Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume I.djvu/120

100 * JOHN QUINCY ADAMS jections to the embargo, which he represented as the first step toward a war with Great Brit- ain, a step into which the administration had been led, as he maintained, by French threats or French seduction. This letter Pickering requested the governor to lay before the legis- lature, which Sullivan refused to do, on the ground that it was "seditious and disorgan- izing." It found its way, however, into the newspapers, and Adams replied to it through the same medium. In this reply he expressed his conviction that the whole of the difficul- ties in which the United States were involved on the question of neutral rights, including the issue of Bonaparte's Berlin and Milan de- crees, had originated in the unwarrantable maritime pretensions of Great Britain. He even went so far as to represent the late British orders in council, issued nominally in retaliation for the Berlin decree, as a first step on the part of Great Britain toward bringing back the United States to colonial subjection. Giving emphatic expression to suspicions and to an an- tipathy which, as to the Hamiltonian or Essex junto section of the federalists, he had imbibed from his father, he broadly hinted that Pick- ering and his special party friends were quite ready to side with Great Britain in the new enterprise which he ascribed to her of re- subjecting America. Although Sullivan had been reflected governor, the embargo had op- erated to give the federalists a small majority in both branches of the Massachusetts legisla- ture ; and when the question of the choice of senator came up, Adams was dropped, and Lloyd, a Boston merchant, chosen in his place. Adams thereupon declined to sit for the remain- ing short session of his term, resigned his sena- torship, and retired to private life. He had previously, however, secured, in addition to his practice as a lawyer, a new resource and em- pl^yment, in the post of professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres at Harvard college. He en- tered upon this professorship in 1806, upon condition of not being obliged to reside at Cambridge, and for three years following dis- charged the duties of it, delivering lectures, the first, it is said, ever read in any American college, and conducting exercises in declama- tion. His lectures, which were printed in 1810, once possessed a considerable reputation, but are now entirely neglected. The winter subse- quent to his resignation he visited Washington, nominally for the purpose of attending the su- preme court. During this visit he sought and obtained a confidential interview with Jeffer- son, in which he distinctly brought against a portion of the federal leaders the charge of a treasonable design of dissolving the Union and forming a separate northern confederacy. The same charge, thus privately made, he not long after repeated in print, in a review of the writ- ings of Fisher Ames, which he published in numbers in the "Boston Patriot." Such was the origin of a charge which for the next ten or fifteen years strongly affected the admin- istration of the government, and which, pen- etrating deeply into the popular mind, made the leading statesmen of New England ob- jects at once of dread and hatred, deprived New England for a considerable period of its natural weight in public affairs, and had a decisive influence in curtailing to a single term the presidential office, to which John Q. Adams, himself afterward attained. That he was sincere in bringing this charge there is little room for doubt. The proof, however, which he presented at the time or afterward of the truth of this plot, was sufficiently slen- der. It was said to have originated with a few federal members of congress, in conse- quence of the annexation of Louisiana a meas- ure which Adams had himself opposed, bi-ing one of the six senators who voted against it and the threatened destruction, by the addition of so much new western and southern territory, of the political influence of the northern and eastern states. These dissatisfied members of congress, so Adams alleged, had proposed to have a meeting at Boston, at which Hamilton was to have been present. It was admitted that Hamilton disapproved of the scheme, and yet his reasons for accepting Burr's challenge were cited as proof that he anticipated a civil war and the being called upon to take a leading part in it. Such seems to have been about the whole of this alleged plot, carefully concealed, as Adams admitted, from the great body of the federalists, and unknown even to the greater part of their leaders, including one so conspicu- ous as Ames. We shall have occasion at a subsequent period of Mr. Adams's life to refer again to this subject. It should be added now, however, that this revelation was among the reasons by which Adams pressed Jefferson to consent to the repeal of the embargo, for which he had himself voted, but which had provoked in all the maritime parts of the country, and especially in New England, a very violent hos- tility, and which could not be persisted in, as Adams thought, without leading to open and violent resistance, and so affording opportunity to the plotters against the integrity of the Union. Immediately alter Madison's accession to the presidency, he nominated Mr. Adams as minis- ter to Kussia. Since the time that Adams, while yet a boy, had visited St. Petersburg as private secretary to an unrecognized minister, the United States had had no ambassador at that court. The senate, not yet satisfied of the expediency of opening diplomatic relations in that quarter, though the same thing had been recommended by Jefferson, refused to confirm the nomination. However, a few months after, the nomination was renewed, and with bet- ter success. John Adams, who did not like being thus separated from his son, saw in this appointment only a sort of political banishment intended on the part of the Virginia politicians to remove a dreaded competitor out of the way. Yet in fact, by removing John Q. Adams from the immediate theatre of contention at home,