212 Chapter 7 National Growing Pains
1819 there were twenty-two states, eleven slave and
eleven free. The expansion of slavery occasioned by the
cotton boom led Southerners to support it more
aggressively, which tended to irritate many
Northerners, but most persons considered slavery
mainly a local issue. To the extent that it was a national
question, the North opposed it and the South defended
it ardently. The West leaned toward the southern point
of view, for in addition to the southwestern slave states,
the Northwest was sympathetic, partly because much of
its produce was sold on southern plantations and partly
because at least half of its early settlers came from
Virginia, Kentucky, and other slave states.
New Leaders
By 1824 the giants of the Revolutionary generation
had completed their work. Washington, Hamilton,
Franklin, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and most of
their peers were dead. John Adams (88), Thomas
Jefferson (81), and James Madison (73) were passing
their declining years quietly on their ancestral acres,
full of memories and sage advice, but no longer active
in national affairs. In every section new leaders had
come forward, men shaped by the past but chiefly
concerned with the present. Quite suddenly, between
the war and the panic, they had inherited power.
They would shape the future of the United States.
In the North, John Quincy Adams was the best-
known of the new political leaders. Just completing his
brilliant work as secretary of state under Monroe, high-
lighted by his negotiation of the Transcontinental
Treaty and his design of the Monroe Doctrine, he had
behind him a record of public service dating to the
Confederation period.
Adams was farsighted, imaginative, hardworking,
and extremely intelligent, but he was inept in personal
relations. He had all the virtues and most of the defects
of the puritan, being suspicious both of others and of
himself. He suffered in two ways from being his father’s
child: As the son of a president he was under severe
pressure to live up to the Adams name, and his father
expected a great deal of him. When the boy was only
seven, John Adams wrote the following his wife: “Train
[the children] to virtue. Habituate them to industry,
activity, and spirit. Make them consider vice as shameful
and unmanly. Fire them with ambition to be useful.”
Such training made John Quincy an indefatiga-
ble worker. Even in winter he normally rose at
5 AM, and he could never convince himself that most
of his associates were not lazy dolts. He set a stan-
dard no one could meet and consequently was con-
tinually dissatisfied with himself. As one of his
grandsons remarked, “He was disappointed because
he was not supernatural.”
Like his father, John Quincy Adams was a
strong nationalist. While New England still
opposed high tariffs, he was at least open-minded
on the subject. Unlike most easterners, he believed
that the federal government should spend freely on
roads and canals in the West. To slavery he was, like
most New Englanders, personally opposed. As
Monroe’s second term drew toward its close,
Adams seemed one of the most likely candidates to
succeed him, and at this period his ambition to be
president was his great failing. It led him to makeSamuel Morse, chiefly famous for his work on the telegraph and
Morse code, was also a talented painter. His House of Representatives
(1822–1823) shows the legislators at work at night, a symbolic
expression of their commitment to the nation.
Source: Samuel F.B. Morse, The House of Representatives. 1822–23. oil on Canvas.
867 ⁄ 8 1305 ⁄ 8. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund.
Eyes like “anthracite furnaces,” the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle
remarked of Daniel Webster; this is the “Black Dan” portrait by
Francis Alexander (1835).
Source: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire,
Gift of George C. Shattuck, Class of 1803.