This end of an unusually exciting contest thus left Mr. Adams in possession of the field, Mr. Crawford the victim of an irretrievable defeat, Mr. Clay still hopeful and aspiring for a future which had only disappointment in store for him, General Jackson enraged and revengeful. Not even Mr. Adams was fully satisfied. When the committee waited upon him to inform him of the election, he referred in his reply to the peculiar state of things and said, "could my refusal to accept the trust thus delegated to me give an opportunity to the people to form and to express with a nearer approach to unanimity the object of their preference, I should not hesitate to decline the acceptance of this eminent charge and to submit the decision of this momentous question again to their decision." That this singular and striking statement was made in good faith is highly probable. William H. Seward says that it was "unquestionably uttered with great sincerity of heart." The test of action of course could not be applied, since the resignation of Mr. Adams would only have made Mr. Calhoun President, and could not have been so arranged as to bring about a new election. Otherwise the course of his argument would have been clear; the fact that such action involved an enormous sacrifice would have been to his mind strong evidence that it was a duty; and the temptation to perform a duty, always strong with him, became ungovernable if the duty was exceptionally disagreeable. Under the circumstances, however, the only logical conclusion lay in the inauguration, which took place in the customary simple fashion on March 4, 1825. Mr. Adams, we are told, was dressed in a black suit, of which all the materials were wholly of American manufacture. Prominent among those who after the ceremony hastened to greet him and to shake hands with him appeared General Jackson. It was the last time that any friendly courtesy is recorded as having passed between the two.
Many men eminent in public affairs have had their best years embittered by their failure to secure the glittering prize of the Presidency. Mr. Adams is perhaps the only person to whom the gaining of that proud distinction has been in some measure a cause of chagrin. This strange sentiment, which he undoubtedly felt, was due to the fact that what he had wished was not the office in and for itself, but the office as a symbol or token of the popular approval. He had held important and responsible public positions during substantially his whole active life; he was nearly sixty years old, and, as he said, he now for the first time had an opportunity to find out in what esteem the people of the country held him. What he wished was that the people should now express their decided satisfaction with him. This he hardly could be said to have obtained; though to be the choice of a plurality in the nation and then to be selected by so intelligent a body of constituents as the Representatives of the United States involved a peculiar sanction, yet nothing else could fully take the place of that national indorsement which he had coveted. When men publicly profess modest depreciation of their successes they are seldom believed; but in his private Diary Mr. Adams wrote, on December 31, 1825:—
"The year has been the most momentous of those that have passed over my head, inasmuch as it has witnessed my elevation at the age of fifty-eight to the Chief Magistracy of my country, to the summit of laudable or at least blameless worldly ambition; not however in a manner satisfactory to pride or to just desire; not by the unequivocal suffrages of a majority of the people; with perhaps two thirds of the whole people adverse to the actual result."
No President since Washington had ever come into office so entirely free from any manner of personal obligations or partisan entanglements, express or implied, as did Mr. Adams. Throughout the campaign he had not himself, or by any agent, held out any manner of tacit inducement to any person whomsoever, contingent upon his election. He entered upon the Presidency under no indebtedness. He at once nominated his Cabinet as follows: Henry Clay, Secretary of State; Richard Rush, Secretary of the Treasury; James Barbour, Secretary of War; Samuel L. Southard, Secretary of the Navy; William Wirt, Attorney-General. The last two were renominations of the incumbents under Monroe. The entire absence of chicanery or the use of influence in the distribution of offices is well illustrated by the following incident: On the afternoon following the day of inauguration President Adams called upon Rufus King, whose term of service as Senator from New York had just expired, and who was preparing to leave Washington on the next day. In the course of a conversation concerning the nominations which had been sent to the Senate that forenoon the President said that he had nominated no minister to the English court, and
"asked Mr. King if he would accept that mission. His first and immediate impulse was to decline it. He said that his determination to retire from the public service had been made up, and that this proposal was utterly unexpected to him. Of this I was aware; but I urged upon him a variety of considerations to induce his acceptance of it.... I dwelt with earnestness upon all these motives, and apparently not without effect. He admitted the force of them, and finally promised fully to consider of the proposal before giving me a definite answer."
The result was an acceptance by Mr. King, his nomination by the President, and confirmation by the Senate. He was an old Federalist, to whom Mr. Adams owed no favors. With such directness and simplicity were the affairs of the Republic conducted. It is a quaint and pleasing scene from the period of our forefathers: the President, without discussion of "claims" to a distinguished and favorite post, actually selects for it a member of a hostile political organization, an old man retiring from public life; then quietly walks over to his house, surprises him with the offer, and finding him reluctant urgently presses upon him arguments to induce his acceptance. But the whole business of office-seeking and office-distributing, now so overshadowing, had no place under Mr. Adams. On March 5 he sent in several nominations which were nearly all of previous incumbents. "Efforts had been made," he writes, "by some of the senators to obtain different nominations, and to introduce a principle of change or rotation in office at the expiration of these commissions, which would make the Government a perpetual and unintermitting scramble for office. A more pernicious expedient could scarcely have been devised.... I determined to renominate every person against whom there was no complaint which would have warranted his removal." A notable instance was that of Sterret, naval officer at New Orleans, "a noisy and clamorous reviler of the Administration," and lately busy in a project for insulting a Louisiana Representative who had voted for Mr. Adams. Secretary Clay was urgent for the removal of this man, plausibly saying that in the cases of persons holding office at the pleasure of the Administration the proper course was to avoid on the one hand political persecution, and on the other any appearance of pusillanimity. Mr. Adams replied that if Sterret had been actually engaged in insulting a representative for the honest and independent discharge of duty, he would make the removal at once. But the design had not been consummated, and an intention never carried into effect would scarcely justify removal.
"Besides [he added], should I remove this man for this cause it must be upon some fixed principle, which would apply to others as well as to him. And where was it possible to draw the line? Of the custom-house officers throughout the Union, four fifths in all probability were opposed to my election. Crawford, Secretary of the Treasury, had distributed these positions among his own supporters. I had been urged very earnestly and from various quarters to sweep away my opponents and provide with their places for my friends. I can justify the refusal to adopt this policy only by the steadiness and consistency of my adhesion to my own. If I depart from this in one instance I shall be called upon by my friends to do the same in many. An invidious and inquisitorial scrutiny into the personal dispositions of public officers will creep through the whole Union, and the most selfish and sordid passions will be kindled into activity to distort the conduct and misrepresent the feelings of men whose places may become the prize of slander upon them."
Mr. Clay was silenced, and Sterret retained his position, constituting thereafter only a somewhat striking instance among many to show that nothing was to be lost by political opposition to Mr. Adams.
It was a cruel and discouraging fatality which brought about that a man so suicidally upright in the matter of patronage should find that the bitterest abuse which was heaped upon him was founded in an allegation of corruption of precisely this nature. When before the election the ignoble George Kremer anonymously charged that Mr. Clay had sold his friends in the House of Representatives to Mr. Adams, "as the planter does his negroes or the farmer his team and horses;" when Mr. Clay promptly published the unknown writer as "a base and infamous calumniator, a dastard and a liar;" when next Kremer, being unmasked, avowed that he would make good his charges, but immediately afterward actually refused to appear or testify before a Committee of the House instructed to investigate the matter, it was supposed by all reasonable observers that the outrageous accusation Was forever laid at rest. But this was by no means the case. The author of the slander had been personally discredited; but the slander itself had not been destroyed. So shrewdly had its devisers who saw future usefulness in it managed the matter, that while Kremer slunk away into obscurity, the story which he had told remained an assertion denied, but not disproved, still open to be believed by suspicious or willing friends. With Adams President and Clay Secretary of State and General Jackson nominated, as he quickly was by the Tennessee Legislature, as a candidate for the next Presidential term, the accusation was too plausible and too tempting to be allowed to fall forever into dusty death; rather it was speedily exhumed from its shallow burial and galvanized into new life. The partisans of General Jackson sent it to and fro throughout the land. No denial, no argument, could kill it. It began to gain that sort of half belief which is certain to result from constant repetition; since many minds are so constituted that truth may be actually, as it were, manufactured for them by ceaseless iteration of statement, the many hearings gaining the character of evidence.
It is long since all students of American history, no matter what are their prejudices, or in whose interest their researches are prosecuted, have branded this accusation as devoid of even the most shadowy basis of probability, and it now gains no more credit than would a story that Adams, Clay, and Jackson had conspired together to get Crawford out of their way by assassination, and that his paralysis was the result of the drugs and potions administered in performance of this foul plot. But for a while the rumor stalked abroad among the people, and many conspicuously bowed down before it because it served their purpose, and too many others also, it must be confessed, did likewise because they were deceived and really believed it. Even the legislature of Tennessee were not ashamed to give formal countenance to a calumny in support of which not a particle of evidence had ever been adduced. In a preamble to certain resolutions passed by this body upon this subject in 1827, it was recited that: "Mr. Adams desired the office of President; he went into the combination without it, and came out with it. Mr. Clay desired that of Secretary of State; he went into the combination without it, and came out with it." No other charge could have wounded Mr. Adams so keenly; yet no course was open to him for refuting the slander. Mr. Clay, beside himself with a just rage, was better able to fight after the fashion of the day—if indeed he could only find somebody to fight. This he did at last in the person of John Randolph, of Roanoke, who adverted in one of his rambling and vituperative harangues to "the coalition of Blifil and Black George—the combination unheard of till then of the Puritan and the black-leg." This language led naturally enough to a challenge from Mr. Clay. The parties met[6] and exchanged shots without result. The pistols were a second time loaded; Clay fired; Randolph fired into the air, walked up to Clay and without a word gave him his hand, which Clay had as it were perforce to take. There was no injury done save to the skirts of Randolph's long flannel coat which were pierced by one of the bullets.