VI
Through some trickery or blunder, that portion of the Presidential Message relating to “relieving the people from unnecessary taxation after the extinguishment of the public debt,” was referred to the Committee on Ways and Means a majority of whose members were hostile to the protective system; and to the Committee on Manufactures was referred that part concerning “manufactures and the modification of the tariff”—a dual reference of the same subject to rival committees. At the head of the Committee on Manufactures was John Quincy Adams—certainly not a spokesman of the Administration; and the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means was George McDuffie of South Carolina, a protégé of Calhoun, and now an implacable foe of Jackson.
In feverish haste McDuffie, representing the extreme free-trade school, began the preparation of his report and the formulation of his bill to get in before the more deliberate Adams. He proceeded independently of the forthcoming report and tentative Administration measure from Secretary McLane, such was his precipitation. Adams, more considerate, awaited the report, in the meanwhile making many morning calls upon the Secretary.[402] Strangely enough, the former President had favorably impressed many Southerners by his admission that existing rates were unfair to the South. His position, as on a more notable occasion later, was unique. Even Jackson was actively making overtures to him. The ever-convenient Colonel Johnson of Tecumseh fame, approaching the old Puritan with a suggestion of a reconciliation, tactfully hinted that he thought the President should make the first move. The cautious Adams, not at all averse, reminded the emissary that Jackson had broken, not he; to which Johnson replied that the General had been poisoned by “scoundrel office-seekers” when he first reached the capital. Would Adams dine at the White House, if invited? The wily old man parried with the reminder that such would only be the courtesy customarily accorded all members. But would Adams dine at the White House with a small and select company? He would not—and on similar grounds. At the end of his rope, the anxious Johnson asked Adams for a suggestion, only to receive the reply that it was a matter for Jackson to decide.[403] The next day Adams received a note from Johnson to the effect that Jackson had “expressed great satisfaction” over the conversation and sent his “personal regards and friendship,” together with the assurance that he was “anxious to have social and friendly intercourse restored.” Thinking it over, the suspicious Adams could not but meditate upon the attacks from Clay’s friends if he should cross the threshold of the White House—and there the matter appears to have rested finally.[404]
There has never been another character in American history quite like Adams. His real portrait, self-painted, peers at the world from between the covers of his monumental diary, in which he communed with himself unreservedly, and expressed his opinion of men and their motives with brutal frankness. He was a professional statesman of a high order. Entering upon diplomatic duties in his youth, he knew the cross-currents of world politics at an age when most Americans are laboriously projecting themselves into the politics of their immediate neighborhood. From his earliest years he had been in contact with great minds, and with men of power and broad vision. A thorough scholar, he was, at the same time, a man of the world. Conscious of his ability and his advantages, cold and reserved, and dignified to the point of frigidity, it is not difficult to understand his supercilious attitude toward men less favored, and yet placed in lofty station. Inspired by the highest ideals of public service, holding himself under such rigid discipline as to have made himself immune to the small vices, placing duty above friendship, scarcely ever yielding his dignity to mirth, and on those rare occasions smiling sardonically, he stood upon an isolated peak—of humanity, and yet separated from it.[405] No one living the monastic life could have lived more by rule, or have scourged himself more faithfully to his tasks.
Of friendships, he knew little from experience. Naturally of a suspicious disposition, he suspected treachery where it was not. Holding to no ordinary standard of perfection, he could not forgive the imperfections of his fellows. Even the transcendent genius of Clay could not hide from him the great man’s lack of education. One searches the pages of his diary in eager quest of some complimentary references—there are scarcely any. That he bitterly realized his isolation is clearly disclosed. “I am a man of reserve,” he wrote, “cold, austere and forbidding manners. My political adversaries say a gloomy misanthrope; my personal enemies, an unsocial savage. With a knowledge of the actual defects of my character, I have not had the pliability to reform it.” That such a man, entertaining such an opinion of his own merits and the failings of his contemporaries, should have consented to serve in the lower House of Congress, after having served in the Presidency, can only mean that he loved his country and sought the opportunity for service. That it was not to punish his enemies, we shall find on more than one occasion when he took his stand with the Administration of the man who displaced him. Not least among the merits of Adams was his capacity to work in serious coöperation with McLane in the moulding of the tariff of 1832.
Quite a different type, and in some respects a greater genius, was George McDuffie. His career was a mingling of romance and tragedy. A child of poverty, the protégé of a Calhoun, [406]
he had while yet in college been regarded “as a young man of extraordinary talents,” albeit at that time “he had not that passionate and eloquent declamation which he was afterwards to display in Congress.”[407] After hearing his great speech on the tariff in 1827, Josiah Quincy, who heard him, described him as “the most sensational orator of the time.”[408] In the fight against the Panama Mission, Sargent thought him “decidedly the most violent and aggressive speaker arrayed against the Administration.”[409] His passionate and impulsive nature frequently led to personal encounters; and in reaching an understanding of his irritable and sour disposition, it is profitable to know that just before entering Congress he had been wounded in the spine in a duel, and never afterwards knew a day free from personal discomfort. This wound, which ultimately killed him, changed a good-tempered and jovial man into the irritable, morose, and nervous creature known to history.[410] The indifference of the protectionists to the interests of the South, and the intemperate attacks of the abolitionists upon the Southern people, acted upon the diseased genius as an irritant and drove him to extremes. Even so, he rejected Nullification as a remedy, and insisted that the sole recourse of the Southerners was revolution.[411] Intellectually honest, morally clean, physically ailing, he put such of himself as he cared for the world to see into his public acts. He withdrew into himself—taciturn, lonely. “A spare, grim looking man, who was an admirer of Milton, and who was never known to smile or jest,” as Perley Poore describes him.[412] His health gone, his life uncertain, an idolized wife taken from him within a year, his leader’s aspirations wrecked, his section threatened, it is not strange that he poured forth on Andrew Jackson such torrents of eloquent vituperation.
VII
Standing not on ceremony, McDuffie hastened to report a bill, accompanied by an elaborate report in the nature of an indictment of the protective system, which “ought to be abandoned with all convenient and practical despatch, upon every principle of justice, patriotism and sound policy.” The bill provided an immediate reduction of duties on all articles except iron, steel, salt, cotton-bagging, hemp and flax, and on everything made of cotton, wool, and iron, to a basis of twenty-five per cent ad valorem. On the excepted articles the reduction was to be gradual, tumbling to twenty-five per cent at once, to eighteen and three quarters per cent on June 30, 1833, and to twelve and a half per cent one year later.
With Adams still laboring on his bill, McDuffie called his up with a slashing speech. This prodigiously long philippic was historical in that it tended to force the issue of Nullification a little earlier than its sponsors had planned.