John Quincy Adams by Harlow Unger Page B

surplus revenue amongst the several states . . . leaving the superintendence of education to the states.” 23
    While newspapers ridiculed John Quincy’s “lighthouses in the skies,” Jackson addressed the needs and concerns of ordinary people. He called for an end to debtors’ prisons, citing a blind man in a Massachusetts prison for a debt of $6 and a Rhode Island woman behind bars for a debt of sixty-eight cents. There were five times as many debtors as criminals in prisons, most of them indigent, with debts of less than $50, and forced to pay for their food in jail—or starve. u Jackson also called for reform of bankruptcy laws to prevent employers from declaring bankruptcy to avoid paying wages.
    Although many of his proposals were two centuries ahead of their time, John Quincy was out of touch with his America. In what was clearly a clash of cultures—indeed, a clash of generations—John Quincy saw man in general, and the American man in particular, as having unlimited talents, restrained only by lack of educational opportunities that he believed the federal government could and should provide. In fact, Americans were largely a society of small landowners and laborers, tilling the soil, accepting their lot as all but predestined, and largely intent on meeting their physical rather than any perceived intellectual needs. The average American man yearned not to attend school or college but to own a plot of
land—to work its soil, to plant and harvest enough to feed himself and his family, and to sell any surplus at market. John Quincy’s proposals were so alien to American thinking of his time that his programs—along with his presidency—met with nothing but ridicule and rejection, his chance for leadership spent, his dream of advancing the nation, culturally and economically, shattered.
    Depressed, he moped about the White House, lost weight noticeably, and reduced his presidential routine to early-morning Bible reading, a daily walk or swim in the Potomac, dinner with Louisa and the family, then an evening chat or a game of billiards. In the course of the day, he kept up with newspapers, signed letters, and received occasional visitors, but grew so moody he stopped writing in his diary, unable to understand why and how he had failed to make his countrymen understand what he was trying to do for them and the nation. His depression made Louisa’s life miserable.
    â€œThere is something in this great, unsocial house which depresses my spirits beyond expression,” she complained in her diary. Evidently weary of the burdens of married life, she grumbled that a husband expected his wife to “cook dinner, wash his clothes, gratify his sexual appetites,” and then “thank him and love him for permission to drudge through life at the mercy of his caprices.” 24 She and her husband grew strangely distant, and when he traveled to Quincy for his usual summer vacation, Louisa went off on her own, up the Hudson Valley and then to New Hampshire. Their estrangement would last for the rest of their stay in the White House, although she appeared at family dinners and public entertainments.
    The mood of the country worsened as well. Planters, farmers, craftsmen, and frontiersmen who made up the majority of Americans were independent and self-sufficient—unwilling to brook interference in their lives by a far-off federal government. They developed a deep resentment for the Harvard scholar who suggested he knew better than they what they needed to know and what they needed to do. They wanted less government, not more. They would read and learn what they liked—or not. They would build their own roads if they thought they needed any and grow and hunt what they pleased when they pleased.

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    English-born First Lady Louisa Catherine Adams despised life in the White House, saying, “There is something in this great, unsocial house which depresses my spirits