Read Online John Quincy Adams by Harlow Unger - Free Book Online Page B

among their friends.” 30 Even the President joined in the festivities that followed the cutting of the cake by entering “with spirit into the mazes of the Virginia reel.” 31 After the wedding, Louisa’s nephew Thomas, who had loafed about the White House after dropping out of Harvard, ran off with one of the young White House maids and, mercifully, left John Quincy with one less family member to support.
    By spring of 1828, the President’s daily activities were devoid of consequence for the nation:
    I rise generally before five—frequently before four. Write from one to two hours in this diary. Ride about twelve miles in two hours on horseback with my son John. Return home about nine; breakfast; and from that time till dinner, between five and six, afternoon, I am occupied incessantly with visitors, business, reading letters, dispatches, and newspapers. I spend an hour, sometimes before and sometimes after dinner, in the garden and nursery; an hour of drowsiness on a sofa; and two hours of writing in the evening. Retire usually between eleven and midnight. 32
    The President’s political inactivity triggered a barrage of scurrilous attacks by Jacksonian newspapers, which took aim at every member of John Quincy’s cabinet as well as John Quincy himself. The attacks left Henry Clay so distraught he took a medical leave of absence. Although John Quincy did not want to allow his enemies to topple him from office without defending himself, everything he tried failed. Invited to preside at a July 4 groundbreaking for the heralded Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, a
symbol of the very national improvements he espoused, he addressed a friendly crowd of more than 2,000 spectators, then took a gilded spade to turn the first shovel of dirt—only to feel the shovel clang and rebound sharply, then slip from his hands after hitting a hidden tree stump. As murmurs of disappointment spread through onlookers, the President tried again—and again. Finally, he did something he had never done in public: “I threw off my coat and, resuming the spade, raised a shovelful of the earth, at which a general shout burst forth from the surrounding multitude, and I completed my address.”
    It was the first time in months that an audience had cheered the President, and he left elated, inviting the officers who escorted him home to join him for drinks in the White House. Although it was too late, John Quincy had evidently learned a lesson about relating to the general public: “My casting off my coat,” he wrote later, “struck the eye and fancy of the spectators more than all the flowers of rhetoric in my speech.” 33 He was, of course, a master at interrelating with czars, kings, counts, and courtiers, but had simply never had the chance to befriend ordinary citizens—at home or abroad.
    Although eager for the first time to enter the election fray, it was all too new to him, and he let others do the electioneering. They attacked Jackson and his allies viciously, with Clay allegedly coaxing the editor of Cincinnati’s Gazette to charge Jackson with having maintained an adulterous relationship with his wife, Rachel, before she had divorced her first husband. The Jacksonians fired back with equally vicious libels against the Yankee “aristocrat” with an “English wife,” who had spent public funds to purchase a billiard table for her husband’s amusement in the White House.
    In the end, election campaign rhetoric made little difference. The hero of the Battle of New Orleans was simply too popular, and the public was thoroughly convinced that the aristocratic New Englander from Harvard had ignored the will of the people and purchased his election by appointing Henry Clay as secretary of state. Unlike John Quincy, Jackson had
formed a new and well-organized political party that operated at both local and state levels and acquired consummate skills in obtaining newspaper