Step back into a defining moment of American history as we introduce two towering figures: John C. Calhoun, a brilliant and ambitious young politician, and John Quincy Adams, the sharp-minded son of a Founding Father. Despite their differences, these men found a mutual respect and intellectual kinship when they first served together in President Monroe’s cabinet. Their paths intertwined, initially bringing them into a shared orbit of power and influence, even as a dangerous question about the nation’s future began to stir, threatening to unravel the very fabric of the United States.
The true turning point arrived during the Missouri Crisis, where a profound conversation between Adams and Calhoun laid bare their fundamental disagreement over slavery. Calhoun’s defense of the institution, even hinting at secession, deeply alarmed Adams, sparking a powerful realization about slavery’s corrupting hold on the country. This moment ignited Adams’s resolve, transforming him into a fierce anti-slavery advocate who would famously return to Congress and tirelessly battle for justice, culminating in his courageous defense of the Amistad captives. Their story reveals how these influential leaders grappled with American principles, forever changing the course of the nation.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Up next, a story about two men that changed American history: the men, slavery firebrand John C. Calhoun, and the son of our second President, John Quincy Adams. Here to tell the story is James Troub, author of “John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit”; Doctor Robert Elder, author of “John C. Calhoun: American Heretic”. Let’s get into the story, take it away.
00:00:45
Speaker 2: Robert Calhoun comes onto the political scene during the War of 1812. He’s one of the small group of congressmen who really pushed the war legislatively and were responsible for keeping the war effort together. And so he’s instantly a sort of national figure. And he goes into James Monroe’s Cabinet as a Secretary of War, and that’s where he meets John Quincy Adams.
00:01:15
Speaker 3: His father was a man who lived in the nation.
00:01:18
Speaker 4: His father was one of the leaders of the forces that ultimately rebelled against the British. The loveabies with which his mother would rock him to sleep glorified poems from the Irish rebellion against the British, glorified sacrifice in the name of patriotism and principle.
00:01:38
Speaker 2: And pretty instantly, what they recognize in each other is they’re both very intelligent, very smart. John Quincy Adams writes in his diary about Calhoun and says, “I like this guy. He’s independent, he expresses his arguments really well. He’s smart.”
00:01:54
Speaker 4: He was the only person in Monroe’s Cabinet who Adams regarded as an equal.
00:01:58
Speaker 3: He was a much younger man in Adams.
00:02:00
Speaker 2: And it is during the Missouri Crisis, there is this amazing meeting that they have.
00:02:07
Speaker 4: This is the first time when the United States faces the problem of admitting new states as to whether they will be slave or free.
00:02:16
Speaker 3: And they had a debate.
00:02:19
Speaker 4: And afterwards, Adams and Calhoun walk away and talk a great length, and Adams writes in his diary. Afterwards, he describes his long walk in the conversation he had with Calhoun.
00:02:32
Speaker 2: Adams says they talked so long that Calhoun missed his dinner. And Adams expresses his view that slavery should not expand beyond where it was, and that the Declaration of Independence should actually be policy, even if it couldn’t be fully realized right away. And Calhoun, in—
00:02:53
Speaker 4: language that Adams found appalling and also probably illogical,
00:02:58
Speaker 2: he says, “You have to understand, in the South, we think about this very differently. Those ideals are very admirable, but we never, in our wildest imagination, thought that Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration applied to slaves. We wouldn’t have joined the Union if we thought it did.” And Calhoun says that in this, alarms Adams, I think, even more. Calhoun says, “If slavery is threatened, then the South will secede and ally itself with Great Britain.” The United States had just finished fighting a war with Britain a few years earlier, and so this is an incredibly shocking admission. And Adams, when he finally gets back to his own house, Adams says, “This conversation has set off this incredible chain of thinking for me about the future of the Union.”
00:03:51
Speaker 4: And he says that he had never understood until then how slavery corrupts the master as—
00:04:00
Speaker 3: well as debasing slave.
00:04:02
Speaker 4: That for him to listen to Calhoun made him think that this thing was a disease that was eating—
00:04:09
Speaker 3: away at the vitals of the Republic.
00:04:12
Speaker 4: So that thought was there, and then it went away. The issue didn’t present itself, but then it did. This was the great drama of his later—
00:04:25
Speaker 2: years. This conversation that they have is the beginning of a rift between Adams and Calhoun. Not immediately, I mean he goes on to become Adams’s Vice President, of course, but John Quincy Adams returns to the House of Representatives, which is kind of remarkable for an ex-president to do, and he becomes the foremost anti-slavery politician in the antebellum era.
00:04:52
Speaker 3: He would be putting himself into a solitary position.
00:04:56
Speaker 4: Most northern men were quite happy to what the issue go away, and Adams, that fact didn’t trouble him in the least.
00:05:04
Speaker 3: He became the—
00:05:05
Speaker 4: go-to guy for petitions because once the South succeeded in passing a rule that said that petitions on slavery cannot be presented to the House, other members took that as a settled question.
00:05:20
Speaker 3: Adams knew he had no chance of winning.
00:05:21
Speaker 4: The gag order, so-called, would always be passed, but Adams would fight it tooth and nail. He would find some sly way of presenting a petition as if it were not about slavery, when in fact it was. And when that became clear, they would be an uproar, a hubbub. And in 1843, they moved to have him censured, and he beat them. He defeated the censure motion.
00:05:45
Speaker 2: And Adams defends the Amistad captives successfully.
00:05:51
Speaker 4: It was an illegal slave ship because slavery had been—the slave trade had been eliminated as of 1817. These were slaves who, who had been taken from West Africa, brought to Cuba, where slavery still existed, rebranded as Cuban slaves, as Cubans, and then sent to the South. The slaves mutinied, and then they told the captain, who was still around, to let—to steer them to Africa, which he didn’t do, and instead he actually wound up steering them to Long Island, where the ship was sighted and taken. Then a very complicated set of court cases ensued. Adams learned about this, wrote to the anti-slavery people who were funding the—
00:06:37
Speaker 3: defense of the slaves, and then they came to him.
00:06:40
Speaker 4: The case had gotten to the Supreme Court, and Adams, who hadn’t appeared before the Supreme Court in thirty years, threw himself into this. And it was a very complicated case because the slaves were, from the point of view of slave owners, they were not people, they were things.
00:06:58
Speaker 3: They were merchandise.
00:07:00
Speaker 4: And even though it was clear and admitted that they had been brought there illegally, they were still being claimed as merchandise. And the owners of the ship wanted to be compensated. The slaves were going to be free, they were going to be compensated, and they kept insisting that the slaves really were chattel. And so Adams immersed himself in the precedent of the case. Now today, when you argue a case before the Supreme Court, you start speaking, and after ten words, one of the Justices interrupts you. It didn’t work like that in those days. The Justices didn’t ask questions. You stood up and you presented the case. Adams presented a nine-hour case over the course of two days, about the facts and about the—
00:07:49
Speaker 3: law and about the history.
00:07:53
Speaker 4: So here he was, a 73-year-old figure, the last living a link to the Founding Fathers, a president, and the son of a president. And so he addressed the Justices as an equal, and perhaps in certain respects, almost superior of theirs. And so maybe I’ll just read the very end, because you get a feeling of his language. He spoke of all of the figures whom he had known as a young man, and he said, “Where are—”
00:08:33
Speaker 3: They all gone? Gone?
00:08:35
Speaker 4: All gone, gone from the services which in their day and generation they faithfully rendered to their country. And now he’s standing in the well of the Supreme Court, and their tears pouring down his face. There’s a gallery that’s sitting there in dead silence, and he says, “From the excellent characters which they sustained in life, so far as I’ve had the means of knowing, I humbly hope and fondly trust that they have gone to receive the rewards of Blessedness on high.” In taking, then, my final leave of this bar and of this Honorable Court, I can only ejaculate a fervent petition to Heaven that every member of it may go to his final account with as little of earthly frailty to answer—
00:09:22
Speaker 3: for as those illustrious did, and that—
00:09:25
Speaker 4: you may, everyone, after the close of a long and virtuous career in this world, be received at the portals of the next with the approving sentence, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.'”
00:09:43
Speaker 3: That’s how he ended.
00:09:46
Speaker 4: And this Court, virtually all of whose members were slave owners, ruled unanimously for the Amistad slaves. It was the greatest victory of the anti-slavery movement. It was galvanizing. It was an astonishing and thrilling moment.
00:10:12
Speaker 2: And imagine that meeting.
00:10:13
Speaker 1: Both are serving in Monroe’s Cabinet: Mr. Anti-Slavery and Mr. Pro-Slavery, North and South. Having that conversation, and what does Adams walk away with? Such a profound insight. Slavery doesn’t just debase the slave, it corrupts the master. And boy did it with John C.—
00:10:33
Speaker 3: Calhoun.
00:10:35
Speaker 1: The story of a conversation that changed John Quincy Adams’s life. Here on our American Stories.
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