Adams and Calhoun: From Shared Vision to Irreconcilable Conflict by William F. Hartford

Author:William F. Hartford
Format: epub

“The Subject of Slavery, to my great sorrow and mortification, is absorbing all my faculties.” So wrote John Quincy Adams in an April 1837 diary entry. By the early 1840s, antislavery had become his most important concern. After a long and distinguished diplomatic career, followed by four disappointing years in the Executive Mansion, Adams had found another calling. To appreciate why he considered this a matter of such regret, it is necessary to understand the reasons prompting his return to public life. Adams had entered the Executive Mansion intent on realizing a grand developmental vision that would thrust the United States into the front ranks of the world’s great powers. An ardent economic nationalist, he aimed to lay the foundation for a self-sufficient, interdependent economy bound together by an expansive network of internal improvements that gave full employment to the nation’s vast human and material resources. At the same time mindful of the nation’s diverse and conflicting interests, he believed the resulting system would counteract tendencies toward disunion by strengthening ties among the country’s different regions. As it turned out, his administration made little headway toward achieving any of these objectives. People from all sections and parties, he observed during the closing days of his unsuccessful presidency, had assailed his “aspirations for improvement,” creating insurmountable barriers to progress. However disconsolate he may have been, Adams did not despair: “Passion, Prejudice, Envy and Jealousy will pass. The Cause of Union and Improvement will remain; and I have duties to it and to my Country yet to discharge.” When he entered Congress several years later, he did so with every intention of resuming the struggle to create the magnificent structure that he had so signally failed to erect as chief executive. His slavery-related interventions in the nullification crisis were more a distraction than the beginning of a new course of action, and he afterward hoped that, for a time at least, he would be able to devote full attention to his much-cherished program for national improvement. But this was not to be. “My conflict now,” he wrote in an 1836 letter, “is with the nullifier and Slave-holder, and with their conjoint system of policy, and this conflict has already commenced.” Adams had come to realize that nothing could be accomplished without confronting the obstacles presented by slavery. “The Public Lands, the Bank, Tariff, and Currency controversies, the Indian War and … everything down to the Northeastern boundary question,” he told his son, “will run into the confluent small-pox of Slavery” and the machinations of a Democratic administration pledged to uphold the institution, whatever the consequences.³⁵

Adams’s above reference to nullifiers in a letter written three years after the controversy concluded was no slip of the pen. Whenever Adams thought of the threat slavery posed to the union and everything else that he held dear, he often thought of South Carolina and Calhoun’s doctrine of state interposition. For reasons that he did not fully understand, South Carolina’s proslavery radicals appeared to stand apart from

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