Aar-Alv: Aaron through Alvord

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.


AARON, Samuel, 1800-1865, Morristown, New Jersey, educator, clergyman, temperance activist, abolitionist.  Manager, American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), 1840-1842.  Vice President, 1839-1840, Executive Committee, American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.  (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, p. 1. 


ADAMS, Abigail, president’s wife and activist

ADAMS, ABIGAIL (November 11, 1744-October 28, 1818), noted letter writer, wife of John Adams, second President of the United States, was born at Weymouth, Massachusetts, where her father, the Reverend William Smith, was minister of the Congregational church. Her mother was Elizabeth Quincy, daughter of Col. John Quincy and grand-daughter of the Reverend John Norton. Of her childhood she writes: "I never was sent to any school. I was always sick" (Familiar Letters, preface, p. xi). Much of her time was spent in seclusion at the home of her grandparents at Mount Wollaston. Her grandmother, with a "happy method of mixing instruction and amusement together," took the place of school. The distance separating the homes of her relatives and friends was too great to permit of frequent social intercourse, so that letter writing became habitual among the young people. On October 25, 1764 she was married to John Adams, and during the next ten years their four children were born John Quincy, Thomas, Charles, and. Abby. In the early part of the Revolution, when John Adams was much of the time in Philadelphia, Abigail was left with the entire care of the young family, exposed to many dangers. From the top of Penn's Hill, at the foot of which her house stood, she with her seven-year-old son watched the smoke of burning Charlestown. Later, she wrote, "The constant roar of the cannon is so distressing that we cannot eat, drink, or sleep" (Letters, pp. 31-32). She went through the trials of an epidemic and wrote her husband that there was sickness and death in nearly every household. During John Adams's absence in Europe she managed his affairs with great ability, at the same time attending to the farm, keeping up her keen interest in politics, and perpetuating in her letters a vivid picture of the times. After the signing of the treaty of peace, she joined her husband to spend the next eight months in Paris and then three years in London. Her letters during this period show her inimitable gift for brief and vivid description. Those from France are the more amiable; the English letters are thickly sprinkled with rather vindictive comments upon the people—although as she came to know the English better she liked them more, and long afterward could write to her son, "England, you know, is the country of my greatest partiality" (Ibid., p. 368). With her return to America in 1787, and the election of Adams as vice-president, came what was perhaps the happiest period of her life. Her health, though delicate, had not yet given way, her husband was the second man in the nation, and about her was a remarkable society. But during the twelve years of public life in America her letters lose something of their sprightliness, due perhaps to increasing ill health. She was forced more and more to withdraw from the gayeties of the capital, and much of her time was spent at Quincy, as her home was now called. Nevertheless it was reported that she exercised great political influence over her husband. She fully shared the violent social and political feelings of the Federalist party. Gallatin, with a touch of malice, after Adams had become president, sneered at "Her Majesty," and interpreted her conversation as hostess to the effect that she was "Mrs. President not of the United States, but of a faction" (Henry Adams, Life of Albert Gallatin, 1879, p. 185). After 1801 practically all of her remaining life was spent in Quincy. There she and her family passed the years as tranquilly "as that bald old fellow, called Time" would permit. She wrote her son, "You will find your father in his fields, attending to his haymakers, and your mother busily occupied in the domestic concerns of her family." She resumed her "operations of dairy-woman" and she might be seen at five o'clock in the morning, skimming the milk, or going about the house with her pet dog Juno at her heels. The death of her daughter in 1813 cast a shadow over her last years, but as she said of herself, "My disposition and habits are not of the gloomy kind." Her grandson records that her cheerful nature "enlivened the small social circle around her." The key-note of this sunset of her life was her serene religious faith, joined with a never-failing disillusion about herself. "I bear no enmity to any human being; but, alas ! as Mrs. Placid said to her friend, by which of thy good works wouldst thou be willing to be judged?" (Ibid., p. 411). She died of typhoid fever in her seventy-fourth year.

[A proposal late in her life to publish her letters was laughed aside by Mrs. Adams. Her grandson, Charles Francis Adams, published two collections-Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams, and Familiar Letters of John Adams and his Wife During the Revolution; each is prefaced by a memoir. A charming portrait of her as a young woman, by Blythe, is engraved in each collection. There is also a sketchy biography, Abigail Adams and Her Times (1917), by Laura Elizabeth Richards.]

M.T.S.


ADAMS, Charles Francis, 1807-1886, Vice President, Anti-Slavery Free Soil Party, newspaper publisher and editor.  Son of former President John Quincy Adams.  Grandson of President John Adams.  Opposed annexation of Texas, on opposition to expansion of slavery in new territories.  Formed “Texas Group” within Massachusetts Whig Party.  Formed and edited newspaper, Boston Whig, in 1846. (Adams, 1900; Duberman, 1961; Goodell, 1852, p. 478; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 32-33; Pease, 1965, pp. 445-452; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 51, 298; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, pp. 12-13. Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 40-48)

ADAMS, CHARLES FRANCIS (May 27, 1835-March 20, 1915), railroad expert, civic leader, historian, was born at Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Charles Francis Adams [q. v.] and Abigail Brown (Brooks) Adams. His earlier years were passed between Boston and Quincy and by a preference for the latter he became identified with its history as a town. He remembered his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, as an old man, "always writing ... with a perpetual ink stain on the forefinger and thumb of his right hand" (Autobiography, p. 9), and was impressed by his industrious and somewhat solitary life. From private schools the boy went through the Boston Latin School, entered Harvard University in the sophomore year, and graduated in 1856. Critical of his education and career, he looked back with pleasure on his Harvard days as a "period of rapid development and much enjoyment" (Ibid., p. 31). After leaving college he studied law in the office of Richard Henry Dana and Francis E. Parker, leading lawyers of their day; but though he was admitted to practice in 1858, he soon discovered that he had no great liking for the law. As what practice he had occupied but a small part of his time, he was in a position to form relations that developed his as yet unformed aptitudes. In 1848 he had accompanied his father to the Buffalo convention, and during the session of the convention Charles Sumner took him to Niagara Falls. He formed a close and admiring friendship for Sumner and later for Seward, with whom he and his father made a tour in the West in the campaign of 1860, where the young man made some speeches, which were well received. In Dana's office he met the best and took what was offered in the association. He grew up in an atmosphere of political discussion. His hours gave him time to write and he began, as had his father, with newspaper communications on public questions. Visiting his father in Washington in the winter of 1860, he eagerly made use of his opportunity to meet prominent men and gained in assurance as well as knowledge. Seeking a wider audience, he offered to James Russell Lowell, then editor of the Atlantic Monthly, an article on "The Reign of King Cotton," a subject of living interest. Its acceptance gave him encouragement. At this time he kept a diary, as his three forebears had done. Of this a few extracts only have been preserved, enough to cause regret that he destroyed the record in later years.

In February 1861 he again went to Washington, remained for nearly a month, and witnessed the inauguration of Lincoln, still widening his acquaintance with public men, observing, and studying the situation, only to admit in after years that, with almost every one concerned, he had failed to grasp the situation. His father and Seward seemed to him to have a policy "eminently sensible" (Ibid., p. 73), that of holding the border states loyal until the secession movement should recede, the new administration be in power, and the Union reaction encouraged. Adams's vivid account of this interval, with its uncertainties, doubtings, and lack of cooperation, the coming of the President-elect and his loose utterances on the way, and the sentiments of Seward and Sumner, give proof of his gift of description.

Returning to Boston in March, the appointment of his father to the English mission laid upon him the care of the family property, and the outbreak of war made this a heavy responsibility. As all young men were in the militia, he was a member of the 4th Battalion of Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, learned the manual and how to march, and was in garrison in Fort Independence in Boston harbor. The training was elementary yet serviceable. He saw the first regiments leave for the South without a strong wish to follow them; he had five weeks of playing soldier at Fort Independence in April and May 1861; and in the following months he watched his friends take service. By the end of October his course of action was determined and he applied for a captaincy in the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry. He received a commission as first lieutenant in December and on the 28th of that month he started for South Carolina with his regiment. To Adams it proved a service of three and a half years, and five years passed before he was again a resident of Boston. Summing up his experience, he was inclined to regard his military life as educationally incomparably more valuable than his years in the university; it would have been even more valuable had he been a staff officer, as he more than once had the opportunity to become. A regimental officer, he records, "no matter how high his grade, sees nothing and knows nothing of what is going on-obedience, self-sacrifice, and patient endurance are the qualities most in demand for him; but as for any intelligent comprehension of the game in progress, that for the regimental officer is quite beyond his ken" (Ibid., pp. 135-36). His family letters during his service have been printed in A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-65 (1920) and have a quality of their own. Vivid in description, natural in expression, frank in opinion on men and events, they are shot through with the vein of introspection natural to an Adams. Sharing in two of the great battles, Antietam and Gettysburg, he gives a picture of camp and garrison service that is unmatched. Conscientious in the performance of duty and learning by experience the essentials of routine, he held an enviable reputation and General Humphreys offered him the highest position on his staff. Adams, now a colonel, declined, feeling obliged to remain with his negro regiment-the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry. In August 1864 his health began to break down and in May 1865 he was a physical wreck. Mustered out in June of that year, he received the brevet of brigadier-general. He married at Newport, November 8, 1865, Mary Hone Ogden, daughter of Edward and Caroline Callender Ogden of New York.

After eleven months in Europe in 1865-66 he returned, restored in health but without occupation. Realizing his unfitness for the law as a source of livelihood, he took to his pen and wrote on railroads, then the important feature in the economic growth of the country. The transcontinental lines were being (milt with government aid, and in Wall Street the greatest speculators were fighting for control of eastern roads. Adams, seeking for the broad principles that should apply to the development of railroad construction and management, had before him the best of examples. From 1866 to 1873 the building of roads had been overdone. They had been recklessly financed and made the object of stock gambling, involving good as well as doubtful undertakings. Adams analyzed the acts and intentions of the men seeking to gain possession of the Erie road, while wrecking it, and in a series of articles fearlessly attacked them and exposed the criminal acts to which they resorted. The papers attracted as great attention by their courage as by their grasp of some railroad problems of general application. Gathered into a volume- Chapters of Erie and Other Essays (1871) they have kept a place in the literature of railroads and stock speculations. He also wrote a series of articles on the Tweed Ring, which were printed under the title, "An Episode in Municipal Government," in the North American Review (October 1874, January and July 1875, October 1875) over the name of C. F. Wingate, who had supplied some of the material and to whom Adams characteristically gave the full credit.

When Massachusetts took the lead in establishing a Board of Railroad Commissioners in 1869 Adams because of his evident fitness was appointed one of the three members. The youngest and most active, he performed the labor, controlled the proceedings, and in 1872 became the chairman. This position he held until 1879, producing a series of reports on railway accidents and policy that drew attention to the methods and utility of the board and led to the creation in other states of boards closely modeled after that of Massachusetts. The success of his administration rested upon a full and impartial public examination of facts and a frank presentation to the public of conditions and conclusions. He won the confidence of both operators and public; and the handling of the engineers' strike in 1877 proved the efficacy of his principles, for no other, strike among railway operatives in Massachusetts occurred for twenty-five years. The subject was treated by him in 1902 in Investigation and Publicity as opposed to Compulsory Arbitration and his methods found favor but not acceptance. He left records of his railroad experience in Railroads: Their Origin and Problems (1878) and Notes on Railroad Accidents (1879). In 1878, through the influence of Carl Schurz, he became chairman of the government directors of the Union Pacific Railroad, visited the Pacific coast, and prepared the report. Later, in 1884, he became president of that road, a position forced upon him, only to be ousted from it after six years by Jay Gould and his following, who were none too friendly to Adams because of his exposure of the Erie. Adams foresaw the future importance of the road and from the verge of bankruptcy he raised it to a solvent and efficient system. The later financial situation and legislative measures hindered the completion of his administrative reforms. Through no fault of his own he was unable to meet the maneuvers of the speculative railroad wrecker. Still another recognition of his abilities in railroad affairs was his appointment to the Board of Arbitration of the Trunk Line Railroads, but he held the position for only three years, convinced that the time was not ready for such a board.

Living in Quincy, Massachusetts, he and his brother John Quincy Adams served as moderators in town meetings for twenty years and directed the proceedings of the town government at a time when the place by its size was outgrowing that form of administration. Charles Adams had the more suggestive mind and the greater capacity for labor, but the two brothers left their impress in permanent form. Adams was a member of the school committee, a trustee of the public library, a park commissioner, and a commissioner of the sinking fund. In each of these positions he accomplished results that in retrospect pleased him. He found the school system antiquated and the methods of teaching so imperfect as to be of little value. The average graduate of the grammar school in 1870 could not read with ease, nor could he write an ordinary letter in good English in a legible hand. Uncertain what reforms were necessary, Adams proposed the employment of a trained superintendent and in 1875 gained his end. Out of this came the "Quincy System," which was widely studied and imitated throughout the land and for which Adams was almost wholly responsible. It substituted new methods for the old mechanical ones. In place of memorizing rules, children were to learn to read, write, and cipher as they learned to walk and talk, naturally and by practice. In reading and writing, a geography or history took the place of speller, grammar, and copybook. By 1880 the success of the system seemed assured and Adams's account of the reform-The New Departure in the Common Schools of Quincy passed through six editions.

As the town possessed no public library, provision for one was made in 1871, the cost to be met by town and private subscription. Opened in that year, it proved a great success, and nine years later, through Adams's agency, the town gained the Thomas Crane library building, dedicated in 1882, Adams making the address. In 1874 the town had a debt of $112,000; after nine years of the Adams brothers' management this was reduced to $19,000 and disappeared shortly after. Owing to Adams's plans the town received Wollaston Park, historic as the site of Thomas Morton's Merry Mount. The union of the suggestive and the practical in Adams which had benefited the town by application trained him for wider fields, and in 1892 he was appointed to the state commission to devise a system of parks and public reservations in the vicinity of Boston. The work of this commission has surrounded the city with beautiful connecting roadways, saved Blue Hill from the quarrymen, and preserved the Middlesex Fells as public parks. He also served as chairman of a state commission to report upon the relations of street railways and municipalities, which caused him to study the subject, in European cities and produced useful general legislation based upon his recommendations, which again was copied in other cities.

For twenty-four years from 1882 he was a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University and was prominent in many lines of its development. The nomination of visiting committees fell to him and he himself gave special attention to the English department. His elaborate reports on conditions produced some changes, but he was never satisfied that he had fully understood the situation and the remedy. To him the Harvard system was "radically wrong," and he expressed his views in two addresses which called out much controversy. His ideas on the education to be given by college and university were developed in A College Fetich (1883), a protest against the compulsory study of dead languages; and, in 1906, near the term of his long service as overseer, in Some Modern College Tendencies, in which he pointed out the complete separation of teacher and individual student and the absence of direction in studies and of the personal influence of instructors. A remedy he found in a group of colleges, each independent and each having its specialty, where the master should know every student. The university should supplement college training. Both papers were constructive in their suggestion and served their purpose of causing reexamination of accepted methods.

Meanwhile another field had opened to him, by accident as he thought, when the citizens of Weymouth asked him to deliver an address on the 250th anniversary of its settlement. Without experience in historical investigation he accepted and in so doing entered upon forty years of historical writing, essentially his "aptitude," from which he derived his greatest pleasure and most lasting reputation. The address was given in 1874, and in the following year he was elected a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, became a vice-president of it in 1890 and president in 1895, a position he held until his death. In that period he contributed many papers, broadened the scope of the society, and added greatly to its reputation. In 1883 he printed some six copies of Episodes in New England History, a study of the history of Quincy, which in 1892 appeared in an extended form in two volumes as Three Episodes of Massachusetts History and remains a model local history in its form and treatment. In the same year (1883) appeared his edition of Morton's New English Canaan and in 1894 his Antinomianism in the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay, 1636-38, elaborately annotated. He ventured into a somewhat new field in a biography of Richard Henry Dana (1890), and in a life of his father, Charles Francis Adams (1900), both of which have taken a high place in American biography.

Wishing to write a full biography of his father, Adams for a number of years gave close study to the political history of Massachusetts and the War of Secession and its results. Not a little of his material was used in occasional papers and addresses, the more important of which were side studies of his principal theme. In a group of papers he expressed his conception of secession and particularly the conduct of General Lee: "Shall Cromwell have a Statue?" ( 1902), a plea for a statue to Lee in Washington; Lee at Appomattox, etc. (1902); Constitutional Ethics of Secession(1903); and Lee's Centennial (1907), a series that marked the waning of the animosities which had survived the war. Beginning with 1899 and for fifteen years thereafter he prepared a number of papers on the diplomatic history of the War of Secession, the larger part of which appeared in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Drawing largely from the family papers, he was able to give valuable material hitherto unknown, and he enriched it by an interpretation which, always original and individual, often ran counter to accepted conclusions. In 1899 he printed "The Laird Rams," in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. XXXIII; in 1901 he made an address in New York on Before and after the Treaty of Washington (published in 1902), and followed it by a number of essays on the British Declaration of Neutrality, the Trent Affair, the Rams, and British and French mediation. Becoming convinced that the story could not be fully told without having the contemporary English and French diplomatic papers, he went twice to England in 1913, the first visit being due to his appointment to deliver three lectures on American history at Oxford University. These lectures were printed in 1913 as Trans-Atlantic Historical Solidarity. He gained access to important collections in England, obtained much material, and returned to complete the life of his father. The new material led to a revision of his earlier studies in diploma tic history, but was never fully utilized.

All this does not measure the extent of his activities. He engaged in large business enterprises and with a measure of success. In the town of Lincoln, Massachusetts, whither he removed from Quincy, he showed the same interest in town government as he had in Quincy. Throughout his whole career he was keenly alive to the course of political events, took an active share in reform and independent movements, and was an eager participant in the discussions of public policy, both state and national. He began as a Republican, but later became independent of party and remained so to the end. Except for the positions held in Quincy he never was a candidate for nor held an elective office. In 1883 he was offered a nomination for the governorship, but declined it on the ground that a third candidate would divide the party and make the defeat of General Butler less certain. In dealing with public questions, he acted and wrote not as a partisan but in a large way-as had his ancestors before him. He spoke and published on ballot and electoral reform, proportional representation, free trade (he was in favor of a tariff for revenue), civil service reform, currency and finance, taxation, the abuses of the pension system, Panama tolls, the Philippines, and imperialism. To the end he remained active, individual, and suggestive. He died in Washington, March 20, 1915.

"Always independent, sometimes recalcitrant ... by nature inclined to believe that long-established practices of governments, institutions of education, and financial or industrial organizations were likely to be wrong, or at least capable of great improvement," was President Eliot's summary of his life-work (Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, XL VIII, 387). "Inheriting a great tradition of public service, he felt the obligations which it imposed, and to that patriotism which was born in the descendant of men who had done so much to found and preserve this nation was added the consciousness of what was due from the members of his family," added Moorfield Storey (Ibid., XL VIII, 387). In his writing, so much of which was for special occasions, he has left a record of his own acts, opinions, and experience, expressed with detachment and independence. Possessing an inquiring and historical mind, with pronounced ability to investigate and present social and historical problems, progressive in matters of political or administrative improvement, yet conservative in action, he showed that he was near to John Quincy Adams in qualities of mind but wanting in the aggressiveness that distinguished the elder statesman. Passing a life largely in controversy, his absolute honesty of purpose and conviction was never questioned.

In addition to what has been mentioned Adams printed a number of historical addresses, of which the following· are the more important: Double Anniversary, '76 and '63 at Quincy (1869); An Oration before the Authorities of Boston, July 4, 1872 (1872); History of Braintree (1891); The Centennial Milestone, Quincy (1892); Massachusetts: its Historians and its History (1893); Sifted Grain and the Grain Sifters (1900); and "'Tis Sixty Years Since" (1913). On politics he published Individuality in Politics (1880) and Emancipation of the Voter (1894). In 1911 he gathered into a volume a number of his papers Studies: Military and Diplomatic, 1775-1865- and before 1912 he prepared an autobiography, published the year after his death.

[The chief sources are Charles Francis Adams 1835- 1915: An Autobiography, with a "Memorial Address" by Henry Cabot Lodge (1916) and tributes in Massachusetts Historical Society Proc., XLVIII.]

W.C.F.


ADAMS, John


ADAMS, John Quincy, 1767-1848, Massachusetts, sixth U.S. President (1825-1829), U.S. Congressman (1831-1848), U.S. Secretary of State, lawyer, anti-slavery leader, activist, abolitionist, son of second U.S. President John Adams.  Opposed the Missouri Compromise of 1819, which allowed the expansion of slavery in southern states.  Fought against the “Gag Rule” in Congress, which prevented discussion of the issue of slavery in the U.S. House of Representatives.  The Gag Rule was revoked in 1844.  (Adams, 1874; Bemis, 1956; Cable, 1971; Dumond, 1961, pp. 238, 243-244, 367-370; Filler, 1960, p. 57, 80, 82, 96, 98, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108, 164, 168, 208; Goodell, 1852; Hammond, 2011, pp. 25, 175, 176, 240, 248, 272, 273, 276, 380; Mason, 2006, pp. 3., 90, 93, 98, 165, 185, 187, 190, 200, 205, 214-222, 263n31, 383n32, 289n47; Miller, 1996; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 3, 6, 8, 10, 18-19, 24, 33, 39, 45, 137, 197, 248; Pease, 1965, pp. 260-267; Remini, 2002; Richards, 1986; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 40-41, 49, 45, 132, 153-154, 305; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, pp. 24-28. Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 84-92.)

ADAMS, JOHN QUINCY (July 11, 1767- February 23, 1848), eldest son of John and Abigail (Smith) Adams, was born at Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts. With little early schooling he accompanied his father to France in 1778, already keeping a journal which developed into one of the most famous of diaries. He had a short training in French and Latin in an academy at Passy. Returning to America he went to France again in 1779 and attended the Latin School at Amsterdam. He matriculated into Leyden University in January 1781, but soon went to St. Petersburg as secretary to Francis Dana, United States minister to Russia. In 1783 he returned to The Hague and resumed his classics under Dumas, the editor of Vattel, again to be called away to serve as secretary to his father during the peace negotiations. On the father's appointment to the London mission the son determined to return to America, entered Harvard College a junior sophister, graduated in 1787, studied law at Newburyport under Theophilus Parsons, afterwards chief justice of Massachusetts, and was admitted to practice July 15, 1790. Law as a profession did not attract him and he readily turned to political discussion. In 1791 he wrote, under the name of "Publicola," a reply to Paine's Rights of Man, and the authorship was ascribed to his father in London and Edinburgh reissues. He contributed to and translated for a French newspaper in Boston and in a series of essays signed "Marcellus," "Columbus," and "Barneveld," he so dealt with Genet and neutrality as to attract the notice of Washington, who commissioned him (May 30, 1794) minister to the Netherlands. He arrived at his post as the French occupied the country, but remained to study, observe, and report upon European conditions. On July 26, 1797, while in England on diplomatic business he married Louisa Catherine, daughter of Joshua Johnson, of a Maryland family. He was named for the mission in Portugal, but his destination was changed to Berlin, where he negotiated a treaty and found abundant leisure for reading. He made a visit to Silesia and printed a volume of letters describing it. His foreign mission ended in September 1801, he resumed his law practice in Boston. He was nominated for Congress, but was defeated on November 3, 1802, by W. Eustis, who received a majority of 59 votes in a total of 3,699. Though without party affiliations, Adams had been previously elected to the state Senate in April 1802. On the first opportunity he showed his want of respect for party lines by proposing in caucus that two or three of the governor's council be "of opposite politics to our own, by way of conciliatory procedure," but his suggestion was rejected. In February 1803 he was elected to the United States Senate, with Timothy Pickering as a colleague, and took his seat in October while the bill for taking possession of Louisiana was under consideration. On October 26 he asked its supporters where in the Constitution they found authority for vesting in persons appointed by the President the military, civil, and judicial powers exercised "by the existing government of Louisiana." He proposed to amend the bill "consistently with the Constitution," but his motion, not being in order, could not be considered. On November 3 he voted in favor of an appropriation for carrying into effect the purchase treaty, which other Federalist senators opposed, and on January 10, 1804 he introduced two resolutions against taxing the inhabitants of Louisiana without their consent, neither of which was accepted by the Senate. He also opposed a bill for the temporary government of the territory. He was never reconciled to the course of legislation taken at that time, but believed the acquisition of Louisiana to have been "accomplished by a flagrant violation of the Constitution."

His report on Senator John Smith, who was implicated in the Burr plot, his attitude on the impeachment of Judge Pickering, his apparent support of the administration in regard to British aggressions against neutrals and the affair of the Chesapeake, and finally his votes on the Embargo of 1807, where he chose to favor embargo as an alternative to war, proved his want of party allegiance and aroused the full hostility of Pickering. The latter denounced him at home, secured a premature election of a new senator from Massachusetts, and thus forced Adams to resign, on June 8, 1808. He was now regarded by the Federalists as an apostate, was shunned by his old associates, and shared in the odium heaped upon his father, He had in 1806 been appointed to the chair of rhetoric and oratory in Harvard College and even in that position was made to feel the dislike of his social equals. During his term as senator the tendency of the Federalists to condone the insults and injuries inflicted upon American commerce, that peace might be kept with Great Britain, had led Adams to draw away from that party; and its secret maneuvers, with Pickering as a leader, to form closer relations, if not more, with England shocked his devotion to the Union. Unable to induce the Federalists of Boston to pledge full support to the government after the affair of the Chesapeake, he accomplished his end in a meeting of Republicans. Yet he was not a Republican nor a full supporter of the administration, and refused an offer from Republicans of a nomination to Congress. An independent, he was regarded with suspicion by both parties.

When Madison became president he nominated Adams to be minister at St. Petersburg, and in October 1809 the new minister was at his post. His experience at other capitals proved of service in Russia, the only country of Europe which refused to comply with the commercial decrees of Napoleon and thus the only outlet for the trade of the United States. On friendly terms with the Tsar, respected by his diplomatic colleagues, participating in the social life of the capital though without being able properly to reciprocate favors, he widened his knowledge and, even against the English representative, furthered the interests of his country with results that were to be gratefully remembered fifty years later. During his absence (February 1811) he was nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States, an appointment which he immediately declined. He saw Russia invaded by Napoleon because of her refusal to close her ports and he saw the United States declare war against Great Britain at the very time when Russia was combining with that nation against France. An offer from Russia to mediate the differences between England and the United States led to the appointment of peace commissioners by the latter, and Adams, James A. Bayard, and Albert Gallatin were named (April 17, 1813) and dispatched, too hastily, it proved, as Great Britain had not agreed to the mediation, and the Senate rejected Gallatin (July 19, 1813). Growing weary of the war, Great Britain expressed a willingness to negotiate, but not under Russian mediation, and the United States again named the same agents and added to the mission Jonathan Russell and Henry Clay (January 18, 1814). In a commission composed of such incongruous personalities differences in opinion were certain to arise. Adams was the first in authority by his appointment, but he required Gallatin's tact and criticism to temper his too ardent sensibility and in the end the credit for success may be divided between those two members. The British commissioners were by no means the equal in ability of the Americans, and by their demands and arrogant manner of making them created a situation unfavorable to agreement. Adams drafted the papers of the American commissioners and complained somewhat overmuch that his colleagues revised them in a hostile spirit. Clay specially irritated him, for they differed in temperament as well as in interests. To Adams the fisheries were immeasurably important; to Clay the navigation of the Mississippi. Clay favored a continuance of war, Adams looked for peace. The course of the negotiation and the pa rt played by each commissioner are related in Adams's diary. While failing to obtain all their instructions called for, they succeeded in making peace (December 24, 1814) and either postponed undetermined questions or provided for their settlement in future instruments.

Adams was in Paris on the return of Napoleon and during the greater part of the "Hundred Days." He was made minister to the Court of St. James's, thus repeating the father's experience in being the fir s t minister to that court after a war, and, still in succession, took part in discussing a commercial treaty. For two years Adams had abundant opportunity to complete his diplomatic education. N ever quite congenial with the English, he carried on negotiations with the cabinet of the King on questions still at issue between the two countries, without reaching agreement. He lived at Ealing, in the neighborhood of London, and took but little part in the social life around him, though he formed many agreeable connections, and educated his sons in English schools. Official functions he endured, rather than enjoyed, and he indulged his tastes as a reader and student.
He was invited by Monroe, in March 1817, to be secretary of state in his cabinet and took up his duties September 22. No more congenial office could have fallen to him, and his previous training and experience eminently fitted him to fill it. Politically, it was a period of calm. The war for independence and the organization of a federal government had been accomplished; a new generation, with new problems, had come forward and Adams, though inheriting and easily imbibing prejudices, brought to the conduct of his office wide experience and knowledge, great industry, and political independence. At times, it is true, his direct method seemed aggressive and unnecessarily forceful in cabinet discussion. He soon learned, too, that the apparent "era of good feeling" was largely neutralized by a contest among many for the presidency, in success ion to Monroe. Clay had opposed Adams's appointment to the State Department, deeming that he had himself better claims and he opposed the administration because of his disappointment. Crawford and Calhoun, in the cabinet, laid their plans for succession and the last four years of Monroe's term were passed in maneuvering for political position.

The questions before the Department of State were many and of grave moment. The revolting Spanish colonies in America fitted out many privateers in the United States, a practice defended by Clay, who severely criticized both Monroe and Adams for their more cautious and correct policy. The Floridas, still Spanish territory, afforded a refuge for Indians and malefactors, and Spain could not protect the United States from raids and retreats, accompanied by murder and rapine. Jackson, placed in command, went against the Seminole Indians, pursued them into Spanish territory, hanged some of them, executed two British subjects, deposed one governor and named another, and left a garrison in occupation. Thus to invade the territory of a nation in time of peace created serious liabilities. Monroe and all his cabinet, except Adams, believed the general had exceeded his instructions and had done what could not in law be defended. Calhoun would have punished him. Adams took the ground that, as Spain had proved incapable of policing her territories, the United States was obliged to act in self-defense, and so far and so ably justified Jackson's conduct as to silence protests either from Spain or Great Britain. Congress debated the question, with Clay as the leading opponent of Jackson, but would not disapprove of what Jackson had done. It was strange that Jackson’s later hatred of Adams, his ablest defender, should have been greater than his hatred of Clay and Calhoun, his critics.

The most delicate and important negotiation conducted by Adams was the treaty for the cession of the Floridas by Spain. Not only were the western bounds of the territory in doubt, but the delays and trickiness of Spanish diplomacy complicated the agreement. Huge grants of land to court favorites, not mentioned, or concealed by false dates, nearly trapped Adams in serious errors. He had secured(1818)a postponement of the Oregon question by an agreement with Great Britain for a joint occupation for ten years, and to obtain Florida and quiet Spanish claims he gained an acknowledgment from Spain of a line of boundary to the South Sea, a proposal wholly his, in which he took natural pride. Giving up Texas with the consent, if not at the instance of Monroe, he obtained a treaty of cession (1819) which later was declared by his opponents a deliberate sacrifice of territory. Jackson approved of the treaty, and Clay again opposed what had been done, but without success.

While the Spanish treaty was in the making Missouri applied for statehood and a struggle arose on the exclusion of slavery. Adams approved of the Missouri Compromise and believed the measure excluded slavery in territories and in states formed from territory north of the dividing line. He saw clearly that the principle involved momentous possibilities, and might even lead to the dissolution of the Union. To him the controversy over Missouri was the "title-page to a great tragic volume." His opposition to slavery was pronounced and in his diary he pictured a life devoted to the problem of emancipation as "nobly spent or sacrificed."

The Spanish colonies in America obtained recognition of their independence from Monroe in March 1822. Already Adams had questioned the claims of Great Britain on the Pacific Ocean, and soon after, in contesting a Russian ukase regarding the same ocean, he laid down the principle that "the American continents are no longer subjects for any new European colonial establishments." Russia acquiesced. Great Britain feared that the United States would take Cuba and that France, if allowed to interpose in Spain, might control the Spanish empire in America. Acting on a suggestion of Adams that the interests of the United States and Great Britain were the same, Canning proposed a joint declaration against a forcible subjection · of the colonies to Spain and against acquisition by cession or conquest of American territory by any European power. Both Jefferson and Madison favored this proposal, though it recognized the leadership of England and opposition to the Holy Alliance; but Adams wished to remonstrate against interference of European powers by force with South America, to disclaim all interference with Europe, and to make an American policy. The President's message of December 2, 1823, embodied those principles. Striking out his own references to European questions, such as the invasion of Spain by France and the Greek revolt, Monroe asserted that the American continents "are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power"; that "any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere" would be regarded as "dangerous to our peace and safety," and "we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them [the late Spanish possessions], or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States." Known as the Monroe Doctrine, and with credit equally divided between the President and the Secretary, it has proved of great importance in the history of American diplomacy.

As the time of the presidential election approached Adams was one of four candidates. His office had by custom come to be regarded as the stepping-stone to the presidency, but in his term of service he had done little directly to advance his prospects by conciliating his rivals or the politicians. He stood upon his public services, and was the only Northern candidate. When the returns were known Jackson had received 99 votes; Adams, 84; Crawford, 41; and Clay, 37. Adams's support had come from New York and New England. With Crawford broken in health the decision in the House rested with Clay and his pronounced dislike of Jackson made a support of Adams natural. Adams, receiving the votes of thirteen states to Jackson's seven, was declared elected. The contest left a long train of consequences materially affecting the later careers of the two candidates, and Adams himself wished that a nearer approach to unanimity could have been reached, even had it been necessary for him to refuse the office in order to permit a new choice. Before the House had acted it was charged that Clay had entered into a corrupt bargain with Adams by which Adams would be president and Clay secretary of state. Though without any basis of truth the charge gained plausibility when Clay was appointed secretary. In the hands of Jackson and his followers it became a weapon which served to check Clay's success during his life and to defeat Adams in 1828. Three years before that election Jackson was again nominated for the presidency by the legislature of his State; he accepted and announced his platform, the essence of which was the denunciation of the alleged bargain between Clay and Adams.

President Adams in his inaugural stated his broad plan of internal improvements, and, in his annual message, his ideas of directing government powers to promote the arts and sciences, a national university, astronomical observatories, and scientific enterprises, in short, to whatever would improve the people. Not only were Northern strict constructionists astonished at the proposal that the federal government should exercise such extensive powers but Southerners were alarmed, fearing slavery might be abolished under them. Opposition in Congress took shape and was first directed against the proposed Panama mission the sending of commissioners to attend a congress of the republics, lately Spanish colonies. In the course of the debate John Randolph uttered his famous characterization of the "coalition of  Blifil and Black George-the combination, unheard of till then, of the Puritan with the blackleg." Adams's own faith in any success from the Congress was not strong and he gauged the weakness of the republics better than did Clay. In the end circumstances prevented the United States from being represented.

The mid-term elections of 1827 to Congress gave, for the first time in the history of the government, a large majority against the administration. By the union of the Crawford and Jackson forces the South was consolidating its influence against Adams. ·with no great difference in policy to justify contests of parties the agitation for political vantage turned upon personalities. Adams removed no man for political opinion or even for political activity against himself, and so little of the politician did he have in his make-up that he wished to retain Crawford in the cabinet and to appoint Jackson to the War Department. He refused to break with McLean, the postmaster general, though cognizant of his activities in behalf of Jackson. Such restraint in the exercise of a power to secure followers by the use of patronage alienated friends and encouraged enemies. During his administration only twelve removals from office were made, yet in 1826 he was arraigned for abuse of patronage and an effort was made to transfer a good share of the appointments from the President to congressmen. Few campaigns have equalled that of 1828 for its license and bitter personalities. For want of a party of his own to check the attacks of the well-organized opposition, Adams and his policy of centralized government were defeated. In the electoral college he received only 83 votes while to Jackson were given 178.

He returned to Massachusetts, where the old-time Federalists showed much the same opposition to him that they had shown to his father. By the publication of a Jefferson letter in the last days of the campaign Giles of Virginia fixed upon Adams the charge of giving Jefferson knowledge of the disunion proposals by the leaders of the party in 1804. To a demand for names and particulars by thirteen leading Federalists of Massachusetts Adams made a reply which did not satisfy, and the questioners published a letter (expressive of their deep resentment against him) which they believed to be conclusive (see Correspondence between John Quincy Adams and Several Citizens of Massachusetts, 1829). Keenly feeling the attitude and language of his opponents, among whom were some of the most influential men in the state, he prepared a reply, which was first published in 1877 (Documents Relating to New England Federalism, ed. by Henry Adams). As a controversial document it stands high and as an explanation of the somewhat obscure movements of Pickering and others, it must be accepted as final.

Retiring to Quincy, ostracized by the Federalists and deeming his defeat an unjust return for his long public service, Adams expected to repeat the years of practical banishment endured by his father. Books, of which he had collected many in Europe, offered some refuge from memories of the past, his farm required attention, and he planned writing history or biography. Before he could fall upon any settled and engrossing task, however, he was asked to be the representative in Congress from the Plymouth district. without definite party support he was elected to the Twenty-second Congress (March 4, 1831) by a large majority and was returned for eight successive Congresses-a period of seventeen years lacking ten days. At the time of his election no member had sat in the House who possessed such varied experience and appropriate qualities. He was familiar with the inside political history of forty years abroad and at home. His remarkable memory of events was supplemented by a remarkable diary, the general accuracy of which could hardly be questioned, however colored it might be by temperament and prejudice. Industrious and conscientious in the discharge of his public duties in Congress, he served on many important committees and prepared reports which covered many questions of public policy. As a debater he was listened to with respect and, when aroused, with nearly as great fear; for his integrity was unquestioned, his information vast and ready, and his utterances direct, forceful, and at times tipped with gall. Altogether he entered upon years of influence and combat which made his congressional service unique and quite the most important part of his career.

His first appointment, chairman of the committee on manufactures, which he held for ten years, brought him into indirect connection with South Carolina nullification. For Calhoun he had no warm feeling, having received no support from him in Monroe's cabinet and only opposition in the presidency; but he thought that some concessions in the protective tariff might be made to placate South Carolina. Though it was not his committee that devised tariffs, he presented from it a minority report censuring the course of the administration. Jackson's proclamation he commended, but he believed in the event too much had been yielded to the nullifiers by a compromise which postponed instead of deciding the issue. To him any compromise on that particular question would lead to "final and irretrievable dissolution of the Union," an ever present thought in his view of public affairs.

In the discussion of the question of slavery Adams did not take a prominent part before 1835 and even then leadership was thrust upon him by force of circumstances. In 1805 he had proposed to lay a duty upon imported slaves, but only four senators had voted with him. As secretary of state he had dealt with the suppression of the slave-trade and not with the ques tion of slavery. Atrocious as he considered that traffic, he considered the right of search by foreign officers of American vessels upon the seas in time of peace a still greater evil (Memoirs, VI, 37). When Haiti had become free and could be recognized in 1826, as president he had acted with caution and had found reasons for withholding an acknowledgment of independence. Clay's influence h ad led him to evade the question in the propose d Panama Congress, as both Haiti and Cuba furnished "near and dangerous examples, against the contagion of which "all means necessary to the security" of the United States should be employed. Now in Congress the question assumed a new form. In the first weeks of his first session he had presented petitions on slavery. In 1834 the attempts of the upholders of slavery to suppress the right of petition had been successful. For Congress to refuse to receive appeals from individuals and associations was bad enough from any point of view; to treat with contempt resolutions from the legislature of a State, no matter what the subject, involved an extraordinary exercise of power, even more indefensible. Adams, whether armed with resolutions of the legislature of Massachusetts, or with his "bundles" of petitions, kept the question before the House, greatly exasperating the majority, who were always ready to enforce the gag principle.

When president he had made a fruitless attempt to obtain Texas from Mexico by cession; but now when the annexation of Texas was first brought forward he opposed it and in a speech delivered May 25, 1836--"by far the most noted speech that I ever made," he wrote in the following year-he "opened the whole subject of the Mexican, Indian, negro, and English war." A Spanish translation was printed in Mexico and Miss Martineau used it in her volume upon America. On the general reception given to it, assailed in the South and West and applauded in the North and East, he felt that his opportunity had come. "This [the extension of slavery] is a cause upon which I am entering at the last stage of life, and with the certainty that I cannot advance in it far; my career must close, leaving the cause at the threshold. To open the way for others is all that I can do. The cause is good and great"(Memoirs, IX, 298). His position, the same as that he had taken on the admission of Louisiana, was on the broadest lines. In June 1838, it was expressed in the following language: "That the power of annexing the people of a foreign government to this Union has not been delegated to the Congress nor to any Department of the Government of the United States, but has been reserved to the people. That any attempt by Act of Congress or by treaty to annex the republic of Texas to this Union would be a usurpation of power, which it would be the right and the duty of the free people of the Union to resist and annul" (Memoirs, V, 20). On that proposition he occupied the "morning hour" from June 16 to July 7, 1838, preventing a vote on annexation; and in 1843 he united with twelve other members of Congress in a protest declaring that annexation would mean the dissolution of the Union (Niles' Register, LXIV, 173-75). Territory, they held, could be acquired by treaty, but there was no power to transfer a man from one country to another without his consent. Adams embodied the conviction that the Texas question involved the sacrifice of Northern freedom to slavery and the South, and the purchase of Western support by the plunder of the public lands. His opposition to annexation and to the war with Mexico brought to him petitions against annexation as well as on slavery in the District of Columbia and on slavery in general and they came to him in increasing numbers. His management of these "incendiary papers" was at first guided by the unanimous support of the Massachusetts members of the House of Representatives (Memoirs, IX, 443), but he acted more and more independently.

Wearied if not frightened by the number of petitions relating to slavery, some of which had been presented through Adams, the House entertained a proposition (December 1836) that no such petitions should be read, printed, committed, or in any way acted upon by the House. This took final shape in the rule that all such petitions should, without reading or printing, or any other action of the House upon them, be laid upon the table. As a motion to lay on the table admitted no debate, all discussion was precluded. Each year, from 1836 to 1844, Adams opposed without success the adoption of this rule. Such a "gag" on free discussion, he charged, was a direct violation of the Constitution, of the rules of the House, of the rights of his constituents, and, as he said in after years, of his right to freedom of speech as a member of the House. On December 3, 1844, the "gag" resolution was at last defeated. While the right of petition was to Adams the real issue, he became the channel through which petitions on slavery streamed in large numbers. He was not an abolitionist, and suffered from the attacks of the abolitionists as well as from their opponents; but he recognized, as few of his day did, that a denial of the right to discuss a public question of such character threatened the continuance of the Union. Further, he early expressed (1836) the conviction that should the South become the se at of a war, "civil, servile, or foreign, from that instant the war powers of the Congress[ would]extend to interference with the institution of slavery in every way by which it can be interfered with" (Register of Debates in Congress, vol. XII, pt. IV, p. 4047), a sweeping proposition which implied an assertion of an even strong er power; viz., that slavery could be abolished by the exercise of the treaty-making power (1841) and still la ter, that in a state of war the military authority-president or commander of the army-might order the universal emancipation of slaves (April 14, 1842. See C. F. Adams, "John Quincy Adams and Emancipation through Martial Law" in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd series, vol. XV). To check Adams's continued presentation of petitions, Southern members proposed to discipline and even to expel him, but he proved capable of holding his positions and of putting his critics in the wrong. Thus in February 1837 he asked if the gag resolution would cover a petition he had received from twenty-two persons who declared themselves to be slaves, and in the confusion that followed various motions from censure to expulsion were offered. When permitted to speak, Adams, by stating that the petition favored slavery, turned the tables on his opposers, who rounded out a somewhat ridiculous policy of suppression by gravely proposing to censure Adams for ''creating an impression and leaving the House under that impression" that the petition in question was for the abolition of slavery (Letters from John Quincy Adams to his Constituents, 1837, p. 16); also for "giving color to the idea that slaves have the right of petition" and for being ready to serve as their organ (Ibid., p. 19). The petition was probably a hoax, intended to embarrass Adams. His final speech silenced his critics and proved his ability to meet, almost single-handed, the forces of the South.

His course in the House showed what was regarded at the time as strange inconsistency. He debated and voted with complete independence, to the great confusion of those who counted upon his support. When assurance was made by those in charge of the bill for the admission of Arkansas as a State that no proposition concerning slavery would be made in the debate, Adams remarked that if no other member would offer such a proposal he would, and kept his promise. The fact that he had not been on speaking terms with President Jackson and had received insult at his hands did not prevent his supporting him-"at the hazard of my own political destruction" in Jackson's quarrel with France, in his controversy with South Carolina, and in other critical periods of his administration. Yet he opposed Jackson's bank policy, submitting a minority report in protest against the proceedings of the committee of inquiry of which he was a member. A speech upon Jackson's removal of the public moneys from the Bank of the United States was not delivered but was published and served its purpose. From the committee on manufactures he also submitted (February 1833) a report which reviewed the claims of the South for the protection of slavery, the proposed disposal of the public lands, and the doctrine of nullification. To none of these would he yield a particle. Only one other member of the committee signed this report.

His personal influence and ability to deal with a crisis were shown in December 1839, when the House assembled to find itself unable to organize because of the arbitrary action of its clerk. So equally were parties divided in it that the members from New Jersey, whose election was contested, would decide the political complexion of the House, the Speaker, and the committees. The clerk, himself the clerk of the last House, without authority to do anything but list the members offering proper credentials, and depending for his own reelection on the issue of the contest, refused to name the contested seats, producing a state of complete inaction difficult to meet. After three days of futile effort, Adams appealed to the members to organize and stated his determination himself to put to the meeting the question of ordering the clerk to read the names of the New Jersey members holding the governor's credentials. He was elected chairman, and for eleven days presided over a body not yet formally organized and torn by a partisan difference, on which depended the large rewards of committee appointments and their influence on legislation. Belonging to no party and entirely familiar with parliamentary practice, he controlled the stormy sessions and brought the extraordinary situation to a successful issue.

When the Whigs controlled the House in the Twenty-seventh Congress Adams was made chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, for which he was eminently fitted. He could not escape attack, however, and his position in the matter of the Creole, a vessel captured by its cargo of slaves and taken to Nassau, where the slaves were set free by the authorities, invited it. A petition from Georgia for his removal engaged the House for some days; the Southern members of the Committee on Foreign Affairs resigned from it, unwilling, as they said, to serve with a chairman in whom they had no confidence, and others appointed asked to be excused. If the objectors planned to replace Caleb Cushing in the chairmanship, they failed; but Adams was not reappointed to that committee in the next Congress.

In January and March 1841, for the first time since 1809, Adams appeared before the Supreme Court of the United States. On the earlier occasion he had argued in defense of certain rights in which many of his fellow citizens had much property at stake; on the later he presented an elaborate argument vindicating the right to freedom of the Armistad captives, fifty-three negroes who had been taken at sea by a vessel of the United States, after they had revolted, killed the captain, and obtained possession of the vessel in which they and their masters were sailing for their destination. They were charged with murder and piracy. The Spanish owners claimed the negroes, the Spanish minister claimed both ship and negroes under the treaty of 1795, and the United States officer called for salvage. The United States circuit court held that it had no jurisdiction of a crime committed on the high seas in a Spanish vessel, but would not release the negroes claimed as property by the Spaniards. Adams was asked to defend the slaves and made an argument which Justice Story described as "extraordinary, for its power, for its bitter sarcasm, and its dealing with topics far beyond the record and points of discussion" (W. W. Story, Life and Letters of Joseph Story, 1851, II, 348). The decision of the Court declared the negroes to be free. Adams's published argument was a plea for justice, but it also served once more to express his views upon slavery.

In 1842 another occasion arose in the House of Representatives for action against Adams. He had presented (January 24) a petition from citizens of Haverhill, Massachusetts, praying that for sectional reasons the Union of the States be peaceably dissolved, and moved its reference to a select committee with instructions to report against it. The document may be regarded as a satire on the proposed dissolution of the Union. Days were spent in discussing resolutions prepared in a caucus of Southern members and presented by Marshall of Kentucky, stating that Adams had disgraced his country, might well be expelled from the national councils, and should receive their "severest censure." After eleven days of excitement, with A dams as the center of the storm, he offered to drop the subject if the resolution of censure were tabled, ending a scene that was dramatic and sensational and ending also all attempts to suppress the offender by threats of censure.

Science had interested him, though he was too absorbed in public duties to be able to pursue the study. When in Russia he had given some attention to Russian weights and measures and, shortly after becoming secretary of state, the Senate (March 1817) called upon him for a full report. The House did not act until December 1819, when it made the same requisition. On receiving the Senate's call Adams began a report, but had made little progress before that of the Hou se was received. Devoting six months to the subject he completed the document-"a fearful and oppressive task"-and in February 1821 it was printed by Congress. Elaborate and thorough for the time and containing definite recommendations for permanent and universal uniformity of standards, it remained without influence in legislation or in advancing an agreement among nations on the subject. It was reprinted in 1871 and is still of value for reference. In another direction he left a permanent record. He was chairman of the committee to report upon the power of Congress to accept the fund left by the Englishman, James Smithson, to the United States, to establish at Washington an institution for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge." Adams not only reported that Congress was competent to accept the bequest, but he made recommendations for employing it and was instrumental in preventing its diversion to local and temporary objects. He wished to establish in the United States "the most complete astronomical observatory in the world," but Congress was unwilling to act. From the receipt of the fund in 1838 until 1846 Adams jealously watched the proposed uses, made four elaborate reports upon its disposition, provided for restoring the fund when wasted by bad investment in state bonds, and saw success in the end-a permanent fund and a national observatory. In the Smithsonian Institution his foresight and labor have been justified. It was in recognition of his efforts to encourage the study of astronomy that he was invited in 1843 to lay the corner-stone of the Cincinnati Observatory.

On September 17, 1842, Adams gave to his constituents a full statement of his conduct during his service in Congress in the form of an examination of the administration under the successive presidents in that time (Address of John Quincy Adams to his Constituents of the Twelfth Congressional District). It embodied his conception of what the South and the slave power had done or wished to do, and how far their policy had been aided by a sacrifice of principle by the North. Entirely characteristic in form and expression it contains an excellent picture of the great political acts of twelve years by a leading actor in them. It was the last political paper prepared by Adams and may serve as his political testament. A minority report supporting resolves of the legislature of Massachusetts which proposed to amend the Constitution of the United States so as to abolish the representation of slaves was made by him in April 1844, signed also by Giddings. Occasional addresses, of more or less political cast, and debates in Congress on the annexation of Texas and the Oregon question, occupied his attention and called out his accustomed vigor and acumen. On November 19, 1846, he was stricken with paralysis while walking in the streets of Boston, but recovered sufficiently to take his seat in the House on February 16, 1847. A year later, February 21, 1848, shortly after responding to the call of his name he fell in a second stroke and, carried to the Speaker's room in the Capitol, he died there on the evening of February 23 without having recovered consciousness. Mrs. Adams died on May 15, 1852.

Of unquestioned patriotism, Adams believed that the nation should contribute to the happiness of all, and that no nation should "regulate its conduct by the exclusive or even the paramount consideration of its own interest." He saw and criticized the faults of policy or administration even more readily than he praised conduct that was based on the performance of duty. From his early years he studied political institutions, especially those of his own country, applying his knowledge to national and international questions as they came before him. Too much engrossed by immediate problems, he did not formulate a policy and thus appears inconsistent in his conduct, as if swerved by temporary considerations. Yet it was recognized in his day that one sentiment ran through all his life, an intense love of freedom for all men, and an invincible belief in the inalienable rights of man. The American Constitution was to him but a stage in the political development of those rights, not creating but accepting them, and must itself, therefore, be interpreted as a means rather than an end. As his father had done before him, he went back to natural law for the origin of rights, and, because the Constitution embodied "compromises," he accepted and defended it only so far as its principles rested upon natural right. In his long and bitter controversy over slavery this conception of the Constitution and its failure to embody the higher forms of freedom and rights of man gave him a weapon of great power. "Slavery and democracy," he wrote, "especially a democracy founded, as ours is, on the rights of man-would seem to be incompatible with each other; and yet, at this time, the democracy of the country is supported chiefly, if not entirely, by slavery."

In the contest with the slave power he acted almost alone. Independence of party was a "duty" imposed upon him, for his service belong ed to the nation. Even as a representative in Congress from Massachusetts he was not influenced by the peculiar interests of that State, unless support of a protective tariff ca n be instanced to the contrary, a tariff that in form was framed for the whole country. To him a majority meant nothing, unless it acted oppressively-and he worked for the individual or a number, for the slave or the free man, for women or men, with the same zeal and detachment, intent only on defending the cause he had at heart. No other man of his day came to represent as he did the essence of the right of petition, and his persistence and courage won admiration even from those who thought him a madman or incendiary, and condemned his methods and the principle for which he was contending.

His many writings and speeches contain much that is autobiographical and much that is historical, for he dwelt on past and present history, and both utilized his own experience to the full and rested upon documents. His state papers and controversies suffered from the wealth of reference which his early studies, wide reading, extraordinary memory and application supplied. His readiness in debate and his bitterness of speech, which seemed at times almost too strongly colored by vindictiveness, made his attack something to be feared. Fond of combat and of controversy, his career was marked by an assertiveness amounting to pugnacity. Conscientious to a fault, he left no argument without exhausting its possibility. From his early days surrounded by enemies, as he believed, his gift of contention was developed and leaned toward offense. Yet he kept himself under restraint in the face of great provocation. He avoided the mean and tricky: he was always an honorable foe. No man judged his own acts more severely than he, and his diary, described as a "treasury of damnations," dealt with his own thoughts and acts more contritely than the occasion demanded. Harsh as his judgments on men and deeds appear, they show an ability to touch upon character and motives that makes them in part true. He had a deeply religious feeling and became a Unitarian, but never worked out a system of theology, any more than he did a system of politics. Only in his great fight on freedom did he approach a philosophy of the latter subject.

To him his generation gave the title of "the old man eloquent." Yet Theodore Parker thought him "seldom eloquent" and what oratorical ability he had to be of late development. In his manner of speaking there was little dignity and no grace, though sometimes there was a terrible energy and fire and " invective was his masterpiece of oratoric skill." Emerson, who heard him in his later years, spoke of his reputation as a fine reader: "No man could rea d the Bible with such powerful effect" (Works, 1904, VIII, 122). Of the fine voice broken by age he declared that the "wonders he could achieve with that cracked and disobedient organ showed what power might have belonged to it in early manhood" (Ibid.).

Simple in his tastes, and disliking the exposure to flattery that high position in the state brings, Adams was known as a man of social talent, a good talker, admired for his richness of recollection and apt illustration. Even his enemies, of whom he had an abundance, recognized that side of him and wondered. His family letters are of a quality different from his public papers, and his admiration for his father and his ambitions for his son, Charles Francis Adams, led to free confidences which reveal a softer and more lovable nature and a conscience that smote him when he thought himself most obliged to oppose or punish. Theodore Parker, not sparing in his opinion of others, wrote on the death of Adams, "The one great man since Washington, whom America had no cause to fear" (Works, 1908, vol. VII).

The more important writings of John Quincy Adams are: Memoirs, 12 vols., edited by Charles Francis Adams (1874-77); Life in a New England Town, diary as a l a w student, 1787-88, edited by Charles Francis Adams, Jr.(1903); Documents R elating to New England Federalism, edited by Henry Adams (1877); Writings, edited by W. C. Ford, 7 vols. (1913); Oration at Plymouth, Massachusetts, December 22, 1802 (reproduced, 1820); Letters on Silesia (London, 1804; Paris, trans. by J. Dupuy, 1807); Inaugural Oration (1806); Letter to H. G. Otis (1808); American Principles, a Review of the Works of Fisher Ames (1809); Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, 2 vols. (1810); Correspondence, 1811-14 (1913); Report on Weights and Measures (1821); Duplicate Letters, the Fisheries and the Mississippi (1822; 2nd ed., Louisville, 1823); Correspondence between John Quincy Adams and Several Citizens of Massachusetts, concerning the Charge of a Design to Dissolve the Union (1829); Eulogy on James Monroe (1831); Dermot MacMorrogh, or the Conquest of Ireland (1832); Letters to Wm. L. Stone ... upon the Subject of Masonry and Anti-masonry (1833); Letters to Edward Livingston [on Freemasonry] (1833); Oration on Lafayette, December 31, 1834 (1835); Eulogy on James Madison (1836); Letters to his Constituents (1837); Character of Hamlet: a letter to J. H. Hackett (1839); Speech upon Right of Petition, June-July, 1838; Jubilee of the Constitution (1839); China Question (1841); New England Confederacy of MDCXLIII (1843); Oration, Cincinnati Astronomical Society (1843); Letters on the Masonic Institution (1847); Poems of Religion and Society (1848); and Orations, 4th of July, at Boston, 1793; Quincy, 1831; and Newburyport, 1837.

[W. H. Seward, Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams (1849); Josiah Quincy, Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams (1858); John T. Morse, John Quincy Adams (1882).]

W.C.F.


ALCOTT, Amos Bronson, 1799-1888, abolitionist, educator, writer, philosopher, reformer.  Opposed the Mexican American War and the extension of slavery into Texas.  His home was a station on the Underground Railroad.  His second daughter was noted author Louisa May Alcott, who was also opposed to slavery.  Friend of abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips.  (Baker, 1996; Bedell, 1980; Dahlstrand, 1982; Matteson, 2007; Schreiner, 2006)

ALCOTT, AMOS BRONSON (November 29, 1799- March 4, 1888), educator, author, mystic, was the most transcendental of the Transcendentalists. His father was Joseph Chatfield Alcox, a corruption of Alcocke, the name borne by the earliest definitely known ancestor, who came to Massachusetts in 1630 with the elder Winthrop. His mother was Anna Bronson, a daughter of Amos Bronson, a Connecticut sea-captain. Alcott, who owed the spelling of his surname to his own choice, was born on a large farm at Spindle Hill near Wolcott, Connecticut, in the same log-house in which his father was born before him. His formal education was of the meagerest, derived mainly from the district school and a few months of private instruction under two clergymen of the neighborhood. He desired to go to Yale, but being the eldest of eight children felt that he must help support the family,-although throughout life he always turned out to be a financial liability rather than asset to those w horn he would benefit. At nineteen he went to Virginia, hoping to teach school, but failing to secure a position he took up peddling. For four and a half years he offered his wares to Virginia and the Carolinas with as scant success as he was later to meet in offering ideas to the North. But his time was not wasted. To the example of the Virginia planters he owed something of the courtliness of manner for which he was later noted, and to the North Carolina Quakers he owed that faith in individual inspiration which became the corner-stone of his life and work. In March and April 1823 he read Penn, Barclay, Fox, Clarkson, and Law, and soon returned to New England with his mind bent on higher things than peddling.

The next ten years established Alcott's lifelong habit of spiritual success and temporal failure, the one largely the cause of the other. They were years of teaching-in the small Connecticut towns of Bristol, Wolcott, and Cheshire (1823-27), in Boston (1828-30), and in Germantown, Pennsylvania (1831-33). Although recognized as personally an able teacher, he worked out an educational program too far in advance of anything then known in America for it to be permissible. It was directed toward the harmonious development of the physical esthetic, intellectual, and moral natures, with especial emphasis on the imagination. To this end Alcott introduced in his schools organized play, gymnastics, the honor system, and juvenile libraries; minimized corporal punishment; beautified the school-rooms; and presented instruction and study as activities pleasant in themselves rather than as the means to discipline or acquisition of learning. These extraordinary changes everywhere aroused doubts of the schoolmaster's fitness, which were increased by only too well-founded suspicions of religious heresy. In fact, during this period, Alcott was writing in his diary: "I hold that the Christian religion is the best yet promulgated, but do not thence infer that it is not susceptible of improvement; nor do I wish to confound its doctrines with its founder, and to worship one of my fellow-beings." Such sentiments, however guardedly expressed, were highly offensive to the majority of Alcott's countrymen and together with his radical educational views were sufficient to defeat his work.

The situation was made no easier by the development of Alcott's general philosophy. His stay in Germantown was marked by the reading of Plato and Coleridge, under whose influence, later intensified by that of the Neo-Platonists, Alcott reached an extreme transcendental idealism which viewed the world as the visionary creation of the fallen soul of man, itself a distant emanation of the deity. The notion of preexistence, which most of the transcendentalists merely played with, became to Alcott a fundamental tenet. Spirit, temporarily imprisoned in the illusions of matter, could be freed, he thought, through its intuitive self-knowledge and utter devotion to its own inspirations. This philosophy Alcott integrated thoroughly with his personality, and without being given to trance or vision he lived in a state of quiet ecstasy which illuminated his whole being. Lacking all sense of humor, he was never willing, like Emerson, to compromise in the slightest degree with facts.

Thus when he opened a new school in the Masonic Temple in Boston on Sept, 22, 1834, it was of even more radical character than his previous ones. To his earlier reforms he now added great emphasis upon moral education cultivated by a conversational method of question and answer through which he endeavored to elicit from the children those rational ethical ideas which he believed innate in every one. The method was open to criticism as tending to develop habits of introspection far too early, but it was not this point which eventually aroused the wrath of Boston. The Record of a School, Exemplifying the General Principles of Spiritual Culture (1835), judiciously edited by Alcott's assistant, Elizabeth Peabody, was followed by Conversations with Children on the Gospels, Volume I (1836), Volume II (1837), less judiciously edited by Alcott himself. These works made it all too plain that Alcott was stimulating his pupils to independent thinking in religious matters. A single passage, however, constituted the cardinal offense: "A mother suffers when she has a child. When she is going to have a child, she gives up her body to God, and he works upon it, in a mysterious way, and with her aid, brings forth the Child's Spirit in a little Body of its own" (Conversations, I, 229). This modes t attempt to supplant the legend of the stork was promptly stigmatized as blasphemous and obscene by two prominent Boston newspapers, the Daily Advertiser and the Courier. Replies in Alcott's support by Emerson and James Freeman Clarke proved of no avail, and the attendance at the school dropped to one-third of its former numbers. Alcott fell deeply in debt, to cover which the furniture and school library were sold at auction in April 1837. The school itself lingered on, moving about from place to place until 1839 when it finally gave up the ghost owing to the refusal of various parents to permit their children to associate with a young colored girl who had been admitted.

He had married on May 23, 1830, Abigail May, sister of a distinguished Unitarian clergyman, and he was now the impoverished father of a growing family. Early in March 1840 the Alcotts moved their few belongings to Concord, where they took a small cottage at an annual rental of $50; with it went an acre of ground which Alcott proposed to till. The spectacle of a philosopher at the plough was very inspiring to Channing and others of Alcott's friends but less so to Alcott himself. Constant attendance at innumerable reform meetings-anti-slavery, vegetarian, temperance- interfered with his success as a farmer. For several years he had been in correspondence with a group of Englishmen, James Pierrepont Greaves, John Heraud, Charles Lane, and Henry Wright, who had founded near London a school which they called "Alcott House," and on May 8, 1842, with money supplied by Emerson, Alcott set sail to visit his spiritual offspring. He remained in England until October, during which time he had two interviews with Carlyle, who was plainly bored but sent to Emerson this immortal description: "The good Alcott; with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn temples and mild, radiant eyes; all bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age; he comes before one like a venerable Don Quixote, whom nobody can laugh at without loving." Alcott returned to America with a large collection of books on mysticism and with three living mystics, Henry Wright, Charles Lane, and his son William, who were to form the nucleus of a Utopian community.

The numerous cooperative communities which sprang up in America during the decade 1830-40 were largely inspired by a hatred of industrialism with its accompanying over-specialization and by a determination to return to larger and simpler modes of living. Their ultimate intent was sane, but they were ruined by the eccentricities so likely to develop in small minority movements. Of them all, however, none failed so swiftly and ignominiously as Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands. During the winter of 1843-44 he kept Wright and the Lanes at his house in Concord, where they worked out the plans for the new enterprise. In the spring Lane invested all his savings (about $2,000) in a hundred-acre tract near the village of Harvard, thirty miles south of Boston. Thither the party moved in June 1844. Others joined the community from time to time during the summer; at its largest it embraced eleven persons, for all of whom Mrs., Alcott acted as an unbelieving but faithful slave. The organization was based on strictly vegetarian principles; the eating of flesh, fish, or fowl, eggs, milk, cheese, or butter was forbidden; the labor of horses was dispensed with; the use of manure was disdained. In his zeal for spirituality, Alcott is said to have drawn a distinction between the "aspiring vegetables" which grow upward and those degraded forms which burrow in the earth; the former alone received the doubtful compliment of being eaten. The crops were planted late and carelessly; at harvest time the men left to attend a reform meeting, and Mrs. Alcott and her daughters rescued what they could from an impending storm. By winter 0the Lanes and Alcotts, sole remaining members of the community, were on the brink of starvation. In January 1845 the undertaking was finally abandoned.

The Alcotts returned to Concord to continue their long war with poverty, not to be ended until 1868, when the success of Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott [q.v.] placed her parents in comfortable circumstances. During the intervening years, in Concord 1845-47, in Boston 1848-54, in Walpole, New Hampshire, 1855-57, and again in Concord after 1857, the family was supported mainly by the efforts of Mrs. Alcott and Louisa in sewing, teaching, or domestic service, supplemented by the assistance of various friends. Meanwhile Alcott gradually developed a system of attractive but not particularly remunerative "conversations"-informal lectures and discussions-with which after 1853 he repeatedly toured the old Northwest. He was a brilliant, though rambling, talker, somewhat after the manner of Coleridge. On one occasion when Theodore Parker was present, he asked Alcott to define his terms. "Only God defines," replied the seer, "man can but confine." "Well, then, will you please confine," said Parker. But Alcott refused to confine or be confined; he soared above rational distinctions in the true mystic manner. Only in the field of education was he ever able to harness his inspiration to a definite program. Appointed superintendent of the dozen, schools of Concord in 1859, he introduced into the curriculum singing, calisthenics, and the study of physiology, and advocated the introduction of dancing, hours of directed conversation, and a course of readings aloud. He organized an informal parent-teachers club. His three school reports were models of sane educational thinking. In 1879 the Concord Summer School of Philosophy and Literature was modestly started in Alcott's library. Later it was more adequately housed and continued to flourish as a center of belated transcendentalism until his death in 1888. Alcott's direct service in connection with it terminated in 1882, as on October 24, while writing two sonnets on Immortality, he was stricken with paralysis from which he never fully recovered.

Alcott's publications included Observations on the Principles and Methods of Infant Instruction (1830); The Doctrine and Discipline of Human Culture (1836); the mystical "Orphic Sayings" contributed to the Dial (1840); Tablets (1868); Concord Days (1872); Table Talk (1877); New Connecticut, a poetical autobiography covering his boyhood and youth (privately printed in 1881, published1887); Sonnets and Canzonets, in memory of his wife, who died in 1877 (1882); Ralph Waldo Emerson (privately printed in 1865, revised and published in 1882, together with Alcott's finest poem, "Ion"). Alcott's verse has ease and melody, while his prose, at its best, possesses an oracular quality almost equal to that of Emerson. But he was never able for long to communicate the glow of his personality to the printed page, and his writings as a whole are undoubtedly tedious. Hence a later generation has been at a loss to account for his influence over such men as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Channing, and W. T. Harris. The loftiness which they found in his serene unworldly spirit can now only be glimpsed, as it were, between the lines; while it is also between, not in, his deeds, that one senses a nature much too sweet and simple for this complex world.

[F. B. Sanborn and W. T. Harris, A. Bronson Alcott, His Life and Philosophy (1893),containing copious excerpts from Alcott's letters and diary; R. W. Emerson, sketch in the New American Cyclopedia (1858); Clara Endicott Sears, Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands(1915), containing also a reprint of Transcendental Wild Oats by Louisa M. Alcott, whose personal animus against Lane is to be discounted; a brief but exceptionally discriminating estimate of Alcott by H.C. Goddard in Cambridge History of American Lit. (1917), I, 336-39; a more diffuse but still valuable discussion by O.B. Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England (1876),ch. X; a sympathetic account of Alcott's educational career by Honore Willsie Morrow, The Father of Little Women (1927).]

E.S.B.


ALCOTT, Louisa May, 1832-1888, writer, opponent of slavery, feminist.  Author of Little Women: Or Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy (1868).  Daughter of abolitionist Amos Bronson Alcott. Their home was a station on the Underground Railroad.  (Eisenlein, 2001; MacDonald, 1983; Saxton, 1977)

ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY (November 29, 1832- March 6, 1888), author, was the second daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott [q.v.] and Abigail (May) Alcott. She was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, but her childhood and youth were passed mainly in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts. She obtained her education almost entirely from her father, although Thoreau was an early instructor, and she received friendly guidance and inspiration from Emerson and Theodore Parker. At the age of sixteen she began to write for publication, and produced her first book, Flower Fables, which was not published for six years. In her efforts to assist her family she tried teaching, sewing, and even domestic service. At the age of seventeen, having shown some talent in amateur theatricals, she contemplated a stage career. "I like tragic plays, and shall be a Siddons if I can," she confided to her diary (Cheney, p. 63). She wrote a number of melodramatic plays, such as The Bandit's Bride and The Captive of Castile; or, The Moorish Maiden's Vow, one of which, The Rival Prima Donnas was accepted by Barry of the Boston Theatre, but never produced. She had more success, however, with poems and short stories and by 1860 her work began to be published in the Atlantic Monthly. During the Civil War she became a nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown where she rendered efficient service until her health broke down. Her letters to her family, in a revised form and under the title "Hospital Sketches," were published by Frank B. Sanborn in the Commonwealth in 1863 and later in the same year brought out in book form. They excited widespread interest, and were followed, in 1864, by her first novel Moods. In 1865 she visited Europe, and on this trip made the acquaintance of a Polish youth, who was the original of Laurie in Little Women. In 1867 she became editor of Merry's Museum, a magazine for children.

The first volume of Little Women, founded on her own family life, was written in 1868; its success was immediate and its popularity so great that she promptly produced a second volume (1869); both were translated into several languages and had a phenomenal sale. From this time she was able to make her family financially independent. In 1870 An Old Fashioned Girl was published and she again visited Europe. It was during this sojourn that Little Men (1871) was written. Work (1873), which recounts her own early experience, was followed by Eight Cousins (1875); Rose in Bloom (1876); Silver Pitchers (1876); A Modern Mephistopheles (1877); Under the Lilacs (1878),written during her mother's last illness; Jack and Jill (1880); Aunt] Jo' s Scrap-Bag (6 vols., 1872-82); Proverb Stories (1882); Spinning-Wheel Stories (1884); Lulu's Library (3 vols., 1886-89); Jo's Boys (1886); and A Garland for Girls ( 1888). Much of her work was done in Boston where the climate suited her better than in Concord; there she spent her last years, and wrote her final books. She died on March 6, 1888, two days after the death of her father. In appearance she was striking, her well-proportioned figure indicating strength and activity. She possessed ardent sympathies. A born champion of persons and causes dear to her heart, she espoused both woman's suffrage and the temperance movement. Literature was to her always a means to moral edification rather than anesthetic end in itself. Nevertheless, her books, after half a century, still retain their appeal to youthful readers. Their charm lies in their freshness, humor, and true understanding of the feelings and pursuits of boys and girls. Her characters are full of the buoyant, free, and hopeful spirit characteristic of their creator.

[Ednah D. Cheney, Louisa May Alcott, Her Life, Letters, and Journals (1889); Maria S. Porter, Recollections of Louisa M. Alcott, etc. (1893); F. B. Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years (1909); Clara Endicott Sears, Fruitlands (1915); Gamaliel Bradford, Portraits of American Women (1919).] C. T.


ALDEN, Joseph W., 1807-1885, educator, clergyman, writer (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, p. 42. Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 147-148.)

ALDEN, JOSEPH (January 4, 1807-August 30, 1885), educator, author, began his career as a teacher at the age of fourteen in a district school and finished it with a fifteen-year term as principal of a normal school, having been in the meantime a professor and college president. He was a descendant in the sixth generation of John Alden of Plymouth, and was born in Cairo, New York, the son of Eliab and Mary (Hathaway)Alden. He entered Brown University but transferred to Union College, where he graduated in 1829 ( Union University Centennial Catalogue, 1795-1895, elsewhere given as 1828). For two years he studied at Princeton Theological Seminary and was subsequently a tutor at Princeton. In 1834 he was ordained pastor of the Congregational Church, Williamstown, Massachusetts, but resigned after a few months to accept a professorship at Williams College. Thereafter, although acting as a supply and as college pastor, he gave his entire time to educational work and writing. At Williams, where he served from 1835 to 1852, he was first professor of Latin, and then of English language and literature, political economy, and history. In the latter year he accepted the chair of mental and moral philosophy at Lafayette College, leaving there in 1857 to take the presidency of Jefferson College, which office he held for five years. From 1867 to 1882 he was principal of the State Normal School at Albany, New York. He was twice married: first, in 1834, to Isabella, daughter of Reverend Gilbert R. Livingston; and second, June 30, 1882, to Amelia, daughter of George W. Daly, of Tompkinsville, Staten Island. He left a son, William Livingston Alden[q.v.].

He was more highly regarded as a teacher than as an administrator and was best-known perhaps as an author. His success in the class-room was largely due to his ability to clarify a subject quickly and reveal the essential facts. A clear thinker himself, he trained his students to think logically. For generalities or splurge he had no tolerance, and was likely to make one who indulged in them feel ridiculous. His lesser success as an official was due to the impression of impatience and condescension he gave to those who had dealings with him, his habit of pointing out errors for the pleasure of correcting them, and a tendency to lose his balance and make ill advised remarks.· "He was a man of fine presence, about five feet ten inches tall, and well-proportioned, with massive head well-rounded, hair a little thinned on top and turned to iron grey, and whiskers of the Burnside order" (J. W. Wightman, History of the Jefferson College Class of 1860, l9II).

His published writings, which number more than seventy, disclose tireless industry and a wide range of interests. They are chiefly of a didactic nature, many of them books for Sunday-school libraries, others intended to be used in the classroom. His was the practical type of mind and he wrote with a view to getting results in every-day life, whether his subject was philosophy, government, or religion. Among these writings are: The Aged Pilgrim (1846); Alice Gordon, or the Uses of Orphanage ( 1847); The Lawyer's Daughter (1847); Anecdotes of the Puritans (1849); Christian Ethics (1866); Elements of Intellectual Philosophy (1866); Elizabeth Benton, or Religion in Connection with Fashionable Life (1846); The Example of Washington Commended to the Young (1846); The Jewish Washington, or Lessons in Patriotism and Piety Suggested by the History of Nehemiah (1846); Studies in Bryant, with introduction by W. C. Bryant (1876); A Textbook of Ethics (1867); Thoughts on the Religious Life, with introduction by W. C. Bryant (1879); Self-Education: What to Do and How to Dolt (1880); First Principles of Political Economy (1879); Introduction to the Use of the English Language (1875); Science of Government (1866); Normal Class Outlines (1900).

[Calvin Durfee, Williams Biography Annals (1871); General Cat. Williams Col1ege (1910); Princeton Theol. Sem. Necr. Report, 1886; An Historical Sketch of the State Normal College at Albany, New York, 1844-1894; New York. Herald, New York Tribune August 31, 1885; New York Observer, September 3, 1885.]

H.E.S.


ALLEN, Reverend George, 1808-1876, Worcester, Massachusetts, educator, theologian, anti-slavery agent.  Lectured extensively against slavery. (Dumond, 1961, pp. 187, 285, 393n20; Rice, 1883; Zilversmit, 1967, pp. 99, 104, 153; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, p. 52. Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 190-191.)

ALLEN, GEORGE (December 17, 1808-May 28, 1876), educator, Episcopal clergyman, author, was the son of Sarah (Prentiss) Allen and Heman Allen, a successful lawyer, distinguished judge, and member of Congress. Though born at Milton, Vermont, George Allen considered himself "a native of Burlington." His first steps toward scholarship followed a well-marked path. "My earliest instruction in Greek and Latin," he wrote, "was given partly by students in my father's office, by students of the University of Vermont, such as may have happened to keep our district school of winters, and partly by the principal of an academy at Burlington ... " (Penn Monthly, August 1876,p.648). At sixteen he was sent to Canada, where he studied French in the household of Father Consigny and acquired a sympathetic understanding of Roman Catholicism. In 1823 he entered the University of Vermont, where, he wrote, "the classical instruction was at fir st miserable, contemptible .... My best studies I made by myself ... " (Ibid., p. 649). Nevertheless he was influenced by Robertson, Porter, and Marsh, the latter, particularly, awakening his interest in Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the German Romanticists. He graduated in 1827.

He began his teaching in an academy at Georgia, Vermont. Of this experience he later wrote, "You will la ugh to hear me say that I even taught Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, quite furiously." From 1828 to 1830 he filled a vacancy in Languages, which was the occasion for beginning serious classical study. He said, "I did five years' reading during those eighteen months." During 1830 he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 183r. On July 7 of the same year he married Mary Hancock Withington. After his father was elected to Congress, he gave some attention to the law office, but soon slighted it for a newly awakened interest in religion and the church. In 1832 he was confirmed and began to study Hebrew and theology, while he taught classics at the Vermont Episcopal Institute. In May 1834 he was ordained and began to preach. Because of ill health, the strenuous combination of two professions was relinquished, and he accepted the rectors hip of a church in St. Albans, where he spent three happy and significant years. With the practise in sermon writing, he experienced a "reawakening of a literary spirit, more intense and enthusiastic . . . than I had ever known before .... " The reawakening bore fruit in an article, "The Study of Works of Genius," published in the New York Review, and in his justly celebrated "Critical Review" of McVickar's edition of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (Churchman, March 7 to May 9, 1840).

In 1837 he returned to teaching, and continued in that profession till his death. For eight years he was professor of Languages in Delaware College, whence he was called in 1845 to the chair of Latin and Greek at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1864 he was made professor of Greek. About the middle of the century a movement began having as its objective a greater university with curtailment of the college. This found expression in a much-discussed "Letter and By Laws," reported by the trustees November 3, 1852. To the views of the letter and its proposals Allen raised vigorous objections in a closely reasoned statement covering twenty-one pages. In 1847 he startled, and even alienated, some of his friend s by becoming a Catholic. This sudden and superficially inexplicable change was due to several factors,-notably, his life and study in the household of Father Consigny, the secession of a number of the Oxford group to join the Roman church, and the fact that he had defended Mr. Hoyt, former associate and close friend, who had taken a similar action a year earlier. Allen served, for a time, as counsel in Philadelphia for Pope Pius IX.

Besides classical literature, Allen cultivated an interest in music, chess, and military science. His published works include The Remains of W. S. Graham (1849); The Life of Philidor (1863); The History of the Automaton Chess Player in America ( 1859), and many articles for the United States Service Magazine, edited by Coppee. His chess collection, about 1,000 volumes, was the best in the United States when, at his death, it was purchased by the Library Company of Philadelphia. Though his scholarly attainments were well known and recognized by such men as Hadley, Felton, and Woolsey, he published no contribution to classical scholarship. As a teacher, how ever, he had few rivals. His colleagues united in saying of him: "He wanted no one of the qualities of the finished gentleman, the polished scholar, the efficient instructor... he taught with brilliant success ... [and] as a scholar, especially in Greek literature, he combined the nicest accuracy with a broad range of attainment. " (Penn Monthly, July 1876, p. 574).

[The best accounts of George Allen are: An Autobiographical Fragment, in the Penn Missouri, August 1876; a sketch by R. E. Thompson, Penn Missouri, July 1876; and W. G. Smith's George Allen: An Address to the Society of Alumni of the University of Pennsylvania., June 13, 1900. The Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, especially 1849-64, contain significant letters, which, with unpublished essays and lectures, help to form an accurate estimate of his work. For family hist. see C. J. F. Binney, History and Genealogy of the Prentice, or Prentiss, Family in New England (1 883), p. 306.]

T.W.


ALLEN, Richard, 1760-1831, clergyman, free African American, former slave.  Founder, Free African Society, in 1787.  Founded Bethel African Methodist Church (AME) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1794.  (Allen, 1983; Conyers, 2000; Dumond, 1961, pp. 170, 328-329; George, 1973; Hammond, 2011, p. 75; Mabee, 1970, pp. 133, 187; Nash, 1991, pp. 127, 160, 171, 182, 193, 198-199; Payne, 1981; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 25, 26, 28, 156-160, 294-295, 559-560; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, pp. 54-55. Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 204-205.) 

ALLEN, RICHARD (February 14, 1760-March26, 1831), founder and first bishop of the African ' Methodist Episcopal Church, was born a slave in Philadelphia, and at an early age was sold to a farmer near Dover, Delaware. Reaching manhood at the time of the increasing toleration and religious liberty granted such sects as the Quakers, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists, he early manifested interest in religion. He was converted under the influence of the Methodists and immediately became a religious worker. Impressed with his deep piety, his master permitted Allen to conduct religious services in his home, was himself converted at one of the meetings, and made it possible for Allen and his family to obtain their freedom. Allen educated himself by private study. While working at such occupations as wood-cutting and hauling he embraced every opportunity for preaching to both whites and blacks. He traveled through various parts of Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland; and at the meeting of the first general conference of the Methodist Church in Baltimore, in 1784, was accepted by that hierarchy as a minister of promise. He then traveled with Richard Watcoat and Bishop Asbury, who gave him appointments to preach. Coming to Philadelphia in 1786, he was asked to preach occasionally at the St. George Methodist Church. He began also to conduct prayer-meetings among his own people. He immediately thought of making a special appeal to the negroes by establishing for them a separate place of worship, but both the whites and the blacks objected. When, however, the forceful preaching of Allen attracted to the church a large number of negroes, the white members objected to their presence, pulled them from their knees one Sunday when in an attitude of prayer, and ordered them to the gallery. Rather than submit to the insult, the negroes withdrew and established in 1787 an independent organization known as the "Free African Society." Out of this body some few went with Absalom Jones to establish the African Protestant Episcopal Church, but Richard Allen influenced the majority to organize an independent Methodist church. The church thus founded was dedicated by Bishop Asbury in 1794. Allen was ordained deacon in 1799, and elder in 1816. In the meantime, other negro churches; separated from the whites in the same way in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, offered the opportunity. for national organization. This was effected by sixteen congregations in 1816, and Allen was chosen bishop. Thus began the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which is one of the strongest organizations ever effected by negroes. Allen labored incessantly for the promotion of this cause until he died in 1831. By that time he had finally succeeded in impressing the public and had won national standing for his denomination. It was not allowed to expand in the South after the supposed connection of certain of its members with the Denmark Vesey plot in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822; but the work had found its way into the Northern states east of the Mississippi River. In 1836, five years after Allen's death, the churches numbered eighty-six. There were four conferences, two bishops, and twenty-seven ministers. These served 7,594 members, and controlled $125,000 worth of property. Allen had made the Church not only an agency for religious uplift; but, forced into the anti-slavery movement and the Underground Railroad effort, the institution had become a factor in the battle for freedom. [The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Reverend Richard Allen, Written by Himself (1793, republished 1888); Absalom Jones and Rich. Allen, Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in the year I793 (1794); sketch in R. R. Wright's Centennial Encyclopedia of the African M. E. Church (1916), pp. 5-6; a treatment of "Allen's contribution to the development of the Church in C.G. Woodson, History of the Negro Church ( 1921) in the chapter entitled "The Independent Church Movement," pp. 71-99.]

C.G.W.


ALLEN, William G., born 1820, free African American abolitionist, publisher and editor. Manager and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society in December 1833.  Publisher with Henry Highland Garnet of The National Watchman, Troy, New York, founded 1842. (Filler, 1960, pp. 142, 249, 261; Mabee, 1970, pp. 107, 109; Rodriguez, 2007, p. 48; Abolitionist, Vol. I, No. XII, December, 1833; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 1, p. 346; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Vol. 1, p. 127)


ALLISON, William Boyd, 1829-1909, Republican, Member of the U.S. House of Representatives 1863-1871, U.S. Senator, voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery (Appletons’, 1888, Vol. I, p. 58; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 220-222; Congressional Globe)

ALLISON, WILLIAM BOYD (March2, 1829- August 4, 1908), congressman, was born in Perry township, Ashland County, Ohio, the son of John and Margaret (Williams) Allison: His parents gave him a strong constitution; and life about the log cabin and on the farm developed him into a sturdy, dignified youth of some five feet, eight inches, with a broad frame and a bushy shock of hair. Some of that restless ambition which brought his Scotch-Irish forebears from Ireland to Pennsylvania sent their descendant searching from one early institution to another for his educational equipment. "Professor Parrot's School," two years of Wooster Academy, one of Allegheny College, an interlude of school-teaching, and a final year of life at Western Reserve constituted his academic experience. Back in Ashland County again, he gained admission to the bar at twenty and launched himself upon his legal and political career forthwith. He was twice married: in 1854, to Anna Carter who died in 1860, and in 1873 to Mary Nealley.

Like many another Ohioan of those days, Allison abandoned the Whigism of his father to unite with Democrats in the new Republican venture. They made Chase governor (1855); but Allison felt a degree of disappointment because he himself failed of election as district attorney. In this mood he set his face westward, first toward Chicago and thence by chance to Galena and across the Mississippi to Dubuque, Ia. The Dubuque of those days was a place to stir the imagination the chief city between St. Louis and St. Paul, thriving on river commerce, and optimistic about becoming a railroad center to tap the rich hinterland westward. Here Allison stopped and remained. He entered the law firm of Samuels & Allison, but politics proved a more engaging profession. The aggressiveness of the Middle West found expression in the Allisoi1 of the next ten years. From that stronghold of the Democrats, Dubuque, he set forth to help unite the Republican organization of the state sufficiently to elect Kirkwood governor in 1859. At Chicago in 1860 he switched from futile support of his friend Chase to Lincoln as the candidate, giving the party more assurance. As a special aid on Kirkwood's staff in 1861, he raised and equipped four regiments in northeastern Iowa, securing important cooperation from Major-General Baker. Finally the congressional Republican organization recognized him in 1862 with a nomination to Congress from the newly created third district, and a combination of absentee soldier votes and local personal effectiveness made Allison a member of the Iowa delegation in the Thirty-eighth Congress, a place he retained four terms. Thus, he passed under the tutelage of Thaddeus Stevens at the same time as did Blaine and Garfield.

As a representative, Allison labored for harmony between loyalty to his party and loyalty to his section, a balancing feat incumbent upon all successful congressmen. He ·usually avoided a vindictive attitude toward his associates, cultivating a normal friendliness instead. As a Republican from the inception of the party, he gave his vote to the Lincoln administration for new loans, continuance of the bounty system, amendment of the National Bank Act, and the Thirteenth Amendment, and acted with the majority in the House on the impeachment of Johnson and the Wade-Davis reconstruction program. As a midwestern representative he at all times advocated Mississippi improvements and increased transportation largess; and he sometimes voted with the inflationists on the currency issue. His current tariff pronouncements urged the lowering of wool and iron schedules to give the Middle Border less costly clothing and cheaper iron rails. It was his uneven record on the currency (Palimpsest, VI, 274) and his urgency for lowered schedules throughout his congressional period that made Allison's reputation as a moderationist a reputation which was to cling to him through his thirty-five years in the Senate and to determine his peculiar function and unique importance in that body. By 1869 Allison felt that his constituents, for whom he had fought many a battle in the Ways and Means Committee, should place him in the Senate. Disappointment came then, and again in 1870. Eastern tariff interests propagandized the state against him; his chief competitor for the nomination, James Harlan, was more widely known at home than he; and Allison's entanglement with Blaine and others in railroad-construction projects lessened his availability (Atlantic, LXX, 549; Oberholtzer, History of the United States ( 1922), II, 545, 602 ff.; T. C. Smith, Life and Letters of James Abram Garfield (1925), pp. 528 ff.). It is significant of this period in American development that Allison's career, like that of two of his coadjutors, Garfield and Henry Wilson, suffered no permanent ill effects from the disclosures. He simply put the matter behind. him, enjoyed a European trip (1871) which gave him contacts with foreign students of finance, and returned to ride into the Senate on a wave of anti-Harlanism (1872).

Allison ran as a Grant supporter and yet enjoyed the favor of the liberals. A curious ability to unite opposing groups had become his forte; and he employed it so effectively throughout the next three decades that the erratic state of Weaver, of Larrabee, and of Cummins returned him to the Senate five times successively. He employed as senator a personal technique of rare effectiveness : an invariable friendliness in manner of approach which brought liking without dangerous intimacy; an unobtrusiveness and a lack of great wealth which allayed jealousy; a ready expression of sympathy for younger politicians and an avoidance of controversy which maintained his leadership of the delegation at Washington; a moderation of speech and of outward attitude which gave conservative constituents a sense of security and radical constituents a gleam of hope. And one thing more-the capstone to the whole edifice of his local and national success Allison had become identified with the nation-wide, expansive business urge of the time, especially in the fields of manufacturing and transportation. He chose the two highest official committees with the result that he was chairman of Appropriations for twenty-seven years (1881-1908), and had a place on Finance during thirty years. Also as senior senator he inherited from Sherman in 1897 the highest unofficial place in the Senate, chairmanship of the caucus. These powerful committee-ships of course ramified influentially into the committee on committees and the steering committee, and brought Allison into close harmony with the other dominant beneficiaries by seniority, Aldrich, O. H. Platt, Spooner, and Hale. Allison's special function in the joint leadership was best described by its dominant personality, Senator Aldrich, as that of "a master of the arts of conciliation and construction." Such he was in currency legislation, when his amendment emasculated Eland' s bill (1878) but stayed the appetite of Silverites by substituting, for remonetization, limited silver purchase and a bimetallic conference (Congressional Record, 45 Congress, 2 Sess., H. R. No. 1093). Again (1892), to gain time for the passing of the silver craze he acted as chairman of the Brussels Monetary Conference. In Cleveland's second term he actively offset the silver majority of the Finance Committee and Senate. The Gold Standard Act (1900) followed upon careful preliminary cooperation between Allison, Platt, and Aldrich. Rooseveltian tendencies toward currency expansion were forestalled by united action between Allison, Aldrich, O. H. Platt, and Cannon. Thus Allison became one of the few western men popular with eastern financiers, who felt that his conservatism bore evidence of genius.

The tariff gave Allison the special school and theatre of his powers. As party harmonizers, he and Morrill and Aldrich united the Republican caucus behind that substitute for the Mills bill which brought Republican victory in 1888 and acknowledged its commitments in 1890 in the form of the McKinley tariff. In his role of moderate protectionist he often won encomiums from local constituents, while national protective organizations were lauding his work with Aldrich for drastic enforcement of customs regulations (1888--90). Democrats demonstrated a like confidence in him, particularly as regards the sugar schedule of 1894. The burden of reconciling conflicting importunities, especially on lumber, coal, and silver, for the so-called Dingley bill (1897) was shouldered by Allison. In the days of Roosevelt the result of the united efforts of Allison, Platt, and Aldrich is summed up in the fact that the Roosevelt administration postponed settlement of the tariff until the days of its successor.

Transportation legislation was Allison's greatest problem. He sympathized fully with railroad needs as voiced by Perkins, Hughitt, Fish, and Dodge and always worked hard to justify their faith in him. Yet he realized the closeness of the subject to everyday life, to legislative usage, to campaign exigencies; seeing intervention inevitable he sought to guide it into safe channels. From 1885, when Cullom as chairman of the Interstate Commerce Committee found Allison the safe man to follow, until the era of Hepburn's bill (1906), when Roosevelt utilized an amendment bearing Allison's name for reaching an agreement with conservative opponents, Iowa's senior senator was balancing the railroad problem for many Republicans. In the words of Depew, "He could grant to an adversary an amendment with such grace and deference to superior judgment that the flattered enemy accepted a few suggestions from the master as a tribute to his talents. The post-mortem revealed his mistake" (Congressional Record, 60 Congress, 2 Sess., p. 1988).

When death took Allison he was the senior, by eight years, of any colleague left in the Senate; he was a national institution; and by reason of that fact the Republican party stood in immense debt to this moderationist. Not a campaign from 1880 on but he had helped to correlate the concrete necessities of the national committee with ron!1'ressional performance. Not a party so lit from the days of Conkling and Garfield to those of Aldrich and Roosevelt but he served as a go-between. Scarcely a legislative tangle but what this most modest and benignant of drill-sergeants, almost first on the roll-call, beckoned pleasantly for the faithful to follow. His political value was further enhanced by his disinclination to demand that his party pay him in kind. Cabinet honors he declined from Garfield, Harrison, and McKinley. He continued the even tenor of his way, enjoying with three or four others control through the Senate of the political affairs of the expanding republic.

[The chief available source in general is the Congress Rec. with accompanying docs. Iowan background is furnished by the Annals of I a., series 3; I a. History Rec.; Ia. Journal of History and Politics; the Palimpsest; D. E. Clark, Kirkwood (1917); J. E. Briggs, Hepburn (1913); J. Brigham, Harlan (1913); F. E. Haynes, Third Party Movements (1916); O. B. Clark, Politics of Ia. (1911); and S. J. Buck, Granger Movement (1913). Allison's personal and private papers are available only under restrictions in the History, Memorial, and Art Dept. of Ia.]

J.P.N.


ALVORD, John Watson, 1807-1880, abolitionist, anti-slavery agent, clergyman. Congregational minister.  Worked around Ohio area.  Secretary, Boston Tract Society.  Chaplain with General Sheridan’s Union Forces in Civil War.  Worked with former slaves.  (Dumond, 1961, pp. 164, 185; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 1, p. 399).



Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.