which now vex the country had not arisen. There was no quarrel between
freedom and slavery; no man in Congress ventured to denounce slavery as
a crime; the African slave-trade was thought wrong, not the slavery
which caused it. Party lines, obliterated under Mr. Monroe's
administration, were viewed and marked with a good deal of care and
exactness; but the old lines could not be wholly restored. Mr. Adams was
not the President of a section of the country; not the President of a
party, but of the nation. He favored no special interest of a class, to
the injury of another class. He did not reward his friends, nor punish
his foes; the party of the spoils, patent or latent at all times, got no
spoils from him. He never debauched his country by the removal and
appointment of officers. Had he done otherwise, done as all his
successors have done, used his actual power to promote his own ambition,
no doubt he might have been reelected. But he could not stoop to manage
men in that way. No doubt he desired a reelection, and saw the method
and means to effect that, but conscience said, "It is not right." He
forbore, lost his election, and gained--we shall soon see what he
gained.
On the 19th of July, 1826, at a public dinner at Edgefield Court-house,
South Carolina, Mr. McDuffie said, "Mr. Adams came into power upon
principles utterly subversive of the republican system; substituting the
worst species of aristocracy, that of speculating politicians and
office-hunters, in the place of a sound and wholesome republican
democracy." When Mr. Adams retired from office, he could remember, with
the virtuous Athenian, that no man had put on mourning for him because
unjustly deprived of his post. Was an office-holder or an office-wanter
a political friend of Mr. Adams, that did not help him; a foe, that did
not hinder. He looked only to the man's ability and integrity. I wish it
was no praise to say these things; but it is praise I dare not apply to
any other man since Washington. Mr. Adams once said, "There is no
official act of the chief magistrate, however momentous, or however
minute, but it should be traceable to a dictate of duty, pointing to the
welfare of the people." That was his executive creed.
* * * * *
As a public servant, he had many qualities seldom united in the same
person. He was simple, and unostentatious; he had none of the airs of a
great man; seemed humble, modest, and retiring; caring much for the
substance of manhood, he let the show take care of itself. He carried
the simplicity of a plain New England man into the President's house,
spending little in its decorations--about one fourth, it is said, of the
amount of his successor. In his housekeeping, public or private, there
was only one thing much to be boasted of and remarked upon: strange to
say, that was the master of the house. He was never eclipsed by his own
brass and mahogany. He had what are called democratic habits, and served
himself in preference to being served by others. He treated all that
were about him with a marked deference and courtesy, carrying his
respect for human rights into the minutest details of common life.
He was a model of diligence, though not, perhaps, very systematic. His
State papers, prepared while he was Minister, Secretary, or Member of
Congress, his numerous orations and speeches, though not always
distinguished for that orderly arrangement of parts which is instinctive
with minds of a high philosophical character, are yet astonishing for
their number, and the wide learning they display. He was well acquainted
with the classic and most modern languages; at home in their literature.
He was surprisingly familiar with modern history; perhaps no political
man was so thoroughly acquainted with the political history of America,
and that of Christian Europe for the last two hundred years. He was
widely read and profoundly skilled in all that relates to diplomacy, and
to international law. He was fond of belles-lettres, and commented on
Shakspeare more like a professor than a layman in that department. Few
theologians in America, it is said, were so widely read in their
peculiar lore as he. He had read much, remembered much, understood much.
However, he seems to have paid little attention to physical science, and
perhaps less to metaphysical. His speeches and his conversation, though
neither brilliant, nor rich in ideas, astonished young men with an
affluence of learning, which seemed marvellous in one all his life
devoted to practical affairs. But this is a trifle: to achieve that,
nothing is needed but health, diligence, memory, and a long life. Mr.
Adams had all these requisites.
He had higher qualities: he loved his country, perhaps no man more so;
he had patriotism in an heroic degree, yet was not thereby blinded to
humanity. He thought it a vital principle of human society, that each
nation should contribute to the happiness of all; and, therefore, that
no nation should "regulate its conduct by the exclusive or even the
paramount consideration of its own interest."[33] Yet he loved his
country, his whole country, and when she was in the wrong he told her
so, because he loved her. This, said he, would be a good sentiment: "Our
country! May she be always successful; but, whether successful or not,
may she be always in the right." He saw the faults of America, saw the
corruption of the American government. He did not make gain by this in
private, but set an honest face against it.
He was a conscientious man. This peculiarity is strongly marked in most
of his life. He respected the limit between right and wrong. He did not
think it unworthy of a statesman to refer to moral principles, to the
absolutely right. I do not mean to say, that in his whole life there was
no departure from the strict rule of duty. I have mentioned already some
examples, but kept one more for this place: he pursued persons with a
certain vindictiveness of spirit. I will not revive again the old
quarrels, nor dig up his hard words, long ago consigned to oblivion; it
would be unjust to the living. He was what is called a good hater. If he
loved an idea, he seemed to hate the man who opposed it. He was not
content with replying; he must also retort, though it manifestly
weakened the force of the reply. In his attacks on persons he was
sometimes unjust, violent, sharp, and vindictive; sometimes cruel, and
even barbarous. Did he ever forgive an enemy? Every opponent was a foe,
and he thrashed his foes with an iron hoof and winnowed them with a
storm. The most awful specimens of invective which the language affords
can be found in his words--bitter, revengeful, and unrelenting. I am
sorry to say these things; it hurts my feelings to say them, yours not
less to hear them. But it is not our fault they are true; it would be
mine, if, knowing they were true, I did not on this occasion point them
out in warning words. Mr. Adams says that Roger Williams was
conscientious and contentious; it is equally true of himself. Perhaps
Mr. Adams had little humor, but certainly a giant's wit; he used it
tyrannously and like a giant. Wit has its place in debate; in
controversy it is a legitimate weapon, offensive and defensive. After
one has beaten the single barley-corn of good sense out of a whole
wagon-load of chaff, the easiest way to be rid of the rubbish is to burn
it up with the lightning of wit; the danger is, that the burning should
begin before the separation is made; that the fire consume the good and
bad indifferently. When argument is edged and pointed with wit, it is
doubly effective; but when that edge is jagged with ill-will, poisoned,
too, with personal spleen, then it becomes a weapon unworthy of a man.
Sometimes Mr. Adams used his wit as fairly as his wisdom; and bags of
wind, on which Hercules might have stamped and beaten a twelvemonth, but
in vain--at a single puncture from that keen wit gave up their ghost and
flattened into nothing; a vanity to all men, but a vexation of spirit to
him who had blown them so full of his own soul. But sometimes, yes,
often, Mr. Adams's wit performs a different part: it sits as a judge,
unjust and unforgiving, "often deciding wrong, and when right from
wrong motives." It was the small dagger with which he smote the fallen
foe. It is a poor praise for a famous man, churchman, or statesman, to
beat a blackguard with his own weapons. It must be confessed, that in
controversy, Mr. Adams's arrows were sharp and deftly delivered; but
they were often barbed, and sometimes poisoned.
True, he encountered more political opposition than any man in the
nation. For more than forty years he has never been without bitter and
unrelenting enemies, public and private. No man in America, perhaps,
ever had such provocations; surely, none had ever such opportunities to
reply without retorting. How much better would it have been, if, at the
end of that long life and fifty years' war, he could say he had never
wasted a shot; had never sinned with his lips, nor once feathered his
public arrow with private spleen! Wise as he was, and old, he never
learned that for undeserved calumny, for personal insult and abuse,
there is one answer, Christian, manly, and irrefutable--the dignity of
silence. A just man can afford to wait till the storm of abuse shall
spend its rage and vanish under the rainbow, which itself furnishes and
leaves behind. The retorting speech of such a man may be silvern or
iron; his silence, victorious and golden.
It is easy to censure Mr. Adams for such intemperance of speech and
persecution of persons; unfortunately, too easy to furnish other
examples of both. We know what he spoke--God only what he repressed.
Who knows out of how deep a fulness of indignation such torrents gush?
Tried by the standard of other men, his fellow politicians of America
and Europe, he was no worse than they, only abler.[34] The mouse and the
fox have as great a proportionate anger as the lion, though the one is
ridiculous and the other terrific. Mr. Adams must be tried by his own
standard, the rule of right, the standard of conscience and of
Christianity; then surely he did wrong. For such a man the vulgarity of
the offence is no excuse.
With this and the other exceptions he appears a remarkably conscientious
man in his public life. He may often have erred, as all men, without
violating his own sense of right.
While he was President he would not consent to any "public manifestation
of honors personal to himself." He would not accept a present, for his
Bible taught him what experience continually enforces, that a gift
blinds the eyes of wise men and perverts their judgment. While at St.
Petersburg, the Russian Minister of the Interior, then an old man, felt
uneasy on account of the presents accepted during his official service,
and, calculating the value of all gifts received, returned it to the
imperial treasury. This fact made an impression on Mr. Adams, and led
to a resolution which he faithfully kept. When a bookseller sent him a
costly Bible, he kept the book, but paid its full value. No bribes, no
pensions in any form, ever soiled justice in his hands. He would never
be indebted to any body of men, lest they might afterwards sway him from
the right path.
Because he was a conscientious man he would never be the servant of a
party, and never was. It was of great advantage to him that he was
absent while the two chief parties were forming in the United States. He
came into the Massachusetts Legislature as a federalist, but some
anti-federalists also voted for him. His first vote showed he was not
limited by the common principles of a party. He was chosen to the Senate
of the United States, not by a party vote. At first he acted mainly with
the federalists, though not always voting with his colleague; but in
1807 acted with the administration in the matter of the Embargo. This
was the eventful crisis of his life; this change in his politics, while
it gave him station and political power, yet brought upon him the
indignation of his former friends; it has never been forgotten nor
forgiven. Be the outward occasion and inward motive what they may, this
led to the sundering of friendships long cherished and deservedly dear;
it produced the most bitter experience of his life. Political men would
naturally undertake to judge his counsel by its probable and obvious
consequences, the favor of the Executive, rather than attribute it to
any latent motive of patriotism in his heart.
While at the head of the nation he would not be the President of a
party, but of the people; when he became a representative in Congress he
was not the delegate of a party, but of justice and the eternal right,
giving his constituents an assurance that he would hold himself in
allegiance to no party, national or political. He has often been accused
of hatred to the South; I can find no trace of it. "I entered Congress,"
says he, "without one sentiment of discrimination between the North and
South." At first he acted with Mr. Jackson, to arrest the progress of
nullification, for the democracy of South Carolina was putting in
practice what the federalists of New England have so often been alleged
to have held in theory, and condemned on that allegation. Here he was
consistent. In 1834, he approved the spirit of the same President in
demanding justice of France; but afterwards he did not hesitate to
oppose, and perhaps abuse him.
He had a high reverence for religion; none of our public men more. He
aimed to be a Christian man. Signs of this have often been sought in his
habits of church-going, of reading the Bible; they may be found rather
in the general rectitude of his life, public and private, and in the
high motives which swayed him, in his opposition to slavery, in the
self-denial which cost him his reelection. In his public acts he seems
animated by the thought that he stood in the presence of God. Though
rather unphilosophical in his theology, resting to a great degree on the
authority of tradition and the letter, and attaching much value to forms
and times, he yet saw the peculiar excellence of Christianity,--that it
recognized "Love as the paramount and transcendent law of human nature."
I do not say that his life indicates the attainment of a complete
religious repose, but that he earnestly and continually labored to
achieve that. You shall find few statesmen, few men, who act with a more
continual and obvious reference to religion as a motive, as a guide, as
a comfort. He was, however, no sectarian. His devotion to freedom
appeared, where it seldom appears, in his notions about religion. He
thought for himself, and had a theology of his own, rather
old-fashioned, it is true, and not very philosophical or consistent, it
may be, and in that he was not very singular, but he allowed others to
think also for themselves, and have a theology of their own. Mr. Adams
was a Unitarian. It is no great merit to be a Unitarian, or a Calvinist,
or a Catholic, perhaps no more merit to be one than the other. But he
was not ashamed of his belief when Unitarianism was little, despised,
mocked at, and called "Infidelity" on all sides. When the Unitarian
church at Washington, a small and feeble body, met for worship in an
upper room--not large, but obscure, over a public bathing-house--John
Quincy Adams, the Secretary of State and expecting to be President, came
regularly to worship with them. It was not fashionable; it was hardly
respectable, for the Unitarians were not then, as now, numerous and
rich: but he went and worshipped. It was no merit to think with any
sect, it was a great merit to dare be true to his convictions. In his
theology, as in politics, he feared not to stand in a minority. If there
ever was an American who loved the praise of God more than the praise of
men, I believe Mr. Adams was one.
His devotion to freedom, his love of his country, his conscientiousness,
his religion, are four things strong and noticeable in his character.
You shall look long amongst our famous men before you find his equal in
these things.[35]
* * * * *
Somebody says, no man ever used all his intellectual faculties as far
as possible. If any man is an exception to this rule, it is Mr. Adams.
He was temperate and diligent; industrious almost to a fault, though not
orderly or systematic. His diplomatic letters, his orations, his reports
and speeches, all indicate wide learning, the fruit of the most
remarkable diligence. The attainments of a well-bred scholar are not
often found in the American Congress, or the President's house. Yet he
never gives proof that he had the mind of a great man. In his special
department of politics he does not appear as a master. He has no great
ideas with which to solve the riddles of commerce and finance; has done
little to settle the commercial problems of the world,--for that work
there is needed not only a retrospective acquaintance with the habits
and history of men, but the foresight which comes from a knowledge of
the nature of things and of man. His chief intellectual excellence seems
to have been memory; his great moral merit, a conscientious and firm
honesty; his practical strength lay in his diligence. His counsels seem
almost always to have come from a knowledge of human history, seldom to
have been prompted by a knowledge of the nature of man. Hence he was a
critic of the past, or an administrator of the present, rather than a
prophetic guide for the future. He had many facts and precedents, but
few ideas. Few examples of great political foresight can be quoted from
his life; and therein, to his honor be it spoken, his heart seems to
have out-travelled his head. The public affairs of the United States
seem generally to be conducted by many men of moderate abilities, rather
than by a few men of great genius for politics.
* * * * *
Mr. Adams wrote much. Some of his works are remarkable for their beauty,
for the graceful proportions of their style, and the felicity of their
decoration. Such are his celebrated Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory,
which are sufficiently learned and sagacious, not very philosophical,
but written in an agreeable style, and at the present day not wholly
without value. His review of the works of Fisher Ames, I speak only of
the rhetoric, is, perhaps, the finest of his compositions. Some of his
productions are disorderly, ill-compacted, without "joints or
contexture," and homely to a fault: this oration is a growth out of a
central thought, marked by an internal harmony; that, a composition, a
piece of carpentry distinguished by only an outward symmetry of members;
others are neither growth nor composition, only a mass of materials
huddled and lumped together. Most of his later productions, with the
exception of his congressional speeches, are hard, cold, and unfinished
performances, with little order in the thoughts, and less beauty in the
expression. His extemporaneous speeches have more of both; they are
better finished than his studied orations. He could judge and speak
with fury, though he wrote with phlegm. His illustrations are usually
drawn from literature, not from nature or human life; his language is
commonly cold, derived from the Roman stream which has been filtered
through books, rather than from the deep and original well of our Saxon
home. His published letters are compact, written in a cold style,
without playfulness or wit, with no elegance, and though mostly business
letters, they are not remarkable for strength or distinctness. His
diligence appears in verse as well as prose. He wrote much that rhymed
tolerably; little that was poetical. The same absence of nature, the
same coldness and lack of inspiration, mark his poetry and prose. But in
all that he wrote, with the exceptions mentioned above, though you miss
the genial warmth, the lofty thought, the mind that attracts, embraces,
warms, and inspires the reader, you find always a spirit of humanity, of
justice, and love to God.
Mr. Adams was seldom eloquent. Eloquence is no great gift. It has its
place among subordinate powers, not among the chief. Alas for the
statesman or preacher who has only that to save the State withal!
Washington had none of it, yet how he ruled the land! No man in America
has ever had a political influence so wide and permanent as Mr.
Jefferson; yet he was a very indifferent writer, and never made a speech
of any value. The acts of Washington, the ideas of Jefferson, made
eloquence superfluous. True, it has its value: if a man have at command
the electricity of truth, justice, love, the sentiments and great ideas
thereof, it is a good thing to be able with Olympian hand to condense
that electric fire into bolted eloquence; to thunder and lighten in the
sky. But if a man have that electric truth, it matters little whether it
is Moses that speaks, or only Aaron; whether or not Paul's bodily
presence be weak and his speech contemptible: it is Moses' thought which
thunders and lightens out of Sinai; it is Paul's idea that is powerful
and builds up the church. Of true eloquence, the best thoughts put in
the best words, and uttered in the best form, Mr. Adams had little, and
that appeared mainly in the latter part of his life. Hundreds have more.
What passes for eloquence is common in America, where the public mouth
is always a-going. His early orations are poor in their substance and
faulty in their form. His ability as an orator developed late; no proofs
of it appear before he entered the House of Representatives, at a good
old age. In his manner of speaking there was little dignity and no
grace, though sometimes there was a terrible energy and fire. He was
often a powerful speaker--by his facts and figures, by his knowledge,
his fame, his age, and his position, but most of all by his independent
character. He spoke worthily of great men, of Madison or Lafayette,
kindling with his theme, and laying aside all littleness of a party.
However, he was most earnest and most eloquent not when he stood up the
champion of a neglected truth, not when he dwelt on great men now
venerable to us all, but when he gathered his strength to attack a foe.
Incensed, his sarcasm was terrific; colossal vanity aspiring to be a
Ghenghis Khan, at the touch of that Ithuriel spear shrank to the
dimensions of Tom Thumb. His invective is his masterpiece of oratoric
skill. It is sad to say this, and to remember, that the greatest works
of ancient or of modern rhetoric, from the thundering Philippics of
Demosthenes down to the sarcastic and crazy rattle of Lord Brougham, are
all of the same character, are efforts against a personal foe! Men find
hitherto the ablest acts and speech in the same cause,--not positive and
creating, but critical and combative,--in war.