Dead Presidents

Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams’s Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress
Joseph Wheelan
Paperback.  309 pp.
2008.  PublicAffairs.

On March 4, 1829, John Quincy Adams, 6th President of the United States, skipped the inauguration of his successor and prepared for what he imagined would be a quiet and private retirement.  For nearly 50 years, Adams had served his country, beginning as a secretary to his father and other American diplomats overseas as a teenager during the American Revolution before becoming perhaps the best diplomat in the history of the United States.  Adams — the son of the 2nd President — occupied diplomatic posts in the Netherlands, Portugal, Prussia, and Sweden by the time he was 30 years old.  He served in the U.S. Senate from 1803-1808, returned to Europe as the U.S. Minister to Russia under President Madison, declined a seat on the Supreme Court when he was just 44 years old, negotiated the Treaty of Ghent to end the War of 1812, served as the U.S. Minister to Great Britain immediately after the war, and spent 8 years as President Monroe’s Secretary of State — a role in which Adams excelled and where he helped formulate the Monroe Doctrine, a cornerstone of American foreign policy for nearly two centuries.

In 1824, Adams sought the Presidency and lost the popular vote to Andrew Jackson in a four-way race that also included Henry Clay and William H. Crawford.  Despite Jackson’s popular vote victory, no candidate obtained a majority of Electoral Votes, so the election was thrown into the House of Representatives for a decision on who would become the 6th President.  When Henry Clay swung his support behind Adams, the brilliant but dour man from Massachusetts clinched enough votes to win the Presidency.  When Adams then named Clay as his Secretary of State, Adams’s opponents claimed that there was a “Corrupt Bargain” between the new President and Clay.  Andrew Jackson was the politician most angered by the results of the 1824 election and he practically began campaigning aganst Adams before JQA even took the oath of office.  Adams and Jackson became vicious rivals while Jackson and his supporters made life in the White House miserable for John Quincy Adams.  By the time the 1828 election rolled around, there was little doubt that Jackson would gain his revenge and oust Adams from the White House.  While Adams was cordial to Jackson in the transition prior to Jackson’s inauguration, JQA refused to attend Jackson’s inauguration, just as his father had refused to attend the inauguration of his successor in 1801, Thomas Jefferson.

“After the third of March I shall consider my public career closed,” President Adams wrote prior to leaving the White House.  All five Presidents who had preceded Adams had quietly retired at the end of their respective Administrations.  The 61-year-old Adams was the youngest former President up to that point in American History and in good health.  For a man who had been in nearly constant public service since he was a teenager, retirement was an unfamiliar place for John Quincy Adams.  Adams had been miserable as President — partly due to the opposition that Jackson and his supporters maintained throughout his entire four-year team, and partly due to the fact that his political temperament and intense personality was not conducive to the Executive Branch. 

Leaving the White House was not an unpleasant experience for Adams.  “No one knows, and few conceive, the agony of mind that I have suffered from the time that I was made by circumstances, and not by my volition, a candidate for the Presidency till I was dismissed from that station by the failure of my re-election,” Adams wrote.  Yet, a man as prideful and sensitive as John Quincy Adams couldn’t help but feel a lack of validation due to his defeat in 1828.  With retirement on the horizon, Adams had a foreboding sense that history would not remember him fondly — or worse, would not remember him at all.

That quickly changed, however.  As Joseph Wheelan chronicles in Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams’s Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress (2008, PublicAffairs), the people of the Massachusetts still understood the value of former President John Quincy Adams and some of his biggest accomplishments took place after he left the White House.  In 1830, Adams was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives — the first of just two Presidents to serve in Congress following their Presidencies (Andrew Johnson was elected to the Senate after leaving the White House).

In the House, Adams became a leading opposition voice to the Jackson, Van Buren, Tyler, and Polk Administrations, and a champion of abolitionism.  Upon taking his seat in Congress, Adams found a renewed vigor for the political battles that had frustrated him so much as President.  In the House of Representatives, Adams mastered the parliamentary system and used his extraordinary intelligence to become a brilliant debater, mesmerizing orator, and tireless anti-slavery advocate.

Wheelan’s book examines how the former President spent eight terms in Congress using his rhetorical skills and passion for the issues to rise above partisan politics and sectional squabbles in order to fight for the causes he believed in.  Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade is actually this nation’s first crusade — the ideal that our country was founded upon, the belief that all men are created equal.  As the United States grew and the evils of slavery continued to poison the roots of liberty, Adams constantly fought to defend the rights brought forth in the Declaration of Independence and enshrined in the Constitution.

Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade portrays John Quincy Adams as perhaps the last living link to the Founders.  Adams had a unique connection to the Founding Fathers, and not simply because he was the son of John Adams.  JQA was appointed to his first diplomatic posts by George Washington and served each of the first five Presidents in some manner.  Adams is one of the few Americans who knew George Washington and Abraham Lincoln (Lincoln served one term in Congress with JQA shortly before Adams’s death).  While JQA was not of the same generation as Washington, his father, Jefferson, and Madison, his role in the early years of the American republic cannot be ignored.  If the older generation were the Founding Fathers, perhaps JQA was a Founding Son; as a teenager and young adult Adams was already representing the United States in European courts such as Amsterdam and St. Petersburg.

When Southern members of Congress attempted to silence debate on slavery by imposing a Gag Rule on the petitions of citizens to the House, Adams launched his longest and most tireless battle of his post-Presidential career.  To avoid any stirring of sectional troubles, many House leaders attempted to ban petitions from citizens, and for several years, Adams continued bringing petitions to the House floor.  “The right of petition…is essential to the very existence of government; it is the right of the people over the Government; it is their right, and they may not be deprived of it,” Adams thundered.  One of the major components to Adams’s Congressional career is his continuous battle to protect the right-to-petition (whether Adams agreed with the petitions submitted to the Congress or not), and Wheelan expertly explains Adams’s deep-seated belief in that right, his indefatigable effort in fighting for it, and the satisfaction that Adams experienced when he was finally victorious.

Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade includes much more, as well.  There is, of course, Adams’s defense of the slaves who mutinied on the Amistad while en route to bondage in Cuba.  Adams took on the case of the Amistad mutineers and fought for their freedom before the Supreme Court as President Van Buren attempted to placate Southern interests by secretly handing the Amistad and its occupants back to Spain.  Most fascinating is the transformation of Adams from the somewhat dour, cold personality that he had been as President into the passionate, energetic “Old Man Eloquent”, as he was nicknamed during his post-Presidential Congressional career.

Finally, Wheelan gives us insight into the former President’s focus on his work in Congress, despite physical ailments and the encroachment of old age.  Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade gives us an account of John Quincy Adams’s last days as, fittingly, the 80-year-old Congressman and one of the last links to the Revolution collapses at his desk in the House of Representatives and dies two days later in the Speaker’s Room of the United States Capitol.  After a lifetime of service, John Quincy Adams died at his post, and there was an outpouring of grief nationwide for a once unpopular President who had redeemed his career, validated his own self-worth, and built an entirely different legacy with a remarkable post-Presidential life.

Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams’s Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress by Joseph Wheelan is available now from PublicAffairs.  You can order the book from Amazon, or download it instantly for your Kindle.  Mr. Wheelan’s website is www.joewheelan.com.

The Lip and the Heart.

One day between the Lip and the Heart
A wordless strife arose,
Which was expertest in the art
His purpose to disclose.

The Lip called forth the vassal Tongue,
And made him vouch—a lie!
The slave his servile anthem sung,
And brav’d the listening sky.

The Heart to speak in vain essay’d,
Nor could his purpose reach—
His will nor voice nor tongue obeyed,
His silence was his speech.

Mark thou their difference, child of earth!
While each performs his part,
Not all the lip can speak is worth
The silence of the heart.

— John Quincy Adams, poet and 6th President of the United States

The Presidents Talk About: John Quincy Adams

“Mr. Adams is the most valuable public character we have abroad…There remains no doubt in my mind that he will prove himself to be the ablest, of all our diplomatic corps.” — George Washington, 1797

“I shall always be happy to see you here, and wherever we may chance to meet.  I shall through life, take a sincere and great interest in your welfare and happiness.” — James Monroe, in a letter to JQA after JQA was defeated for re-election in 1828

“What disgraceful scenes in Congress…Is Mr. Adams demented, or is he perversely wicked?  Both, I think, and Adams ought to be confined to a hospital.” — Andrew Jackson, during Jackson’s Presidency when JQA had returned to Congress, 1831

“Mr. Adams’ general personal demeanor was not prepossessing.  He was on the contrary quite awkward, but…he was, in a small and agreeable party, one of the most entertaining table companions of his day…He loved his country, desired to serve it, and was properly conscious of the honor of doing so.” — Martin Van Buren

“It is said he is a disgusting man to do business.  Coarse, dirty and clownish in his address and stiff and abstracted in his opinions, which are drawn from books exclusively.” — William Henry Harrison

“His disposition is as perverse and mullish as that of his father.” — James Buchanan

“The single really interesting thing about Adams, I’m afraid, is that he was the only son of a President in our history to become President himself…He was a conscientious and well-meaning man, and I wish I could say more about his achievements…I just don’t think there were any events in Adams’ administration that were very interesting.” — Harry Truman

“The dominant piece of art in the room was a portrait of John Quincy Adams, the only other son of a President to hold the office.  I hung it as an inside joke with Dad.  One day early in my Presidency, he was teasing me about the special kinship between W and Q.  I wanted him to have to look Q in the face the next time he felt the urge to needle.  I had read a fair amount about Quincy.  I admired his abolitionist principles, although I wasn’t crazy about his campaign to exclude Texas from the Union.  Nevertheless, I kept the portrait up for the rest of my time in the White House.” — George W. Bush, on a portrait of JQA which hung in the small private dining room next to the Oval Office, Decision Points, 2010

Exactly 163 years ago today, John Quincy Adams died in the Speaker’s Room of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.  The 80-year-old former President had spent the final 17 years of his life representing Massachusetts in the House of Representatives — the only former President elected to the lower house of Congress.  Two days earlier, Adams had given a loud, “No!” vote to a bill being debated on the floor of the House about honors for Mexican War veterans (JQA was a vehement opponent of President Polk’s war in Mexico) and collapsed at his desk. 

Carried to the Speaker’s Room, it was quickly understood that Adams had suffered a stroke.  One of the world’s greatest diplomats and the son of the feisty second President, John Quincy Adams was also a fighter.  For two days, he lingered and attempted to fight the inevitable, but on February 23, 1848, the 6th President of the United States died.  Originally interred in Washington’s Congressional Cemetery, JQA was lated moved back to his beloved Massachusetts and buried in Hancock Cemetery.  After his wife Louisa died in 1852, he was buried next to her and his parents, John and Abigail Adams, inside the crypt of United First Parish Church in Quincy, Massachusetts where he rests today.

John Quincy Adams was an eloquent voice for freedom and liberty, an ardent abolitionist, a candid, outspoken, no-nonsense man, and a witness to the Revolution, the birth of the nation, and the unsteady first half century of America’s story.  JQA was a bridge between two almost-mythical eras.  He was one of the only people in American History who personally knew George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  The son of a President and the foremost diplomat of the young nation’s first decades, JQA helped establish relations with several European countries and helped guide the foreign policies of Presidents from Washington to Monroe. 

John Quincy Adams was not one of our greatest Presidents.  He wasn’t built for the Presidency and his personality didn’t suit that of a chief executive.  Adams was not quick to compromise and had no patience for people who weren’t as smart or hard-working or patriotic as he viewed himself.  To make matters worse, the “Corrupt Bargain” between Adams and Henry Clay in 1824 which swung the unsettled Presidential election (which had been thrown into the House of Representatives) to Adams angered many voters and Congressman and made him a lame duck President before he was even inaugurated.  JQA’s rival, Andrew Jackson, began running for President against Adams almost immediately after the 1824 election was decided. 

What John Quincy Adams was, however, was a great American.  He was too young to be a Founding Father, but he was a Founding Son.  Born in 1767, he traveled through Europe during the Revolution as his father’s private secretary.  No one his age was ever more experienced or more important in politics and diplomacy.  JQA was born into service and until he took his final breath exactly 163 years ago today, John Quincy Adams served his country without pause, without fail, and with great pride.

“Posterity:  you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom.  I hope you will make good use of it.” — John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), 6th President of the United States (1825-1829)