Defections to the Right, Defections to the Left--HST Charged into Dewey's Guns

 

Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey stoked the rage of Southern delegates to the 1948 Democratic National Convention with his call for a strong Civil Rights plank in the platform.  He also made himself a national figure and leader of the liberal wing of the party.

Things were tense in the steaming Convention Hall in Philadelphia on July 14, 1948 as delegates prepared to vote on the nomination of Harry S Truman for a full term in his own right.  Delegates from the Solid South were restive and angry.  Earlier the youthful Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey roused liberal delegates with a rip-roaring appeal for a strong Civil Rights plank in the Party Platform.  Outraged Southerners booed and cursed.

Harry Truman was considered by many that year as “a gone goose,” in the words of Clare Booth Luce speaking to the Republican Convention in the same city three weeks earlier. The GOP had already captured both Houses of Congress by secure margins for the first time since 1928 in mid-term elections.  The established press and much of the country considered Truman at best an accidental place-holder and a Missouri hick unfit for the demands of the office and the mantle of Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

The Republicans nominated popular governors Thomas E. Dewey of New York for President and Earl Warren of California as his running mate on a relatively liberal platform.

Moreover, Truman was under attack by the left wing of his own party unhappy with his increasingly hostile relations with former World War II ally, the Soviet Union and suspicious of his commitment to Civil Rights and a continuation of New Deal policies.  They were rallying behind popular agronomist and former Vice President and Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace who would soon bolt the party and run on the independent Progressive Party ticket.

Just before the convention this cartoon shows Truman as most concerned with a brewing liberal rebellion.  The sweating men included New York Mayor William O'Dwyer and James Roosevelt, son of FDR. 

But Truman’s real problem in the Party was in the South.  Traditionally conservative Democrats had generally gone along with the New Deal, using their seniority in Congress to shepherd through much of Roosevelt’s domestic agenda.  In exchange, to the dismay of northern liberals and his wife, Roosevelt had not advanced a Civil Rights program.  But the war changed that.  Moves were made to pay for Black troops and sailors serving in segregated units the same as Whites and, after Bayard Rustin threatened to lead a war-time march on Washington, a guarantee of equal opportunity and pay in defense industries.  Both actions were an anathema to Southerners who also now feared an influx of “cocky” Black veterans ready to challenge the existing order.  Now Truman, with the strong backing of the beloved and influential former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, was supporting strong new Civil Rights legislation.

Truman, hoping to shore up his shaky support on the left and as a signal that he was committed to Civil Rights, was hoping to have the young and very liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas as his running mate.  But Douglas had him down preferring to remain on the Court with a chance for promotion to Chief Justice.  Instead, Truman turned to an old war horse, Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, who had galvanized the Convention on opening day with a rousing, chest thumping stem-winder of a Keynote Speech.  Perhaps Barkley presence on the ticket might also re-assure the restive Southerners.

Truman tapped popular New Dealer, Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky as a running mate hoping to shore up his support from Roosevelt loyalists and in the hope that the border state figure would reassure Southern delegates.  It worked on the former, failed with the latter.  Here the running mates are seen on Truman's Whistle Stop campaign tour.

The agenda was packed on the final day of the Convention.  The first order of business was the adoption of a Party Platform including Humphrey’s Civil Rights Plank which enjoyed the support of the President. The bitter debate dragged on far past schedule.  When the vote was taken party liberals with the strong support of labor delegates edged the South.

Angrily, Governor Strom Thurman of South Carolina stormed out of the Convention trailing 36 delegates including the entire Mississippi delegation and half of Alabama’s.  They met as a rump in a hotel room to watch the rest of the Convention unfold on the first televised broadcast.

The Mississippi delegation followed Strom Thurman out of the Convention in mass.  The Black newsboy seems caught by surprise. 

The remaining Southern delegates put Georgia Senator Richard Russell in nomination.  Although the results were never in doubt, the nominating speeches and long-winded orations excoriating the President and the Convention during the Roll Call of the States kept Truman waiting in his hotel room until well past midnight.

At 2 am on the 15th the President, in a crisp white summer suit, finally took to the podium for his acceptance speech, well after most radio listeners and television viewers had gone to bed.  But Truman electrified the convention with an aggressive speech that set the stage for his famed underdog campaign.  He vigorously defended the New Deal and pledged to continue its reforms.  He lashed the “Do nothing Congress” and said he would call it into special session and dare the Republican body to enact the provisions of their liberal party platform.  “The battle lines of 1948 are the same as they were in 1932,” he declared, “when the nation lay prostrate and helpless as a result of Republican misrule and inaction.”  And he refused to back down on Civil Rights.

                          

                                        Truman gave an electrifying acceptance speech--at 2 am long after most American had gone to bed.

If the folks at home only got to see the performance in newsreels a few days later, Truman’s performance rallied most of the rest of the convention delegates who began to believe that he might actually prevail in November.  But those remaining Southerners either left in disgust or sat on their hands.

Shortly after the Convention, Truman defiantly signed the long-anticipated Executive Order desegregating the Armed Forces.

In response, Southerners met at Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama, where they nominated Thurmond for President and Governor Fielding L. Wright of Mississippi for Vice president. The new party named itself the States’ Rights Democratic Party but was universally referred to as the Dixiecrats.

The Dixiecrat ticket.

A few weeks later at a second meeting in Oklahoma City, they adopted a platform that made it crystal clear what they stood for:

We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to choose one’s associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one's living in any lawful way. We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program. We favor home-rule, local self-government and a minimum interference with individual rights…. We call upon all Democrats and upon all other loyal Americans who are opposed to totalitarianism at home and abroad to unite with us in ignominiously defeating Harry S. Truman, Thomas E. Dewey and every other candidate for public office who would establish a Police Nation in the United States of America.

The strategy of the Dixiecrats was simple.  They would take over state Democratic Parties where possible and replace Truman with Thurman while running no state or local candidates.  Failing that, they would get on the ballot as a third party.  They succeeded in taking over the parties of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina and were on the ballot of the remaining states of the Old Confederacy and in some border states—but not Truman’s Missouri or Barkley’s Kentucky.

As the campaign heated up Wallace and the Progressive party began to flounder, especially when he refused to renounce the public support and endorsement of the Communist Party.  Many liberals, fearing the three-way party split would usher in the Republicans, returned to the Democratic fold, if not entirely enthusiastically.  

Former Vice President Henry Wallace tried to run as the true heir to FDR and the New Deal, but his campaign collapsed over the endorsement and support of the Communist Party.  The left wing of the Democratic Party was virtually destroyed.

In the meantime, Wallace’s connections with the Communists re-assured voters tempted to stray to the Republicans that the President was not himself the Red menace painted by the right of the GOP and the Dixiecrats.

Then Truman turned in the greatest campaign in American history, his famed Whistle Stop Tour where he stirred up voters with his famous Give ‘em Hell speeches.  Dewey and Warren ran predictable, dull campaigns making boring speeches full of safe, empty platitudes to polite partisan crowds in major cities.

Early polling showed the GOP with such a heavy lead that most news providers decided to suspend polling to save money.  The press, ensconced in the big cities, hardly noticed the growing enthusiasm for Truman everywhere he appeared.  The pundits unanimously regarded the splintered Democrats as dead in the water.  Almost everyone predicted a Dewey landslide.  The Chicago Tribune confidently printed a headline announcing “Dewey Beat Truman” in its early edition the morning after the polls closed but before the actual results were in.

            The most famous photo in American political history.

In the end, of course, Truman was the gloating winner.  Despite the multiple parties on the ballot the President almost won an outright majority of the popular vote—49.6%.  He swamped Dewey with 45.1%, Thurman with 2.9%. Wallace was not far behind that. 

The Dixiecrats were able to carry four states—Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Louisiana plus one Congressional District in Tennessee for a total of 39 Electoral College votes.  The Republicans carried most of the Northeast except for Massachusetts and Rhode Island as well as two Mid-western states, the Prairie States from Kansas to North Dakota, and Oregon for 189 Electoral votes.  Truman took the rest of the states, including those who had been in the Confederacy, for a whopping 303 Electoral votes.  Although Wallace ran a close fourth in the popular vote, he failed to carry a single state and his utter defeat, along with rising anti-communist hysteria, crushed the far left of the Democratic Party.

After the election the Dixiecrats all returned to the Democratic fold.  Those in Congress, where Democrats had resumed control in the House of Representatives and Senate by comfortable margins, were allowed to retain their seniority status, including the Chairmanships of many of the most important committees.  Truman would have to rely on these former foes to advance his agenda. They generally did, although they blocked his Civil Rights program and his proposal for universal health care insurance.

Segregationist Democrats remained in power across the South, although their voters were more restive each election about the national ticket.  With the adoption of a succession of major Civil Rights bills culminating in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 Southern Democrats began their stampede away from the Democratic Party, just as Lyndon Johnson ruefully predicted.  Many supported arch-segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace in his 1968 Presidential bid under the American Independent Party banner, and his 1972 run for the Democratic Party nomination which only ended with the attempted assassination that left him gravely injured.

In 1968 Richard Nixon launched his ultimately successful Southern Strategy to lure Wallace and conservative voters to the GOP.  Over the next decades the once Solid South turned increasingly Republican, symbolized by the defection of Senator Strom Thurman himself.

By the early 21st Century the process was complete, and the South was such a solid base for the Republicans that it drove the erstwhile party of Lincoln further and further to the right.  Along with libertarian ideologues and MAGA zombies the modern GOP is now unrecognizable from its historic roots.  Despite Donald Trump’s disastrous first term, the 2022 Capitol insurrection, and his criminal convictions, he made an astonishing come-back against Joe Biden. 

And in so many ways this whole landslide of history began with the snit and walk-out of the Dixiecrats 78 years ago.

Adams the Younger--The Son Also Rises Part II

                 

                            John Quincy Adams presidential portrait.

The years of the Monroe Administration were already being called the Era of Good Feelings because following the War of 1812 the Federalists had all but disappeared making the Democratic Republicans the single major political party.  But it was unwieldy and had lost the ideological cohesion of the heady days of the Revolution of 1800 when Thomas Jefferson and the party swept into office, crushing John Adam’s hopes for a second term.

The orderly system of party caucus which anointed the favorite of the sitting President had broken down and the era of Revolutionary Founders had run out.  Despite the advantage of being Monroe’s obvious choice and a distinguished eight years as Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams found himself no more than a regional choice of the New England and Mid-Atlantic states.  Other regionally backed candidates emerged to challenge him—John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, William H. Crawford of Georgia, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. 

Each also represented a nuanced political difference.  Calhoun was a fierce nationalist in those days. Clay was the leader of a faction that wanted western expansion and Federally funded internal improvements like canals and roads.  Crawford was the choice of former Presidents Jefferson and Madison as the logical defender of traditional Republicanism.  And the bellicose Jackson ran as an old conservative favoring limited Federal authority on one hand and western populism on the other.  Adams was left as what we would call today a technocrat who had no independent patronage base.

With no unseemly public campaigning by any of the candidates, the race devolved into complicated jockeying for position in the background.  Calhoun dropped out of the race, presumably in favor of Jackson, but possibly also to benefit his fellow Unitarian Adams—the two were among the co-founders of Washington’s All Souls Church.  At any rate, both Adams and Jackson named him their vice-presidential running mate. Crawford, with strong support across the old South, fell ill and for a while looked like he might also have to drop out.  The popular Jackson swamped Clay in the West.  

After the November election there was no clear Electoral College winner.  Adams carried 7 states with 84 Electoral Votes.  Jackson did even better—12 states with 99 votes, but not enough to carry the day.  Crawford lagged far behind with 2 states and 41 votes.  With the race destined to go to the House of Representatives the odd man out Clay, who carried three states but only 37 votes despite besting Crawford in the popular vote, threw his considerable support in the House to Adams insuring a victory in that body.  Clay’s national program was clearly closer to Adams than any other candidate and he personally distrusted his regional rival Jackson.

Jackson, the leader in both electoral and popular votes was outraged.  That outrage grew when Adams appointed Clay as his Secretary of State.  Jackson furiously charged that the election had been stolen from him by a corrupt bargain between Adams and Clay.  He immediately launched what amounted to a four-year campaign to build a political organization to crush Adams in 1832 and win the Presidency and vindication.

Adams, a stickler for separation of church and state, became the only man to be sworn into the Presidency with his hand on a copy of the Constitution not the Bible.

With most pressing foreign policy issues laid to rest by his own successful eight years as head of the State Department, Adams concentrated on domestic issues, at first with some success.  With the support of Clay, now his most trusted advisor, the President pushed an aggressive program of internal improvements and won funding for such projects as the extension of the Cumberland Road into Ohio, the beginning of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, the construction of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal and the Louisville & Portland Canal around the falls of the Ohio, the connection of the Great Lakes to the Ohio River system in Ohio and Indiana; and the enlargement and rebuilding of the Dismal Swamp Canal in North Carolina.

He also supported a high protective tariff, popular both in industrializing New England and Mid-Atlantic states and which was a keystone of Clay’s American System.  But as maneuvering for a new, higher tariff bill went forward, Adams’s supporters in Congress, now known as National Republicans, lost control to Jackson’s supporters, now known as Democrats.  In tricky and duplicitous maneuvering designed by Vice President Calhoun, tariffs on raw materials thought to be obnoxious to New England were added to the bill in the hope that many representatives of that region would be forced to abandon their support.  Then the Southern Democrats, who put forth the program, would withdraw their support, dooming the tariff.  But it did not work out that way.  A substantial minority of New Englanders in Congress supported the Tariff as best for the whole nation.  When not enough of them turned against it, the Tariff of 1828 passed. 

Adams signed it in the face of voracious opposition from the South which labeled it the Tariff of Abominations because of the hardships it imposed on the Planter class, which was dependent on cheap imported manufactured goods. Adams knew it was probably the end of his presidency.

In the election of 1828, the careful plans of Jackson and his new Democratic Party came to fruition.  Adams, like his father, was swept out of office by a virtual bloodless revolution.  Jackson conducted the first real popular election campaign for president while Adams sat traditionally above the fray and reluctant to engage in retail politics to shore up support.  

This map shows how overwhelmed John Quincy Adams was in the election of 1828.

Jackson, with Calhoun once again his running mate, won 15 states, 178 Electoral College votes, and carried a landslide 56% of the popular vote.  Adams and new running mate Richard Rush could only garner 83 Electoral votes from 9 states.  Despite not caring much for the job, the rejection stung.  Like his father before him, Adams left town before his enemy’s inauguration.

Adams decided to do what no other former President had ever done, and none has done since—run for election to the House of Representatives.  He was handily elected as a National Republican in 1840 and went on to be returned to the House seven more times until he literally died in his traces.

In his early years in the House, he led opposition to Jackson’s popular Indian Removal policies and defended the Second Bank of The United States, the main target of Jackson’s wrath.

A run for Governor of Massachusetts in 1834 failed when he lost to a Democrat.  But he kept his House seat.

Adams became increasingly concerned with rising sectionalism, and particularly the issue of the expansion of slavery.  He felt that slavery would either destroy the Union or be ended by a blood bath slave insurrection.

In 1836 the House voted for the so-called Gag Rule which immediately tabled any petitions about slavery, banning discussion or debate of the issue.  The crafty Adams found a way to bring the discussion to the fore anyway.  He laid a petition from a Georgia man calling for disunion to support slavery in the South.  Although he did not support the petition, he did so because it violated the Gag Rule.  Infuriated Southerners called for his censure.  But in his defense in a trial before the House, Adams was able to bring up the topics of slavery and the dangers to democracy by the Gag Rule.  He wielded control of the debate for two solid weeks, gaining national attention.  When the Democratic majority realized that they had been trapped, they tried to withdraw the charges.  But Adams would not let them.  He insisted on an up-or-down vote which he won.

Adams would challenge the Gag Rule again and again, proud to “be obnoxious to the faction.”

If he was obnoxious before, he doubled down during the Amistad Case.  A shipload of chained slaves destined for sale in the Caribbean managed to take control of their Spanish slave ship, La Amistad in 1839, killing many of the crew and forcing the survivors to return them to Africa.  The crew tricked the mutineers and instead sailed north into American waters where the ship was intercepted by a Revenue Cutter off the shores of New York. 

The slaves were taken into custody and the Spanish government demanded the return of its “rightful property.”  A Federal District Court, however, ruled that under the terms of a treaty between Great Britain and the United States which outlawed the international slave trade, Spain had no claim on the men.  Moreover, it ruled that they had properly taken action to free themselves from what amounted to an illegal kidnapping.

The decision outraged Southerners and set up a major diplomatic crisis with the Spanish.  President Martin Van Buren ordered the Justice Department to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.  Congressman Adams offered his assistance in arguing the case before the Court.  After Roger Sherman Baldwin, the young lawyer who represented the slaves from the beginning opened with two days of argument, Adams stood before the Court on his own on February 24, 1841.

John Quincy Adams arguing in defense of the Amistad rebels before the Supreme Court.  The skilled and detailed summation of the issues went on for hours and one justice literally died on the bench.

He boldly attacked President Van Buren for inappropriately assuming unconstitutional powers in the case by ordering intervention.  Then as the most experienced diplomat in American history and the actual author of some of the Treaties cited by Attorney General Gilpin who was personally arguing the case for the government, Adams skillfully demolished claims that the treaties demanded the return of the men to Spain.  Adams argued for eight and a half hours during which time Justice Philip Barbour died.  After a recess for the funeral, he concluded his arguments on March 1.

The Court affirmed the lower court’s ruling on March 9 with Justice Joseph Story citing many of Adams’s arguments in the ruling that freed the rebels.

Adams became a hero of the cause of anti-slavery and more of a villain than ever to the South.

Back in Congress he continued to oppose slavery in any way possible and continued his attacks on the Gag Rule.  He led opposition to the Annexation of Texas as a slave state.

His other major contributions in Congress included authoring a compromise on the Tariff of 1828 that he himself had signed ending the Nullification Crisis and the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution with the funds bequeathed to the United States by English millionaire James Smithson for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge.” A lot of hands were out for a slice of that pie, but Adams insisted on the creation of a national academy.  When the bequest was unwisely invested in shaky bonds, Adams argued to immediately accept the money with repayment of the losses.  Congress decided to accept the legacy bequeathed to the nation and pledged the faith of the United States to the charitable trust on July 1, 1836.

John Quincy Adams became the first President ever photographed when he sat for this daguerreotype as a member of the House of Representatives shortly before his death.

Indefatigably, Adams plugged on despite deteriorating health and advaanced age. But on February 28, 1848 Adams rose to speak against a resolution honoring officers who served in the Mexican War, which he had voraciously opposed.  With opponents trying to shout him down, Adams suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage while standing at his desk and collapsed.  He was carried to the Speaker’s Room off the floor of the House where two days later he died after whispering to his wife and son Charles Francis, “This is the last of earth. I am content.”

John Quincy Adams on his death bed in the Speaker's Room of the House of Representatives in a late 19th Century print.

After a brief internment in the Capitol crypt, his remains were returned to Quincy where he was first laid to rest in the church yard of First Parish Church.  Later his remains were moved to a crypt inside the church next to his mother and father.  The resting place can still be viewed at the Unitarian church that came to be called the Church of the Presidents.

Adams the Younger--The Son Also Rises Part I

 

Famous parents and a daunting legacy--John and Abigail Adams.  John Quincy admired and respected his distant father but bitterly resented his mother who was never satisfied with him and whose sharp tongue made it abundantly clear to him.

At the end of his long life John Quincy Adams was revered as Old Man Eloquent by opponents of slavery and reviled in equal measure as a Yankee mad man by the Southern slave-holding aristocracy.  As a boy and young man, he lived in his famous father’s shadow, an errand boy and gopher for the great man on his diplomatic postings for the infant American republic.

In between he lived an eventful life, full of public service, accomplishments, and occasional respect all the while battling what is now evident as severe depression and self-doubt.

The younger Adams was born on July 11, 1767 at the family home in Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts to John and Abigail Adams.  His mother came from prominent local gentry and his father was a rising lawyer with political aspirations who was soon prominent among Patriot leaders including his cousin Samuel Adams, merchant John Hancock, and fellow lawyer James Otis.

In his early childhood the boy’s father was often busy with his law practice and politics in near-by Boston or away from home for extended periods of time as a delegate to the Continental Congress.  His mother constantly reminded him of how important a man his father was.  One summer day in 1777 he learned about the Declaration of Independence, which his father had done so much to bring about, from a letter read to him by his mother.

Just a year later he packed his bags to accompany his father on a critical diplomatic mission to France where he joined Benjamin Franklin in the delicate negotiations to obtain French support for the war effort.  The boy was from the beginning more than a companion, he was something of a cross between a domestic servant to his father and eventually a secretary.  He absorbed the details of the intrigue around him, including his father’s prickly relationship with the famous and beloved Franklin and learned from the elder Adams’ sometimes curt bluster how not to conduct diplomacy.  While on this trip John Quincy began keeping the diary he would maintain for more than 40 years, giving later scholars a priceless insider account of early America and its politics.

                                

                                              John Quincy Adams age 10--his father's aide and errand boy in Europe.

In 1780 he again accompanied his father when he was made Minister to The Netherlands.  On this trip the boy’s duties were more substantial.  He also got an education, matriculating at Leiden University in 1781.  At the tender age of 14 he was considered competent enough to be loaned to another American diplomat, Francis Dana, who he served as official secretary for the mission to the Court of Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg, Russia.  He also traveled in the Scandinavian countries of Finland, Sweden, and Denmark.

During his years abroad he became fluent in French—the court language of much of Europe—and Dutch as well as passable in German and other languages.

When Quincy returned to the now independent United States, he was already one of the most experienced diplomats the country had despite not being out of his teens.  He enrolled, of course, at his father’s alma mater Harvard and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1787.  The same year his father became the first Vice President under George Washington.

From 1787 to ’89 Young Adams read law with Theophilus Parsons in Newburyport, Massachusetts then returned to Harvard to win a Master of Arts degree in 1790. He passed the Bar in 1791 and began to practice law in Boston.

Despite his notable achievements his mother constantly compared him to her husband and found him wanting.  He loved and admired his often distant father, but came to fear the dominating Abigail, who he blamed for his frequent bouts of melancholia.

Young Adams first came to public notice—and earned the esteem and admiration of the President—for penning a series of polemics in support of Washington’s refusal to be drawn into the wars swirling around the French Revolution, despite a treaty of alliance.  It was Washington, not his father, who insisted that the 26-year-old take up duties as Minister to The Netherlands.  But the young man did not want to take the job.  He feared he would never get out from under his father’s shadow if he pursued a career of public service.  His father convinced him that it was his patriotic duty to do so. 

In addition to his duties in Holland, Adams also carried papers and instructions to John Jay who was trying to negotiate a treaty with Britain clearing up many points of contention in the post-revolutionary period.  He shuttled back and forth between capitals.  When Jay concluded his controversial treaty which many considered far too favorable to the British, Adams wrote to his father urging him to support it as the best possible deal.  The elder shared it with the President who incorporated points from the letter in his Farewell Address.

Washington kept the young man in service, appointing him Minister to Portugal and then Legate to Berlin.  Washington was uncharacteristically effusive in his praise calling Adams “the most valuable of America’s officials abroad.”

                                John Quincy Adams 1797 by John Singleton Copley about to leave to become Minister to Prussia.
 

When his father became President, it again was Washington who urged him to name his son Minister to Prussia despite the inevitable charges of nepotism.  He served from 1797 to 1801, his father’s whole single term as President.  He secured a renewal of the Prussian-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce on very liberal terms.

Before returning to the United States, he married Louisa Catherine Johnson, the British-born daughter of an American merchant in London.

                           

                                    Louisa Catherine Adams, a cultured and accomplished wife.

When he returned to Massachusetts with his new wife, he secured an appointment as Commissioner of Monetary Affairs in Boston by a Federal District Judge.  But that sinecure fell victim to the deep personal animosity between two erstwhile old friends and comrades—the elder Adams and newly elected President Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson wasted no time rescinding the nomination, a slap in the face that did not go unnoticed.

In the end, the offense propelled John Quincy to enter electoral politics as a Federalist, another footstep in his father’s path he has sworn never to undertake. He was elected a member of the Massachusetts State Senate in April 1802 and that fall ran for the United States House of Representatives and lost.  But in March of the next year the Massachusetts General Court elected him to the U.S. Senate where he quickly became a leading voice of the Federalist minority.

But it was during that period when John Quincy engaged in one of the most embarrassing acts of his career.  He penned a series of six satiric ballads in the style common to Harvard undergraduates mocking the Democratic-Republicans and Jefferson.  They were not printed but circulated hand to hand and read with great mirth at Washington taverns where the political elite gathered.  Although written anonymously, it quickly became apparent that they were written by Adams.  One of them, Dusky Sally, a famously lurid ballad about Jefferson’s dalliance with his slave Sally Hemmings was written in 1803 but published anonymously in 1807.  Jefferson was naturally furious.  Some Adams apologists dismiss the work as a schoolboy prank.  It was not.  It was a political dirty trick propagated by a highly sophisticated 40-year-old sitting U.S. Senator.

Despite his service in the Senate, Adams’s expertise in foreign policy and relations caused him to abandon other Federalists and support the President’s Louisiana Purchase and the Embargo Act.  Both of these acts were particularly loathed by Massachusetts Federalists who saw them as a plot to create permanent Southern dominance via new states carved out of the vast land acquisition and whose merchants were badly hurt by the Embargo, a measure meant to keep the U.S. out of the world war between France and Britain.  The General Court met early and stripped Adams of his Senate seat in 1708.  Adams promptly resigned the party of his father and joined his former enemies, the Democratic Republicans.

His new party did not entirely trust its convert.  Instead of seeking a new elected post or political appointment, Adams took the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard.  From his lofty perch he wrote extensively promoting a neo-classical, Ciceronian ideal of disinterested public discourse based on reason and illuminated by rhetoric.  Despite his best efforts, public discourse in the U.S. was taking a vastly different direction.  Still, he would happily have remained in the academy had not duty called once again.

President James Madison called on him to take the critical diplomatic post of Minister to Russia in 1709.  His wife Louisa and their youngest son Charles Francis Adams accompanied him to the Tsarist court.  After reporting the fall of Moscow to Napoleon and his subsequent disastrous winter retreat, Adams was dispatched to Ghent to serve as to serve as chief negotiator of the U.S. commission to negotiate a treaty to end the War of 1812.  Louisa and Charles had to make a harrowing winter coach ride across war torn Europe, always in danger of being caught up in battle or attacked by roving bands of brigands and deserters to join her husband.

 

John Quincy Adams, center, at the signing of the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812.

The peace commission succeeded in gaining a remarkably lenient treaty, mostly restoring the status quo ante bellum even though at the time it was negotiated, the British had dominated the war and humiliated American armies.  But the European wars had left the Mother Country bleeding, exhausted, and broke and Adams knew that they had little appetite for an extended war in North America.  America’s biggest victory, which might have justified even better terms, came after the treaty was signed when Andrew Jackson smashed and destroyed a British Army attacking New Orleans.

John Quincy Adams was thus absent from the actual conflicts of his country’s two first wars, making his personal experience vastly different than most other Americans.

After the treaty was concluded, a grateful Madison named Adams Minister to The Court of St. James, the country’s most distinguished diplomatic post.  He served in London from 1814-17.

On his return home from eight years abroad, newly elected President James Monroe named him Secretary of State, a post for which he was manifestly qualified, and which was then widely regarded as the natural steppingstone to the Presidency.  He stood at the President’s side for two terms, his most trusted advisor and master of foreign policy.

Adams racked up impressive achievement after impressive achievement while at the State Department.  First, he had to address the thorny problem of Florida, which was only tenuously held by Spain, weakened by the Napoleonic Wars on its soil and a mere shadow of a once mighty empire.  Southerners long had ambitions in Florida, and various plots and filibustering schemes were constantly afoot.  The British had agents on the ground in Florida—either actually in service to the Crown or merchant/traders functioning de facto—and seemed to have its own plans to snatch the province to hem in expansionist America to the south.  Florida, and particularly the large and powerful Seminole tribe that dominated its interior, was also a haven for escaped slaves.  Large number of Creek warriors, defeated by Andrew Jackson’s western army, also fled into the arms of the Seminole.

Monroe, undoubtedly with the approval of Adams, ordered Jackson to pursue the fugitive Creek into Florida.  The Hero of New Orleans did so with his customary enthusiasm and ruthlessness.  In the process he captured and hanged two British subjects he suspected of arming the natives, precipitating an international crisis.  Monroe’s Cabinet was unanimous in the opinion that Jackson had exceeded his orders and should be court martialed and removed from command.   Adams alone supported the General, arguing that if the Spanish could not police her territories, the United States had the right to do so in self-defense.  His argument carried the day with Monroe, who only issued a reprimand to Jackson.  But the touchy Jackson assumed that Adams was responsible for the “rebuke to my honor,” thus beginning the bad blood between the two.

Adams skillfully advanced the same arguments to injured Britain and Spain.  In the Adams–Onís Treaty Spain ceded Florida to the U.S. and the boundary between the Louisiana Territory and Spanish Tejas (Texas) was cleared up.

At the same time, Adams had to clear up several post-war issues with Britain, including the final evacuation of frontier posts still held by the British on American soil and clearly defining a western boundary.  The terms of the Treaty of Paris which had ended the Revolutionary War assumed that the Mississippi River extended north to Lake-in-The-Woods from which point a line would be drawn to the Pacific coast. The issue had come to a head in the Oregon country where the British Hudson Bay Company and John Jacob Astor’s American Fir Company were in fierce completion for the highly lucrative fur trade. 

Adams could build on the work of Richard Rush, temporary Secretary of State until Adams could come to Washington.  The Rush–Bagot Treaty agreed to in early 1817 demilitarized the border between the US and British North America including naval disarmament on the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain—the traditional invasion routes that had been used by both sides. The US and Britain also agreed to joint control over the Oregon Territory.  Adams successfully helped shepherd the treaty through Senate ratification in 1818 and used it as a springboard for more talks.

The Treaty of 1818, negotiated by Albert Gallatin and Richard Rush under Adams personal supervision, secured a favorable border for the United States along the 49th Parallel including a sizable chunk of Oregon and deep-water ports from which to ship the valuable furs.  Use of the Oregon Territory remained open to both nations and mutual freedom of navigation was guaranteed.  In addition, the treaty formalized the rights of Americans to their traditional fisheries in the Grand Banks offshore from Newfoundland and Labrador.  The result was the longest undefended border in the world and a permanent end to hostility between the two English-speaking powers.

However, the Hudson Bay Company continued to run roughshod over American fur traders for some time, building to a demand by expansionists to seize all of the Oregon territory and the cry of Fifty-Four-Forty or Fight! almost brought the two nations to war again until the Oregon Treaty of 1846 confirmed the 49th Parallel as the boundary and gave American complete jurisdiction of everything south of that line.

Secretary of State John Quincy Adams at the globe presents Monroe Doctrine to President James Monroe, left and the Cabinet in this historic painting by Allyn Cox in Great Experiment Hall in the U.S. Capitol.

Of course, Adam’s biggest accomplishment was enunciating what became known as the Monroe Doctrine in 1823.  This was a response to Spain’s crumbling new world empire. Several countries had declared independence.  Spain was threatening to send armies to reconquer some of what they had lost and other European powers, particularly the British, French, and Russians were making noises about moving into the void.

Many Americans wanted the U.S. to intervene actively on behalf of the newly independent Republics, some dreamed of a Pan American union.  Southern interests were looking for areas into which to expand their plantation and slave culture and carve out new states.  With an audience in Europe in mind Adams delivered a speech on Independence Day 1821 declaring that while the United States supported the new republics, it would not intervene militarily on their behalf unilaterally, declaring that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” but warning of European intervention.

From this nugget grew an official state paper which was presented to Congress on December 2, 1823 declaring that it is the policy of the United States that further efforts by European powers to colonize land or interfere with states in the Americas would be viewed as acts of aggression requiring U.S. intervention.  The Monroe Doctrine became the basis of American foreign policy and remains in force to this day.

Tomorrow—The Presidency and after.