Bob Crawford joins the Washington Journal to discuss his book on John Quincy Adams, detailing how the sixth president defied the House gag rule and defended Amistad captives in 1839. The conversation covers Adams' opposition to the Mexican War, his collapse in the Speaker's Chamber, and the controversial 1824 "corrupt bargain" with Henry Clay that led to Andrew Jackson's victory. Listeners explore Adams' potential modern party alignment and his legacy as a pivotal bridge between Jefferson and Lincoln, highlighting his evolution from opposing abolitionist tactics to becoming a fierce First Amendment activist against slavery. [Automatically generated summary]
Okay, well, my day job is as the bassist for the Avet Brothers, and we've been around for 25 years.
We're, like you say, I think folk rock band.
I think that's an okay way to describe us.
I think we're in that Americana genre.
For those who haven't heard us, you know, we started out upright bass, banjo, guitar, me and two brothers with those like Everly Brothers type harmonies.
And then over the years, we've become more of a rock band.
Yeah, well, on the road, there's a lot of downtime.
And if you think about the rock musicians of the 60s, 70s, 80s, what did they do with their downtime?
They practiced the art of self-destruction.
Well, these days, myself, and I'm noticing a lot more musicians, we're making use of that time, working on other projects, exercising, trying to find like healthy food on the road.
But I found it, I love history.
I've always loved history.
And I used that time to research, and I wrote a book about John Quincy Adams.
And you were definitely going to talk about John Quincy Adams, but you said in a recent New York Times interview that you used to watch C-SPAN as a kid.
Well, in the early 2000s, traveling around the country on tour.
At this point, we weren't in a tour bus yet.
We were in a conversion van.
I picked up a book by historian Sean Willentz, The Rise of American Democracy from Jefferson to Lincoln.
It covers that period between Jefferson and Lincoln.
Look, we learn about the Revolution in school.
We learn about the Civil War.
But what happened in between?
And so when I, the story that Willence told, as it unfolded, I was just amazed by all the characters and all the crises the nation went through at the time.
See, First Amendment, you petition your government for a redress of grievances.
Back then, like today, we go online and we send a message in the email to our congressmen.
Maybe we stop by their local office.
Back in the 1800s, you literally sent a petition to your congressmen and there was time set aside on the House floor for the reading of petitions.
And anti-slavery activists, abolitionists, they were like, let's flood Congress with these anti-slavery petitions.
That's how we'll have our voice heard.
And a lot of congressmen didn't want to read them.
But Adams was part of a small coterie of congressmen who were brave enough to read them.
Not because Adams agreed with them, but because he believed all citizens have a right to have their voices heard.
So when the gag rule was passed, Adams thought, he's like, this is no longer about emancipation and slavery.
Now this is about the First Amendment.
And if you take away the right to petition your government, next will be the right to peaceably assemble, the right to freedom of religion, freedom of speech.
And he really became a First Amendment activist initially.
I want to show you something and have you comment on a quote from your book.
And this is about his anti-slavery actions.
It says this: John Quincy Adams had long struggled with the issue of slavery.
Like his parents, he did not believe in owning enslaved people.
However, Adams accepted slavery as a reality in America, a political expedience to yield to Southern sentiment for the sake of preserving harmony in the Union.
Privately, he found it repulsive.
He preferred not to think about it at all.
The day would come when it was all he would think about.
Yeah, as Secretary of State, he defended, he argued with Great Britain about reparations for enslavers, Southern slaveholders, who lost their slave property during the War of 1812.
You know, there was a big sense of not upsetting the status quo because if you mess with slavery, if you talk about it, if you try to change the way things are in the present, that will lead to a civil war.
It will lead to a dissolution of the Union.
So Adams, like many Northerners, didn't even want to talk about it.
And in fact, when the abolitionist movement really began to gain steam in the 1830s and 1840s, they received a lot of the violence that was perpetrated against them came in the North from their fellow Northerners who were just terrified that this anti-slavery movement was going to tear apart the nation.
In 1820, when the nation is debating the Missouri Compromise.
So you've got to understand, Missouri Territory is about to come into the Union in 1819.
There's a bill before the House for Missouri statehood.
There's a Northern congressman named James Talmich.
He offers two amendments that would essentially end enslavement in Missouri when it becomes a state.
That bill passes the House and Congress adjourns.
And so Missouri is not yet a state, but it's looking like it could possibly come in as a free state and Southerners lost their minds and it ignited the slavery debate, the debate over slavery in the country, like it had not been discussed since the Constitutional Convention.
So it was like ripping a, if the three-fifths compromise was a band-aid, it ripped the band-aid off of that compromise.
So Adams, he keeps this diary, and he doesn't have a vote.
He's the Secretary of State, but he's writing.
He's writing about the debate going on in the country, in state legislatures, in newspapers, and how it's beginning to rip the country apart.
He says the only way slavery is going to end will be through violence.
It will be through a civil war because the enslavers in the South will never willingly give up their property.
I found, and my friend Chris DeRose, he pointed me to this.
He wrote a book about Congressman Lincoln.
So Adams is very old.
He's still in Congress when Lincoln comes in for his one term.
And they don't talk about each other very much in their writings.
But there is a party at the home of Seton, William Seton, who was the longtime mayor of D.C., and he was the editor of the Washington Intelligence newspaper.
He was a Whig, and he has a party, and this is a few days, like five days before Adams dies.
And it's for Whig congressmen.
And this Southern congressman who's at this party writes that Adams was sitting on a couch greeting people.
And we think Lincoln was there.
So obviously they met.
There's another writing about Adams at his desk surrounded by congressmen from Illinois, like from all, from the congressional delegation of Illinois.
So we think he met there.
It's possible that Lincoln was in the House when Adams died because Adams was fallen by a stroke.
Mike, Indianapolis, on the Independent Line, you're on the air with Bob Crawford.
unidentified
Thank you for taking my call.
I appreciate the information on John Quincy Adams.
Just a question.
What party does Mr. Crawford believe that he would be part of today, a Democrat, Republican, or would he be an Independent like most people, I think, in this country?
And if he could talk about what he thinks about America's involvement in foreign wars, I'll just hang up now.
And Mike asked about America's involvement in foreign wars.
But before you answer that, I want to show you what Senator Rand Paul said.
This was on March 5th, so this is very current.
He said this.
But had Congress debated war with Iran, we would have been wise to recall the words of John Quincy Adams, who, as Secretary of State, advocated a foreign policy of restraint, quote, wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, Adams argued, there will America's heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be.
But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
And a few days later, Pete Hegseth used that same quote when he was talking about America policy in South America, that conference of the Americas.
And he used it in a different context.
So where does Adams stand on foreign wars?
He was, see, the Monroe Doctrine is like, it's like we're not going to, okay, all these South American colonies were in revolt against Spain and their imperialist overlords.
And Adams was saying, Holy Alliance, Prussia, Austria, France, Prussia, you stay out of our hemisphere.
You don't belong here anymore.
Britain, you too, we support these freedom movements in South America, but we're not going to get involved unless at some point we feel like we need to get involved.
So it's really vague.
And I bet some of your callers know this better than I, but I've begun to ask myself the question, because this wasn't the focus of my book, but in before World War II, the isolationist movement in this country, I wonder if they used that quote.
Let's talk to David, Republican, Poughkeepsie, New York.
David, good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
Building on what was just discussed, I was wondering if Bob covered anything about John Clincy Adams' staunch opposition to paying tribute to the Barbary pirates back then and advocating instead for military action to secure the American shipping rights.
A lot of his letters were burned, were lost in a fire.
But he was the heel of, like, how I understand it, through Adams' eyes at least, he was the heel of the cabinet.
He used his, the Treasury Secretary had a lot of spoils to spread around, a lot of patronage, and he used it to his political advantage.
And then also running was the Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, and of course, Andrew Jackson, the war hero, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, a common man for the common man, but a wealthy man, an enslaver, owned over 100 slaves.
And so these four men are standing for the presidency.
And when the election comes and the votes are counted, Jackson has won a plurality, but not a majority.
He has come out of nowhere.
Adams is the one you think is going to win.
Reminds me of 2016, the resume of Hillary Clinton versus the populist fervor and popular appeal of Donald Trump.
And so Jackson, but he doesn't win a majority.
So what happens?
Well, based on the 12th Amendment, the vote goes to the House.
Every state delegation gets one vote.
Henry Clay, so the top three candidates are involved in that.
So it's Crawford, it's Jackson, and it's Adams.
Henry Clay cannot be president, but he can be kingmaker.
And there are in Adams' diary, he talks about being visited by friends of Clay, and they talk about men and things and events.
Clay and Adams themselves meet personally.
Henry Clay hated Andrew Jackson.
Hated him.
Henry Clay wanted to be the first president from the West, not Andrew Jackson.
Andrew Jackson had a really controversial past, and the two men could not be more opposite.
So when the vote comes February 9th, 1825 in the House, Adams wins.
He wins 13 votes straight out, gives him the majority.
He is the president.
Not by the acclamation of the American people, but by the vote of a fail-safe vote in the Congress.
They cry, corrupt bargain, corrupt bargain, because why is it a corrupt bargain?
About a week or so after being president-elect, Adams names Henry Clay to be his Secretary of State, which, like I've said several times so far today, is a stepping stone to the presidency.
I'm presently reading David McCullough's biography about John Adams, John Q. Adams' father.
It's a fascinating and wonderfully written book.
I'm looking forward to your book.
But what I wanted to comment was on the parties, Democratic-Republican parties.
Of course, our Constitution back when in the time of George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, there were no parties that were favored until you just mentioned the Jacksonian Democrats.
And from the Jacksonian Democrats, they then, you know, we move into the Civil War and Reconstruction.
The comment that I want to make, I'm trying not to get ahead of myself.
With John Q. Adams, I really admire him because after he became president and then he lost the next election, he went back to Congress.
He actually defended the mutineers of the Amistad mutiny off of Long Island, which I thought was absolutely phenomenal, that a former president would go back to Congress and then defend mutineers who were against slavery.
So my point is, the Jacksonian Democrats who were for slavery, and they then evolved into the present-day Dixiecrats, who I call Dinos, Democrats in name only, and these Democrats in name only are the present-day faction of Republicans that are white supremacists and racist.
And so this I posed to Mimi, anytime a caller calls in and says that the Democrat Party were against slavery, were against civil rights, please push back on the shibboleth that the Dixiecrats and the like are not the Democratic Party of FDR, of Harry Truman, of Bill Clinton, of Jimmy Carter,
of John F. Kennedy, of Barack Obama, the New Deal Democrats.
Please push back on any caller that comes in and says, oh, Democrats were for slavery.
Really, the Democratic Party, the Whig Party was the party in the time of Adams.
It was the Whigs and the Democrats.
And of course, yes, the Democrats.
Martin Van Buren, who's a character in this book, he's the architect of that first Democratic Party, which was the Jacksonian Party.
They considered it the heir to the Jeffersons party.
And Van Buren's notable because he creates that top-down party structure, right?
There's a state party, and all these local parties feed into the state party.
The state party feeds into the national party.
They embrace conventions and he really, that two-party system, though the names have changed, though the ideals and the ideologies have changed, sometimes these parties, they just change different clothes.
They trade each other's clothes.
But the Dixiecrat Party was an insurgency.
This is not my area of expertise here.
I didn't write a book about the Dixiecrats.
It'd be a worthy book.
I didn't write it.
But the Dixiecrat Party was an insurgency within the Democratic Party, and they became ultimately Republicans today.
And when John Quincy, he would go, so her father was from Maryland and her mother was English and they lived in London.
And a lot of the American diplomats would go visit.
They had quite a scene at their house in London.
He had like, Mr. Johnson had like four or five daughters.
They were all very beautiful.
They all played music.
And so Adams would hang out there and he just kind of liked the scene.
You know, he just kind of liked being there.
I think he maybe at first had a crush on one of her sisters and they get married.
But yeah, John and Abigail were not, they didn't think that a future president should have a foreign-born wife.
But love does what love does and they got married.
But it was a very difficult.
And of course he was hard on his sons like his father was hard on him.
Also, we believe alcoholism ran through Abigail's family line and two of Louisa's and John Quincy's sons die.
One commits suicide.
Two months after he loses reelection, George Washington Adams jumps off the back of a steam ship coming from Quincy to D.C. to help his parents move back north.
And then their other son, John Adams II, essentially drinks himself to death and dies in 1834.
And Charles Francis, just as John Quincy is his parents' surviving son, Charles Francis Adams, the youngest son of John Quincy and Louisa, becomes the surviving son, and he is the son that will become minister to Great Britain in the Lincoln administration and goes on to have a great career.
But in Charles Francis' diary, he's thinking about his brothers and he's wondering if alcohol, if alcoholism doesn't exist as a disease, but he wonders if this alcohol that his brothers have been so addicted to, he wonders, is this actually a disease?
I want to read another portion of your book just for the audience.
It says this, with one hand reaching back to the founding and the other reaching forward toward the Civil War, John Quincy Adams is a bridge and perhaps the best representation of America's tortured adolescents.
John Quincy Adams may not have been an extraordinary president like Washington and Lincoln, but he is our most extraordinary ex-president, a maverick, a public servant, an American hero.
He was not, you know, he was a minority president from the time he took the oath of office.
But what really killed him is his agenda for his presidency was infrastructure.
He wanted federally funded roads, bridges, canals.
He wanted to tie this nation together.
He wanted the government to invest in a naval academy.
He wanted the government to invest in a national university, a national university that was first proposed by George Washington.
And so in his first annual message to Congress, what we would today consider the State of the Union address, he says to Congress, when he's asking, he's laying out his agenda, he says, we cannot be palsied by the will of our constituents.
Basically saying, your constituents don't want to spend taxpayer dollars on these things, on infrastructure, but they don't know what's good for them.
We need to do this regardless of what they think.
And it was essentially, he essentially called half the nation a basket of deplorables.
And the Jackson men and Jackson himself immediately jumped on that comment.
Palsied by the will of your constituents became the basket of deplorables of 1828.
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