Of his stay in Great Britain little need be said. He had few duties of importance to perform. The fisheries, the right of impressment, and the taking away and selling of slaves by British naval officers during the late war, formed the subjects of many interviews between him and Lord Castlereagh, without, however, any definite results being reached. But he succeeded in obtaining, towards the close of his stay, some slight remission of the severe restrictions placed by England upon our trade with her West Indian colonies. His relations with a cabinet in which the principles of Castlereagh and Canning predominated could hardly be cordial, yet he seems to have been treated with perfect civility. Indeed, he was not a man whom it was easy even for an Englishman to insult. He remarks of Castlereagh, after one of his first interviews with that nobleman: "His deportment is sufficiently graceful, and his person is handsome. His manner was cold, but not absolutely repulsive." Before he left he had the pleasure of having Mr. Canning specially seek acquaintance with him. He met, of course, many distinguished and many agreeable persons during his residence, and partook of many festivities, especially of numerous civic banquets at which toasts were formally given in the dullest English fashion and he was obliged to display his capacity for "table-cloth oratory," as he called it, more than was agreeable to him. He was greatly bored by these solemn and pompous feedings. Partly in order to escape them he took a house at Ealing, and lived there during the greater part of his stay in England. "One of the strongest reasons for my remaining out of town," he writes, "is to escape the frequency of invitations at late hours, which consume so much precious time, and with the perpetually mortifying consciousness of inability to return the civility in the same manner." The republican simplicity, not to say poverty, forced upon American representatives abroad, was a very different matter in the censorious and unfriendly society of London from what it had been at the kindly disposed Court of St. Petersburg. The relationship between the mother country and the quondam colonies, especially at that juncture, was such as to render social life intolerably trying to an under-paid American minister.
Mr. Adams remained in England until June 15, 1817, when he sailed from Cowes, closing forever his long and honorable diplomatic career, and bidding his last farewell to Europe. He returned home to take the post of Secretary of State in the cabinet of James Monroe, then lately inaugurated as President of the United States.
CHAPTER II
SECRETARY OF STATE AND PRESIDENT
From the capitals of Russia and Great Britain to the capital of the United States was a striking change. Washington, in its early struggle for existence, was so unattractive a spot, that foreigners must have been at a loss to discover the principle which had governed the selection. It combined all the ugliness with all the discomfort of an unprosperous frontier settlement on an ill-chosen site. What must European diplomats have thought of a capital city where snakes two feet long invaded gentlemen's drawing-rooms, and a carriage, bringing home the guests from a ball, could be upset by the impenetrable depth of quagmire at the very door of a foreign minister's residence. A description of the city given by Mr. Mills, a Representative from Massachusetts, in 1815, is pathetic in its unutterable horror:—
"It is impossible [he writes] for me to describe to you my feelings on entering this miserable desert, this scene of desolation and horror.... My anticipations were almost infinitely short of the reality, and I can truly say that the first appearance of this seat of the national government has produced in me nothing but absolute loathing and disgust."
If the place wore such a dreadful aspect to the simple denizen of a New England country town, what must it have seemed to those who were familiar with London and Paris? To them the social life must have been scarcely less dreary than the rest of the surroundings. Accordingly, with this change of scene, the Diary, so long a record of festivities sometimes dull and formal, but generally collecting interesting and distinguished persons, ceases almost wholly to refer to topics of society. Yet, of course, even the foul streets could not prevent people from occasionally meeting together. There were simple tea-drinkings, stupid weekly dinners at the President's, infrequent receptions by Mrs. Monroe, card-parties and conversation-parties, which at the British minister's were very "elegant," and at the French minister's were more gay. Mons. de Neuville, at his dinners, used to puzzle and astound the plain-living Yankees by serving dishes of "turkeys without bones, and puddings in the form of fowls, fresh cod disguised like a salad, and celery like oysters;" further, he scandalized some and demoralized others by having dancing on Saturday evenings, which the New England ladies had been "educated to consider as holy time." Mr. and Mrs. Adams used to give weekly parties on Tuesday evenings, and apparently many persons stood not a little in awe of these entertainments and of the givers of them, by reason of their superior familiarity with the manners and customs of the best society of Europe. Mrs. Adams was, "on the whole, a very pleasant and agreeable woman; but the Secretary [had] no talent to entertain a mixed company, either by conversation or manners;" thus writes this same Mr. Mills, whose sentiments towards Mr. Adams were those of respect rather than of personal liking. The favorite dissipation then consisted in card-playing, and the stakes were too often out of all just proportion to the assets of the gamesters. At one time Mr. Clay was reputed to have lost $8,000, an amount so considerable for him as to weigh upon his mind to the manifest detriment of his public functions. But sometimes the gentlemen resident in the capital met for purposes less innocent than Saturday evening cotillons, or even than extravagant betting at the card-table, and stirred the dulness of society by a duel. Mr. Adams tells of one affair of this sort, fought between ex-Senator Mason, of Virginia, and his cousin, wherein the weapons used were muskets, and the distance was only six paces. Mason was killed; his cousin was wounded, and only by a lucky accident escaped with his life. Mr. Adams had little time and less taste for either the amusements or the dangers thus offered to him; he preferred to go to bed in good season, to get up often long before daybreak, and to labor assiduously the livelong day. His favorite exercise was swimming in the Potomac, where he accomplished feats which would have been extraordinary for a young and athletic man.
The most important, perplexing, and time-consuming duties then called for by the condition of public affairs happened to fall within Mr. Adams's department. Monroe's administration has been christened the "era of good feeling;" and, so far as political divisions among the people at large were concerned, this description is correct enough. There were no great questions of public policy dividing the nation. There could hardly be said to be two political parties. With the close of the war the malcontent Federalists had lost the only substantial principle upon which they had been able vigorously to oppose the administration, and as a natural consequence the party rapidly shrank to insignificant proportions, and became of hardly more importance than were the Jacobites in England after their last hopes had been quenched by the failure of the Rebellion of '45. The Federalist faith, like Jacobitism, lingered in a few neighborhoods, and was maintained by a few old families, who managed to associate it with a sense of their own pride and dignity; but as an effective opposition or influential party organization it was effete, and no successor was rising out of its ruins. In a broad way, therefore, there was political harmony to a very remarkable degree.
But among individuals there was by no means a prevailing good feeling. Not held together by the pressure exerted by the antagonism of a strong hostile force, the prominent men of the Cabinet and in Congress were busily employed in promoting their own individual interests. Having no great issues with which to identify themselves, and upon which they could openly and honorably contend for the approval of the nation, their only means for securing their respective private ends lay in secretly overreaching and supplanting each other. Infinite skill was exerted by each to inveigle his rival into an unpopular position or a compromising light. By a series of precedents Mr. Adams, as Secretary of State, appeared most prominent as a candidate for the succession to the Presidency. But Mr. Crawford, in the Treasury Department, had been very near obtaining the nomination instead of Monroe, and he was firmly resolved to secure it so soon as Mr. Monroe's eight years should have elapsed. He, therefore, finding much leisure left upon his hands by the not very exacting business of his office, devoted his ingenuity to devising schemes for injuring the prestige of Mr. Adams. Mr. Clay also had been greatly disappointed that he had not been summoned to be Secretary of State, and so made heir apparent. His personal enmity was naturally towards Mr. Monroe; his political enmity necessarily also included Mr. Adams, whose appointment he had privately sought to prevent. He therefore at once set himself assiduously to oppose and thwart the administration, and to make it unsuccessful and unpopular. That Clay was in the main and upon all weighty questions an honest statesman and a real patriot must be admitted, but just at this period no national crisis called his nobler qualities into action, and his course was largely influenced by selfish considerations. It was not long before Mr. Calhoun also entered the lists, though in a manner less discreditable to himself, personally, than were the resources of Crawford and Clay. The daily narrations and comments of Mr. Adams display and explain in a manner highly instructive, if not altogether agreeable, the ambitions and the manœuvres, the hollow alliances and unworthy intrigues, not only of these three, but also of many other estimable gentlemen then in political life. The difference between those days and our own seems not so great as the laudatores temporis acti are wont to proclaim it. The elaborate machinery which has since been constructed was then unknown; rivals relied chiefly upon their own astuteness and the aid of a few personal friends and adherents for carrying on contests and attaining ends which are now sought by vastly more complex methods. What the stage-coach of that period was to the railroads of to-day, or what the hand-loom was to our great cotton mills, such also was the political intriguing of cabinet ministers, senators, and representatives to our present party machinery. But the temper was no better, honor was no keener, the sense of public duty was little more disinterested then than now. One finds no serious traces of vulgar financial dishonesty recorded in these pages, in which Mr. Adams has handed down the political life of the second and third decades of our century with a photographic accuracy. But one does not see a much higher level of faithfulness to ideal standards in political life than now exists.