Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams.

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He then proceeds to show, in a severe and searching examination of
the proceedings of this secretary, that the transfers were utterly
unwarrantable; that he _tampered_ with the public moneys to sustain the
staggering credit of selected depositaries, and "scatter it abroad
among swarms of rapacious political partisans." After stating and
answering all the charges brought by the Secretary of the Treasury
against the Bank of the United States, and showing their falsehood or
futility, he declares all the proceedings of the directors of the
bank to have been within the pale of action warranted by the laws of
the land; and, so long as they do this, "a charge of dishonesty or
corruption against them, uttered by the President of the United States,
or by the Secretary of the Treasury, is neither more nor less than
slander, emitted under the protection of official station, against
private citizens. This is both ungenerous and unjust. It is the abuse
of the shelter of official station to circulate calumny with impunity."

Mr. Adams next examines and severely reprobates the declaration of
the President of the United States, that, "if the last Congress had
continued in session one week longer, the bank would, by corrupt means,
have procured a re-charter by majorities of two thirds in both houses
of Congress;" and declares the imputation as unjust as it was
dishonorable to all the parties implicated in it. He did not believe
there was _one_ member in the last Congress, who voted against
re-chartering of the bank, who could have been induced to change his
vote by corrupt means, had the president and directors of the bank been
base enough to attempt the use of them. "That the imputation is cruelly
ungenerous towards the friends of the administration in this house,
is," said Mr. Adams, "my deliberate opinion; and now, when we reflect
that this defamatory and disgraceful suspicion, harbored or professed
against his own friends, supporters, and adherents, was the real and
efficient _cause_ (to call it reason would be to _shame_ the term),
that it was the real _motive_ for the removal of the deposits during
the recess of Congress, and only two months before its meeting, what
can we do but hide our heads with _shame_? Sir, one of the duties of
the President of the United States--a duty as sacred as that to which
he is bound by his official oath--is that of maintaining unsullied
the honor of his country. But how could the President of the United
States assert, in the presence of any foreigner, a claim to honorable
principle or moral virtue, as attributes belonging to his countrymen,
when he is the first to cast the indelible stigma upon them? '_Vale,
venalis civitas, mox peritura, si emptorem invenias_,' was the
prophetic curse of Jugurtha upon Rome, in the days of her deep
corruption. If the imputations of the President of the United States
upon his own partisans and supporters were true, our country would
already have found a purchaser."

"That this was the true and efficient _cause_," Mr. Adams proceeds,
"of that removal, is evident, not only by the positive testimony of Mr.
Duane, but from the utter futility of the reasons assigned by Mr. Taney.
Mr. Duane states that, on the second day after he entered upon his
duties as Secretary of the Treasury, the President himself declared to
him his determination to cause the public deposits to be removed before
the meeting of Congress. He said that the matter under consideration was
of vast consequence to the country; that, unless the bank was broken
down, it would break us down; that, if the last Congress had remained a
week longer in session, two thirds would have been secured for the bank
by corrupt means; and that the like result might be apprehended the next
Congress; that such a state bank agency must be put in operation, before
the meeting of Congress, as would show that the United States Bank was
not necessary, and thus some members would have no excuse for voting for
it. 'My suggestions,' added Mr. Duane, 'as to an inquiry by Congress, as
in 1832, or a recourse to the judiciary, the President repelled, saying
that it would be idle to depend upon either; referring, as to the
judiciary, to the decisions already made as indications of what would be
the effect of an appeal to them in future.'

"These, then," continued Mr. Adams, "were the effective _reasons_ of
the President for requiring the removal of the deposits _before_ the
meeting of Congress. The corruptibility of Congress itself, and the
foregone decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, were
alike despised and degraded. The executive will was substituted in the
place of both. These reasons had been urged, without success, on one
Secretary of the Treasury, Louis McLane. He had been promoted out of
office, and they were now pressed upon the judgment and pliability of
another. He, too, was found refractory, and displaced. A third, more
accommodating, was found in the person of Mr. Taney. To _him_ the
reasons of the President were all-sufficient, and he adopted them
without reserve. They were all summed up in one,--_'Sic volo, sic
jubeo, stet pro_ RATIONE _voluntas_.'

"It is to be regretted that the Secretary of the Treasury did not feel
himself at liberty to assign this reason. In my humble opinion it ought
to have stood in front of all the rest. There is an air of conscious
shamefacedness in the suppression of that which was so glaringly
notorious; and something of an appearance of trifling, if not of
mockery, in presenting a long array of reasons, omitting that which lies
at the foundation of them all.

"The will of the President of the United States was the reason paramount
to all others for the removal, by the Secretary of the Treasury, of the
deposits from the Bank of the United States. It was part of his system
of simplifying the machine of government, to which it was admirably
adapted. It placed the whole revenue of the Union at any time at his
disposal, for any purpose to which he might see fit to apply it. In vain
had the laws cautiously stationed the Register, the Comptroller, the
Treasurer, as checks upon the Secretary of the Treasury, so that the
most trifling sum in the treasury should never be accessible to any one
or any two men. With a removal of the deposits and a transfer draft,
millions on millions may be transferred, by the stroke of the pen of a
supple and submissive Secretary of the Treasury, from place to place, at
home and abroad, wherever any purpose, personal or political, may
thereby be promoted.

"To this final object of simplifying the machine two other maxims have
been proclaimed as auxiliary fundamental principles of this
administration. First, that the contest for place and power, in this
country, is a state of war, and all the emoluments of office are the
spoils of victory. The other, that it is the invariable rule of the
President to reward his friends and punish his enemies."

In the course of the years 1832 and 1833, Freemasonry having become
mingled with the politics of the period, Mr. Adams openly avowed his
hostility to the institution, and addressed a series of letters to
William L. Stone, an editor of one of the New York papers, and another
to Edward Livingston, one of its high officers, and a third to the
Anti-masonic Convention of the State of New York, in which his views,
opinions, and objections to that craft, are stated and developed with
his usual laborious, acute, and searching pathos and power.

In October, 1833, Mr. Adams was applied to by one of his friends for
minutes of the principal measures of Mr. Monroe's administration, while
he was Secretary of State, and also of his own, as President of the
United States, to be used in his defence in a pending election. "I
cannot reconcile myself," said Mr. Adams, "to write anything for my own
election, not even for the refutation of the basest calumnies. In all my
election contests, therefore, my character is at the mercy of the basest
slanderer; and slander is so effective a power in all our elections,
that the friends of the candidates for the highest offices use it
without scruple. I know by experience the power of party spirit upon the
people. Party triumphs over party, and the people are all enrolled in
one party or another. The people can only act by the machinery of
party."

About this time there was an attempt in Norfolk County to get up a
Temperance Society, and a wish was expressed to him that he would take a
lead in forming it. He declined from an unwillingness to shackle himself
with obligations to control his individual, family, and domestic
arrangements; from an apprehension that the temperance societies, in
their well-intended zeal, were already manifesting a tendency to
encroach on personal freedom; and also from an opinion that the cause
was so well sustained by public approbation and applause that it needed
not the aid of his special exertions, beyond that of his own example.

On the 12th of December, 1833, Mr. Clay sent a message to the President
of the United States, asking a copy of his written communication to his
cabinet, made on the 18th of September, about the removal of the
deposits from the United States Bank; to which the President replied by
a flat refusal. Mr. Adams remarked: "There is a tone of insolence and
insult in his intercourse with both houses of Congress, especially since
his reelection, which never was witnessed between the Executive and
Legislature before. The domineering tone has heretofore been usually on
the side of the legislative bodies to the Executive, and Clay has not
been sparing in the use of it. He is now paid in his own coin."

An intelligent foreigner, in relating a visit to Mr. Adams, in 1834,
thus describes his powers of conversation: "He spoke with infinite ease,
drawing upon his vast resources with the certainty of one who has his
lecture before him ready written. He maintained the conversation nearly
four hours, steadily, in one continuous stream of light. His subjects
were the architecture of the middle ages, the stained glass of that
period, sculpture, embracing monuments particularly. Milton, Shakspeare,
Shenstone, Pope, Byron, and Southey, were in turn remarked upon. He gave
Pope a wonderfully high character, and remarked that one of his chief
beauties was the skill exhibited in varying the caesural pause, quoting
from various parts of his author to illustrate his remarks. He said
little on the politics of the country, but spoke at considerable length
of Sheridan and Burke, both of whom he had heard, and described with
graphic effect. Junius, he said, was a bad man, but maintained that as a
writer he had never been equalled."[2]

[2] _Niles' Weekly Register_, vol. XLVII., p. 91.

In March, 1834, Mr. Polk, of Tennessee, having indulged in an idolizing
glorification of General Jackson, with some coarse invectives against
Mr. Adams, the latter rose and said: "I shall not reply to the gentleman
from Tennessee; and I give notice, once for all, that, whenever any
admirer of the President of the United States shall think fit to pay his
court to him in this house, either by a flaming panegyric upon him, or
by a rancorous invective on me, he shall never elicit one word of reply
from me.

'No; let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee,
Where THRIFT may follow fawning.'"

On the 20th of February, 1834, Mr. Adams attended the funeral of Mr.
Wirt, on which event he thus uttered his feelings: "For the rest of the
day I was unable to attend to anything. I could think of nothing but
William Wirt,--of his fine talents, of his amiable and admirable
character; the twelve years during which we had been in close official
relation together;[3] the scene when he went with me to the capitol; his
warm and honest sympathy with me in my trials when President of the
United States; my interview with him in January, 1831, and his faithful
devotion to the memory of Monroe. These recollections were oppressive to
my feelings. I thought some public testimonial from me to his memory was
due at this time. But Mr. Wirt was no partisan of the present
administration. He had been a formal and dreaded opponent to the
reelection of Andrew Jackson; and so sure is anything I say or do to
meet insuperable obstruction, that I could not imagine anything I could
offer with the remotest prospect of success. I finally concluded to ask
of the house, tomorrow morning, to have it entered upon the journal of
this day that the adjournment was that the Speaker and members might be
able to attend the funeral of William Wirt. I wrote a short address, to
be delivered at the meeting of the house."

[3] Mr. Wirt was Attorney-General of the United States during the
four last years of Mr. Monroe's and the whole of Mr. Adams'
administration.

It appears, by the journal of the house, that, on the 21st of February,
1834, Mr. Adams, of Massachusetts, addressed the chair as follows:[4]

[4] See _Congressional Debates_, vol. X., part 2d, p. 2758.

"MR. SPEAKER: A rule of this house directs that the Speaker
shall examine and correct the journal before it is read. I therefore
now rise, not to make a motion, nor to offer a resolution, but to
ask the unanimous consent of the house to address to you a few words
with a view to an addition which I wish to be made to the journal,
of the adjournment of the house yesterday.

"The Speaker, I presume, would not feel himself authorized to make
the addition in the journal which I propose, without the unanimous
consent of the house; and I therefore now propose it before the
reading of the journal.

"I ask that, after the statement of the adjournment of the house,
there be added to the journal words importing that it was to give
the Speaker and members of the house an opportunity of attending the
funeral obsequies of William Wirt.

"At the adjournment of the house on Wednesday I did not know what
the arrangements were, or would be, for that mournful ceremony. Had
I known them, I should have moved a postponed adjournment, which
would have enabled us to join in the duty of paying the last tribute
of respect to the remains of a man who was an ornament of his
country and of human nature.

"The customs of this and of the other house of Congress warrant the
suspension of their daily labors in the public service, for the
attendance upon funeral rites, only in the case of the decease of
their own members. To extend the usage further might be attended
with inconvenience as a precedent; nor should I have felt myself
warranted in asking it upon any common occasion.

"Mr. Wirt had never been a member of either house of Congress. But
if his form in marble, or his portrait upon canvas, were placed
within these walls, a suitable inscription for it would be that of
the statue of Moliere in the hall of the French Academy: 'Nothing
was wanting to his glory; he was wanting to ours.'

"Mr. Wirt had never been a member of Congress; but, for a period of
twelve years, during two successive administrations of the national
government, he had been the official and confidential adviser, upon
all questions of law, of the Presidents of the United States; and he
had discharged the duties of that station entirely to the
satisfaction of those officers and of the country. No member of this
house needs to be reminded how important are the duties of the
Attorney-General of the United States; nor risk I contradiction in
affirming that they were never more ably or more faithfully
discharged than by Mr. Wirt.

"If a mind stored with all the learning appropriate to the
profession of the law, and decorated with all the elegance of
classical literature; if a spirit imbued with the sensibilities of a
lofty patriotism, and chastened by the meditations of a profound
philosophy; if a brilliant imagination, a discerning intellect, a
sound judgment, an indefatigable capacity, and vigorous energy of
application, vivified with an ease and rapidity of elocution,
copious without redundance, and select without affectation; if all
these, united with a sportive vein of humor, an inoffensive temper,
and an angelic purity of heart;--if all these, in their combination,
are the qualities suitable for an Attorney-General of the United
States, in him they were all eminently combined.

"But it is not my purpose to pronounce his eulogy. That pleasing
task has been assigned to abler hands, and to a more suitable
occasion. He will there be presented in other, though not less
interesting lights. As the penetrating delineator of manners and
character in the British Spy; as the biographer of Patrick Henry,
dedicated to the young men of your native commonwealth; as the
friend and delight of the social circle; as the husband and father
in the bosom of a happy, but now most afflicted family;--in all
these characters I have known, admired, and loved him; and now
witnessing, from the very windows of this hall, the last act of
piety and affection over his remains, I have felt as if this house
could scarcely fulfil its high and honorable duties to the country
which he had served, without some slight, be it but a transient,
notice of his decease. The addition which I propose to the journal
of yesterday's adjournment would be such a notice. It would give his
name an honorable place on the recorded annals of his country, in a
manner equally simple and expressive. I will only add that, while I
feel it incumbent upon me to make this proposal, I am sensible that
it is not a fit subject for debate; and, if objected to, I desire
you to consider it as withdrawn."

Mr. Adams proceeds: "When the question of agreeing to the proposed
addition was put by the Speaker, Joel K. Mann, of Pennsylvania,
precisely the rankest Jackson man in the house, said 'No.' There was a
general call upon him, from all quarters of the house, to withdraw his
objection; but he refused. Blair, of South Carolina, rose, and asked if
the manifest sense of the house could be defeated by one objection. The
Speaker said I had requested that my proposal should be considered as
withdrawn if an objection should be made, but the house was competent to
give the instruction, upon motion made. I was then called upon by
perhaps two thirds of the house,--'Move, move, move,'--and said, I had
hoped the proposal would have obtained the unanimous assent of the
house, and as only one objection had been made, which did not appear to
be sustained by the general sense of the house, I would make the motion
that the addition I had proposed should be made on the journal. The
Speaker took the question, and nine tenths, at least, of the members
present answered 'Ay.' There were three or four who answered 'No.' But
no division of the house was asked."

In a debate in the House of Representatives, on the 30th of April, 1834,
on striking out the appropriation for the salaries of certain foreign
ministers, in the course of his remarks, Warren R. Davis, of South
Carolina, turning with great feeling towards Mr. Adams, said: "Well
do I remember the enthusiastic zeal with which we reproached the
administration of that gentleman, and the ardor and vehemence with
which we labored to bring in another. For the share I had in those
transactions,--and it was not a small one,--_I hope God will forgive
me, for I never shall forgive myself_."

In December, 1834, Mr. Adams, at the unanimous request of both houses of
Congress, delivered an oration on the life, character, and services, of
Gilbert Motier de Lafayette. The House of Representatives ordered fifty
thousand copies to be published at the national expense, and the Senate
ten thousand. Mr. Clay said that, in proposing the latter number, he was
governed by the extraordinary vote of the house; but that, "if he were
to be guided by his opinion of the great talents of the orator, and the
extraordinary merit of the oration, he felt he should be unable to
specify any number."

In January, 1835, Mr. Adams, on presenting a petition of one hundred
and seven women of his Congressional district, praying for the
abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, moved its reference
to a select committee, with instructions; but stated that, if the house
chose to refer it to the Committee on the District of Columbia, he
should be satisfied. All he wished was that it should be referred to
some committee. He begged those members who could command a majority of
the house, and who, like himself, were unwilling to make the abolition
question a stumbling-block, to take a course which should treat
petitions with respect. He wished a report. It would be easy to show
that such petitions relative to the District of Columbia ought not
to be granted. He believed the true course to be to let error be
tolerated; to grant freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and
apply reason to put it down. On the contrary, it was contended by
Southern men that Congress had a right not to receive petitions,
especially if produced to create excitement, and wound the feelings
of Southern members. Mr. Adams advocated the right of petition. If
the language was disrespectful, that objection might be stated on the
journal. He knew that it was difficult to use language on this subject
which slaveholders would not deem disrespectful. Congress had declared
the slave-trade, when carried on out of the United States, _piracy_. He
was opposed to that act, because he did not think it proper that this
traffic without our boundaries should be called piracy, while there was
no constitutional right to interdict it within our borders. It was
carried on in sight of the windows of the capitol. He deemed it a
fundamental principle that Congress had no right to take away or
abridge the constitutional right of petition.

The petition was received, its commitment refused by the house, and it
was laid on the table.

About this time Mr. Adams remarked: "There is something extraordinary in
the present condition of parties throughout the Union. Slavery and
democracy--especially a democracy founded, as ours is, on the rights of
man--would seem to be incompatible with each other; and yet, at this
time, the democracy of the country is supported chiefly, if not
entirely, by slavery. There is a small, enthusiastic party preaching the
abolition of slavery upon the principles of extreme democracy. But the
democratic spirit and the popular feeling are everywhere against them."

In August, 1835, Mr. Adams was invited to deliver an address before the
American Institute of New York. After expressing his good wishes for the
prosperity of the institution, and of their cause, he stated, in reply,
that the general considerations which dictated the policy of sustaining
and cherishing the manufacturing interests were obvious, and had been
presented by Judge Baldwin, Mr. J. P. Kennedy, and Mr. Everett, with
eloquence and ability, in addresses on three preceding years. If he
should deliver the address requested, it would be expected that he would
present the subject under new and different views. His own opinion was
that one great difficulty under which the manufacturing interest of the
country labors is a political combination of the South and the West
against it. The slaveholders of the South have bought the cooeperation of
the Western country by the bribe of the Western lands, abandoning to the
new Western States their own proportion of this public property, and
aiding them in the design of grasping all the lands in their own hands.
Thomas H. Benton was the author of this system, which he brought forward
as a substitute for the American system of Mr. Clay, and to supplant the
latter as the leading statesman of the West. Mr. Clay, by his tariff
compromise with Mr. Calhoun, abandoned his own American system. At the
same time he brought forward a plan for distributing among all the
states of the Union the proceeds of the sales of the public lands. His
bill for that purpose passed both houses of Congress, but was vetoed by
President Jackson, who, in his annual message of December, 1832,
formally recommended that all the public lands should be gratuitously
given away to individual adventurers, and to the states in which the
lands are situated. "Now," said Mr. Adams, "if, at this time, on the eve
of a presidential election, I should, in a public address to the
American Institute, disclose the state of things, and comment upon it as
I should feel it my duty to do, it would probably produce a great
excitement and irritation; would be charged with having a political
bearing, and subject me to the imputation of tampering with the
election."

On the 25th of May, 1836, Mr. Adams delivered, in the House of
Representatives, a speech on certain resolutions for distributing
rations from the public stores to the distressed fugitives from Indian
hostilities in the States of Alabama and Georgia. "It is," said he, "I
believe, the first example of a system of gratuitous donations to our
own countrymen, infinitely more formidable in its consequences as a
precedent, than from anything appearing on its face. I shall,
nevertheless, vote for it." "It is one of a class of legislative
enactments with which we are already becoming familiar, and which, I
greatly fear, will ere long grow voluminous. I shall take the liberty
to denominate them _the scalping-knife and tomahawk laws_. They are all
urged through by the terror of those instruments of death, under the
most affecting and pathetic appeals, from the constituents of the
sufferers, to all the tender and benevolent sympathies of our nature.
It is impossible for me to withhold from those appeals a responsive and
yielding voice." He had voted, he said, for millions after millions,
and would again and again vote for drafts from the public chest for the
same purpose, should they be necessary, until the treasury itself
should be drained.

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