only one signer of the Declaration of Independence, eighty-nine-year-old Charles Carroll of Maryland, remained alive. As the Founders of the republic passed from the scene, Americans were left to carry on their legacy with the help of their example. John Quincy Adams could not have felt more keenly the responsibility to preserve that “precious inheritance.” The United States demonstrated to the world the merits of “representative democracy” (the term was still novel, and Adams the first president to use it). The president believed that knitting the Union together, strengthening it economically and culturally, fulfilled the promise of the Revolution. The whole point of liberation from foreign domination, Adams asserted, was so that Americans could pursue the goal of human improvement, for their own benefit and that of mankind.
²

The deceased patriarchs had been obvious examples of the talent and virtue that the Founders believed should characterize leadership in a republic. But they were also examples of personal improvement. Through hard work and study they had developed their potential and then turned it to the betterment of their countrymen. “Improvement,” in its early nineteenth-century sense, constituted both an individual and a collective responsibility, involving both the cultivation of personal faculties and the development of national resources. Representative government and the Erie Canal improved society. The printing press and public education improved both society and individuals. To improve something was to turn it to good account, to make use of its potential. Thus, one could “improve” an occasion, that is, take advantage of it. A system of “internal improvements” would take advantage of the nation’s opportunities and develop its resources, just as a woman might “improve herself by reading.” Whether individual or collective, the word “improvement” had a moral as well as a physical meaning; it constituted an obligation, an imperative. Many an American, rural as well as urban, poor as well as middle-class, embraced the ethos of material and intellectual improvement. The young Abraham Lincoln with his book by the firelight shared this outlook, both as applied to himself and as applied to navigable waterways in Illinois. Improvement, personal and social, had not only a secular but also a religious appeal, as evangelical reformers like Beecher and Finney showed. To this culturally powerful conception John Quincy Adams dedicated his presidency.
³

II

John Quincy (pronounced “Quinzy”) Adams represented another man of talent and virtue, a worthy son of his father. His intellectual ability and courage were above reproach, and his wisdom in perceiving the national interest has stood the test of time. In an age when presidents were typically well prepared by prior public service, he came to the office the best prepared of all. He had been professor at Harvard, senator from Massachusetts, and “minister plenipotentiary” to the Netherlands, Prussia, Britain, and Russia (the United States did not use the title “ambassador” until the 1890s). More recently, Adams had served his country as peace negotiator at Ghent and as one of the greatest secretaries of state. Despite all this, Adams was not fated to enjoy a successful presidency. The limitations on his effectiveness lay partly beyond his control, but some of the responsibility rested with contradictions in Adams’s own conception of his presidential role.

Contemporaries considered John Quincy Adams the quintessential New England Yankee: serious, hardworking, devout, with integrity of granite. Yet his time in Europe had given him a cosmopolitan perspective (and thanks to childhood years in Paris, fluency in French). Though his ancestors had been Puritans, Adams belonged to the liberal wing of the Congregational Church, much influenced by Enlightenment concepts of human rights and freedom. In both public and private life, Adams devoted himself to “improvement,” which for him meant the painstaking regulation of all activities. Every day he made time for diary-writing and exercise; during his presidential term this included swimming naked in the Potomac at dawn. (He almost drowned there on June 13, 1825, in a rowboat that suddenly filled with water; the president didn’t have time to take off his clothes, which weighed him down.)
⁴
A lifelong student of Cicero and the moral philosophers of eighteenth-century Scotland, Adams envisioned the American republic as the culmination of the history of human progress and the realization of the potential of human nature. Drawing an analogy between technological and political improvement, he once called the United States government “the steamboat of moral and political being.”
⁵
Adams was the most learned president between Jefferson and Wilson but, like many intellectuals, felt ill at ease in society. He could not learn to welcome public appearances. Portly and balding by the time of his inauguration at the age of fifty-seven, he had lost his youthful good looks; charisma he had never possessed. Brooding, critical of those around him, Adams was most unsparing of all toward himself. First Lady Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams of Maryland, charming and musical, had been a major asset to her husband’s election campaign. In the White House, however, her health and spirits declined.
⁶

Adams came into office acutely conscious of his vulnerability as a minority president. “Less possessed of your confidence in advance than any of my predecessors,” he pleaded in his inaugural address for the “indulgence” of the public.
⁷
The contrast between the all-but-unanimous election of Monroe in 1820 and the protracted, divisive election of 1824–25 could not have been greater. Accordingly, the new president took every possible step to underscore the continuity between Monroe’s administration and his own. He stayed in close contact with the outgoing president during the transition, praised Monroe’s achievements, and promised to pursue his initiatives. Indeed, Adams probably had been Monroe’s favored candidate, though it is characteristic of the Virginian’s politic discretion that he never made any such public acknowledgment.

Upon assuming the presidency, Adams refused to admit that the Era of Good Feelings could not be perpetuated. His inaugural address rejoiced that the “baneful weed of party strife was uprooted.” He avowed as his goal a truly nonpartisan approach to government and sought to create an administration based on “talents and virtue,” not party politics or sectionalism—which he declared even “more dangerous” than party. The role of an executive above party was dictated by political theory (Adams had long admired Bolingbroke’s treatise
The Idea of a Patriot King
), by Monroe’s example, and by the constraints of his situation as a minority president with little natural support outside his own section.
⁸
Accordingly, Adams left most of Monroe’s officeholders in place, although some of them had backed his rivals in the recent election. He even offered to allow William H. Crawford to remain at the Treasury, though he must have been relieved when Crawford declined. Forgiving DeWitt Clinton his support for Jackson, Adams offered Clinton the premier diplomatic post at London. But Magnus Apollo was unwilling to forgo his governorship and the coming Erie Canal ceremonies, which he understandably relished. Adams then turned to the Federalist elder statesman, Rufus King, who had been minister to Britain many years before. Old Republicans howled in protest against the nomination of a Federalist, and Adams actually made few other Federalist appointments.
⁹
He filled the vacancy at the Treasury with Richard Rush of Pennsylvania and gave the War Department, Calhoun’s former office, to James Barbour of Virginia. Monroe’s attorney general, postmaster general, and secretary of the navy all stayed put. In the end, Adams hoped he had laid the basis for government by consensus, or what his British contemporaries called a government of “all the talents.”

Of course, Henry Clay’s nomination as secretary of state represented the most momentous appointment. Apart from the role Clay had played in Adams’s election, it was a logical choice, both to give the West a seat in the cabinet and to recognize Clay’s concern with Latin American policy. Adams consulted with Monroe before making the offer, and the outgoing president did not advise against it. In later years Clay came to regret accepting the office, as seeming to confirm the accusation that he had traded his support in the presidential race for it. At the time, however, Clay felt that to decline would be to concede the justice of the accusation even more clearly. Clay had been disappointed when Monroe had not appointed him secretary of state, and now it seemed that Adams had recognized his deserts. Even if Clay had not joined the administration, his enemies would very likely still have gone into opposition.
¹⁰
However logical the Adams-Clay alliance in terms of their agreement on future policies, in 1825 it startled observers that the leading policymaker in the Monroe administration should join up with that administration’s most outspoken congressional critic. Jackson rallied the disappointed of several factions to his cause with the cry that a “corrupt bargain” had been consummated.

The accusation of a “corrupt bargain” proved one of the most effective political weapons ever forged; it harassed the Adams administration and would haunt Henry Clay for the rest of his life. Today its effectiveness seems puzzling. In a multifactional election, a coalition government is inevitable, and an Adams-Clay coalition was as logical as any other (except Adams-Jackson, now no longer an option). But the political culture of the time did not acknowledge that the Jeffersonian Republican party had indeed fragmented into a multifactional system, nor even that candidates sought the presidency. Adams’s appointment of Clay seemed to confirm the charge of “Wyoming” that all the candidates but Jackson were intriguers. Furthermore, the word “corruption” had a special resonance. In the eighteenth century, British monarchs bestowed offices in return for support in Parliament, and colonial governors often tried the same tactic with their legislatures. Critics had called the practice “corrupting” the legislature.
¹¹
The parallel, while not exact, was close enough to imply that Adams and Clay were not only dishonest but un-American.

In the Senate, the vitriolic Old Republican John Randolph led the opposition to the administration. Of all possible critics, this flamboyant Virginia aristocrat was surely the most to be feared. Randolph hated Clay’s nationalism, envied his successful career, and for years had contrived ways to torment him. In the first session of Congress he delivered a characteristically inflammatory speech full of ingenious insults, calling the Adams-Clay administration “the coalition of Blifil and Black George—the combination, unheard of till then, of the puritan with the blackleg.” His listeners gasped, then roared with laughter. Everyone recognized the allusion to the popular culture of the time. In Henry Fielding’s novel
Tom Jones
, Blifil was a sanctimonious hypocrite, Black George an irresponsible scamp. A “blackleg” meant a cardsharp.
¹²
Poor Clay had been trying to live down his early reputation as a gambler and high liver and cultivate an image of statesmanlike moderation. Coming on top of the “corrupt bargain” charges, Randolph’s insult seemed one too many, and Clay challenged the Virginian to a duel. Dueling was a feature of the southern code of manly honor, but two years earlier Clay had foresworn the practice, in support of Lyman Beecher’s movement to abolish it. His good resolution was forgotten in the heat of the moment.
¹³

On April 8, 1826, the two men, accompanied by their seconds and doctors, met and exchanged shots at a distance of ten paces. In spite of coming from Kentucky, Clay was a fumbling incompetent with firearms and missed both times, though his second bullet put a hole in Randolph’s coat. Randolph was a better marksman and came with a pistol set on hair-trigger. Still, he too missed the first time (apparently aiming at Clay’s leg) and then fired into the air. Honor satisfied, the two shook hands and went home. Clay had embarrassed the Adams administration, which depended on evangelical reformers opposed to dueling as part of its core constituency. To his own core constituency of plantation masters, Randolph had shown himself a chivalrous gentleman. He had counted on Clay’s poor marksmanship and had never intended to kill him. The theatricality of it all, speech and duel alike, appealed to Randolph.
¹⁴

In the House of Representatives the administration initially enjoyed the support of a modest majority and secured the Speakership for John Taylor of New York, who had been a strong supporter of the Tallmadge amendment. The Senate presented more difficulty, but the presiding officer there was Vice President Calhoun, who assumed the right to appoint committee members.
¹⁵
Calhoun and Adams had long been close associates in Monroe’s cabinet and had worked together in support of a nationalist agenda. In 1821, Adams had confided to his diary that Calhoun seemed “above all sectional and factious prejudices more than any other statesman of this Union with whom I have ever acted.”
¹⁶
Now, however, far from aiding the administration, Vice President Calhoun used his influence in the Senate to distance himself more and more from President Adams. What had gone wrong with their partnership?