Founding Son: Episode 2 - Andrew Jackson Strikes Back

I'm Bob Crawford. This is founding son John Quincy's America. June seventeenth, seventeen seventy five. A seven year old John Quincy Adams. Here's explosions in the distance.

His mother, Abigail, took him up to a nearby hill when they heard the sounds of canons.

Presidential historian Lindsay Stravinsky says that when John Quincy and his mother got to the top of the hill, they saw all the British and the Continental armies locked in a heated battle.

And he actually observed and witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill, which is one of those incidents that you read about and you just think like, surely this cannot be true, surely this is made up. And yet he was there and he saw it.

Fifty years before John Quincy Adams was president. He saw the American Revolutionary War up close, first as a spectator from his home in nearby Braintree, Massachusetts, but eventually as an unofficial ambassador. The son of one of America's most important diplomats, John Adams, he.

Was this remarkable child. He was eleven years old and his father brought him to Europe to serve as his private secretary.

He ate new cuisines, spent evenings at the opera, learned at some of the world's finest schools.

He was picking up new languages, and so it totally changed who he would become because he had such a worldly perspective and ultimately ended up having so many decas aids of experience at the foreign policy level that he was just an unparalleled mind.

John Quincy Adams was born in seventeen sixty seven, the same year as his future political rival Andrew Jackson. But even though the two men were the same age, Jackson lived through a very different revolutionary war.

He was a boy soldier, not a soldier exactly, but he was a boy participant in the American Revolution.

Sean Wallentz is the author of The Rise of American Democracy Jefferson de Lincoln. He says Jackson grew up along the border of North and South Carolina, in a region known as the Waxaws.

That part of South Carolina, the part of the Carolinas, was dark and bloody ground during the Revolution, and at one point he was captured by the British and was asked to shine a an officer's shoes or.

Boots Jackson refused.

Upon which the outraged officer lifted his sword and cracked him over the head and hit him so hard that he bore that scar for the rest of his life. And I actually think that that's an important moment in understanding Jackson, because his hatred of the British Empire was from that moment on undying.

To say Jackson held a grudge is an understatement. He didn't just have bad blood with the British, but anyone who wronged him, and in eighteen twenty four, John Quincy had done just that. In Jackson's mind, John Quincy and Henry Clay had broken a backroom deal to steal the presidency from him. From that moment on, Jackson and his supporters were hell bent on getting even.

It appears we live in evil times when those exalted to high, dignified and honorable stations have abandoned the course dictated by truth and honor and move on to self aggrandizement, regardless of the use of the means by wi may be acquired.

How far would Jackson's followers go to make John Quincy Adams a one term president and who would win the rematch between the two Chapter two Andrew Jackson strikes back. It's late morning on March fourth, eighteen twenty five, cavalry arrived at John Quincy adams f Street home in Washington, d C. Trumpets blared, cannons boomed as Adams prepared to leave for the inauguration. He put on his plain black coat. It would be his last moments as a private citizen

Body, and afterwards, to what should be the surprise of no one, she fainted.

This is Louisa Thomas, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Louisa, The Extraordinary Life of Missus Adams. She says Luisa had long suffered from physical and mental illnesses. Many were misdiagnosed and mistreated, which was not uncommon at the time, especially if you were a woman.

She was given leeches laudanum, which is basically opium mercury. I mean, he's just basically poisoned. Every turn.

With his wife bedridden, John Quincy headed to his inauguration alone.

She did rouse herself out of bed and got dressed and came down afterward, and then when the family went on to celebrate the inauguration, she went to bed.

After taking the oath of office, President John Quincy Adams plunged into his extremely ambitious agenda. He detailed plans to transform the nation through what he called improvements.

For Adams, improvements meant physical things, what we would today call infrastructure, the building of roads and canals. It meant institutions, the creation of a naval academy. He dreamed of building a network of what he called lighthouses of the skies, which meant telescopes, because he he loved telescopes.

James Traub is author of John Quincy adams Militant Spirit. He says, shortly after taking office, Adams planned to tell the nation about his improvements during his first message to Congress. But when Adams rehearsed the speech to his cabinet, they were like, m, we have a few notes.

When he read his the equivalent of the State of the Union speech, his first annual speech, they all blanched because of how ambitious the demands were, and even the language.

The idea of a strong federal government stoked fears of tyranny. In eighteen twenty five, freedom meant freedom from government, and many lawmakers believe the Constitution wouldn't allow the government to fund John Quincy's infrastructure projects. Adams ignored the advice of his cabinet and threw all of his energy and political capital into the American system.

Anyway, thereby infuriating a large fraction of the Congress and maybe the public you know who thought otherwise.

Adams's determination to plow forward required trust in the government, flying in the face of Thomas Jefferson's idea that government is best which governs least, still a widely popular sentiment. On top of that, many Americans considered Adams an illegitimate president. Congress elected him, not the people.

There were so many reasons why Adams failed as president that you almost could remove the legitimacy question and say he still would have failed.

John Quincy refused to compromise his beliefs and his political ambitions, and he balked at the idea of working with his political opponents. He had a critical handicap as commander in chief. His worldly experience and privileged upbringing made him detached from the typical American he was quick to show off as Harvard education, quoting Cicero and Tacitus at will, Adams thundered in his first annual message in December of eighteen twenty.

Five, while foreign nations are advancing with gigantic strides and public improvement, were we to slumber and indolence and proclaim to the world that we are paulsied by the will of our constituents, would it not be to doom ourselves to perpetual inferiority.

You may not understand exactly what paulsied by the will of our constituents means, but Adams might as well have called a vast swapt of Americans a basket of deplorables. In the early eighteen hundreds, America was still mostly an agrarian society. Many of its citizens were planners, farmers, and mechanics with no formal education, and Adams essentially said that they were the reason America couldn't compete with Europe. Not to be outdone, Jackson replied.

When I view the declaration, that it would be criminal for the agents of our government to be poalsied by the will of their constituents. I shudder for the consequence. The voice of the people must be heard.

Jackson got it, Adams did not. And it wasn't just voters who hated the direction Adams and Henry Clay wanted to take America. Southern politicians had their own specific misgivings about the policies. They despised the goals of Clay and Adams's so called American system.

The American system posed a threat to slavery in a number of ways. If you have more and better forms of travel and communication, it's easier for enslaved individuals to self emancipate and to run away. It's easier for the federal government to encroach on what they call the Southern way of life. So they really saw any measure of federal intervention as a threat to slavery.

While Andrew Jackson represented the antithesis of everything Adams believed, he was mostly the figurehead operating by proxy. Jackson's loyal network of supporters and followers did his bidding in Congress, and the man leading Jackson's rabid sympathizers was a senator from New York.

Martin Van Buren was an operator. You know, he'd be like Carl Rove or something.

Van Buren was a Northerner who liked many didn't necessarily like Jackson. But where others saw widening political division, he saw opportunity.

He saw that there was a chance to combine the West and the South, the old planter class and this new class, as well as some Northerners who could live with slavery.

Since the original parties had dissolved, politics divided along regional boundaries, really North versus South. Van Buren wanted to bring back a Jeffersonian way of dividing political allegiancies by ideology, and for him, the winning strategy was Jacksonian populism.

And so Van Buren is thinking, we have to found a new popular party which poses itself against these old populations and old parties and saying, let's create this new thing.

That new thing is the Democratic Party, and that system has evolved into the two party system that largely exists today. The new party was still just an idea in Van Buren's head when the midterm elections of eighteen twenty six rolled around, but the divisions were real. Jacksonian candidates swept the election, winning a vast majority in both chambers of Congress.

The drubbing that he takes in Eateen twenty six is an indication that most of Congress, even people who would normally think of themselves as belonging to the president's party, would see that John Quincy Adams was perhaps more of a nationalist than what they were. Perhaps, if you're in the House of Representatives, their constituency wants to see in a president.

David S. Brown is a professor of history at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania.

He could not position himself in such a way that even some of his advocates in his own party could really campaign on his record, and so they run against him.

Voters in Congress soundly rejected the American system. John Quincy, like his father, believed to his core that it was the president's duty to doggedly pursue what was best for the nation and to rise above party politics. The midterm election of eighteen twenty six proved that this belief, while laudable, was not a strategy for political success. New York City Mayor Philip Hohne later said of Adams, his desire to avoid party influence lost him all the favor of all

And it was taken as a great omen by a lot of people, but it was a special omen for John Quincy Adams in the middle of his what would be his only term as president, in the.

Wake of his father's funeral and his trouncing in the midterms, John Quincy was in deep despair. Putting his father's affairs in order, John Quincy contemplated what was to come.

For an active and much agitated life to pass suddenly forever to a condition of total retirement and almost solitude trial to which I cannot look without some concern.

He was heading into what many said would be the biggest political route in American history. The election of eighteen twenty eight. The populist wave had become a tsunami powerful enough to sweep Adams from office, and at the head of this movement was his former and now current opponent, General Andrew Jackson. Coming up. Jackson and Adams square off for the presidency again, and this time it's personal, like

So when people say today that elections and politics are nastier than they've ever been, that usually indicates that they haven't actually looked into elections in the past, because the eighteen twenty eight election was incredibly nasty.

Newspapers at the time were used by politicians as instruments of personal destruction.

Most newspapers didn't even pretend to be objective. The storylines they might be fabricated, they might have a bit of truth in them, but really this was not objective reporting.

Newspapers on both sides were brutal and unforgiving in their attacks.

On Jackson's side, it was the NonStop corrupt bargain which they turned into the greatest scandal in the nation's history.

Publications on Adam's side got personal, some downright cruel.

One of the more scurreless newspapers in Cincinnati runs some giant headline about Jackson's mother was a prostitute.

Jackson fumed at the attacks on his mother, Elizabeth. His father died before he was born, so he felt fiercely protective of the only parent he knew, a woman who had given literally everything to her children and her country. When Jackson and his guerrilla fighting brothers were captured by the British in the Revolutionary War, they were sent to a prison camp.

And the conditions were so terrible that when they were released, his brother died two days later, and then his mom. Because she was so moved by this experience, served as a nurse for other prisoners of war that were held on British ships, on which the conditions were absolutely ghastly.

While working as a nurse on the ship, she came down with cholera and died, leaving Jackson an orphan when he was just fourteen years old. It's of John Quincy to drag Jackson's mother through the mud, calling her a prostitute. This cut Jackson to the core, but what really set him off were the attacks on his wife, Rachel.

Rachel was previously married and she then sought a divorce, but it certainly appears that she married Jackson before her divorce was finalized, so that then gave rise to the notion that Jackson had married a harlot.

But like I said, the attacks were vicious on both sides. The newspapers that were sympathetic to Jackson were plenty cruel as well.

John Quincy Adams held several diplomatic posts in Europe and one was in Russia, and the opposition press in eighteen twenty four and to claim that Quincy Adams, while ambassador, had pemped out one of his female servants to the Czar.

This, of course is false, and the press targeted John Quincy's wife, Louisa too.

The claim about his wife being British is of course true, and up until Melania Trump, his wife was the only first lady to have been born elsewhere.

Louisa Catherine Johnson was born in London in seventeen seventy five.

The same year as Jane Austen.

To give you some contexts also, you know, on the eve of the Revolutionary War. Her father was an American, her mother was a Londoner, and she had a sense of herself as always an outsider looking in.

When the Revolutionary War began, Louisa's father, a patriot from Maryland living in London, fled with his family to France. When the war was over, she returned with her family to London. It was there seventeen ninety five that Louisa met John Quincy Adams at a party at their home, a young diplomat of the fledgling United States, dressed in a boxy coat.

Oh, she thought he looked ridiculous. He wasn't dressed fashionable.

Louisa came from a large family and had a lot of sisters. They were all educated, fashionable, social, very pretty and played music.

I think he somewhat fell in love with the scene at first. He was wrote in his diary about the beautiful music and the good food, and the good conversation and the daughters, and he sort of mentioned, you know, which one was good at the harbor, which one was good at piano? And Louisa sings. I think that was his first mention of her.

John Quincy found himself falling in love with one of Louisa's sisters. Eventually, though it seems like he sort of listened to his heart and chose Louisa.

His account of getting engaged, in fact, was he was like passive. This isn't the exact line, but it was something like the ring jumped from my finger or something. I mean, it was a very odd way of phrasing.

In seventeen ninety seven, John and Luisa got married. Fast forward thirty years later. Now her name was smeared across the front pages of newspapers across America. She was criticized for being European upper class. Her sympathies lied with the monarchs, not with their subjects.

She felt vilified and she was. They poked every single sore spot for her, and it was an extraordinarily painful experience.

At this time in American history, it was still only white men who could vote, but in the election of eighteen twenty eight, more men than ever cast ballots, many for the first time, and candidates were fiercely competing for these new voters.

This is a demographic revolution happening. Between eighteen three and eighteen twenty one, eight states entered the Union. All of them were in the South and the west, excepting for one, the state of Maine.

The nation was growing, spreading south and west, racing towards the Pacific.

Ocean sunbult politics isn't just a twentieth century or twenty first century phenomena. It was growing in the early nineteenth century, and Jackson embodies it.

For these new voters. Intellectuals and establishment politicians like John Quincy were what was wrong with the nation. But an adventurer from the West who rose from humble beginnings to become a war hero, that was someone the people could relate to.

Jackson is going to be really the only candidate who could win the selection. I think.

When all the votes were counted in the late fall, Jackson was the clear winner of the popular vote again, but he had also won a decisive one hundred in seventy eight electoral votes. It was a landslide that completely wiped out John Quincy. Unlike the eighteen twenty four vote, there could be no doubt that the people had rejected Adams and the ideals he stood for. Jackson's limited government and states rights agenda prevailed, but Jackson's victory came at

Rachel was prostrated by this public humiliation and died after Jackson was elected and before he was inaugurated. And so you can't imagine how bitter Jackson felt towards it, Adams towards everyone on the other side, and indeed, more broadly, how Jacksonians felt about them.

Jackson later said about his wife.

Heaven will be no heaven to me if I do not meet my wife there.

The election came in a great cost for John Quincy as well. He had spent his life coping with depression, and after losing the White House, he was consumed by despair.

What we think of now is clinical depression. He had it. There's no question, you read it. He has a serotonin deficiency. It's a problem. So when he left office he was depressed. He thought he had let the country down. He had let his father's memory down, his parents' memory down, so he's pretty low.

After Jackson's inauguration, John Quincy and Louisa lingered in Washington, waiting for their eldest son, George, to help them make the trip back to Quincy. Louisa was devastated from the stress of the campaign and a combination of physical afflictions. She looked forward to seeing her oldest son, George.

She was very close to her children and to George in particular.

But George had taken a bad turn. Shortly after the election, Louisa received a letter from her other son, Charles Francis, telling her that George was not doing well.

I write this without any intention of unnecessarily alarming you. He is well enough in all bodily respects, but he pines for want of some kind of excitement to action which does not exist.

George Washington Adams was never adept at handling the pressure of being born into one of the most influential families in New England. He was an alcoholic and womanizer. Now his behavior was getting worse. Louisa and John Quincy had watched their son slowly unravel, feeling helpless, hoping a trip to Washington would do him good. John Quincy was still waiting for George to arrive when his brother in law

It may have been an accident, It may have been a mental health crisis. He may have been hearing voices of some kind. He may have been drunk, he may have jumped.

In his diary, John Quincy wrote that upon learning the news about George's death, Louisa's condition is not to be described.

For him too, that was an unspeakable tragedy, and he was open with himself, at least in his diary, that the pain of the losing the election was nothing, nothing compared to the pain of losing his son.

Utterly crushed by his defeat in the election and the death of his first child, John Quincy retreated to the solitude of Peacefield, been his days, tending to his garden and focusing on his next project, organizing and publishing a collection of his father's papers. And while this could have been the end of John Quincy's story, it was actually just the beginning on a late September morning in eighteen thirty, Adams was visited by a few old friends.

He's approached by locals in Massachusetts to actually or get back into the fray. Go run for Congress.

Run for Congress. He had reached the pinnacle of political success in America. Now he was being asked to be one of dozens of elected officials, all of equal power. He didn't like the idea of taking into motion, but there was something he did like.

There was a certain aspect of revenge. I've always thought that it's not so much that he wanted to get out one particular person, but he did want to reclaim his greatness after he'd been knocked down, after he'd been hurt eighteen twenty at election, after his presidency actually had been something of a failure.

Getting back at Jackson and the other politicians who sank his presidency was an enticing prospect. There are probably many reasons Adams ran for Congress, but Louis's wishes were not one of them. In fact, his wife did not know he was even considering it until days later when she read about it in the newspaper. She was furious she.

Had forcedeign politics. Washington wanted no part in that. She blamed also all that for killing George.

Certainly, she wrote, to pretend that I make this sacrifice willingly would be ridiculous and false.

She basically told John Quincy, enough is enough. How much of your family are you willing to sacrifice to satisfy your ambition?

In the marriage compact, there are, as in every other, two parties, each of which have rights strictly defined by law and by the usages of society. In that compact, the parties agree, before the face of Heaven, to promote, as far as in their power, the wealthare and happiness of each other. The woman, being the weaker of the two, is expected and does, nine times out of ten, make the great sacrifices for her husband.

For Louisa, the sacrifices were gut.

Wrenching, the grave of my lost child, the grasping ambition, which is an insatiable passion, swallowing and consuming all in its ever devouring more.

Against his wife's wishes. John Quincy Adams successfully ran for Congress. He took the oath of office once again in December eighteen thirty one, this time not as president but a US representative. A king now upon thrust into the raucous us House of Representatives. He entered Congress at a time when the nation's fabric was tearing apart. The insidious slaveocracy was burrowing itself deep into the soul of America. John Quincy was yet to make his greatest contribution to his

John Quincy Adams played in a deeply important role in bringing slavery to the center of American national debates at a time when no one else or very few people wanted to do that.

You suppressed the right of petition.

You suppressed the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, and the freedom of religion.

Founding Son is a curiosity podcast asked brought to you by iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans. For help with this episode, we want to thank James Traub, author of John Quincy Adams Militant Spirit, Lindsay Stravinsky, author of The Cabinet, George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution. Luisa Thomas, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Louisa, The Extraordinary Life of Missus Adams. Sean Willentz, author of

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