What Hath God Wrought (38 page)

The president’s grand program for economic development was by no means the only serious challenge he faced. Additional problems arose for the Adams administration from Indian affairs. During the Monroe administration, Secretary of War Calhoun had been responsible for Indian policy. He had encouraged gradual resettlement of the southern tribes across the Mississippi, while simultaneously promoting the assimilation of some of their members into white society. This dual policy failed to satisfy white settlers eager to seize the Natives’ lands; in particular, it led to a conflict between Calhoun and Governor George M. Troup of Georgia. Back in 1802, Georgia had relinquished her claim to what is now Alabama and Mississippi in return for a promise by the Jefferson administration that the federal government would seek voluntary removal of the Indian tribes remaining within her boundaries. The Georgians now felt they had waited long enough for the federal government to make good on what they saw as a binding commitment. They were eager to take possession of the lands retained by the Creek and Cherokee nations. Crawford had exploited these feelings in his presidential campaign. The Georgians also complained that Calhoun seemed too ready to treat the Native Americans as racial equals.
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In the closing days of the Monroe administration, leaders of the Creek tribe signed a treaty at Indian Springs agreeing to sell their Georgia lands and move west of the Mississippi. Seeing in the treaty a convenient end to a troublesome issue, the lame duck Senate swiftly consented to ratification. Within two months, however, serious problems came to light. Chief William McIntosh, head of the Creek delegation and Andrew Jackson’s old ally against the Seminoles, had apparently been bribed. The federal commissioners who negotiated the treaty had colluded with Georgia officials. The Creeks refused to ratify the treaty, and outraged fellow tribesmen assassinated McIntosh as a traitor. Adams concluded that the Treaty of Indian Springs was a nullity and that the Creeks remained the rightful possessors of their lands. Yet the state of Georgia, led by Governor Troup, insisted on implementing the treaty and surveying the Creek lands. Adams’s secretary of war, James Barbour, maintained federal authority against the claims of state rights with a firmness all the more commendable in a Virginian. Andrew Jackson, however, egged on the Georgians. The stage seemed set for a serious federal-state confrontation. At the last minute the Creek tribe got the administration off the hook by agreeing to sell the lands in another treaty, one more favorable to them. Whites throughout the South drew the conclusion that Jackson, but not Adams, could be counted on to secure the complete expropriation of the Five Civilized Tribes. Adams’s annulment of the Treaty of Indian Springs would remain unique in the history of the government’s Indian relations.
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Foreign policy proved most troublesome of all for Adams’s presidency—an irony indeed for this great diplomatist. Adams integrated his foreign policy with his domestic policy and designed both to promote commercial expansion. In his First Message to Congress, he recommended appointment of delegates to attend the first pan-American conference, scheduled to meet in Panama City. The conference had been conceived by the great Latin American liberator Simón Bolívar. Secretary of State Clay felt the United States should play an active role in inter-hemispheric affairs. He wanted to take advantage of the breakup of the Spanish New World Empire to promote U.S. trade with Latin America. Otherwise, he feared, the newly independent republics would gravitate into the British commercial orbit. The location of the conference in Panama had particular relevance to the potential of Central America for a canal linking Atlantic and Pacific, a possibility that already interested the Adams administration.

Martin Van Buren, senator from New York, hit upon the idea of criticizing participation in the Panama conference as an issue that could rally opposition to the administration. Van Buren was smarting from the resounding defeat his Bucktails had sustained at the hands of the New York People’s Party in 1824 and looking for a way to make a comeback. Vice President Calhoun seized the opportunity to join with him. Calhoun hoped to discredit Clay’s foreign policy leadership and force the president to remove him as secretary of state. Van Buren looked farther ahead, to the next presidential election; he had already decided to throw in his lot with Jackson. To lead the charge against the administration in the Senate, they enlisted two redoubtable orators: Robert Y. Haynes of South Carolina and Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. The Panama conference might compromise the country’s avoidance of entangling alliances, the senators argued. To win over the South, they played the race card. Participation in the conference would require associating with mixed-race regimes that had in most cases already abolished slavery. Discussion of the slave trade appeared on the agenda; who knew where this could lead? What if delegates from the black nation of Haiti showed up? Eventually Congress approved participation in the conference, 27 to 17 in the Senate and 134 to 60 in the House. But prolonged debate had delayed the delegates past their optimum departure time. One delegate refused to set out during the malaria season; the other, more foolhardy, died on the way. Having postponed its meetings in the hope of securing U.S. participation, the Panama conference finally came to little. Clay’s hopes for expanding trade with Latin America were not fulfilled.
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A mere six months after Spain and the United States exchanged ratifications of the Transcontinental Boundary Treaty, Mexico achieved her hard-won independence from Spain in the Treaty of Córdova, signed August 23, 1821. It occurred to Adams that the new regime in Mexico City might be willing to renegotiate the boundary, so he instructed Joel Poinsett, the first U.S. minister (in effect, ambassador) to Mexico, to learn what concessions might be forthcoming. Poinsett, a diplomat with broad Latin American experience and fluency in Spanish, got nowhere with this. He tried to strengthen the hand of Mexican liberals in domestic politics and counteract the influence of the British, but his efforts backfired, and a conservative Mexican government eventually requested his recall. Poinsett returned to his native South Carolina to lead the Unionist Party there and cultivate his botanical interests, developing the poinsettia from a flower he had found in Mexico. His
Notes on Mexico, Made in the Autumn of 1822
, remain a classic account by an outside observer.

Another problem for U.S. policymakers was presented by Cuba, still a Spanish colony after almost all the rest of Spain’s once great American empire had achieved independence. Latin Americans discussed the possibility of Mexico and Colombia mounting an expeditionary force to encourage a Cuban revolution and liberate the island. The prospect of an independent Cuba provoked great anxiety in the United States, which coveted the island but could only hope to purchase it so long as Spanish rule continued. Moreover, an independent Cuba would probably abolish slavery and set another bad example. Perhaps the worst eventuality, from the U.S. point of view, would be for Spain to transfer Cuba to France or Britain, for in the hands of a major power the island would pose a strategic threat. Accordingly, the United States employed its diplomatic leverage to dissuade all other countries, both Latin American and European, from intervention in Cuba.
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The final big diplomatic issue of the Adams years also involved the Caribbean: the American attempt to recover the trade with the British West Indies, which had been so profitable before the Revolution. When the United States achieved independence, it was at the cost of losing imperial preferences in trading with the British Empire. To recover the West Indian export trade would help American farmers and fishermen; to have it carried in American vessels would help Yankee shipowners. In 1823, the United States began to threaten retaliations in an effort to pry open the BWI. From 1826 on, mutual retaliations diminished the remaining trade to the vanishing point. Adams was paying a price for not having cooperated with Canning’s overtures at the time of the Monroe Doctrine; the British did not trust him. The deadlock in negotiations hurt the administration politically and (to a lesser extent) the United States economically. It overshadowed the administration’s successes in nine trade agreements with other foreign powers. The British West Indian trade stalemate was not resolved until after Adams had left office.
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As the midterm congressional elections of 1826 and 1827 approached, Adams and his secretary of state disagreed over tactics. With each state setting its own election date, the voting was staggered across the months, like presidential primaries today. Clay thought it time to abandon nonpartisanship and purge the government of officials who were not backing the administration, but Adams did not feel ready to give up on government by consensus. The president had been trying to use patronage to win over critics rather than to reward friends, but his policy had not proved effective. The politics Adams understood was the old-fashioned kind, based on courting regional leaders who could deliver their followings. Van Buren and the men around Jackson’s Nashville headquarters were forging a new politics that worked from the grass roots up, based on patronage, organization, and partisan loyalty. When the elections came, they revealed the administration’s organizational weakness. All too often its supporters could not agree on a single congressional candidate and consequently split their vote, especially in places where there were Federalists as well as Adams Republicans. The opposition gained control of both houses of Congress, producing the country’s first experience with divided government. One of the few consolations for the administration was the Virginia legislature’s decision to replace John Randolph in the U.S. Senate. His successor, John Tyler, seemed willing to work with the administration.

Adams’s difficulties did not simply result from his crotchety temperament, nor from any refusal on his part to engage in political calculation. They stemmed most obviously from the determination, ruthlessness, and skill of his opponents, especially Martin Van Buren. Adams’s program of government activism had a fighting chance for adoption on the strength of its merits and was not inevitably doomed. But his administration suffered from an incompatibility between the president’s means and ends. Adams wanted to govern by consensus, as Monroe had done, but at the same time he wanted to press an agenda of major policy innovations. The president’s goals, openly avowed, proved too controversial to permit implementation by consensus. The Monroe model of governance did not fit with Adams’s bold program in domestic and foreign affairs.
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IV

In February 1816, a Massachusetts merchant sea captain named Paul Cuffe sailed his brig
Traveller
across a stormy Atlantic to the west coast of Africa with a cargo of tobacco, flour, and tools to trade for camwood. Cuffe was unusual among New England shipowners in being the son of a West African father and a mother from the Wampanoag Indian tribe; he staffed his ships with all black crews. Cuffe had made similar voyages before, but this time he also carried thirty-eight African American passengers intending to make new homes in Sierra Leone, Senegal, and the Congo. Cuffe sought to implement a dream that had been nursed by a few black Americans for more than a generation: emigration away from racist oppression to the ancestral homeland. He hoped this would be the first of many such trips and had worked to create an institutional network to promote emigration as a means to a better life for black people. A practicing Quaker, Cuffe also intended his enterprise to promote Christianity in Africa, help stifle the slave trade, and, God willing, turn a profit.
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After Cuffe’s return to New England, white sympathizers contacted him. Cuffe welcomed their involvement, for he wanted congressional support for his cause. He attracted two groups of whites, one centered in Virginia and the other in New Jersey. The Virginians were led by Congressman Charles Fenton Mercer, the Princetonians by the Rev. Robert Finley. Mercer enlisted an impressive range of supporters, including not only Federalists like himself but staunch Republicans like John Randolph and John Taylor of Caroline. As Mercer proposed it, voluntary migration to West Africa would help Virginia deal with what whites saw as the problem of a growing free black population. Proslavery whites regarded free Negroes as a bad example to the slaves, and even antislavery whites feared them as potential incendiaries.

The most common objection offered to emancipation in the South was that it would create a subordinate population who could neither be admitted to political participation nor any longer be effectively controlled. White southern critics of slavery professed themselves baffled by this conundrum. In Jefferson’s eloquent metaphor, “we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”
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Presented as a solution to Jefferson’s dilemma, the African colonization movement initially attracted widespread support in Virginia. The commonwealth had passed a law requiring newly manumitted freedpeople to leave within a year. But other states were reluctant to accept them; Missouri had set the example by banning the settlement of free Negroes. Perhaps a foreign destination would work. Mercer’s own long-range goal was that Virginia should industrialize and shift away from reliance on enslaved labor. But he carefully phrased his endorsement of colonization in such a way as to make it appealing as well to proslavery whites who simply wanted to get rid of those blacks already free. Back in 1807-8, humanitarians had realized their hope to abolish the importation of slaves from overseas by cooperating with slaveholders who wanted to protect the value of their property against cheap foreign imports. Mercer had been active in the anti-slave-trade movement; now, he hoped to forge an analogous alliance behind his new cause. His strategy paid off when the Virginia state legislature overwhelmingly endorsed colonization in December 1816.
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