Flashback, February 1825: Adams Victory in Disputed Presidential Race Launches ‘Corrupt Bargain’ Charge

With none of the three major candidates winning a majority of votes in the Electoral College, the 1824 Presidential election was thrown into the House of Representatives, which awarded the office to John Quincy Adams in February 1825.

I wrote 15 years ago about Adams’ first year in the White House, while surveying his prior distinguished diplomatic career and consequential post-Presidency. But the month in which he fulfilled his ambition for the nation’s highest office was so astonishing—and such an anticipation of how current thinly sourced smear campaigns can poison the electorate—that it deserves exploration in depth.

With the popular James Monroe declining to run for a third term, the stage was set for an electoral free-for-all in 1824, featuring four candidates:

*Secretary of State Adams, the son of another President, John Adams, drew strength from the Northeast, especially New England.

*Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, looked to a base mostly confined to the West and South, with residual support in the Northeast.

*Treasury Secretary William Crawford, though the favorite of the Democratic-Republican Party establishment, had suffered a debilitating stroke before the election. Though unable to campaign, he retained support in the Deep South.

*Speaker of the House Henry Clay, who earned the least votes in the Electoral College, ended up exerting the greatest influence on the vote.

The election of 1824 was the first that used the procedures outlined in the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which called for the House of Representatives to pick among the top three candidates in the Electoral College.

Those three turned out to be Adams, Jackson, and Crawford. Although Jackson led the Electoral College count (and, most historians contend, what would have been the popular vote), he did not have a majority. Crawford’s medical condition effectively made it a two-man race between Adams and Jackson.

Four years before, it took the Missouri Compromise to avert a civil war over slavery. Many of the sectional differences barely muzzled in that agreement were coming to the fore again.

A sense of déjà vu must have particularly gripped Adams: as in the election of 1800 (lost by his father), it would take a New York Federalist to secure the outcome.

But, while Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton had persuaded his side to vote for Thomas Jefferson rather than Aaron Burr in that earlier election on the 36^th House ballot, it took only one ballot—cast by 60-year-old aristocrat Stephen Van Rensselaer III—to settle matters in 1825.

Legend holds that, while agonizing on the House floor over whom to support, Rensselaer noticed a ballot placed in front of him reading, ADAMS. Believing this to be divinely inspired, the congressman voted accordingly.

If only matters had remained that simple…

In an early attempt at creating a unifying “team of rivals” strategy that Abraham Lincoln later used, Adams asked Crawford to remain as treasury secretary and Jackson to take over the War Department. Both declined.

The selection of the third rival, Clay, sparked enormous controversy. The President-elect knew him as a fellow diplomat in the Treaty of Ghent negotiations that ended the War of 1812, and though he didn’t particularly trust the Kentuckian or care for his drinking and gambling, he knew he was able and shared common domestic policy goals.

Adams asked Clay to become Secretary of State after his House of Representatives victory, not before (contrary to what some Websites and podcasts claim to this day).

But, because Clay had swung the vote of his state’s delegation to Adams, and the State Department had served as a steppingstone to the Presidency for all occupants of the office in the prior 25 years, an anonymous letter soon appeared in Philadelphia’s Columbian Observer charging that the two men had engaged in a “corrupt bargain.”

Eventually, the “anonymous” Congressman emerged from the shadows to admit being the source of the allegation: George Kremer of Pennsylvania.

William Russ, Jr.’s article about the incident in the October 1940 issue of the academic journal Pennsylvania History noted not only that Kremer had “sunk into oblivion, even locally,” but that before and after his moment in the spotlight he was “obscure.” That difficulty in remembering him has only increased with time.

In 1825, Kremer, then completing his first term as a congressman, was hardly a disinterested observer, and certainly not a distinguished one. Successive stints as a storekeeper, lawyer, and two-year state legislator had done nothing to disabuse perceptions that he was a backbench time-server, a reputation not helped by his propensity for wearing a leopard-skin coat on the floor of the House. 

The topic that preoccupied Kremer in Congress–eliminating waste and abuse in government—frequently seemed like a pretext to contest initiatives that involved funding internal improvements—the policies that Clay and Adams supported and that Jackson opposed. Kremer, in fact, often anticipated many of the same arguments that MAGA supporters use today against government expenditures.

Challenged by Clay to testify and offer evidence before a congressional committee that would investigate the corruption allegations, however, Kremer backed down, saying at first, bizarrely, that he hadn’t intended to "to charge Mr. Clay with corruption," then refusing to testify on constitutional grounds, before finally crowing, after his three terms in Congress, how proud he was for his part in spreading the news about the scandal.

To be sure, backers of all four major candidates maneuvered furiously for advantage behind the scenes. But no documentary evidence has ever been produced substantiating the claims about Clay and Adams.

Moreover, despite friction between the two men in the past, even a shouting match, there could be little doubt that the House Speaker preferred Adams to Jackson—or, to put it another way, that Clay regarded Jackson as unsuited for the Presidency by virtue of his military background, hair-trigger temper, and distrust of banks.

None of that mattered to Jackson. He could have remembered that Adams, unlike Presidential aspirants like Crawford and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, had come to his defense in the Monroe Administration over his overly aggressive responses to Native American raids from Florida into Georgia.

But it was easier for him to think he’d lost because of the “corrupt bargain” than because of his incompatibility with Clay. So he not only nursed a grudge against the two men, but encouraged his supporters to regard the new administration as illegitimate—not unlike how Donald Trump convinced his followers that, all evidence to the contrary, the election of 2020 had been stolen from him at the polls.

Like his father, Adams erred in believing that he could govern above the fray, without benefit of political adherents. Jackson would not make the same mistake. (The “spoils system” is one Jacksonian legacy that Trump seems especially eager to copy in his return to the White House.)

When Adams left office four years later, defeated by the man he’d beaten previously, Jackson, he was one of the unhappiest men ever to occupy the White House.

Like his father, John Quincy Adams was so peeved by what transpired in his single term in office that he didn’t stick around for the inauguration of his successor.

Historians still regard Adams as the greatest Secretary of State in our history, and, like Jimmy Carter, he earned great respect for his post-Presidential career (see my prior blog post about his fight against the Jacksonian “gag rule” meant to squelch any opposition to slavery in Congress).

But his term in the White House was virtually unrelieved misery for him and his family, because of the stark mismatch between his lofty policy goals and miniscule political instincts. 

This Day in Vice-Presidential History (Indicted Burr Presides Over Senate)

Nov. 5, 1804—On what was supposed to be the opening day of the second session of 8^th Congress, so few Senators attended—13 in all—that those present quickly met and adjourned. But, though activity was slim to nonexistent, the spectacle on display at this early point in the history of the American republic was extraordinary: the official presiding over the proceedings, a member of the Executive Branch, was under indictment.

But I’ll let someone else fill you in on the background, a sharp-eyed witness who wrote in his diary about what brought matters to this pass, Senator John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts:

“The Vice-President, Mr. [Aaron] Burr, on the 11th of July last fought a duel with General Alexander Hamilton, and mortally wounded him, of which he died the next day. The coroner’s inquest on his body found a verdict of wilful murder by Aaron Burr… The Grand Jury in the County of New York found an indictment against him, under the statute, for sending the challenge; and the Grand Jury of Bergen County, New Jersey, where the duel was fought, have recently found a bill against him for murder. Under all these circumstances Mr. Burr appears and takes his seat as President of the Senate of the United States.”

Don’t let the matter-of-fact tone of Adams’ account fool you. The court cases, juxtaposed with Burr’s appearance in his usual spot in the chamber, could only have left the son of the prior American President shaking his head as he scribbled down his thoughts at the end of the day—a practice he had begun 25 years before, and would continue doing for another four decades.

Four words in Adams’ account especially made me sit up and take notice: “Bergen County, New Jersey.”

More specifically, less than two weeks before the senator wrote these lines, in modern-day Hackensack, only a few miles from my hometown, the consequences of the first bitterly contested Presidential election in American history—with Jefferson triumphing in the House of Representatives over Burr only after unexpected help from Hamilton—were being played out, in a way that few if any participants or observers could have foreseen.

I am writing this post on a day filled with its own tension between two rival political parties, with a former President trying to reclaim the office, even after being convicted on 34 felony counts. I confess that it gives me comfort to get away from the TV, radio, and Internet and revisit a time when the young United States managed to survive its own crisis, generated by an earlier politician seeking desperately for a way out of his own self-generated dilemma.

The politician that Adams balefully eyed lacked a political base but not swirling intrigue around him. Federalists abominated him for killing their de facto leader, Hamilton. As for the Democratic-Republicans, though Thomas Jefferson was dining with him a good deal more often in hopes he would deliver favorable rulings in the upcoming impeachment trial of Federalist Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, Burr's too-clever-by-half maneuvers for the Presidency four years before left the President and the other Virginia leaders of the party profoundly distrusting the northerner.

Over 50 years ago, a syndicated column by Garry Wills compared Burr to Richard Nixon, a more recent Vice President (and eventual President) whose career was truncated by scandal. But many observers have noticed uncanny similarities with another New Yorker, Donald Trump.

One quote they frequently cite came from a letter by Hamilton 12 years before his appointment with Burr in Weehawken. Glimpsing the rise of a fellow Revolutionary War veteran in his state’s politics, George Washington’s Treasury Secretary did not like what he saw:

“When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

Except for that phrase about “military habits,” this description of Burr as a potential American Caesar sounds an awful lot like Trump.

Not that the Vice President has been without advocates. Over 220 years after his political career effectively ended, Burr critics and revisionists among historians still debate his intentions and legacy.

Controversy lingers over Burr partly because of lack of documentation about his life, as discussed in this June 2019 American Scholar article by Penelope Rowlands. Some of his papers were lost while he was in transit as a kind of Flying Dutchman of the young republic; others, in the December 1812 shipwreck that took the life of his beloved daughter, Theodosia.

But, even when correspondence and diary entries are available, their content is often cryptic.

Burr could switch to writing in a different language in the middle of a document if he suspected it was being secretly read by someone else. He employed ciphers, but even when these messages were decoded, their actual meaning might only be understood by the recipient.

For example, in a letter written by son-in-law Joseph Alston in July 1804, as Burr awaited the results of grand jury investigations in New York and New Jersey, even his decoded message is not necessarily easy to infer:

“Immediately on the receipt of your letter on finance, I put the thing in a train of inquiry – The person employed has not yet met with success – your name is not used –

                The jury Mentioned in my last have adjourned over to Monday Eveg (23d.) – The result will determine my Movements –.”  

The Burr quality admitted by both detractors and admirers, charm, won to his side people who thought they discerned his ambiguous plans, and disarmed and confused those predisposed against him. 

Even the likes of Senator Adams and his wife Louisa, as related in this 2021 blog post by Gwen Fries of the Massachusetts Historical Society, ended up “fallen under his spell” on a March 1805 boat ride from Baltimore to Philadelphia.

Adams’ grandson, historian Henry Adams, right after introducing the “quiet, gentlemanly, and rather dignified” Vice President into his epic narrative of the administration of Thomas Jefferson, swerved toward assessing him, in the most scathing terms, as “a new power in the government…an adventurer of the same school as scores who were then seeking fortune in the antechambers of Bonaparte and Pitt…[and] the certain centre of corruption.”

A little over three years after Adams’ November 1804 diary entry, the New Jersey Supreme Court quashed the Bergen County indictment because, though shot in the state, Hamilton had died across the Hudson River in New York.

Another legal escape came that same year (much like Trump a few months ago) via the U.S. Supreme Court, when Chief Justice John Marshall, narrowly construing the Constitution’s definition of treason, ruled in Burr's favor when Jefferson’s Department of Justice brought charges related to the disgraced politician's attempt to separate the Western states and the Louisiana Territory from the Union.

Shortly afterward, Burr fled for Europe, dodging creditors, courts, and all manner of rumors (including that he was planning an assassination attempt against Jefferson). But, two years after this controversial acquittal in the conspiracy case, Burr’s travel plans and schemes had become the subject of speculation again.

Adams, now out of the Senate and back into a more congenial role as America’s greatest diplomat, was informed by Czar Alexander I’s Chancellor, Count Romanoff, that while in Gottenberg, Sweden, Burr had applied for a passport to Russia.

In February 1810, Romanoff told Adams of another Burr attempt to go to Russia, and asked the American minister if the former Vice President had violated any laws. Adams responded, “as well as its complicated nature would admit in the compass of a short conversation.”

Recent biographers of Burr have thoroughly examined aspects of his life formerly given relatively short shrift that now deserve more attention, including his challenge to the politics of deference that allowed the Virginia Dynasty to enormously influence the Presidency in the first four decades of the nation’s founding.

But these revisionists have a harder time explaining why Burr, as noted by Henry Adams, “made himself intimate with every element of conspiracy that could be drawn within his reach.” The United States was fortunate that, for all his energetic conspiracy-spinning, his implementation was maladroit. The republic may not always be so blessed.

This Day in Presidential History (‘Old Man Eloquent’ Adams Dies in Congress, Combating Slavery)

Feb. 23, 1848—Two days after casting a loud “no” vote in the House of Representatives on a war he abominated for extending slavery, then suffering a massive stroke as colleagues watched helplessly, former President John Quincy Adams died in a private room just off the chamber where he had revived his reputation.

As he expired, the 80-year-old Adams—a son of America’s second President who had struggled to cope with high parental expectations, as well as with his own ambition, unrelenting conscience, and, very likely, a major depressive disorder—conveyed a sense that his taxing personal journey was complete. “This is the last of earth; I am content,” were his reported last words.

In the last couple of days, with the news that Jimmy Carter has gone on hospice care, many observers have noted that, whatever his failures in office, he rewrote the playbook on how post-Presidencies could be conducted.

But, with no disrespect to the ailing former President, Adams achieved a greater impact in less than half the time—a little less than 19 years after he departed the White House, versus 42 years for Carter.

That impact was achieved because, while Carter concentrated on non-governmental service, Adams was elected and reelected to the House of Representatives, a body where to this day, no other President has served after leaving the White House.

(Other ex-Presidents have been consequential after leaving the White House, but not to the extent Adams was, nor as happily. In 1875, Andrew Johnson went back to the Senate, only to die just a few months later. William Howard Taft became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a position he preferred immensely over the Presidency. Theodore Roosevelt was so unhappy over being out of the Oval Office that he ran for his old post in 1912 against his former friend Taft, opening up a fatal split between the conservative and progressive wings of the Republican Party.)

I believe that places can often express the essence of a historic person far more vividly than words can. In the case of Adams, two places yield special insights into his character.

One is National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. Before this space was converted to an area where states could honor their most significant citizens, it served as the Hall of the House of Representatives.

When I toured this room some years ago, a guide not only pointed out that Adams had his fatal collapse at his desk here, but also this was where he had rattled opponents in debate.

To be sure, much of his effectiveness derived from his careful preparation for wording speeches and figuring what was most likely to unsettle adversaries, but he was also aided by the spontaneous insights he gained from a certain spot, where a mere whisper on one side of the room could echo to where he was standing.

The second place that provides a vivid sense of Adams is Peacefield, in Quincy, Mass.—for four generations of the family that lived here from 1788 to 1927, nicknamed “The Old House,” but now run by the National Park Service. I visited there 20 years ago, but vivid memories from my day there still linger.

The globes in Peacefield’s study belonged to John Quincy—a subtle reminder of a dazzling diplomatic career in which he not only served as America’s minister to Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain, but also altered the contours of the world’s maps by negotiating Florida’s purchase from Spain while he was secretary of state.

(Indeed, back in 1981, when American Heritage surveyed historians about “The Ten Best Secretaries of State,” Adams was the first choice of 80% of the respondents. I doubt if that result would change 40 years later.)

Adams’ son Charles Francis Adams built on the property a “Stone Library” to house the more than 6,00 books that his father acquired during his lifetime.

The most dramatic items in this library, and perhaps the ones cherished most by generations of the Adams family, are a Bible and a desk. They mark a vindication of sorts for the dedicated but politically frustrated Adams.

The English Bible was presented to John Quincy by Mendi tribesmen in gratitude for his Supreme Court arguments that won freedom for the Amistad slave mutineers in 1841—an episode in American history dramatized in Steven Spielberg’s 1997 drama Amistad.

The desk symbolizes John Quincy’s service in the House of Representatives from 1830 to 1848—a tenure that served as balm to a spirit made miserable by an ineffectual single term as President and wounded by scurrilous campaign charges.

(During Adams’ failed Presidential re-election bid in 1828, Andrew Jackson’s supporters claimed that the President had pimped for the Czar while minister to Russia, and that, in an “unfair bargain,” he had appointed Henry Clay secretary of state in return for Clay’s bloc of votes in Congress in the disputed election of 1824.)

But throughout his post-Presidential career, John Quincy’s resentment was transformed into positive energy on behalf of a cause.

As the most visible surviving link to the founders of the republic as the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, he became the most valuable asset of the anti-slavery movement.

Leading an eight-year effort to overthrow the “gag rule” that restricted congressional debate on slavery and threatened the constitutionally guaranteed right of petition, Adams earned the nickname “Old Man Eloquent.” 

And, like freshman Congressman Abraham Lincoln, Adams had attacked the Mexican War from the outset, regarding the conflict as a pretext for adding a slave state to the Union.

Adams’ anti-slavery advocacy formed just part of his wider opposition to Jacksonian policies on the rights of non-white peoples. As President, he had called for better protection of Indian Territories. 

By 1841, having watched his successor’s “simultaneous operation of fraudulent treaties and brutal force,” he confided to his diary his sense of impotent rage over “this abomination”: “It is among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring them to judgement—but as His own time and by His own means.”

Adams was more successful during his post-Presidency in steering the nation towards another goal of his Presidency: government investment in scientific research. He was influential in seeing that the curious bequest of English scientist James Smithson—calling for “an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of Knowledge" in the United States—was carried out when Congress created the Smithsonian Institution in 1846.

And one of the late, most gratifying periods of his life came in 1843. As he journeyed west to speak at the dedication of the Cincinnati Observatory, crowds turned out in droves to see this politician who had battled so stubbornly—and often at such a steep price to his mental well-being—for the causes of a lifetime.

For all the high intelligence, integrity, and unswerving patriotism that enabled Adams and other members of his family to achieve greatness, they also suffered an unrelenting, even puritanical pursuit of perfection, overwhelming depression, and tragedy when they couldn’t measure up to the near-impossible standards they set for themselves.

“If you do not rise to the head of your country…it will be owing to your own laziness,” John Adams advised his oldest and most dutiful son. John Quincy did so, but his brothers, wilting under their father’s disapproving eye, fell victim to alcoholism and depression, as did two of his own sons nearly 30 years later.

Often cold and austere, John Quincy made his British-born wife Louisa so miserable that only with great reluctance did she abandon her White House plans for a tell-all memoir about their marriage.

Adams tortured none of his loved ones, however, worse than himself. Assessing his life to date on his 45^th birthday, he confessed to his diary:

“Two thirds of a long life are past, and I have done Nothing to distinguish it by usefulness to my Country, or to Mankind— I have always lived with I hope a suitable sense of my duties in Society, and with a sincere desire to perform them— But Passions, Indolence, weakness, and infirmity have sometimes made me swerve from my better knowledge of right, and almost constantly paralyzed my efforts of good.”

Others took a more generous view of his legacy. In an unprecedented gesture, thousands of mourners filed past his bier for two days as he lay in state in the Capitol.

Four years later, when he joined John, his mother Abigail, and wife Louisa in an enlarged family crypt, the ornate coffin prepared by Congress for him proved too large for his sarcophagus, halting the ceremony while stonemasons worked hurriedly to widen the enclosure.

The mishap aptly sums up a family that, to their despair and posterity’s favorable judgment, refused to fit into the narrow political confines of their day.

This Day in Presidential History (Birth of George Washington Adams, Byronic Scion)

Apr. 12, 1801—George Washington Adams, who, though gifted with good looks and a flair for poetry, would stagger under the weight of expectations as the son and grandson of Presidents, was born in Berlin, where his father was serving at the time as U.S. Ambassador to Prussia.

I have to chuckle every time someone brings up the misbehavior of Hunter Biden and the alleged influence exerted on his behalf by his father. Leave aside the convenient amnesia of these critics when it comes to the prior President and the personal and financial misdeeds of his three older children. The fact is that, going back to the founding of the republic, Presidential children (particularly, far more often than not, Presidential sons) have given their parents fits.

Or, as Doug Wead recalled about a 1988 study he did for George W. Bush in his history of this group, All the Presidents' Children: “Research showed that being related to a president brought more problems than opportunities. There seemed to be higher than average rates of divorce and alcoholism and even premature death. Some presidential children seemed bent on self-destruction.”

The biggest case in point: the Adams family. The trouble started with the alcoholic male in-laws of patriarch John Adams. That tendency towards substance abuse, along with a predisposition towards depression, carried over to the following three generations of this American political dynasty.

Say what you want about Hunter Biden, but the grandson of John Adams, George Washington Adams, got there first.  Traumatized by parental separation early in life? Check. A fling with the female darling of one’s brother? Check. Overshadowed not just by a powerful father but a brother of great promise? Check. A major substance abuser for much of his adult life? Check. A headache who gave his father’s political foes plenty of ammunition? Check.

Young Adams’ father, John Quincy Adams, became America’s greatest Secretary of State, then its sixth President. In his post-Presidential career, he became the most relentless congressional foe of slavery and advocate for the constitutional right of petition. But in private life, his personality—anxious, taciturn, dour, and demanding—often darkened the lives of his wife and children. 

Paul Nagel’s superb collective biography of the family was called Descent From Glory. At times, however, I thought it might be better called Descent Into Despair. George epitomized the latter title.

His birth was greeted with joy, relief—but also with trepidation. It came one month after John Adams, the first President to lose a reelection bid, left the White House peevishly rather than witness the inauguration of rival and former friend Thomas Jefferson. A child to continue the family line was seen as balm for the old man’s spirits.

The successful delivery of the baby also soothed, at least for awhile, the anxiety of John Quincy and wife Louisa Johnson Adams, who had already suffered a couple of miscarriages. The new mother and her son were each “fat and rosy,” the diplomat assured concerned relatives and friends.

That jocular tone was uncharacteristic of the ambassador. His wishes for his son were best expressed through the pillar of integrity and restraint he was named for: President Washington, who in his second term had been so impressed by his Vice President's son that he predicted John Quincy would head America’s diplomatic corps in time. “I implore the favour of Almighty God that he [George] might live and never prove unworthy of [his name],” John Quincy wrote after the birth.

It was not to be.

When John Quincy Adams was appointed America’s first envoy to Russia in 1809, he decided to take two-year-old son Charles Francis Adams with him and Louisa to St. Petersburg but to leave eight-year-old George and six-year-old John Adams II in the care of relatives in Massachusetts. The parents were gone for so long—six years—that, upon their return, they did not recognize the now teenage George.

The reports they received in the interim about George—that he was, as Nagel put it in John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life, “hyperactive, erratic, brilliant but undisciplined, effeminate, and lazy”—were not reassuring.

The diplomat father—brilliant but ultra-disciplined—had already been peppering his son with letters advising him about Bible study, good companions, and the necessity to rise before 6 am to learn Greek and Latin. Now he decided to take an even stronger hand in directing his George’s future.

Grandfather John, maybe regretting his own hectoring for driving John Quincy’s brothers Charles and Thomas towards insolvency, alcoholism and despair, delicately tried to warn his son against also exerting too tight a control over his children, writing of the grandson he wished had been named for him, “George is a treasure of diamonds. He has a genius equal to anything, but like all other genius, requires the most delicate management.”

That “genius” was manifested in an area that John Quincy wished he could have indulged more—poetry. George was so good at writing verses that when he attended Harvard, he won the prestigious Boylston Prize over a formidable competitor: Ralph Waldo Emerson.

But whatever pride John Quincy might have felt in his son’s accomplishment was lessened by his otherwise lackluster performance at a school that his father had trained, pushed, and pulled strings for him to enter. With no American until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow more than two decades later making his living solely through poetry, it was necessary that George work at another profession: the law.

Even with excellent mentors—John Quincy and Senator Daniel Webster—George showed little interest in this career, and also underperformed when he followed father and grandfather into politics. Successful races for the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the Boston City Council preceded service in these bodies, where he evinced little interest in his work.

What really interested George were ladies and liquor. Like his literary hero, the Romantic poet Lord Byron, he drew women to him with his good looks. He would be deeply sorry for one of those conquests: the beautiful niece of his mother, Mary Hellen, who took up with him after playing with the affections of the youngest son, Charles Francis Adams—and who, after breaking off her engagement with George, married instead middle brother John Adams II.

From this point onward, George’s downward spiral accelerated. Mounting gambling debts increased the problems caused by lack of career success. Looking at Charles Francis, he saw a paler but unmistakable image of his father: introspective, self-critical, but high-minded and responsible enough to carve out a public niche.

Worse, love-on-the-rebound led George to impregnate the maid of the family’s Boston doctor. The threat of scandal deepened his depression.

With John Quincy having repeated his father’s Presidential electoral loss, he turned his attention again in the spring of 1829 to his oldest child, summoning George to DC to help with the family transition back to Massachusetts.

Being under the thumb of his relentlessly demanding father was more than George could bear. Before leaving for the nation’s capital, he was already confiding in associates his intention to commit suicide. Before dawn on April 30, he either jumped or fell overboard from a passenger liner in New York Harbor. It would be a month before his remains washed ashore.

In pondering in his diary the news that his son was lost, the former President momentarily deluded himself into thinking that the death had been precipitated by “the motion of the Stage and Steamboat in twenty-four hours [which] had produced a fever, with a rushing of the blood to the brain,” but what followed sounded more like soul-crushing guilt over this probable suicide:

“Blessed God! Forgive the repining of mortal flesh, at this dispensation of thy will! Forgive the wanderings of my own mind under its excruciating torture!”

Agony caused by George continued to plague the family for a few years. Charles disposed of his brother's papers, but refused to be blackmailed concerning George's illegitimate child. Two years later, the family had to suffer through the publication of a 44-page pamphlet that divulged all the secrets of the affair.

Over a century later, a more successful President, Franklin Roosevelt, surely thinking of his own children’s struggle in the public eye, observed, “One of the worst things in the world is being the child of a President. It’s a terrible life they lead.” Though a more playful and warm-hearted father than John and John Quincy Adams, even FDR could only pray that his children could survive a life disrupted by parental ambition as best as they could.

This Day in Presidential History (Birth of John Quincy Adams, ‘Old Man Eloquent’)

July 11, 1767—John Quincy Adams, who like his father saw a lifetime of devotion to the young American republic culminate in a single, unhappy term as President, was born in in Braintree, Mass.

Adams may have left the most extraordinary ongoing glimpse into the achievement—as well as the physical and psychological health—of any President in the form of the diary he kept faithfully, beginning in 1779 at age twelve and continuing until his death almost 70 years later.

Anxiety, both about his own failures and those of his country, was expressed in splenetic rants that he wrote (or, in his late 70s, dictated, after a minor stroke) at the end of the day. Few people provoked him more than his successor in the White House, Andrew Jackson.

As his father did when he left Washington before the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson in 1801, Adams did not stick around to see the swearing-in of the man who defeated him in his re-election bid. Unlike his father, who reconciled with his old friend in retirement, Adams did not make peace with Jackson.

He could not draw on a reservoir of years of respect, affection and shared intellectual interests for Jackson, as John Adams could with Jefferson. Having endured four years of abuse from Jackson’s surrogates over accusations of a “corrupt bargain” with Henry Clay in the House of Representatives that won him the Presidency despite losing the popular vote, Adams then lost a re-election campaign barely rivaled for rancor in Presidential history.

Out of office, Adams stewed whenever Jackson won additional acclaim or honors. He refused to attend the ceremony in which his beloved Harvard bestowed an honorary degree on this “barbarian and savage who could scarcely spell his own name.” Jackson, he fumed, was so “ravenous of notoriety that he craves the sympathy for sickness as a portion of his glory,” to the point that the President even permitted talk of his “constant diarrhea.”

Was Adams a sore loser? Sure. But much of his anger stemmed from genuine concern over the direction of the country set by Jackson and his followers.

During Adams’ post-Presidential years as a Congressman—the only former White House occupant to serve in the House of Representatives—he lent his prestige, as the son--and, therefore, one of the last link--to the leaders of the American Revolution, to opposing, sometimes single-handedly, “the Gag Rule,” a brazen attempt by Jacksonian Democrats to abridge freedom of petition by tabling any memorial touching in any way on slavery. Later, he opposed the admission of Texas to the Union and the Mexican-American War, deriding them as attempts to augment the power of the slave states.

Less well-known was his deep, lasting anger over Jackson’s treatment of Native Americans. Jackson had not only pushed the Cherokee tribe to leave their ancestral territory for new land west of the Mississippi, but had even defied a Supreme Court decision handed down by the revered John Marshall that he must honor the tribe’s rights. 

The climax for Adams may have come on June 30, 1841, in a morning visit from the Cherokee Chief John Ross and two others in his delegation. Adams, having refused appointment to chair the House Committee on Indian Affair, believed that this service would have resulted in “total impotence to render any useful service.” He could not help feeling alarmed at what he saw coming to pass, as he confided in his diary:

“The policy, from Washington to myself, of all the Presidents of the United States had been justice and kindness to the Indian tribes—to civilize and preserve them. With the Creeks and Cherokees it had been eminently successful. Its success was their misfortune. The States within whose borders their settlements were took the alarm, broke down all the treaties which had pledged the faith of the nation. Georgia extended her jurisdiction over them, took possession of their lands, houses, cattle, furniture, negroes, and drove them out from their own dwellings. All the Southern States supported Georgia in this utter prostration of faith and justice; and Andrew Jackson, by the simultaneous operation of fraudulent treaties and brutal force, consummated the work. The Florida War is one of the fruits of this policy, the conduct of which exhibits one (un)interrupted scene of the most profligate corruption. All resistance against this abomination is vain. It is among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring them to judgement—but as His own time and by His own means.”

The pre-Jackson policy of the American government should not be treated as a nirvana. It smacked of paternalism, of the need to “civilize and preserve” the tribes. The first six American Presidents believed in an expansionist America where whites enjoyed priority.

But Adams believed that abrogation of treaty obligations represented a dangerous, irreversible step, out of keeping both with our adherence to law and to respecting the rights of other nations. United States Indian policy, Adams confided in his diary on another occasion, amounted to a “sickening mass of putrefaction.”

The President responsible for this “putrefaction” preached a militant form of nationalism that has made him a favorite of Steve Bannon, adviser to our current President. Consider that when weighing if this is the kind of “populism” desirable for America.

As he rose, again and again, in opposition to the depredations of Jacksonian Democrats, Adams was given a nickname: “Old Man Eloquent.” His diary reveals in full the intellectual commitment and moral passion—along with the frequent bouts of depression—that animated his commitment to serving the United States.

Photo of the Day: DC Infrastructure, Way Before You-Know-Who

Did you know that the White House had christened the last several days “Infrastructure Week”? No?

Don’t feel bad. It wasn’t only that adverse media coverage about a former FBI Director’s riveting Capitol Hill testimony left the White House press office too Comey-tose to press their agenda, but that the President had done nothing, really, to advance what purports to be his plan: a $200 billion boost in federal spending that is supposed to trigger $800 billion in private financing through public-private partnerships. Nothing, that is, except toss to the ground thick binders of what he said were unnecessary and burdensome environmental reviews holding up a highway project.

Once, American leaders did more than offer cheap theatrics over infrastructure. They proposed detailed, carefully reasoned plans that not only created jobs, but that helped knit together the youthful but unruly and disparate regions of a sprawling nation.

Including in our nation’s capital, as I discovered in the fleeting but fascinating glimpse of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that I photographed from a bus while on vacation three and a half years ago. I was on my way down to Foggy Bottom when, looking out the right side of the bus window, I saw this towpath—a sight far different from what you’re likely to encounter in the glass and marble structures that line today’s Washington.

As I write this, the Georgetown Chesapeake and Ohio Canal is closed for renovation. As soon as it’s completed, though, I advise you to take it in, and marvel at what people once did once they set their minds to it.

The seeds of the Chesapeake and Ohio were planted by George Washington, who with other entrepreneur formed the Potomac Company to improve navigation on the Potomac. Logistics stymied construction of that, but the building of the Erie Canal starting July 4, 1817 altered the views of lawmakers across the nation. (Let the record show that the effort to spearhead it was led by a New Yorker, DeWitt Clinton—who, as a lawyer and longtime legislator, knew how to educate and persuade people to his point of view—all without insulting tweets. Imagine!)

For the next decade or so, federal assistance to “internal improvements”—not just canals, but also roads and bridges—seemed the wave of the future. That came to an end when the President that Donald Trump likened himself incessantly to, Andrew Jackson, vetoed a major roads bill.

But in the meantime, the Chesapeake and Ohio Company was chartered in 1825 to build a shipping canal connecting two rivers: the Potomac’s tidewater in DC with the headwaters of the Ohio in western Pennsylvania. President John Quincy Adams broke ground for the canal in ceremonies at Little Falls, Maryland, on July 4, 1828. The construction effort survived even more dangers than the red tape that President Trump complained about, including recession, labor shortages, landowner fights concerning right-of-way, and a five-year construction shutdown. At last, it opened in 1850.

The canal’s heyday was relatively brief—only a generation or so after its midcentury opening—but it enabled engineers to surmount future challenges because of the solutions supplied here: dams, hundreds of culverts, and a 3,117-foot tunnel through a large shale rock formation. 

Today’s challenges may be different, but are hardly insurmountable if approached with a spirit not just of ingenuity, but of intelligence and persuasiveness—qualities in desperately short supply at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days.