by Sarah Hume, Editorial Assistant, Adams Papers

On 7 September 1842, John Quincy Adams took his seat on the 6 o’clock A.M. train from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. The weather was warm, with more than thirty people crowding onto the train. Among them were Robert Tyler and John Tyler Jr., sons of President John Tyler. When asked if they had spoken with Adams, Robert “answered no, because [Adams] had abused his father.”

Certainly, John Quincy Adams harbored no love for John Tyler. After former president William Henry Harrison died one month after his inauguration, vice-president Tyler assumed the presidency. It was the first time an acting president had died in office and the Constitution failed to provide clear next steps.

In Adams’ opinion, Tyler should have been “Vice-President acting as President,” but instead Tyler took the office. To make matters worse, Adams found Tyler “principled against all improvement— With all the interests and passions, and vices of Slavery rooted in his moral and political constitution—with talents not above mediocrity” (JQA, Diary, 4 April 1841). This extended to Tyler’s family as well.

“Captain Tyler’s two sons are to him what nephews have usually been to the Pope, and among his minor vices is nepotism,” Adams wrote. “The son John was so distended with his dignity as Secretary that he had engraved on his visiting cards ‘John Tyler junr. Private and confidential Secretary of his Excellency John Tyler, President of the United States.’”

Adams himself was no stranger to nepotism. When he had been a young diplomat, his father President John Adams nominated him for a diplomatic post in Prussia. John Quincy had long vowed he would never take a position given by his father. When he accepted the post out of duty for public service, he felt he had “broken a resolution that I had deliberately formed…  I have never acted more reluctantly” (JQA to AA, 29 July 1797).

In Adams’ eyes, the same could not be said for John Tyler’s sons. The two men seemed to revel in their newfound power. “Robert is as confidential as John, and both of them divulged all his cabinet secrets to a man named Parmelee and John Howard Payne, hired Reporters for Bennett’s Herald Newspaper at New-York,” Adams wrote (JQA, Diary, 7 Sept. 1842).

Just a few short months later, T.N. Parmelee would be dismissed from the paper for his “indolence and incompetence,” and move to Washington, D.C. to “hang upon the President and his friends,” as reported by the New York Herald on 31 Dec. 1842.

In this way, Adams’ views were confirmed: Tyler’s sons and T.N. Parmalee had little confidentiality to spare. These ethical questions of nepotism, pride, and public good raised the tension between Adams and John Tyler, exacerbating their public issues over slavery.

And though Adams predicted that slavery would ultimately end, he sensed that it would come at a cost. “The conflict will be terrible,” he wrote on 13 Dec. 1838, “and the progress of improvement perhaps retrograde before its final progress to consummation.”

The Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our sponsors. Major funding for the John Quincy Adams Digital Diary was provided by the Amelia Peabody Charitable Fund, with additional contributions by Harvard University Press and a number of private donors. The Mellon Foundation in partnership with the National Historical Publications and Records Commission also supports the project through funding for the Society’s digital publishing collaborative, the Primary Source Cooperative.