What Hath God Wrought (37 page)

When Adams first indicated an intention to appoint Clay secretary of state, Calhoun tried desperately to dissuade him.
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Calhoun thought he should be Adams’s successor and felt betrayed. Adams did not feel he had made such a commitment to Calhoun—and anyway, Calhoun had not delivered South Carolina to Adams in the election, so Adams didn’t owe him as he did Clay. But if Adams served two terms and Clay then succeeded him, Calhoun could see his own presidential hopes receding into a remote, imponderable future.

The estrangement of the two former colleagues derived from more than personal ambition. The political climate in South Carolina had changed significantly since Denmark Vesey’s aborted uprising of 1822. Moderation and nationalism were becoming unpopular in the white community. James Hamilton, who as mayor of Charleston had rooted out the plotters, gained election as a Radical state-rights congressman; Justice William Johnson, who had questioned the propriety of the measures taken in the wake of the conspiracy, came to feel so uncomfortable he moved to Philadelphia. As secretary of state, Adams had angered South Carolina by urging repeal of preventive detention for visiting black sailors. While he was president-elect, the state legislature emphatically rebuffed his proposal.
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Even if Calhoun had wanted to cooperate with Adams, it would have been politically awkward for him to do so. A sudden fall in cotton prices from thirty-two cents a pound to thirteen cents during 1825 compounded South Carolinians’ growing sense of insecurity. Rather than blame overproduction on the rich soils of the Gulf states, Carolinians complained about the unfairness of the tariff (raised in 1824 against their wishes), which condemned cotton producers to buy in a protected market and sell in an unprotected one. Calhoun decided he could no longer support a nationalist agenda of internal improvements and a protective tariff in the face of such dissatisfaction in his home state. After the Missouri Compromise, Calhoun and his lieutenant, George McDuffie, had beaten back a challenge from South Carolina Old Republican Radicals who had refused to accept the restriction of slavery. But by 1825, Radicals were starting to call the shots in South Carolina politics. That year the legislature passed a resolution condemning internal improvements and a protective tariff as unconstitutional. Calhoun spent seven months in his home state then, his first extended stay there in eight years, and he came to realize that he would jeopardize his political base if he continued to defy the state-righters. The new vice president accordingly commenced what has been called a “breathtaking reinvention” of his political self, from nationalist to particularist.
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As the running mate of both Jackson and Adams in 1824, Calhoun had been officially neutral between the two. In office he made clear his independence from the Adams administration. By 1826, he was actually debating against an administration spokesman in the newspapers—both parties using pseudonyms, of course.
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In June of that year Calhoun offered Jackson his unequivocal support for president in the next election. The two reached an understanding, brokered by Van Buren, that Calhoun would again be Jackson’s running mate. Calhoun could still hope to become Jackson’s heir, if not Adams’s. Encouragingly, Jackson had said presidents should serve but one term.
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At this point, it remained unclear in what policy directions either Jackson or Calhoun would move.

The Crawfordites too eventually rallied to the standard of the military hero who claimed to represent the voice of the people, unfairly shut out by a bargain among corrupt insiders. The Richmond Junto took longer than the Albany Regency to be persuaded to accept this rank outsider.
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Jackson himself resigned his Senate seat and went back to Nashville, where planning his next run at the White House became his full-time job. In October 1825—before Adams’s first Congress had even met—the Tennessee legislature nominated Jackson for president. With the caucus now discredited as a system of choosing nominees, and national party conventions not yet invented, this seemed a logical way of putting Old Hickory’s candidacy before the public, though it was three years early.

As the Republican Party drew apart into two contending divisions, the press groped for terms to describe them. Most often it simply referred to “Adams men” and “Jackson men.” Everyone felt reluctant to admit publicly the splintering of Jefferson’s great party. For a president who had aspired to govern by consensus, the reality of polarization, whether avowed or not, showed that things were not working out.

III

While the opposition to his administration gathered its forces, John Quincy Adams was formulating a program for American economic development. Adams laid out his vision both broadly and specifically on December 6, 1825, in his First Annual Message to Congress—what later generations would call a “State of the Union” message.
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Where the president had been conciliatory in his inaugural address, this time he was bold. His message represented the logical fulfillment of John C. Calhoun’s exhortation of 1816: “Let us conquer space.”
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Adams celebrated the benefits of improved transportation and communication and undertook to marshal the resources of the federal government to further them. The time had come to implement the projects planned by the General Survey enacted under Monroe, and the Army Corps of Engineers should be expanded to aid in the process. One of the president’s favorite Scottish philosophers, Adam Smith, had declared that where private enterprise needed help, government should supply economic infrastructure and public education; this would be especially important in the early stages of economic development.
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Adams agreed. With the national debt about to be retired, Adams looked forward to the time when “the swelling tide of wealth” generated by the sale of the public lands “may be made to reflow in unfailing streams of improvement from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” What made it particularly appropriate to spend the proceeds from public land sales on transportation projects was that these improvements would raise land values, benefiting the government and private landowners alike. Land sales under this policy would eventually generate enough money for the federal government to run all its programs, Adams hoped, without having to take anything from the people in taxes. In this climactic document of Republican nationalism, Adams proposed a federal version of DeWitt Clinton’s program for the state of New York, singling out the Erie Canal as an example of what could be done by an involved government.
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The president’s vision of expanded American commerce did not stop at the water’s edge. He endorsed negotiating free-trade agreements based on reciprocity and “most favored nation” clauses with as many countries as possible, meanwhile building up the navy to protect American ocean commerce. Other proposals to help American business included a standard national bankruptcy law and the adoption of the metric system, a fulfillment of the massive
Report on Weights and Measures
Adams had prepared while secretary of state. Both of these were explicitly authorized by the Constitution but had not yet been carried out. Adams’s forward-looking proposals included a Department of the Interior (it would be created in 1849) and a federal organization to coordinate the state militias (not really implemented until 1903). The president waxed most eloquent over his plans for exploration, science, and education, which included a national university in Washington, D.C., and at least one astronomical observatory (of which, he pointed out, there were 130 in Europe and not one in all North America). The inclusion of these subjects demonstrates that his objectives were not only material but also intellectual, including personal as well as public improvement. Indeed, there is a striking analogy between Adams’s plan for national improvement and his own careful, rigorous program of individual self-improvement.
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After enumerating the Constitution’s grants of power to the federal government, the president concluded that “to refrain from exercising them for the benefit of the people” would be “treachery to the most sacred of trusts.” Adams interpreted the Constitution as defining duties as well as rights. He had a positive rather than a negative conception of liberty; freedom properly exercised was not simply a limitation on authority but an empowering of human initiative. “Liberty is power,” he declared. American citizens had a responsibility to use their freedom, to make the most of their God-given faculties. Their officials had a corresponding duty to facilitate improvement, both public and private. “The spirit of improvement is abroad upon the earth,” Adams pointed out in his peroration. Let not foreign nations with less liberty exceed us in “public improvement,” the president exhorted his countrymen. To do so would “cast away the bounties of Providence” and doom what should become the world’s most powerful nation “to perpetual inferiority.”
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When Adams laid the draft of this message before his cabinet, all save Richard Rush considered it too ambitious. But the president stuck to his guns. He felt that even if his program could not all be attained immediately, it would be worthwhile to have it before the public as a long-term goal, provoking discussion and influencing opinion. Adams’s explicit presentation contrasted sharply with the consummate ambiguity of his predecessor. Adams had no taste for Monroe’s hidden agendas, advanced through patient private consultation. Long before Theodore Roosevelt, John Quincy Adams determined to use the White House as a “bully pulpit.” How could the American people reject his compelling vision of national destiny and mission?
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In fact, upon delivery, Adams’s famous message provoked no hostile outcry from the public at large. Internal improvements were not unpopular, and the president’s program deliberately included a lot for the South, including a second national road to link Washington with New Orleans. The formation of an opposition to the administration had more to do with the Adams-Clay alliance and consequent frustration of Jackson, Crawford, and Calhoun than it did with internal improvements. Criticism of Adams’s national program originated with the strict constructionists of the Richmond Junto, among whom old man Jefferson seemed particularly irreconcilable.
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The opposition mocked Adams’s rhetoric not only where it was weak (his tactless admonition to Congress not to be “palsied by the will of our constituents”) but also where it was strong (his felicitous metaphor for astronomical observatories as “lighthouses of the skies”—which called attention to the applicability of astronomy to celestial navigation).

In Congress, of course, members did not want to surrender control over pork-barrel legislation to planners in the Executive Branch. The same reaction had stymied the plans of Albert Gallatin and John McLean. The result this time was not a blanket rejection of internal improvements but a multitude of individual projects with no overall plan. Back in 1817, James Madison had vetoed the Bonus Bill rather than allow congressional logrolling to define priorities in internal improvements. Adams proved more flexible. Even piecemeal federal aid to internal improvements was better than none at all, he decided, approving more internal improvements than all his predecessors put together. By 1826, the federal government had become the largest entrepreneur in the American economy. The bottleneck of presidential reluctance to sanction internal improvements without a constitutional amendment had finally been uncorked.
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Conspicuous among the internal improvements Congress approved during the Adams administration, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal fulfilled the dream of George Washington long before. Centerpiece of the system of national works laid out in the General Survey Act of 1824, the canal was built by a mixed public-private enterprise in which the states of Maryland and Virginia, several municipalities, and the federal government all cooperated. On the Fourth of July 1828, the president participated in the ceremonial groundbreaking. When he took spade in hand to dig the first earth, the tool struck a hard root and bounced ineffectually off. Rising to the occasion, Adams threw off his coat and renewed his assault with such vigor that soon he was able to hold up a shovelful of dirt. The friendly crowd of two thousand cheered the president’s resolution. It was one of the few times that Adams felt good about a public appearance.
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Eventually the Chesapeake and Ohio, like many other canals, was overtaken by the development of railroads. In 1850, the canal reached Cumberland, Maryland, where it connected with the National Road. Thereafter construction ceased, and in 1852 the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad made the link to the Ohio River at Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), that the canal had originally been intended to create. But until it finally closed in 1924, the C&O Canal performed a useful function as a broad waterway from upcountry to tidewater.

Adams’s “spirit of improvement” addressed not only transportation but also communications. His innovative and successful postmaster general, John McLean, completed the postal network and reinvested the profits of the postal system in it. An expanded stagecoach industry received federal subsidies for carrying the mail, strengthening both communication and transportation. But McLean’s political ambitions complicated the picture. His alliance with John C. Calhoun had made good sense during the latter’s nationalist years. As Calhoun became estranged from the administration, however, McLean had to choose. Secretly, he remained loyal to the vice president, rather than to the president. When this came to light, Clay urged Adams to fire McLean, but Adams refused. Having been accused already of “corruption” in bestowing cabinet office as a reward for political support, Adams did not want to lay himself open to another such charge by a dramatic removal. Besides, there was a philosophical issue. The chief executive wanted the federal government to operate as a nonpartisan meritocracy even at the highest levels. McLean exemplified the talent Adams hoped the government would recruit. To dismiss him for political reasons would concede the failure of government by consensus and the conception of office as a public trust.
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