Presidents in Retirement: John Quincy Adams
Perhaps one of the most prolific and active retirements of any former Presidents was that of John Quincy Adams, the 6th President of the United States. Elected as President in 1824 in a controversial election, (Adams was chosen as President despite finishing second in popular and electoral votes because no candidate had won a majority in the Electoral College), Adams had also won the enmity of first place finished Andrew Jackson, who accused Adams and Henry Clay of concocting a "corrupt bargain" to deny Jackson the prize. When Jackson ran against Adams in 1828, and soundly defeated Adams, the incumbent President left office in the wake of a bitter campaign, filled will personal attacks.
Adams considered permanently retiring from public life after his 1828 defeat. His troubles were compounded by the suicide of his son, George Washington Adams, in 1829. Adams was appalled by many of the Jackson administration's actions and policies, including its blatant use of the spoils system and the prosecution of Adams' close friend, Treasury Auditor Tobias Watkins, for embezzlement. Once Adams had been a supporter of Jacksons, but now the two men hated each other in the decades after the 1828 election.
Adams likely grew bored with his retirement and still believed that his career was unfinished. It is also likely that he felt he had nothing to lose, and was no longer constrained by the demands of the presidency and the pressures of winning re-election. He could now speak his mind. He ran for and won a seat in the United States House of Representatives in the 1830 elections. His election was in conflict with the the generally held opinion, shared by his own wife and youngest son, that former presidents should not run for public office. This didn't matter to Adams. He would go on to win election to nine terms, serving from 1831 until his death in 1848. (Adams and Andrew Johnson are the only former presidents to serve in Congress.)
After winning election, Adams became affiliated with the Anti-Masonic Party. The National Republican Party's leadership in Massachusetts included many of the former Federalists that Adams had clashed with earlier in his career. The Anti-Masonic Party originated as a movement against Freemasonry, but it developed into the country's first third party.
Adams was 64 years old when he was first elected, and he didn't expect to be called on to do much, but Speaker Andrew Stevenson selected Adams chair of the Committee on Commerce and Manufactures. Though Adams was a member of the Anti-Masonic Party, Congress was broadly polarized into allies of Jackson and opponents of Jackson. It's east to guess which camp Adams sided with. Stevenson was an ally of Jackson, and he had placed Adams on the committee in the hope that this would keep Adams busy defending the tariff, and the Jacksonian majority on the committee would prevent Adams from accruing any real power.
As chair of the committee, Adams was charged with writing tariff laws. He would soon become an important player in the nullification crisis, which arose out if Southern objections to the high rates imposed by the Tariff of 1828. South Carolina leaders argued that states could nullify federal laws, and they announced that they would bar the federal government from enforcing the tariff in their state. Adams helped pass the Tariff of 1832, which lowered rates, but not enough to mollify the South Carolina nullifiers. The crisis ended when Clay and Calhoun agreed to another tariff bill, the Tariff of 1833, that furthered lower tariff rates. Adams was unhappy with the Nullification Crisis's outcome. He thought that the Southern states had unfairly benefited from challenging federal law. Adams believed that Southerners exercised undue influence over the federal government through their control of Jackson's Democratic Party.
In the 1833 Massachusetts gubernatorial election, the Anti-Masonic Party nominated Adams in a four-way race between Adams, the National Republican candidate, the Democratic candidate, and a candidate of the Working Men's Party. The National Republican candidate, John Davis, won 40% of the vote, while Adams finished in second place with 29%. Because no candidate won a majority of the vote, the state legislature decided the election. Rather than seek election by the legislature, Adams withdrew his name from contention, and the legislature selected Davis.
Adams was almost elected to the Senate in 1835, when he had the support of a coalition of Anti-Masons and National Republicans. Ironically, it was his support for Jackson in a minor foreign policy matter that annoyed National Republican leaders. They withdrew their support for his candidacy, and after this Adams never again sought higher office, focusing instead on his service in the House of Representatives.
In the mid-1830s, the Anti-Masonic Party, the National Republicans, and other groups opposed to Jackson banded together to form the Whig Party. In the 1836 presidential election Democrats put forward Martin Van Buren, while the Whigs fielded multiple presidential candidates. Adams found fault with all of the major party contenders for president, so he did not take part in the campaign. Nonetheless, after Van Buren's victory, Adams became aligned with the Whig Party in Congress. Adams opposed most of the initiatives of President Van Buren, though they maintained a cordial public relationship.
The Republic of Texas won its independence from Mexico in the Texas Revolution of 1835-1836, Texas had largely been settled by Americans from the south who enslaved people, despite an 1829 Mexican law that abolished slavery. Many in the United States and Texas favored the admission of Texas into the union as a slave state. Adams was more forward-thinking. He became one of the leading congressional opponents of annexation. When he served as secretary of state, Adams had sought to acquire Texas, but he justified this on the basis that Mexico had abolished slavery. He now argued that the acquisition of Texas would transform the region from a free territory into a slave state. He also feared that the annexation of Texas would encourage Southern expansionists to pursue other potential slave states, including Cuba.
Whig nominee William Henry Harrison defeated Van Buren in the 1840 presidential election, and the Whigs gained control of both houses of Congress for the first time. Adams had a low opinion of Harrison but he was enthusiastic about the new Whig administration and the end of the long-standing Democratic dominance of the federal government. When Harrison died in April 1841 and was succeeded by Vice President John Tyler, this changed the calculus. Tyler was a Southerner who, unlike Adams, Henry Clay, and many other prominent Whigs, did not embrace the American System. Adams saw Tyler as an agent of what he called "the slave-driving, Virginia, Jeffersonian school, principled against all improvement". When Tyler vetoed a bill to restore the national bank, Whig congressmen expelled Tyler from the party. Adams was appointed chairman of a special committee that explored impeaching Tyler, and he presented a scathing report of Tyler that argued that Tyler's actions warranted impeachment. The impeachment process did not move forward, though, because the Whigs did not believe that the Senate would vote to remove Tyler from office.
Tyler made the annexation of Texas the main foreign policy priority of his administration, hoping that this might lead to his re-election. Tyler attempted to win ratification of an annexation treaty in 1844, but the Senate rejected the treaty. The annexation of Texas became the central issue of the 1844 presidential election, and Southerners blocked the nomination of Van Buren at the 1844 Democratic National Convention due to the Van Buren's opposition to annexation. The party nominated James K. Polk, a protege of Andrew Jackson. Once again Adams did not take part in the campaigning. He blamed the outcome of the election partly to the Liberty Party, a small, abolitionist third party that may have siphoned votes from Clay in the crucial state of New York. After the election, Tyler, a lame duck President, once again submitted an annexation treaty to Congress. Adams strongly argued against the treaty, correctly predicting that the annexation of Texas would lead the United States into "a war for slavery". Despite Adams's opposition, both houses of Congress approved the treaty, with most Democrats voting for annexation and most Whigs voting against it. Texas joined the United States as a slave state in 1845.
Adams had served with James K. Polk in the House of Representatives, and not surprisingly Polk was another person that Adams loathed. He saw Polk as another expansionist, pro-slavery Southern Democrat in the mold of Jackson. Adams supported the annexation of the entirety of Oregon Country, a disputed region occupied by both the United States and Britain, and was displeased when President Polk signed the Oregon Treaty, which divided the land between the two claimants at the 49th parallel.
When Polk's expansionist aims centered instead on the Mexican province of Alta California, and he attempted to buy the province from Mexico, the Mexican government refused to sell California. It did not even recognize the independence and subsequent American annexation of Texas. Polk deployed a military detachment led by General Zachary Taylor to back up his assertion that the Rio Grande constituted the Southern border of both Texas and the United States. After Taylor's forces clashed with Mexican soldiers north of the Rio Grande, Polk asked for a declaration of war in early 1846, asserting that Mexico had invaded American territory. Both houses of Congress declared war, with the House voting 174-to-14 to approve the declaration. One of the 14 dissenting votes was Adams. He believed that Polk wanted to wage war in order to expand slavery. After the start of the war, Adams supported the Wilmot Proviso, an unsuccessful legislative proposal that would have banned slavery in any territory ceded by Mexico.
After 1846, ill health increasingly affected Adams, but he continued to oppose the Mexican-American War until his death in 1848. Adams was longtime opponent of slavery, Adams used his new role in Congress to fight it. He became the most prominent national leader opposing slavery. He had earlier wrote in his private journal in 1820:
In the abstract they admit that slavery is an evil, they disclaim it, and cast it all upon the shoulder of Great Britain. But when probed to the quick upon it, they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vainglory in their condition of masterdom. They look down upon the simplicity of a Yankee's manners, because he has no habits of overbearing like theirs and cannot treat negroes like dogs. It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice: for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?
In 1836, partially in response to Adams's consistent presentation of citizen petitions requesting the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, the U.S. House of Representatives imposed a gag rule that immediately tabled any petitions about slavery. Democrats and Southern Whigs favored the rule, but Northern Whigs, like Adams, opposed it. In late 1836, Adams began a campaign against the gag rule. He frequently attempted to present anti-slavery petitions, often in ways that provoked strong reactions from Southern representatives. Although the gag rule remained in place, Adams used it as a vehicle to indirectly debate the morality of slavery. He fought actively against the gag rule for another seven years, eventually moving the resolution that led to its repeal in 1844.
In 1841, at the request of Lewis Tappan and Ellis Gray Loring, Adams joined the case of United States v. The Amistad. Adams went before the Supreme Court on behalf of African slaves who had revolted and seized the Spanish ship Amistad. Adams appeared before the court on February 24, 1841, and spoke for four hours, successfully convincing the court, which ruled that the Africans were free and they returned to their homes.
Adams also became a leading force for the promotion of science. In 1829, British scientist James Smithson died, and he left his fortune for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge". In Smithson's will, he stated that should his nephew, Henry James Hungerford, die without heirs, the Smithson estate would go to the government of the United States to create an "Establishment for the increase and diffusion of Knowledge among men". After the nephew died without heirs in 1835, President Andrew Jackson informed Congress of the bequest, which amounted to about US$500,000 (US$18 million in 2024 dollars after inflation). Adams became Congress's primary supporter of the future Smithsonian Institution. The money was invested in shaky state bonds, which quickly defaulted. After a heated debate in Congress, Adams successfully argued to restore the lost funds with interest. Congress accepted the legacy bequeathed to the nation and pledged the faith of the United States to the charitable trust on July 1, 1836. Largely due to Adams's efforts, Congress voted to establish the Smithsonian Institution in 1846. A nonpolitical board of regents was established to lead the institution, which included a museum, art gallery, library, and laboratory.
In 1846, Adams, now 78 years old, suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. After a few months of rest, he made a full recovery and resumed his duties in Congress. When Adams entered the House chamber on February 13, 1847, everyone rose and applauded. Eight days later, on February 21, 1848, the House of Representatives was discussing the matter of honoring United States Army officers who served in the Mexican-American War. Adams had been a vehement critic of the war, and as Congressmen rose up to say, "Aye!" in favor of the measure, he instead yelled, "No!" He rose to answer a question put forth by Speaker of the House Robert Charles Winthrop, but almost immediately he collapsed, having suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He was taken to a bed in the Speaker's Room inside the Capitol. It was there, two days later, on February 23, he died at 7:20 p.m. with his wife at his side. His only living child, Charles Francis, did not arrive in time to see his father alive. His last words were "This is the last of Earth. I am content". Among those present for his death was future president Abraham Lincoln, then a freshman representative from Illinois.
Adams' original interment was temporary, in the public vault at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Later, he was interred in the family burial ground in Quincy, Massachusetts, across from the United First Parish Church, called Hancock Cemetery. After Louisa's death in 1852, his son had his parents re-interred in the expanded family crypt in the United First Parish Church across the street, next to John and Abigail. Both tombs are viewable by the public. Adams's original tomb at Hancock Cemetery is still there and marked simply "J.Q. Adams".
Adams considered permanently retiring from public life after his 1828 defeat. His troubles were compounded by the suicide of his son, George Washington Adams, in 1829. Adams was appalled by many of the Jackson administration's actions and policies, including its blatant use of the spoils system and the prosecution of Adams' close friend, Treasury Auditor Tobias Watkins, for embezzlement. Once Adams had been a supporter of Jacksons, but now the two men hated each other in the decades after the 1828 election.
Adams likely grew bored with his retirement and still believed that his career was unfinished. It is also likely that he felt he had nothing to lose, and was no longer constrained by the demands of the presidency and the pressures of winning re-election. He could now speak his mind. He ran for and won a seat in the United States House of Representatives in the 1830 elections. His election was in conflict with the the generally held opinion, shared by his own wife and youngest son, that former presidents should not run for public office. This didn't matter to Adams. He would go on to win election to nine terms, serving from 1831 until his death in 1848. (Adams and Andrew Johnson are the only former presidents to serve in Congress.)
After winning election, Adams became affiliated with the Anti-Masonic Party. The National Republican Party's leadership in Massachusetts included many of the former Federalists that Adams had clashed with earlier in his career. The Anti-Masonic Party originated as a movement against Freemasonry, but it developed into the country's first third party.
Adams was 64 years old when he was first elected, and he didn't expect to be called on to do much, but Speaker Andrew Stevenson selected Adams chair of the Committee on Commerce and Manufactures. Though Adams was a member of the Anti-Masonic Party, Congress was broadly polarized into allies of Jackson and opponents of Jackson. It's east to guess which camp Adams sided with. Stevenson was an ally of Jackson, and he had placed Adams on the committee in the hope that this would keep Adams busy defending the tariff, and the Jacksonian majority on the committee would prevent Adams from accruing any real power.
As chair of the committee, Adams was charged with writing tariff laws. He would soon become an important player in the nullification crisis, which arose out if Southern objections to the high rates imposed by the Tariff of 1828. South Carolina leaders argued that states could nullify federal laws, and they announced that they would bar the federal government from enforcing the tariff in their state. Adams helped pass the Tariff of 1832, which lowered rates, but not enough to mollify the South Carolina nullifiers. The crisis ended when Clay and Calhoun agreed to another tariff bill, the Tariff of 1833, that furthered lower tariff rates. Adams was unhappy with the Nullification Crisis's outcome. He thought that the Southern states had unfairly benefited from challenging federal law. Adams believed that Southerners exercised undue influence over the federal government through their control of Jackson's Democratic Party.
In the 1833 Massachusetts gubernatorial election, the Anti-Masonic Party nominated Adams in a four-way race between Adams, the National Republican candidate, the Democratic candidate, and a candidate of the Working Men's Party. The National Republican candidate, John Davis, won 40% of the vote, while Adams finished in second place with 29%. Because no candidate won a majority of the vote, the state legislature decided the election. Rather than seek election by the legislature, Adams withdrew his name from contention, and the legislature selected Davis.
Adams was almost elected to the Senate in 1835, when he had the support of a coalition of Anti-Masons and National Republicans. Ironically, it was his support for Jackson in a minor foreign policy matter that annoyed National Republican leaders. They withdrew their support for his candidacy, and after this Adams never again sought higher office, focusing instead on his service in the House of Representatives.
In the mid-1830s, the Anti-Masonic Party, the National Republicans, and other groups opposed to Jackson banded together to form the Whig Party. In the 1836 presidential election Democrats put forward Martin Van Buren, while the Whigs fielded multiple presidential candidates. Adams found fault with all of the major party contenders for president, so he did not take part in the campaign. Nonetheless, after Van Buren's victory, Adams became aligned with the Whig Party in Congress. Adams opposed most of the initiatives of President Van Buren, though they maintained a cordial public relationship.
The Republic of Texas won its independence from Mexico in the Texas Revolution of 1835-1836, Texas had largely been settled by Americans from the south who enslaved people, despite an 1829 Mexican law that abolished slavery. Many in the United States and Texas favored the admission of Texas into the union as a slave state. Adams was more forward-thinking. He became one of the leading congressional opponents of annexation. When he served as secretary of state, Adams had sought to acquire Texas, but he justified this on the basis that Mexico had abolished slavery. He now argued that the acquisition of Texas would transform the region from a free territory into a slave state. He also feared that the annexation of Texas would encourage Southern expansionists to pursue other potential slave states, including Cuba.
Whig nominee William Henry Harrison defeated Van Buren in the 1840 presidential election, and the Whigs gained control of both houses of Congress for the first time. Adams had a low opinion of Harrison but he was enthusiastic about the new Whig administration and the end of the long-standing Democratic dominance of the federal government. When Harrison died in April 1841 and was succeeded by Vice President John Tyler, this changed the calculus. Tyler was a Southerner who, unlike Adams, Henry Clay, and many other prominent Whigs, did not embrace the American System. Adams saw Tyler as an agent of what he called "the slave-driving, Virginia, Jeffersonian school, principled against all improvement". When Tyler vetoed a bill to restore the national bank, Whig congressmen expelled Tyler from the party. Adams was appointed chairman of a special committee that explored impeaching Tyler, and he presented a scathing report of Tyler that argued that Tyler's actions warranted impeachment. The impeachment process did not move forward, though, because the Whigs did not believe that the Senate would vote to remove Tyler from office.
Tyler made the annexation of Texas the main foreign policy priority of his administration, hoping that this might lead to his re-election. Tyler attempted to win ratification of an annexation treaty in 1844, but the Senate rejected the treaty. The annexation of Texas became the central issue of the 1844 presidential election, and Southerners blocked the nomination of Van Buren at the 1844 Democratic National Convention due to the Van Buren's opposition to annexation. The party nominated James K. Polk, a protege of Andrew Jackson. Once again Adams did not take part in the campaigning. He blamed the outcome of the election partly to the Liberty Party, a small, abolitionist third party that may have siphoned votes from Clay in the crucial state of New York. After the election, Tyler, a lame duck President, once again submitted an annexation treaty to Congress. Adams strongly argued against the treaty, correctly predicting that the annexation of Texas would lead the United States into "a war for slavery". Despite Adams's opposition, both houses of Congress approved the treaty, with most Democrats voting for annexation and most Whigs voting against it. Texas joined the United States as a slave state in 1845.
Adams had served with James K. Polk in the House of Representatives, and not surprisingly Polk was another person that Adams loathed. He saw Polk as another expansionist, pro-slavery Southern Democrat in the mold of Jackson. Adams supported the annexation of the entirety of Oregon Country, a disputed region occupied by both the United States and Britain, and was displeased when President Polk signed the Oregon Treaty, which divided the land between the two claimants at the 49th parallel.
When Polk's expansionist aims centered instead on the Mexican province of Alta California, and he attempted to buy the province from Mexico, the Mexican government refused to sell California. It did not even recognize the independence and subsequent American annexation of Texas. Polk deployed a military detachment led by General Zachary Taylor to back up his assertion that the Rio Grande constituted the Southern border of both Texas and the United States. After Taylor's forces clashed with Mexican soldiers north of the Rio Grande, Polk asked for a declaration of war in early 1846, asserting that Mexico had invaded American territory. Both houses of Congress declared war, with the House voting 174-to-14 to approve the declaration. One of the 14 dissenting votes was Adams. He believed that Polk wanted to wage war in order to expand slavery. After the start of the war, Adams supported the Wilmot Proviso, an unsuccessful legislative proposal that would have banned slavery in any territory ceded by Mexico.
After 1846, ill health increasingly affected Adams, but he continued to oppose the Mexican-American War until his death in 1848. Adams was longtime opponent of slavery, Adams used his new role in Congress to fight it. He became the most prominent national leader opposing slavery. He had earlier wrote in his private journal in 1820:
In the abstract they admit that slavery is an evil, they disclaim it, and cast it all upon the shoulder of Great Britain. But when probed to the quick upon it, they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vainglory in their condition of masterdom. They look down upon the simplicity of a Yankee's manners, because he has no habits of overbearing like theirs and cannot treat negroes like dogs. It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice: for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?
In 1836, partially in response to Adams's consistent presentation of citizen petitions requesting the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, the U.S. House of Representatives imposed a gag rule that immediately tabled any petitions about slavery. Democrats and Southern Whigs favored the rule, but Northern Whigs, like Adams, opposed it. In late 1836, Adams began a campaign against the gag rule. He frequently attempted to present anti-slavery petitions, often in ways that provoked strong reactions from Southern representatives. Although the gag rule remained in place, Adams used it as a vehicle to indirectly debate the morality of slavery. He fought actively against the gag rule for another seven years, eventually moving the resolution that led to its repeal in 1844.
In 1841, at the request of Lewis Tappan and Ellis Gray Loring, Adams joined the case of United States v. The Amistad. Adams went before the Supreme Court on behalf of African slaves who had revolted and seized the Spanish ship Amistad. Adams appeared before the court on February 24, 1841, and spoke for four hours, successfully convincing the court, which ruled that the Africans were free and they returned to their homes.
Adams also became a leading force for the promotion of science. In 1829, British scientist James Smithson died, and he left his fortune for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge". In Smithson's will, he stated that should his nephew, Henry James Hungerford, die without heirs, the Smithson estate would go to the government of the United States to create an "Establishment for the increase and diffusion of Knowledge among men". After the nephew died without heirs in 1835, President Andrew Jackson informed Congress of the bequest, which amounted to about US$500,000 (US$18 million in 2024 dollars after inflation). Adams became Congress's primary supporter of the future Smithsonian Institution. The money was invested in shaky state bonds, which quickly defaulted. After a heated debate in Congress, Adams successfully argued to restore the lost funds with interest. Congress accepted the legacy bequeathed to the nation and pledged the faith of the United States to the charitable trust on July 1, 1836. Largely due to Adams's efforts, Congress voted to establish the Smithsonian Institution in 1846. A nonpolitical board of regents was established to lead the institution, which included a museum, art gallery, library, and laboratory.
In 1846, Adams, now 78 years old, suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. After a few months of rest, he made a full recovery and resumed his duties in Congress. When Adams entered the House chamber on February 13, 1847, everyone rose and applauded. Eight days later, on February 21, 1848, the House of Representatives was discussing the matter of honoring United States Army officers who served in the Mexican-American War. Adams had been a vehement critic of the war, and as Congressmen rose up to say, "Aye!" in favor of the measure, he instead yelled, "No!" He rose to answer a question put forth by Speaker of the House Robert Charles Winthrop, but almost immediately he collapsed, having suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He was taken to a bed in the Speaker's Room inside the Capitol. It was there, two days later, on February 23, he died at 7:20 p.m. with his wife at his side. His only living child, Charles Francis, did not arrive in time to see his father alive. His last words were "This is the last of Earth. I am content". Among those present for his death was future president Abraham Lincoln, then a freshman representative from Illinois.
Adams' original interment was temporary, in the public vault at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Later, he was interred in the family burial ground in Quincy, Massachusetts, across from the United First Parish Church, called Hancock Cemetery. After Louisa's death in 1852, his son had his parents re-interred in the expanded family crypt in the United First Parish Church across the street, next to John and Abigail. Both tombs are viewable by the public. Adams's original tomb at Hancock Cemetery is still there and marked simply "J.Q. Adams".