Published February 15, 2025
By Kent Hull
If John Quincy Adams had retired after his service in the administration of President James Monroe, his reputation might differ from what it has become. John Quincy’s principal biographer, Samuel Flagg Bemis of Yale University, deemed him the greatest Secretary of State in American history.
His victory in the bitter election of 1824 led to a presidency uniformly considered a failure. The historian Allan Nevins, raised on a farm near Camp Point, Illinois, in his edition of John Quincy’s Diary, summarized this paradox. He wrote, despite “experience, natural gifts and spotless integrity,” John Quincy’s “peculiarities of temperament, his strong views and his intense determination,” and “stiff unyielding temperament,” left him “quite unfit to cope” with the political realities of the 1820’s.
Both the nation and the new state of Illinois were changing as he took office. A transportation revolution, with canals, steamships and nascent railways encouraged easterners to homestead in “the West,” which is today’s Midwest. Upon taking office, John Quincy urged Congress to authorize internal improvements such as roads, turnpikes and river and harbor upgrading. Those improvements would support westward migration. He also urged creation of a national university and an observatory, but neither was built.
All of those proposals reflected his strong nationalism. Like Henry Clay, whom he had appointed Secretary of State, he wanted an American system of internal improvements, which he believed would help unify the nation and mitigate tension among the unique sections of the country, the South, the Northeast and the West.
His opponents, notably future presidents Andrew Jackson of Tennessee and Martin Van Buren of New York, argued that the Constitution strictly limited federal power and provided no legal authority for his projects. Underlying their resistance, and the resistance from southern leaders, was a fear that a strong national government might eventually limit, even abolish, slavery, especially in western territories admitted to the Union as individual states.
Some of his opponents also resented the power eastern banks could exert throughout the other regions. John Quincy’s opponents portrayed him as allied with New England interests which exploited planters, farmers and small business owners. The South and the West needed financial credit from eastern lenders as the nation’s economy became more complex and diversified. During John Quincy’s presidency Congress debated a tariff on imported goods, protecting certain industries, such as Massachusetts manufacturers of woolen clothing, from competition by European firms. Western sheep farmers, who sold their wool abroad, anticipated retaliation from Europe, as did southern planters exporting cotton. Both groups regarded a tariff on woolen imports as unfairly subsidizing New England companies, with no comparable support for agriculture in the West and the South.
John Quincy sought agreement on the tariff with his opponents, many of whom became the core of the modern Democratic Party, but Van Buren urged western voters to support Andrew Jackson in the 1828 presidential election. The law John Quincy eventually signed became the “tariff of abominations” and contributed to his defeat by Jackson. John Quincy’s nationalism also obscured his view of the displacement of Creek Indians from Georgia by the state government’s seizure of their land. He suspected, correctly, that the purported agreement by the Creeks to vacate was tainted by fraud. Yet he acquiesced in their forced removal to what is now Oklahoma, an event which anticipated President Andrew Jackson’s later removal of other tribes.
Amidst these national events Illinois underwent its first decade of statehood since admission in 1818. New residents established communities in southern counties initially, with a significant population reaching Pike County’s lower line by 1820. In 1825 the state legislature detached the upper portion of Pike to create Adams County, with Quincy as the county seat. Adams County lay within the “military tract,” also called Bounty Lands, in which land warrants enabled residents to establish homesteads. To encourage military enlistments during the War of 1812 against Great Britain, Congress had authorized land warrants, permitting ownership in Illinois and elsewhere by military veterans. Warrants could then be purchased by speculators who, using credit instead of cash, bought and subdivided large land tracts for sale to the public. Illinois roads were so inadequate that river access was essential for the state’s commerce. Dredging, removal of sandbar obstructions and harbor maintenance, measures John Quincy had proposed to Congress as proper federal initiatives, were imperative.
Against these events was the emerging crisis over slavery. The Compromise of 1820, in James Monroe’s presidency, had admitted Missouri to statehood without explicitly prohibiting or permitting slavery, while simultaneously admitting Maine, where slavery was impractical. The balance of power between North and South in the Senate thus remained unchanged. The Compromise, also called the Missouri Compromise, prohibited slavery above the 36/30 parallel, but otherwise left undecided the question of slavery in the rest of the vast western territories. From his retirement at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson called the unresolved slavery question a “fire bell in the night” for American society. In the 1828 election, the first presidential election for Adams County, John Quincy lost even in his namesake county. Adams County’s presidential vote total of 137 showed seventy-two votes for Andrew Jackson and sixty-five votes for Adams. Jackson’s statewide victory was a landslide, with John Quincy receiving only 33% of the total vote.
John Quincy Adams, defeated by Andrew Jackson, left the White House on March 3, 1829. He did not attend Jackson’s inauguration the next day, just as John Adams, defeated by Thomas Jefferson in 1800, had not attended Jefferson’s inauguration. John Quincy would, nevertheless, soon return to Washington as a Representative to Congress and make lasting contributions to his nation’s public life.
Kent Hull, a retired lawyer living in South Bend, IN, is a long-distance member of the Historical Society. He grew up in Plainville and graduated from Seymour High School in Payson, Illinois.
Sources:
Adams, John Quincy., The diary of John Quincy Adams, 1794-1845 : American diplomacy and political, social, and intellectual life from Washington to Polk. Edited by Allan Nevins, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951.
Bemis, Samuel Flagg. John Quincy Adams and the Union, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956.
Pease, Theodore Calvin. The Frontier State, 1818—1848, Springfield, IL: Illinois Centennial Commission, 1918.
Pease, Theodore Calvin. Illinois Election Returns 1818—1848, Springfield IL: The Trustees of the Illinois State Historical Library, 1923.
Remini, Robert V. John Quincy Adams, New York: Times Books, 2002.
Remini, Robert V. “Martin Van Buren and the Tariff of Abominations,” American Historical Review, 63, no. 4 (1958): 903-17.
