This is the best biography of J.Q.A. I've read, by a wide margin. It's actually a history of ante-bellum America (if you already have some context). Adams was in politics and diplomacy for 50 years, from 1794 to 1848. He was the Forrest Gump of his era, except that he wasn't a bystander. The factoids that James Traub presents, sometimes almost as an aside, answer a lot of questions: "Didn't they foresee that...?" and "Howcum nobody said that [blah, blah, blah]...?" It turns out that they did, and debated it thoroughly, in Congress and the press.
My interest in the Civil War started early. I'd read Bruce Catton's trilogy on the Army Of The Potomac before I was well into my teens; my Dad took me on father-son road trips to Gettysburg and Antietam. (I still remember a small pink-and-white mobile home in or near the West Wood at Antietam, something the National Park Service removed long ago.) The thought (and question) that naturally occurs to a Civil War neophyte is "What a waste, all those dead soldiers, brother-against-brother, how did they get themselves into this mess, and why didn't they try to prevent it?"
It might be that trying to answer this question was what focused my interest on the period from the Founding to Fort Sumpter. After all, America was a self-created country. We didn't have a history of constant war (except with indians) and ancient grievances, like Europe. How do you start with a clean sheet of paper and end up, 70 years later, in a catastrophic war?
"When I came up" (around 1960), the now thoroughly discredited "Dunning School" of historiography still held sway. Or at least was holding its own. The Dunning School held that it was a failure of political leadership, an almost willful, cynical, manipulation by self-interested politicians, that led to the Civil War. If they had worked harder, in a more statesmanlike way, at sectional compromise, the whole thing could have been prevented. But they didn't live up to the standards of the Founders and mismanaged the country. Who to blame? "The politicians." I was still reading "Dunning School" stuff in college and graduate school. But anyone who came of age in the modern Civil Rights era could see that there was a problem with the Dunning School: "Wait a minute... Isn't the stuff I'm seeing on the news every night now what they were arguing about from 1800 to 1860?"
It was, at least in great measure. But the national experience of the Great Depression and World War Two had changed the lens through which the North viewed the South. The moral arguments of Martin Luther King Jr. and the confrontational non-violence of "the kids" were unanswerable. Before Dr. King went to Chicago, northern liberals (like me) were smug in our condemnation of the South. Even northern racists were no longer comfortable with de jure apartheid in the South. (We all learned, soon enough, that most white people were mostly comfortable with de facto segregation.)
It's worth remembering that most of the Founders, including many southern ones, thought that slavery would eventually die of natural causes in a few decades. It turns out that that stuff we learned in high school about Eli Whitney's cotton gin was true. Switching from tobacco to cotton, efficient preparation of cotton for manufacturing, and new western land rescued slavery. By the 1830's formerly anti-slavery Southerners were defending slavery as "a way of life." The most vociferous defended it as "a positive good" (for everyone, including slaves). John Quincy Adams marveled that the otherwise fine mind of a contemporary who he had admired--John C. Calhoun--could be as corrupted as it was by slavery. Adams felt that he had seen it happen. Calhoun, educated at Yale and a nationalist "War Hawk" in 1812, and with whom Adams worked comfortably under President Monroe, had become a monomaniac on slavery and defending sectional Southern interests by the mid 1820's.
As for Henry Clay, another giant of the era, Adams began thinking him an unprincipled and ambitious man, came to admire him, and ended up thinking him an unprincipled and ambitious man. Adams never considered Daniel Webster anything but an unprincipled man. J.Q.A. was not a generous judge of his peers (or himself).
As for the politics of slavery, everybody, to one degree or another, saw it coming as a train wreck. Adams saw Clay's Compromise of 1820 as a harbinger of Big Trouble to come. He was then about age 50, at the height of his powers and considered judgement as a politician. Thomas Jefferson, long-retired and with 6 years to live, heard the Compromise "as a fire bell in the night." Adams, privately (in his diary) concluded that he was personally anti-slavery but that there was little to be gained in agitating against it in politics because the country had shrugged its shoulders and heaved a sigh of relief at Clay's compromise.
Adams developed idiosyncratic views on abolitionism as time wore on. Although he was a hero to abolitionists for his firey opposition to the Gag Rule in the House Of Representatives, he did not believe that immediate abolition was possible or desirable. Neither did he believe that gradual emancipation and more-or-less forced emigration to Africa was realistic. He thought the American Colonization Society, of which Henry Clay was a member and which Abraham Lincoln endorsed in principle as a rising star in Illinois politics, was foolish. Clay and Lincoln believed that whites would never live peacefully side-by-side with blacks who had equal rights. Adams, who always considered black people as fully human and equal, asked "Why would several million black people, who have never known a home other than here, voluntarily deport themselves to Africa? And why should the United States, a vociferously anti-colonial nation, support colonialism in Africa?" As the 1830's and '40's wore on, Adams worked more and more closely with abolitionists. But he never endorsed immediate emancipation, compensated or otherwise. He thought it was politically unworkable.
Adams had a similarly fraught relationship with American expansionism and Manifest Destiny. He was always dismissive of indian rights. He believed that hunter-gatherer cultures were demonstrably inferior to European-based farming and manufacturing culture. The indians were in the way: they had to go. There was no daylight between Adams and Andrew Jackson on "the indian question," and Jackson was a man that Adams otherwise despised, as a human being and a public man. Basically, Adams was all-in for getting all the territory America could get, from sea to shining sea. He thought Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase was brilliant. He tried to buy all of Florida, and did buy what we now call "the Redneck Riviera." He negotiated the first treaty that gave America transcontinental claims--aggressively--that's what he wanted. He was all-in for doing a deal with the British to make Oregon American.
Except, except...
He reversed his position on the acquisition of Cuba because he came to see it as a slaveholders' boondoggle. He reversed his position on the acquisition of Texas because... ditto. At first, Adams was all-in for buying Texas from Mexico. He came to see the entire Texas project as a slaveholding State pretext to create as many as 4 new slaveholding States by "whatever means necessary." He was as skeptical as Lincoln and other Whigs about the whole "Texas independence / annexation / pretexts for starting the Mexican War" thing. Adams favored the diplomatic recognition of Haiti, as consistent with American anti-imperialism. This enraged southerners, for whom slave rebellion was a nightmare.
Adams came to skepticism about his own expansionist beliefs. He was for New England expansionism: small freeholder farms, commerce, manufacturing, "infrastructure." He came to see the 3/5 clause in the Constitution as a poison pill. The South was--and always would be--over-represented in the national government. Adams wanted a strong national government yoked to personal freedom and economic development. At, we may say in today's lingo, "taxpayer expense."
He didn't see any way out. Adams came to believe that the American story would end in a slave insurrection, or civil war, or both. He foresaw that "the slavocracy" (his phrase) would accept nothing less than control of the national government. Slavery would never "go quietly, into that good night." Adams didn't live to see the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, "squatter sovereignty," the Dred Scott case. He didn't live to see Lincoln elected on a platform of "no further expansion of slavery," and secession. But he predicted it, or something like it. This was a man born in 1767, who came of age during the Founding, who spent 50 years in politics and diplomacy at the highest levels, with intelligence and insight far superior to most of his peers. And he didn't see any way out but civil war.
The 3 things I got out of this book:
1) People, at least those who were paying attention, 1800-1850, knew damned well what was going on. All you have to do is read Traub's mentions of some detail of J.Q.A.'s private correspondence or diary entries. 2) They weren't stupid. A lot of smart minds wrestled with basic problems for 50 years. We still had a Civil War. 3) They remind me of us. We know better. What have the last 50 years of politics, 1968-2018, been, if not about denial?
