John Quincy Adams (28 page)

Like John Quincy, Lord Castlereagh embraced the concept of Anglo-American reconciliation, and at John Quincy's suggestion, he agreed in principle to total disarmament on the Great Lakes, pledging, “I will propose it to the government for consideration.”
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While the government considered,
both men agreed to freeze armaments at then-current levels. A year later, both nations agreed to reduce naval armaments on the Great Lakes to four ships each, armed only enough to enforce customs regulations—a landmark voluntary agreement for reciprocal naval disarmament that would become the longest-lasting and most successful agreement of its kind in the world.

With the Great Lakes eliminated as a danger zone, John Quincy addressed other issues that had soured Anglo-American relations in the years after the Revolutionary War: impressment, American access to fisheries off the Canadian Atlantic coast, and the return of slaves who had fled to the British West Indies with the British after the war. Castlereagh brushed each of them aside, however, saying they were best postponed until reconciliation between the two countries had progressed and each could address emotional issues more objectively. In the matter of impressment, for example, Castlereagh pointed out the difficulties of determining the true citizenship of seamen not born in one country or the other. As for returning slaves to their owners, he deferred to Prime Minister Charles Jenkinson, the Earl of Liverpool, who asserted as diplomatically as he knew how, “I do not think they can be considered precisely under the general denomination of private property. A table or a chair, for instance, might be taken and restored without changing its condition; but a living human being is entitled to other considerations.”

Although he insisted that the treaty ending the Revolutionary War had made no such distinction, John Quincy relented, admitting the validity of Liverpool's point. “Most certainly a living, sentient being, and still more a human being, was to be regarded in a different light from the inanimate matter of which other private property might consist.”
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Convinced by the arguments of Castlereagh and Liverpool, John Quincy stopped discussing unresolved issues that had no evident solutions and turned his attention to reconciliation between the two governments and the two peoples. “My social duty at present,” John Quincy explained to his father, “is to preach peace. And from the bottom of my soul I do
preach it as well to those to whom as to those from whom I am sent. I am deeply convinced that peace is the state best adapted to the interest and the happiness of both nations.”
¹³

Becoming the consummate ambassador of goodwill, he and, when appropriate, Louisa attended every public function and accepted every invitation they could, including the dinner of London's lord mayor in the spring of 1816 to honor the Duke of Wellington. After presenting Wellington to John Quincy, the lord mayor toasted “the President of the United States.” John Quincy responded, “My lord, I pray your lordship to accept my hearty thanks for the honor you have done my country. . . . To promote peace, harmony, and friendship between Great Britain and the United States is the first duty of my station. It is the first wish of my heart. It is my first prayer to God.”
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The all-pervasive peace in the Western world left John Quincy and other diplomats with few, if any, formal negotiations. They and he spent much of their time creating and improving personal ties to each other at receptions, dinners, and balls, and John Quincy established warm—and, as it turned out, lasting—relationships with both Lord Liverpool and Viscount Castlereagh and many others of note. “The Duke of Wellington called in person,” John Quincy enthused in his diary, “and invited me and Mrs. Adams to the wedding in his house. . . . The duchess afterwards called and left her card.”
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John Quincy sought out and befriended as many academic leaders, jurists, and thinkers as possible and established a close friendship with jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who pioneered penal reform in England and with whom John Quincy often walked and talked for hours.

With so little official work to do in London, John Quincy moved his family into a rented house in rural Ealing, about eight miles from his London quarters. John Quincy called the house “one of the most delightful spots upon which I ever resided.”
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He enrolled the two older boys in a local private school, then supplemented George's daily academic chores with advanced work in Greek, Latin, and history—essentials for entrance into
Harvard. He and Louisa occasionally went into town to the opera—they both loved Mozart's
Don Giovanni—
and he took John II to see several debates in Parliament. But he spent most of his time at Ealing.

At night, he and the boys gazed at the heavens, and he took time to write long, intimate letters to his father, often digressing into complex discussions of political philosophy. Louisa, meanwhile, began writing Abigail, and the two ladies, often cool to each other during the first years of Louisa's marriage, established a deep and warm mother-daughter relationship. To Abigail's delight, Louisa described her sorties to the opera, theater, and formal dinners in London and details of her activities with the boys in Ealing. She was particularly generous in describing the progress of the boys—knowing, of course, how much Abigail and John Adams missed their grandchildren.

“How delighted I should be to have them all about me,” John Adams wrote in one of his increasingly emotional letters to John Quincy. “Yet they would devour all my strawberries, raspberries, cherries, currants, plums, peaches, pears and apples. And what is worse, they would get into my bedchamber and disarrange all the papers on my writing table.”
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The elder Adamses also missed their son. “A man should be in his own country,” the former President admonished John Quincy.

Inspired perhaps by his nightly studies of the stars, John Quincy started writing poetry again—serious poetry. He had harbored ambitions of writing poetry since his days in Newburyport, when he wrote rhymes to ease the boredom of reading law. “Could I have chosen my own genius and condition,” he now thought to himself, “I should have made myself a great poet.”
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John Quincy often read some of his poems to his family and neighborhood friends, after which they all gathered about Louisa and her harp to sing. While at Ealing, Louisa assumed chores as her husband's private secretary, writing and answering routine letters—mostly from Americans in Britain needing or complaining about one thing or another—or, too often, stranded without money.

While Louisa replied to his letters, John Quincy was writing

In 1816, Secretary of State James Monroe rode a wave of popularity for his wartime successes to an easy election victory to succeed his friend James Madison as President. Next to the President himself, the secretary of state held the most important and powerful post in any administration, with a portfolio that included far more than simple foreign relations. In modern terms, the secretary of state in the early 1800s controlled many functions of today's Secret Service, Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Interior, Department of Commerce, Department of Agriculture, Department of Transportation, and a number of agencies such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Given the secretary of state's range of executive authority, it was no coincidence that the American electorate had chosen three successive secretaries of state to succeed the Presidents they had served—Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and, in 1816, Monroe. Two days after his inauguration, President Monroe named John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts to be secretary of state—the first sign of a break in the Virginia dynasty that had provided four of the first five Presidents.

Despite widespread calm in the Western world, the United States remained surrounded on land and sea by powerful foreign powers, each greedily eyeing the rich resources of the American continent and ready to pounce if an opportunity arose. The secretary of state and his overseas
envoys were therefore central to the nation's survival, tiptoeing away from military confrontations while maintaining trade relations essential to the American economy. John Quincy had been the most visible and most eloquent American diplomat in Europe for seven years and, like Monroe himself, had proved himself the most skillful—parrying and thrusting delicately and effectively, taking a stand or not, as the situation required, to extract the best terms he could realistically obtain, given his nation's relatively weak military and naval posture.

“The question whether I ought to accept the place . . . is not without difficulties in my mind,” John Quincy wrote about his new appointment. “A doubt of my competency for it is very seriously entertained.”
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Former President John Adams had sensed his son's fatigue with public service and his infatuation with the poet's quiet life in Ealing. Fearing his son might reject the appointment—as he had the Supreme Court—he urged John Quincy to

Abigail added her voice to her husband's appeal, saying that American political leaders were already pointing to him as “worthy to preside over the councils of a great nation.”
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Some of John Adams's colleagues from the Continental Congress of 1774 had indeed written to congratulate him on his son's appointment: “It seems that the office of secretary of state . . . is the stepladder to the presidential chair, at least it has been so in the case of the last three presidents,” wrote one of John Adams's friends. “Now, as your son . . . is appointed to that station, if he makes the best advantage of his situation, it is more than probable that he may be the next President of the United States.”
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As he had in the past, John Quincy yielded to his parents' ambitions and accepted his new assignment. Critics predicted that as a former Federalist, he and the Republican President would soon be at odds over foreign policy, but he scoffed at the allegations, pointing out that he had worked harmoniously under Secretary of State Monroe for eight years. “I have known few of his opinions with which I did not cordially concur. . . . My
duty
will be to
support
and not to counteract or oppose the President's administration.”
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On June 15, John Quincy Adams abandoned his idyll at Ealing and, with his wife and three sons, set sail for America, taking with him two maids, a household manager, thirty-one trunks, barrels, and boxes, and furniture accumulated in Russia and England. Without any space to spare left on board, he had to sell his 560 bottles of red wine and 298 bottles of champagne before leaving.

After celebrating his fiftieth birthday in mid-ocean, John Quincy Adams stepped on shore in America for the first time in eight years, landing in New York City on August 6, 1817. He immediately sent word to his parents of his and his family's safe arrival.

“Yesterday was one of the most uniformly happy days of my whole life,” the ecstatic former President replied to his son. “Kiss all the dear creatures for me, Wife, George, John and Charles. I hope to embrace them all here in a few days. God Almighty bless you all. So prays John Adams.”
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“God be thanked,” an equally joyful Abigail wrote to her son in a separate note. “We now wait in pleasing expectation of welcoming you, one and all, to the old habitation, altered only by the depredation of time, like its ancient inhabitants. Come then all of you; we will make you as comfortable as . . . love and affection can render you.”
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After attending several functions in New York in his honor, John Quincy and his family left by boat for Boston, and at 10 a.m., on August 18, their carriage pulled up to John and Abigail Adams's house in Quincy. Abigail stood in the door as John Adams II flew from the carriage into his grandmother's arms in tears, with George Washington Adams just behind him crying, “Oh! Gran'! Oh! Gran'!”

Poor little Charles, only ten, held back. He had not seen his grandparents since he was an infant, didn't know them or what to do or say, and could not yet share their “affection and reverence.”
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He quickly changed his mind, however, as seventy-three-year-old Abigail resumed her role as family governor and hectored all three boys to be diligent, punctual, neat and clean, and so forth. Like his older brothers, he learned that hectoring was the only way his grandmother knew to express her “love and warm affection.”
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Over the next three weeks, friends, relatives, and enthusiastic Republican supporters of President Monroe took turns entertaining John Quincy and Louisa, and they managed to settle briefly into the old house that had been John Quincy's birthplace. His brother, Thomas Boylston Adams, had prospered in Boston. A successful lawyer and father of five, he had won appointment as a judge and, privately, built John Quincy's estate to more than $100,000 in cash and securities and acquired five income-producing residential properties for his brother. But the size of his family was growing uncontrollably, and the strain, it seems, motivated him to begin drinking—a fatal error for anyone with Abigail Adams's genes.