America’s Founding Son is an accessible and entertaining biography of our nation’s greatest public servant and original political maverick John Quincy Adams, from the bassist of the Grammy-nominated band the Avett Brothers.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Sitting at his desk, the aged congressman was caged in by his colleagues’ sneers and stares. Enough with his moralizing diatribes. A rule to silence him was no longer good enough. Nothing less than censure—maybe even expulsion—would do. The rules of the House of Representatives had been weaponized against its own members.
But this congressman, this elder statesman, knew their tactics would not work. He knew how to expose their disdain for constitutional government and their antidemocratic thirst for power. Because he knew the Constitution better than they did. He knew the First Amendment was the mustard seed of democracy. Heck, he had spent almost his entire life protecting, upholding, serving, and defending it.
His enemies’ views about American governance were not only misguided—they were amoral, the antithesis of the nation’s founding principles. The very principles—set down in the founding documents—that his accusers once held sacred.
After multiple attempts to silence the elder statesman failed, Congress charged him with “treason,” accusing him of not being a “true American.”
The question Who are the “true Americans”? threatened the dissolution of the Union. For almost a decade, deep polarization sparked action and reaction on every issue facing the electorate: a declining vision of America, tariffs, an economy on the brink, and, of course, race.
Activists gathered in the streets, town halls, and places of worship. They held rallies, made speeches, and circulated petitions demanding equality and freedom. At every turn, they were met by rowdy, angry mobs led by men of great wealth and power who used threats and violence to preserve the status quo.
The year was 1842.
The aged congressman from Massachusetts was the seventy-five-year-old former president of the United States, John Quincy Adams. Never before—or since—had a former president served in Congress after his term. Now here he was, a former president turned congressman, sitting before the House, on trial for censure. That fact alone is remarkable. But it is the why of it all that makes it relevant to us today. John Quincy Adams was on trial for defending the First Amendment right to free speech—and the right of all Americans to be heard, to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Why did I want to tell the story of John Quincy Adams? Since 2016, I have cohosted a history podcast called The Road to Now alongside my good friend Dr. Ben Sawyer. The mission of our program is to try to understand: How did we get here?
I’m also not your typical historian. I’m the bassist for the band the Avett Brothers. For the last twenty-plus years, I’ve studied American history while seeing it up close, traveling up and down interstate highways, freeways, and back roads of this country.And so when I look around at the current challenges facing America—upheaval, the struggle for racial and gender equality, the pandemic, January 6, inflation, the second election of Donald Trump, tariffs—they all led me to reflect on the years between the Missouri Compromise and the Civil War, and how Adams’s story relates to our own time. I’ve come to understand this critical moment thanks to the great historians, who for more than a century have brought rigor to the study of John Quincy Adams and his era—many of whom I quote in the pages that follow. I’ve also had access to a wealth of source materials from the period, including John Quincy Adams’s personal diaries. While some period language has been adjusted for grammar and clarity, the sentiments ring remarkably true today.
Some say that history repeats; others credit Mark Twain with the phrase history does not repeat, it rhymes. I can’t say for sure whether history repeats or rhymes, but I do notice echoes from the past in our present. That’s because history is driven by people—and people haven’t changed since 1776. Truth be told, people haven’t changed since Adam and Eve, or however you signify the beginning of time (or should I say, history?). Spend a little time reading about the 1830s and 1840s, and you’ll encounter figures who feel eerily familiar. They dressed differently and used different slang, but in a very real sense, we are them and they are us.
INTRODUCTION
Washington, DC, January 1842
From an elevated rostrum on the flat side of the semicircular chamber, beneath a red draped canopy, the Speaker of the House, a Kentuckian named John White, presided over the proceedings as politicians, foreign dignitaries, and members of Washington society watched from the gallery.
The muse of history, Clio, soared above it all, her foot perched on the edge of a winged car, emblazoned with the likeness of the father of the country, George Washington, blowing a horn. The wheel of the chariot: a clock, a wheel of time marking the seemingly endless hours as the consequential events unfolded below it. John Quincy Adams stood before the bar of the House, accused of high crimes and treason for presenting a petition from forty-six citizens of Haverhill, Massachusetts, who would prefer to dissolve the Union rather than continue to take on the burdensome, peculiar practice of the Southern states, slavery.
Going all the way back to the first session of Congress in 1789, there was nothing unusual about a congressman presenting petitions and memorials before the House on behalf of his constituents. The practice is enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Before the days of congressional offices, websites, and constituent services, presenting a petition was the only way people lobbied their representatives. But by the middle of the 1830s, Southern congressmen—or as John Quincy Adams referred to them, the slavocracy—grew weary of the flood of antislavery petitions flowing into Congress. These antislavery petitions typically came from Northern states and were sent by a small but pesky group of activists known as abolitionists. Many abolitionists were Christian, and often they were women, who had come to believe that slavery was a sin against God. These petitions so threatened Southern congressmen that, with the help of their Northern allies, they passed a rule in the House of Representatives known as the gag rule. The gag rule stated thatAll petitions, memorials, resolutions, propositions, or papers, relating in any way, or to any extent whatsoever, to the subject of slavery or the abolition of slavery, shall, without being either printed or referred, be laid on the table and that no further action whatever shall be taken.
Adams believed slavery was morally reprehensible, but he did not believe the Constitution gave Congress the power to do anything about it in the states where it existed. He also disagreed with the tactics radical abolitionists used to try to bring an end to the practice. He believed the reforms championed by antislavery societies popping up across the North were impractical and unrealistic. “The captious disputations of moral and political casuistry, about non-resistance, defensive war, the rights of women, political action, no Government, the social condition of the colored race, the encouragement given to the slaves to escape from their masters, and exaggerated representations of the miseries of the condition, have eminently concurred not only to counteract their influence upon the main object of their association, but to make them unpopular and even odious, not only in the South, but in all parts of the Union.”However, Adams revered the First Amendment as the cornerstone of the American republic. The gag rule usurped a citizen’s freedom of speech—a right endowed to all Americans, abolitionist and enslaver alike. Adams reasoned if freedom of speech could be so easily dismissed in the People’s House, then freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the freedom to peaceably assemble were also in jeopardy.
In the years following May 1836 when the first gag rule was enacted, Adams openly and actively worked to subvert it. He attacked the gag rule by employing an array of procedural tricks, manipulations, and sleights of hand to outsmart, outthink, and outdo his opponents. I like to say that he practiced the art of verbal jujitsu. Year after year, in the face of hisses from the chamber, Adams offered antislavery petition after antislavery petition. But the Haverhill petition was different than the others. It was an escalation in rhetoric coming from the North.
Therefore, it should not have surprised any of his congressional colleagues on Monday, January 25, 1842, when Adams read that petition from forty-six citizens of Haverhill, Massachusetts, who preferred to dissolve the Union rather than let slavery continue. “Because,” the petition read, “no union can be agreeable or permanent which does not present the prospects of reciprocal benefits,” and “Because a vast proportion of the resources of one section of the Union is annually drained to sustain the views and course of another section without any adequate return.” In other words, a house divided against itself cannot stand.
Ignoring calls of “Order, order!” Adams read on. The sound of long and loud gasps hung in the air as Southern congressmen feigned shock and outrage. The pearl-clutching was a ploy. Over the past decade, the slavocracy had issued their own threats of disunion when the occasional challenge to slavery came before the House. For Adams, this was not a slavery issue. It was about freedom of speech. He was no stranger to trials of any kind, and it was not the first time he’d been called before the bar for censure. It had occurred once, a few years before, in 1837. At that time, he’d so enraged his Southern colleagues that they walked out of the chamber and threatened never to return.
Adams had many a Southern nemesis, but for all the fiery wrath that could come from the tongue of antagonists like South Carolina’s James Henry Hammond and Waddy Thompson, or Virginia’s Henry Wise, nothing cut him as deep as the rejection of the American people themselves. In 1828, after he lost reelection to Andrew Jackson, he confessed to his diary, “The Sun of my political life sets in the deepest gloom—But that of my Country shines unclouded.”
In the winter of 1842, Adams had a far gloomier view of American political life. For two weeks over the end of January and into early February, he faced a new Southern prosecutor in the form of Kentucky Congressman Thomas Marshall, a nephew of the late chief justice John Francis Marshall. Adams’s actions, the younger Marshall told the assembly, “merit expulsion,” but he deemed it “an act of grace and mercy, when they only inflict upon him their severest censure for conduct so utterly unworthy of his past relations to the State, and his present position. This they hereby do for the maintenance of their own purity and dignity; for the rest, they turn him over to his own conscience and the indignation of all true American citizens.”
The indignation of all true American citizens? Who are the true Americans? This was as much a partisan attack line in 1842 as it is today—a question meant to divide us, to slice us and dice us into smaller and smaller subgroups, which makes us easier to manipulate. The indignation of all true Americans? Did Marshall suggest that John Quincy Adams, a son of John and Abigail Adams, was not a true American?
John Quincy Adams might be the truest American. He lived his life in service of his country. Born in 1767, in Braintree, Massachusetts, John Quincy was the second child, and elder son, of John and Abigail. A month shy of his eighth birthday, young John Quincy felt the vibrations of the cannon blast, as his mother took him by the hand, and the two climbed a nearby overlook to watch the Battle of Bunker Hill from the relative safety of Quincy, Massachusetts.
When his father was appointed special envoy to Paris in 1778, he carried eleven-year-old John Quincy with him across the dangerous waters of the Atlantic. Thus began a seven-year journey in which Adams spent his adolescence being educated in the best schools Europe had to offer.
While John Adams was negotiating military support from the French and economic support from the Dutch, and ultimately peace with Great Britain, his son was learning new languages, tasting exotic cuisines, attending the opera with Thomas Jefferson. In 1781, John Quincy spent a year as translator and personal secretary for Francis Dana, the newly appointed US emissary to St. Petersburg.Upon his return to the United States in 1785 to attend Harvard, the young Adams was already well on the path to an extraordinary life of public service. The founding son’s talent for diplomacy even caught the eye of George Washington.
As a struggling young lawyer, Adams published a series of anonymous essays in support of President Washington and his administration’s policies. In 1794, in recognition of the young man’s understanding of geopolitics and fluency in French and Dutch, Washington appointed John Quincy minister to the Hague. Washington saw in the young man someone with all the abilities to be a great public servant for the new nation, as well as someone who could help renegotiate the repayment of Dutch loans. During his father’s administration, John Quincy was appointed to the same post in Prussia.
In 1797, John Quincy married Louisa Catherine Johnson. The two met while Adams was traveling through London on a diplomatic mission. Louisa’s father was from Maryland but served as American consul in London. Because Louisa’s mother was English, John Quincy’s parents were not thrilled about the arrangement. In their minds, how would it look for a future president to have a foreign-born wife?
After his father’s loss to Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the elder Adams recalled his son from his diplomatic post in Berlin to spare him the embarrassment of being fired by his successor. John Quincy returned home to Massachusetts and entered the political fray. He won election to the Massachusetts state senate and in 1803 was appointed to the United States Senate by Massachusetts Federalist Party elders.
A streak of independence that would cut both ways for the rest of his life quickly got him in trouble. Adams refused to toe the party line. When he supported Thomas Jefferson on the issue of the Embargo Act, Adams earned the reputation of being a political maverick and stoked the ire of the Federalist Party. Though his days in the Senate were numbered, his career was just getting started.
