John Quincy Adams by James Traub

Author:James Traub [Traub, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

PART IV

INTERNAL IMPROVEMENT

CHAPTER 23

The Spirit of Improvement

(1825)

ON THE LATE MORNING OF MARCH 4, 1825, CAVALRY DETACHMENTS from the Washington and Georgetown volunteer militias arrived at John Quincy Adams’ F Street home. Trumpets blared and drums boomed. The president-elect and Mrs. Adams emerged, along with their sons John and Charles Francis; settling into a carriage, they took their place at the head of a caravan directly in front of President and Mrs. Monroe, and rode off to the Capitol between rows of cheering citizens. At the Capitol Adams was greeted by the Marine Corps, drawn up in order. A crowd had been surging into the great dome since the moment the doors had opened at 9; by 10, not a place was to be found. The diplomatic corps had been seated in the first row of the House, then military officers and their wives, and other dignitaries. The crowd in the House gallery had maintained a dignified silence. At 12:20 marshals in their blue scarves appeared at the front door of the great hall; they were followed by officers of both houses of Congress, then Adams, then Monroe. Adams, dressed in black—all of domestic manufacture—ascended to the Speaker’s chair. By tradition, the president delivered his Inaugural Address before being sworn in.

Adams had been thinking about the speech for weeks; perhaps he had been thinking about it his whole life. Whatever he might once have wished to say, he knew now that he had to address the deep fissures his election had exposed and perhaps exacerbated. “Of the two great political parties which have divided the opinions and feelings of our country,” he said, “the candid and the just will now admit that both have contributed splendid talents, spotless integrity, ardent patriotism, and disinterested sacrifice, to the formation and administration of our Country.” European wars had sown “the baneful weed of party strife.” But “ten years of peace, at home and abroad, have assuaged the animosities of political contention, and blended into harmony the most discordant elements of public opinion.”

Adams was very nervous. Justice Joseph Story would later write to his wife that the president-elect “trembled so as barely to hold his papers,” though at the same time “he spoke with prodigious force, and his sensibility had an electrical effect.” What Adams hoped was not to wish away difference but to acknowledge and accommodate it. Party feeling is transitory, he went on, but divisions based on “climate, soil and modes of domestic life”—the intrinsic differences of coast and interior, agriculture and manufacturing—are lasting. The genius of America’s federal system allowed states to govern themselves within their own sphere, while at the same time sending eminent men to the nation’s capital to learn to respect one another’s views.

Adams reviewed Monroe’s great achievements and then turned to the one field he hoped to make his own—internal improvements. “It is that from which I am convinced that the unborn millions of our posterity … will derive their most fervent gratitude to the founders of the Union.

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