Charles Francis Adams

Preface

Twenty-seven years have now elapsed since Mr. Adams returned from Europe, after the Geneva arbitration of 1872, in which he rendered his last considerable public service, and it lacks a few days only of thirteen years since his death. No use whatever has hitherto been made of his papers. Though neither in bulk nor in interest equal to the accumulations left by John Adams or by John Quincy Adams, these have none the less a distinct value, shedding, as they do, much contemporaneous light on a period and a struggle which, not improbably, will hereafter be accounted the most momentous in American history. Mr. Adams was not an active letterwriter, or systematic collector of material ; but he preserved all his correspondence, together with copies of his own letters, and for over fifty years, from the time he entered Harvard, he kept a diary, in which there is scarcely a break.

The time has now come when this material may fairly be used. The following sketch is, therefore, in part a preliminary study, and in vi PREFACE

part the condensed abstract of a larger and more detailed work already far advanced in preparation. If narrated by another than himself, no matter how skillfully, the career of Mr. Adams would offer not much of interest. One brief volume would amply suffice to do full justice to it. It so chanced, however, that he has told his own story in his own way ; the story of a life some of which was passed in a prominent position, at a great centre, and during a memorable period. This story he has told, too, very simply and directly ; but, necessarily, in great detail. When a public character thus gives an account of himself, and what he did and saw, and how he felt, not autobiographically, but jotting it all down from day to day as events developed, he must be given space. In such case, through a too severe condensation the biographer is apt to substitute himself for the man. It has so proved with Mr. Adams ; and yet in the larger publication but a small portion of the material he left will be used.

The present sketch is chiefly biographical. In it only now and then does Mr. Adams speak for himself. The work hereafter forthcoming will be made up in a much greater degree of extracts from his diary, letters, and papers, with only such extraneous matter as may be deemed ne-

PREFACE vii

cessary to connect the narrative, and to throw light upon it by means of developments since made, explaining much which was to him at the time he wrote obscure or deceptive.

C. F. A.

November 11, 1899.

Contents

CHAP. PAQE

I. Bibth and Education 1

II. Early Life 12

Chapter I

Though born in Boston, and, until he was over fifty, passing all his maturer life under New England influences, Charles Francis Adams was of mixed Northern and Southern descent. Pure English on both sides, without a trace, so far as can be ascertained, of Scotch or Irish, much less of continental ancestry, race characteristics went with him in the blood, — a factor of no inconsiderable moment in his public life. But while through his father he came of the genuine New England stock, — the Aldens of Plymouth, and the Shepards, Quincys, Nortons, Boylstons, and Basses of the Massachusetts Bay, — on the maternal side he was a Johnson of Maryland. Of this family Governor Thomas Johnson was, in Revolutionary times, the head. An ardent patriot and close personal friend of Washington, he was afterwards not only appointed by the first President an associate justice of the Supreme Court, but later was tendered the chief justiceship ; which position he declined. A large family, during Revolutionary times the Maryland Johnsons were well represented in the Continental army ; but one brother, Joshua, twelve years the junior of Governor Thomas, had in early life established himself as a merchant in London. When the trans- Atlantic troubles broke out Joshua Johnson removed to France, taking up his abode at Nantes, where he acted as agent of the Maryland colony. After the peace of 1783 he went back to England ; and, in 1785, under the Confederation, was appointed American consul at London, being the first to hold that office. He lived in a house near Tower Hill ; and J. Q. Adams, then representing the United States at the Hague, though recently appointed and confirmed as minister to Prussia, records in his diary that, at 9 o'clock on the morning of July 26, 1797, he went " to Mr. Johnson's, and thence to the Church of the parish of All Hallows Barking, where I was married. . . . We were married before eleven in the morning, and immediately after went out to see Tilney House." Louisa Catherine, the second of Mr. Johnson's five daughters, was, on this occasion, the other party to the ceremony.

In 1801 J. Q. Adams returned to America. Settling in Boston, he began, rather than resumed, the practice of his profession as a lawyer ; and, in February, 1803, being then a member of the Massachusetts State Senate, he was chosen by the legislature United States senator. In 1806 he was further appointed the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. Holding these two positions, now so curiously incompatible, he lived, in 1807, in a frame house which long stood opposite the Common, on the southwest corner of Tremont and Nassau, as Boylston Street was then called, being on part of the present site of the Hotel Touraine. Here, on Tuesday, August 18, 1807, his third child, a son, was born ; and nearly four weeks later, on Sunday, September 13th, the father wrote : " My child, born the 18th of last month, was this afternoon baptized by Mr. Emerson, and received the name of Charles Francis, — the first of which I gave him in remembrance of my deceased brother, and the second as a token of honour to my old friend and patron, Judge Dana." The Mr. Emerson here mentioned was then the settled minister of the First Church of Boston, and father of Ralph Waldo Emerson, at the time a child of four years. The " deceased brother," Charles, a third son of John Adams, had died in New York in December,

1801. The connection with " Judge Dana " was more remote, and there was about it a pleasant sentimental significance. In 1807 Chief Justice Dana had, only about a year before, retired from the Supreme Court of Massachusetts ; but twenty-seven years earlier J. Q. Adams, then a boy still in his fourteenth year, had accompanied him on a futile diplomatic errand to Russia, acting as his secretary and French interpreter. This remote Revolutionary recollection now bore fruit in a family name.

On August 10, 1809, two years after the diary entry above referred to was made, John Quincy Adams, having in 1808 resigned his seat in the Senate and shortly after been appointed by President Madison first minister of the United States to Russia, left Boston, and, driving " over Charles River Bridge to Mr. William Gray's wharf in Charlestown, there went on board his ship Horace, Captain Beckford, fitted out on a voyage to St. Petersburg direct." With him went the young Charles Francis, a child not yet two ; and " eight full and eventful years " were to elapse before, a lad of ten, he was again to see his native town. His education during those years was of a very desultory character, first in his father's house at St. Petersburg and later in an English boarding-school. In Russia, French was not only the court language, but the language of society ; and, curiously enough in the case of Americans at that time, both Mr. and Mrs. Adams had passed much of their childhood in France, — he at Paris, she at Nantes. They, therefore, enjoyed the inestimable advantage, placed as they then were, of perfect familiarity with French ; and French thus became the child's native tongue, that which he talked in preference to any other. After his return home, in 1817, close upon forty-four years were to elapse before he was again in Europe ; but when, in 1871-72, he served on the Geneva Arbitration, he had occasion to appreciate at its full value that childish familiarity with French acquired more than half a century before.

At the close of April, 1814, J. Q. Adams left St. Petersburg, under instructions from his government to take part in the peace negotiations with Great Britain, shortly afterwards entered upon at Ghent. Mrs. Adams remained, with her child, in Russia until the following winter, awaiting instructions from her husband. The correspondence between father and son, which was to continue until the death of the former, now began, and has still an interest, revealing, as it does, the kindlier, more domestic, and less austere features of the older man's character. For instance, from Amsterdam in June, 1814, he writes to the child, not yet seven, describing how much he had wished his three boys with him in his travels of late, and adding this graphic little pen-and-ink genre sketch of Holland : —

" It is a very curious and beautiful country to see, especially at this season. It is all smooth and level as the floor of a house ; a constant succession of green pastures, covered with multitudes of sheep and cattle, and intersected with canals upon which the people travel in large covered boats drawn by horses. I am sure it would be a pleasure to you to see the little boys, in large breeches, big enough to make you two suits of clothes, and wooden shoes, and black round wigs, and pipes of tobacco in their mouths ; and the little girls, with petticoats stuffed out like an umbrella, coming half down their legs, and blue stockings, and slippers without heels, flapping at their feet as they walk along."

Presently it became evident that J. Q. Adams was not to return to St. Petersburg ; so Mrs. Adams, breaking up the establishment there, set out to join her husband somewhere in western Europe, exactly where she did not know ; for the times were troublous, and means of communication poor. Taking with her the boy, now in his eighth year, and accompanied only by a servant, she left St. Petersburg in her traveling carriage, and found her way in midwinter across Europe, then filled with the troops of the allied armies on their way home after the abdication of Napoleon, and finally joined her husband in Paris on March 23, 1815, at the beginning of the famous " Hundred Days." It was a Thursday when she drove up to the hotel in Paris, and Napoleon, fresh from Elba, had on the previous Monday been borne in triumph up the steps of the Tuileries in the arms of his old soldiers, delirious with joy. The journey had been long and trying; but Mrs. Adams was quite equal to the occasion, for she delighted in movement, and never felt so well or so happy as when inside of a traveling carriage. They remained at Paris until the middle of May, when J. Q. Adams, who had then been appointed to the English mission, crossed over with his family to London, arriving there just three weeks before the day of Waterloo. When they started for England, Napoleon had not yet left Paris, and Charles Francis always afterwards had a vivid recollection of looking up, a boy in the surging crowd, and seeing the Emperor as he stood in the familiar clothes on the balcony of the Tuileries, acknowledging the acclamations of the multitude below.

The next two years were passed in England, where J. Q. Adams was at last rejoined by his two elder sons, from whom he had been six years separated. John, the second, and his young brother Charles were sent to a boarding-school at Ealing, kept by a Dr. Nicholas, where they made a rough and simultaneous acquaintance with English boys and with the Latin grammar, taught, as that grammar in English schools then was, itself in Latin. It was just after the close of the war of 1812-15, — indeed, the battle of New Orleans and the brilliant engagement in which the Constitution captured the Cyane and Levant had occurred only a few months before, and within the year ; so it was in no degree to be wondered at that the two young " Yankees " did not find their position peculiarly pleasant. The school was a large one, there being in it some two hundred and fifty boys, and on one occasion at least the two Adamses would seem to have had distinctly the advantage ; for, in writing to his mother, J. Q. Adams, referring to the school-life, tells her that Dr. Nicholas was " highly diverted with a repartee of John's to one of the boys, who asked him slyly, whether he had ever been at Washington. No (said John), but I have been at New Orleans." In August, 1815, General Scott, fresh from Niagara and Chippewa, was in London. Of course he visited Mr. Adams : and the old soldier never afterwards forgot the fact that, when he was dining at Mr. Adams's house, young Charles Francis spoke up suddenly, and asked him to tell about his battles in Canada, for use at school. More than twenty years later, while walking with his father through the capitol at Washington, Mr. Adams met General Scott, who recalled the incident, illustrating thereby, as Mr. Adams thought, his well-known personal vanity ; though it would have seemed natural enough, and in no way peculiar to Scott, that, within three months after Waterloo, an American officer should feel gratified to find his name and exploits familiar as household words in the mouth of a boy of eight in England.

Singular as it may appear, like the French of his infancy at St. Petersburg, this experience at the Ealing boarding-school was of very appreciable value to Mr. Adams half a century later, indeed was a most important educational factor. It caused him to understand the English character. He had come in contact with it as a child in the absolutely natural life of an English school ; and when, as a man, he came in contact with it again, an insight did not have to be acquired. It had, on the contrary, already been bred, probably beaten, into him ; and he acted unconsciously upon it. He was in a degree to the manner born ; for, though he retained no pleasant memories of the English character or of English boys, he and they had been brought up together in one nursery.

In 1817, at the beginning of the first administration of Monroe, J. Q. Adams, after eight years' residence in Europe, was recalled to America. Landing in New York with his parents in August, the young Charles Francis was taken immediately to Quincy, where, when his father a month later went to Washington to assume his duties as secretary of state in the Monroe cabinet, he remained in charge of his grandmother, Mrs. John Adams. Mrs. Adams was then in her seventy-third year, and died thirteen months later; but never, to the end of Mr. Adams's life, did the impression her character then made on him fade away. Older than he, and now almost grown up, his two brothers, during their father's absence in Russia, had been left under her care ; and in later life Mr. Adams used to describe his own surprise, shortly after he got home in 1817, at seeing his big brothers actually burst into tears as they tried to exculpate themselves when their grandmother, because of some trifling misconduct, had occasion to rebuke them. At the time he could not understand the feeling of affection and reverence with which they regarded her; though a little later he himself fully shared in it. Her death brought with it a change, as complete as it was sad and indescribable, in both the moral atmosphere and the physical surroundings of the house at Quincy ; but not until twenty years afterwards did the publication of her letters make apparent to others the cause of the veneration with which her descendants looked up to her, and the grounds of her influence over them. Immediately after his return to America Mr. Adams entered the Boston Latin School, of which Benjamin Apthorp Gould had then been for three years head master, and came under that teacher's inspiring personal influence. From childhood upwards a matured, self-contained character, he was apparently somewhat a favorite with Mr. Gould, of whom he always afterwards spoke with the utmost respect, while the Latin School and its traditions stood high in his estimation ; so high indeed that, as matter of course, he in due time sent to it his own two eldest sons in their turn, with results, to them at least, the reverse of satisfactory. Entering Harvard in 1821, when scarcely fourteen, Mr. Adams graduated in 1825.

Chapter II

After graduation, Mr. Adams passed some years at Washington ; living in the White House then presided over by his mother, mixing in the society of the place, observing the course of events, and noting down his impressions of the eminent public men of the period, — Randolph, Jackson, Clay, and Webster. In the autumn of 1828, however, Mr. Adams left Washington and went back to Boston, there, as it proved, to take up his residence for the next thirty years. Mr. Webster, in the full swing of his great powers, had advised him that, as things then were, the law was " a man's only course ; " and Mr. Adams, reflecting on this advice, made up his mind that " the proper course [for him] to adopt [was] to make the law a profession, so as to rise in character ; and, if anything better should present, to take it, provided it [was] really better." So, with this in view, he entered the office of Mr. Webster as a student in November, 1828. His studies do not seem to have been of long continuance, for, on the 6th of the following January, being then in his twenty-second year, he was admitted to practice as an attorney ; and, six months later, on September 5, 1829, he was married, at the family residence in Medford, to Abigail Brown, the youngest child of Peter Chardon Brooks, of Boston, whose other daughters were the wives, the one of Nathaniel L. Frothingham, then and long after, in succession to William Emerson, with one brief intervening ministry, pastor of the First Congregational Church ; the other, of Edward Everett.

Beginning in December, 1859, and closing in November, 1872, the active public life of Mr. Adams was confined to almost exactly thirteen years ; and to the history of those years, and the share he took in their events, this biography will be mainly devoted. Not that the earlier period lacked interest, or interest having an historical bearing, but it was mainly in connection with others, or with great political movements then in the more incipient stage. For instance, between 1830 and 1846, the life of Mr. Adams was inseparably interwoven with the career of his father, and, in reality, not less essential to that career than influenced by it. Indeed, the memorable record made by J. Q. Adams from 1832 to 1846 would not have been possible had it not been for the cooperation and quiet support he received from his son, whose own direct influence on public questions was meanwhile hardly perceptible. Yet at the beginning the son had strenuously opposed the reentry of the father into public life.

When, through the election of General Jackson, J. Q. Adams was retired from the presidency, he was in his sixty-second year. According to all precedent he thus found himself, in the full enjoyment of his great powers, relegated to what was known as " a dignified retirement." Meanwhile, adapted to public life, he had an insatiable craving for it. Accustomed to it, from it he derived that enjoyment which every strong man derives from the exercise of his muscles, intellectual or physical. His son now wanted J. Q. Adams, with the examples of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison before him, quietly to accept the situation, and devote his remaining years to literary pursuits and philosophical meditation. To the father this prospect was not alluring ; for though, by accident of birth, some forty years the elder man of the two, he was in combativeness of disposition considerably the younger, and in feelings the less mature. Accordingly, on the first opportunity that offered, he plunged once more into the political current ; nor did he again emerge from it. As is well known, he sank in the swim.

EAKLY LIFE 15

Meanwhile when in 1830 he, an ex-President, accepted the nomination for Congress tendered him from what was then known as the Plymouth district, he took the chances heavily against himself ; for at that juncture he was passing through a severe ordeal. During the previous twenty years his career had been one of almost unbroken success. Minister to Russia during the close of the Napoleonic period, negotiator of the treaty of Ghent, minister to Great Britain after the war of 1812-15, secretary of state for eight years and President for four, he had passed on from one position to another with a regularity and firmness more suggestive of European than American public life. In private, too, he had been sufficiently prosperous. His sons had grown up and chosen their professions ; two of them were married ; his estate, though not large, sufficed for his needs. Suddenly, beginning with the autumn of 1828, calamity succeeded calamity. Defeated by Jackson in the election of that year, hardly had he been retired from the presidency when he lost his oldest son, suddenly and while on the way to Washington. Five years later another son died. Through the unfortunate business ventures of the latter the father had become pecuniarily involved ; and thus, between 1830 and 1835, he was confronted at once by political defeat, domestic affliction, and financial ruin. The situation, in every aspect bad, was made appreciably worse by the fact that the remaining son so disapproved of the father's return to public life that the two were for a time " not upon terms of perfect cordiality."

The elder man, however, bore up bravely ; and, from the spring of 1835, affairs gradually assumed a more cheerful aspect. The father's course had then unmistakably vindicated itself. He had demonstrated that he was right, — that he understood himself and the situation. So far as he was concerned, the problem of what we are to do with our ex-Presidents did not call for further consideration. This particular ex-President had developed the capacity to take care of himself ; and thenceforth not only did remonstrance cease on the part of the son, but the feeling which gave birth to it changed, as rapidly as silently, into one of pride, loyalty, intense approval, and earnest cooperation. The cooperation, too, was essential. The financial tangle had to be unsnarled ; and, while perfectly tractable and quick to adopt any needful measures of economy, J. Q. Adams could not educate himself to business methods or to those details incident to the care of property. One of the commonly whispered charges against him during his later years and after his death was an alleged inclination to parsimony, — a well-developed tendency to New England thrift. The fact was that, by reason of incorrigible carelessness in private monetary matters, he escaped ruin and want — the fate of his predecessor Monroe — only through prudent management on the part of his son, who, in 1835-36, practically, though with that gentleman's consent, put the ex-President under financial guardianship. Though his establishment was a modest one, J. Q. Adams, from that time to the end of his life, rarely lived within his income ; of which his paltry pay of $1500 or $2000 per annum as a member of Congress was an essential part. The increasing value of such real estate as he owned in Boston and Washington gradually relieved him from any pressing embarrassment ; but throughout his congressional career it was solely due to the wholesome oversight thus exercised over him that J. Q. Adams was able to remain in public life. But for it he would have faded out in financial straits.

Thus vicariously doing his share in public life, Mr. Adams turned his attention more and more to literary, historical, and, incidentally, to political topics. The " North American Review " was then the recognized medium through which New England culture found expression ; and towards that medium Mr. Adams naturally turned. Between the years 1829 and 1843 the " North American " was edited first by Alexander H. Everett, a brother of Edward, and then by Dr. John G. Palfrey, subsequently the historian of New England, Dr. Palfrey succeeding Mr. Everett in 1835. The Review was then a vigorous, well- written, high-toned " quarterly," modeled on the " Edinburgh," of which it was an unpartisan and consequently somewhat colorless American echo. In fact, as compared with its great Scotch prototype, it was slightly suggestive of the play of " Hamlet," the part of the Prince of Denmark, in that case personified by Francis Jeffrey, being omitted. To it Mr. Adams, first and last, contributed in all seventeen papers, filling more than four hundred and fifty printed pages, and dealing ordinarily with topics more or less connected with American history, such as the lives of Thomas Hutchinson and Aaron Burr, the Madison Papers and the Northeastern Boundary. Beginning in the January number of 1831, with a review of James Graham's "History of the United States," first published some three years before, and then little known in America, he closed in the number for July, 1846, with an article on the " Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield."

During all these years, as long before, the papers left by John Adams were still lying bundled up in the boxes to which, in repeated processes of removals, they had been consigned, — a vast, unsorted, miscellaneous accumulation. It was part of the son's plan, only slowly and very reluctantly abandoned, that J. Q. Adams should put these papers in order, and prepare from them a biography of his father ; for, all his life, Mr. Adams labored under the delusion that J. Q. Adams, preeminent as a controversialist and for drawing state papers, had also great literary capacity. Fortunately J. Q. Adams understood himself much better than his son understood him ; and, greatly to the discomfiture of the latter, he evinced the utmost indisposition to having anything to do with the John Adams papers or controversies. His son could not account for this indifference ; and yet it seems explicable enough when he records how his father one day, made impatient by his solicitude, exclaimed upon " the weariness of raking over a stale political excitement." There was, in truth, in J. Q. Adams a great deal of human nature. Yielding to its impulse, he was now again involved in the political movements at Washington, taking, as his astonished son wrote, " as much interest as if he was a young man." So, yielding to the influence of the stronger and more active mind, the son himself next became concerned in questions of the day, and for a time ceased to occupy himself with the family papers and contributions to the " North American."

Curiously enough, the mutations of " this whimsical world," as he called it, had, during the congressional session of 1835, brought J. Q. Adams into the support, at once vigorous and dramatic, of his victorious rival, now for the second time President. Towards Jackson, personally, his feelings had undergone no amelioration. The Tennessee frontiersman, soldier and politician, offended him from every point of view. " A barbarian and savage, who could scarcely spell his own name," he had, as President, violated both principle and precedent, degrading " the offices of the heads of department into mere instruments of his will." On the other hand, J. Q. Adams entertained deep-seated, almost passionate, convictions on certain fundamental points of national policy and constitutional construction ; and upon these points he now found the " barbarian and savage," who had supplanted him, standing forth as the unmistakable champion of the policy for which he had labored and the construction in which he believed, with his own friends and natural allies united in an opposition purely political. The issues were three in number : — South Carolina nullification, known as " Calhounism ; " the complication with France arising out of the nonpayment by that country of the indemnity for spoliations provided for in the convention of 1831 between the two countries ; and, finally, the constitutional issue between the President and the Senate over the executive power of appointment to, and removal from, office. As respects these issues J. Q. Adams felt strongly. To quote his own language in a confidential letter to his son : — "I cannot reflect [upon these three subjects] in the aspect which they now bear, and in which they will probably be presented at the ensuing session of Congress, without deep concern and inexpressible anguish. It will be impossible, after the part that I have taken with regard to two of them — the impending foreign and domestic war — for me to dodge either of the questions. I led the House upon both of them in the last session. I cannot shrink from advising the House concerning them at the next."