John Quincy Adams (11 page)

As a principal speaker at his class graduation, John Quincy earned plaudits from alumni as well as classmates; even President Willard conceded in a letter to John Quincy's parents, “I think he bids fair to become a distinguished character.”
¹²

Although college life had isolated him, news of Shays's Rebellion in Springfield, Massachusetts, permeated every corner of the land and awakened John Quincy to the woes facing American society. “The people are said to be discontented and to complain of taxation, of the salaries of public officers, and of debts public and private,” he wrote to his mother. “I suspect that the present form of government will not continue long. . . . The poor complain of its being oppressive. . . . The men of property think the Constitution gives too much liberty to the unprincipled citizen.”
¹³

The “Constitution,” as John Quincy called it, was, in fact, the Articles of Confederation, which the states had signed during the Revolutionary War. The Articles recognized each state as sovereign and independent and left the Continental Congress impotent, with no power to levy taxes—even to pay its troops. Still unpaid at war's end and beset by property taxes, farmers in western Massachusetts had rebelled. A former captain in the war, Daniel Shays, a farmer struggling to keep his property, convinced neighbors that Boston legislators were colluding with judges and lawyers to raise property taxes and foreclose when farmers found it impossible to pay. With that, he exhorted farmers, “Close down the courts! ”—and they did. Farmers marched across the state and shut courthouses in Concord,
Worcester, Northampton, Taunton, Great Barrington, and, finally, Cambridge, where John Quincy and other Harvard students watched from the safety of their classroom buildings.

Hailed by farmers across the nation, the shutdowns ended foreclosures in most of Massachusetts. Determined to expand his success and seize control of state government, Shays led a force of five hundred men to Springfield to raid the federal armory. About 1,000 more farmers joined him, but as they approached the arsenal, soldiers unleashed a few artillery blasts that fell short of the approaching farmers but demonstrated the advantages of cannonballs over pitchforks. A militia from Boston then chased the farmers to their homes and captured most of their leaders, although Shays fled to safety in what was then the independent republic of Vermont.

As John Quincy had predicted, fears that Shays's Rebellion would ignite a national uprising spurred Congress to urge revisions in the Articles of Confederation to strengthen federal government powers. On May 25, 1787, delegates from twelve of the thirteen states met in Philadelphia and began writing a new constitution that created a new, more powerful federal government.

In the meantime, John Quincy went to Newburyport, about forty miles northeast of Boston, to study law with the renowned New England attorney Theophilus Parsons, who would later become chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. One of five Harvard men under Parsons's tutelage, John Quincy enthused at first about “frolicks” with his friends, often serenading as “the bottle went round with unusual rapidity, until a round dozen had disappeared.” Nor did women escape his attention, although he rebelled at the popular pastime of so-called kissing games. “Tis a profanation of one of the most endearing demonstrations of love,” he railed in his diary. “A kiss unless warmed by sentiment and enlivened by affection may just as well be given to the air as to the most beautiful or the most accomplished object in the universe.”
¹⁴
He said he much preferred singing “good, jovial, expressive songs such as we sang at college.”
¹⁵

While studying law he began writing poetry, a pastime that quickly became a passion—indeed, one so serious that he considered abandoning
his studies and returning to Paris to study literature and become a full-time poet.

“Around her face no wanton Cupids play,” he wrote in a poem he called “A Vision”—part of a collection of satirical portraits of nine of his women friends.

He did, of course, study some law, but a prodigious reader like John Quincy consumed so much law so quickly that he filled the rest of his time reading history, including “about fifty pages a day” of Edward Gibbon's six-volume epic
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Although his studies of law proved satisfying, ordinary practice—wills, deeds, and bankruptcies—bored him to distraction. “God of heavens!” he complained poetically. “If those are the only terms upon which life can be granted to me, Oh! Take me from this earth before I curse the day of my birth.”
¹⁷

After John Quincy's parents learned of their son's growing disenchantment, John Adams felt it was time for him and Abigail to resume their roles as parents, and he wrote to Secretary of State John Jay to end his assignment in Britain. In fact, both Adamses were homesick and missed their boys. They had not seen John Quincy in three years. Four years had passed since John Adams had last seen Charles—then a boy of fourteen—and nine years since he had seen Thomas, who was seven at the time. Charles was now eighteen, Thomas sixteen, and both were in trouble for participating in student riots at Harvard.

On June 17, 1788, John and Abigail Adams landed in Boston. John Adams had not set foot in America for nine years, and Governor John Hancock led Boston—indeed all of America—in welcoming him. Next to George Washington himself, and perhaps Benjamin Franklin, Americans held John Adams in highest esteem. Hancock invited him and Abigail to
stay at Hancock House, his lavish mansion on the summit of Beacon Hill overlooking the Common and the rest of Boston. Charles and Thomas rushed over from Harvard to join them, and John Quincy arrived from Newburyport for their first family reunion in nearly a decade.

Offered every public office but the presidency itself—along with many lucrative opportunities in private practice—John Adams made it clear he wanted to serve as the nation's first vice president under George Washington. Accordingly, on January 7, 1789, the Electoral College elected George Washington first President of the United States and John Adams as the nation's first vice president. Three months later, on April 20, 1789, Adams climaxed a weeklong trip from Massachusetts and crossed the bridge onto the northern end of Manhattan Island, where throngs of well-wishers lined the roads to welcome him to New York, the nation's temporary capital. A troop of New York cavalry awaited with Foreign Affairs Secretary John Jay and congressional leaders to escort him southward to the city and his temporary lodgings at Jay's magnificent mansion. The next morning, the Senate's president pro tempore greeted him at Federal Hall and showed him to his chair in the Senate chamber, where he assumed the presidency of that body. A week later, on April 29, Adams witnessed the presidential swearing in and George Washington's first inaugural address.

A year after his father's inauguration, John Quincy passed his bar exams, and on August 9, 1790, he opened a law office in Boston and waited for his family's name and fame to draw a stream of clients to his door.

He waited in vain.

“Very busy with nothing to do,” he wrote in his diary. “Long walk, but solitary,” he wrote a day later. “Little to do. Reading Cicero.”
¹⁸

More than a month later, he found a few clients at the courthouse—all indigent petty criminals who paid him nothing. By mid-November, he had handled fewer than a dozen cases, none of which had yielded a penny, leaving him completely dependent on the £9-per-month allowance that his father had been sending him since his days at Harvard.

“I have a profession without employment,” he lamented to his sister Nabby. “The hope of supporting myself [is] probably somewhat distant.”
¹⁹
A month later, he wrote to his mother, saying that “there would not be a happier being in the United States . . . could I have just enough business to support my expenses, so as to relieve me from the mortification of being, at my time of life, a burden to my parents.”
²⁰

His father tried to cheer him up: “It is accident commonly which furnishes the first occasions to a young lawyer to spread his reputation.”

John Adams tried lifting his son's spirits by giving him power of attorney and control of the family's financial affairs in Braintree and Boston, including management of several income-yielding properties, with a retainer of £25 per quarter. Early in 1791, John Adams and Abigail gave their son another morale booster by inviting him to the national government's new seat in Philadelphia. The visit threw John Quincy back into the midst of the powerful and famous and restored his conviction that he was bound for greatness. He heard debates in Congress, attended Supreme Court proceedings, and dined with such illustrious figures as Elbridge Gerry. He climaxed his visit by joining his parents at dinner with George and Martha Washington at the presidential mansion.

John Quincy returned to Boston with a new sense of excitement. Although his law practice showed no signs of improvement, life in the federal capital had enthralled him, and he decided to force his way into the national political picture. Early in June, he wrote the first of eleven essays he called
Letters of Publicola
, assailing two icons of the American Revolution—Thomas Paine and, of all people, his friend Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. Paine's pamphlets
Common Sense
and
The Crisis
had roused Americans to fight for independence from
Britain, and to these he had just added another work,
The Rights of Man,
which called for a similar uprising in England to overthrow the monarchy. After Jefferson endorsed it,
The Rights of Man
received widespread distribution in America.

“His intention,” John Quincy complained to Boston's
Columbian Centinel
, “appears evidently to be to convince the people of Great Britain that they have neither liberty nor a constitution—that their only possible means to produce these blessings to themselves is to ‘topple down headlong' their present government and follow implicitly the example of the French.” John Quincy blasted Paine's assumption that the majority of the English people opposed monarchy. “It is somewhat remarkable that, in speaking of the particular right of forming a constitution, Mr. Paine denies to a nation . . . [the] right to establish a government of
hereditary succession
. . . . He supposes the essence of a free government to be the submission of the minority to the will of the majority, [but] in a free government the minority never can be under an obligation to sacrifice their rights to the will of the majority.”
²²

John Quincy's attack on Paine caused a furor—in Europe as well as America, coming as it did when the French Revolution was reaching a peak of savagery that sent emotional tremors across the United States. Radicals had seized control of the National Assembly and imprisoned King Louis XVI and his family in their own palace. Two years earlier, most Americans had hailed the French Revolution as an extension of America's own revolution and the spread of democracy to the Old World. Jefferson, the American minister to France at the start of the revolution in July 1789, called it “an illumination of the human mind.”
²³
In the two years that followed, however, widespread drought combined with national bankruptcy to produce famine, mass unemployment—and mob action. Rioters raged through cities, towns, and villages, looting and burning manors, châteaus, and any other structure that smacked of aristocratic plenty. Although Jefferson dismissed the violence as an unfortunate consequence of social progress, Vice President Adams said the French revolutionaries “make murder itself as indifferent as shooting a plover.”
²⁴

The slaughter appalled President Washington and other American statesmen. Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton condemned radical leaders of the French Revolution as “assassins reeking with the blood of murdered fellow citizens.”
²⁵

The American press reflected the divisions in the cabinet. Philadelphia's
Gazette of the United States
condemned French atheism, anarchy, and mass slaughter, while its rival, the
National Gazette
, reminded readers how France had ensured America's victory over British tyranny in the struggle for liberty and independence. As groups gathered outside newspaper offices to read the papers, the French Revolution—and Paine's defense—divided the American people.

“Perhaps the strongly excited passions of the hour . . . contributed to the result,” John Quincy concluded, but the
Publicola
essays “at once attracted great attention, not less in Europe than in America. They were reprinted in the papers of New York and Philadelphia . . . and elicited numerous replies. . . . The reputation of
Publicola
spread far beyond the confines of the United States. No sooner did the papers arrive in England than they were collected and published in London. . . . Another edition was . . . published in Glasgow . . . and still a third at Dublin.”
²⁶

As he had hoped, fame thrust John Quincy onto Boston's political stage, giving him more than enough to do to occupy his time. Although his law practice did not expand, government officials across the region appointed him to citizen committees—to improve Boston's police procedures, to recommend redistricting, and to look at so-called blue laws. Braintree asked him to convert its legal status from a parish to a town, which he promptly renamed Quincy, after his great-grandfather Colonel John Quincy. He thrust himself into every major political controversy. After Boston voted to permit theaters to open and perform plays, the state legislature defied Bostonians and banned theatrical productions. After police arrested an actor, “a mob of about two hundred people collected together . . . to pull down the theater,” and John Quincy wrote three newspaper essays that heaped scorn on the legislative majority and opponents of theater. In contrast to his previous stand against anarchy, he called on supporters of theater
to commit civil disobedience—urging actors to continue to perform and audiences to attend. “No obedience is due to an unconstitutional act of the legislature,” he declared—in effect, espousing a concept of nullification of laws that he would later despise.