John Quincy Adams by Harlow Unger Page A

weights upon my arms. 17
    The President managed to strip and swim ashore, where his son John II pulled him from the water, while Antoine scampered out and dressed as best he could, before running to the Adams house across the bridge to get a carriage. “While Antoine was gone,” the President confided to his diary, “John and I were wading and swimming up and down on the other shore, or sitting naked basking on the bank at the margin of the river. . . . The carriage came and took me and Antoine home, half dressed.” 18
    Although he escaped injury, the President did not escape a torrent of ridicule, and later in the year, in October, the Tennessee legislature heaped insult on top of ridicule by nominating Jackson for the presidency—three years in advance of the next presidential race in 1828. Jackson immediately resigned his Senate seat to begin a national campaign to unseat John Quincy Adams—sooner or later.
    Rather than reinforcing his presidency, John Quincy seemed to go out of his way to undermine it. Apparently unaware of or unable to address the needs of a semiliterate rural population in his speeches, he always appeared
to address Harvard scholars or their ilk, insisting that “the great object of civil government is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact.”
    Roads and canals . . . are among the most important means of improvement. But moral, political and intellectual improvement are duties assigned by the Author of our existence. . . . Among the first . . . instruments for the improvement of the condition of men is knowledge, and to the acquisition of much of the knowledge adapted to the wants, the comforts and enjoyments of human life, public institutions and seminaries of learning are essential. 19
    In what he considered—and what really was—a brilliant, forward-looking address to advance the nation, he called on Congress to promote “the improvement of agriculture, commerce and manufactures, the cultivation and encouragement of the mechanic and of the elegant arts, the advancement of literature, and the progress of the sciences.” Among the sciences, he cited astronomy as the most important and called for federal construction of astronomical observatories, or “lighthouses of the sky,” to study the heavens. He warned that failure to do so “would be treachery to the most sacred of trusts.” If any congressmen still supported his program at that point, he proceeded to lose them all with one of the most politically inept statements of his career: “While foreign nations . . . are advancing with gigantic strides in . . . public improvement, were we to slumber in indolence . . . and proclaim to the world that we are palsied by the will of our constituents, would it not be to . . . doom ourselves to perpetual inferiority?” 20
    Even his most loyal supporters misunderstood the phrase “palsied by the will of our constituents.” North Carolina congressman Nathaniel Macon charged that “the message of the President seems to claim all the power to the federal government.” 21 And General Edmund Gaines, whom former President Monroe had sent to rid Amelia Island of pirates, predicted that
“the planters, farmers and mechanics of the country” would see the next presidential election as “a great contest between the aristocracy and democracy of America.” 22
    Jackson thundered a reply that devastated John Quincy, who seemed unaware of the implications of what he had written and said. “When I view . . . the declaration that it would be criminal for the agents of our government to be palsied by the will of their constituents, I shudder for the consequence. . . . The voice of the people . . . must be heard. Instead of building lighthouses in the skies, establishing national universities, and making explorations round the globe . . . pay the national debt . . . then apportion the