Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 6
1836-05-13
Weather cloudy with an occasional sprinkling of rain. I went and took a warm bath and thence to the Office. Engaged most of my time in drawing up an account current of matters with T. B. Adams and writing a letter to accompany it.1 Nothing of further consequence. Mr. Foster stopped in about the horses which are destined to plague me to the end of the chapter. I ordered them sold, and wrote Mr. Forbes a letter which if he had any conscience he would feel,2 but prosperity has hardened his heart. Home where I continued to read Livy and the same effect working though to worse results in the Roman people. Afternoon, reading Sismondi, Ariosto and Foster.
387My time now passes very quietly and monotonously but I shall soon have to vary it by superintending concerns at Quincy. Perhaps it would be more creditable to me to undertake the management and improvement of my father’s property there, than to meddle in the present political questions. For I cannot find myself exactly right any where. My father has engaged himself in a controversy with General Jackson3 which shows the wisdom of my keeping out of all party shackles so far as official nominations are concerned. Evening, reading some of the Biographies of the Gallery of Portraits. Then writing another Essay upon the present state of things.
To Lt. Thomas B. Adams (LbC, Adams Papers).
Letter not found.
The current spirited controversy between JQA, ailing and infirm, and President Jackson related to (1) the degree to which the United States was bound to recognize the frontier with Mexico as fixed by the Treaty of 22 Feb. 1819 with Spain and confirmed in that of 12 Feb. 1828 with Mexico, and (2) the responsibility borne respectively by JQA and Jackson for defining the boundary in the Treaty articles. During the session of the House on 7 May in the debate on an appropriations bill for the defense of the western frontier, JQA, on being charged by Waddy Thompson Jr. of South Carolina with having negotiated the Treaty boundary so as to exclude Texas, replied that his position during the negotiations and in the Cabinet discussions had been opposite to that charged, that President Monroe had directed him before the Treaty was signed to consult Gen. Jackson on the boundary, and that he, JQA, “took it to Gen. Jackson, he being then in this city, and asked him if it ought to be signed with that boundary, and he said, yes. General Jackson had the treaty before him with that boundary, and approved of it” (National Intelligencer, 9 May, p. 2, col. 3). Almost simultaneously, but in an apparently unrelated action, Secretary of War Lewis Cass released to the House, through the chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means, official papers relating to the boundary dispute with Mexico, including a letter from Cass to Gen. Gaines, 25 April 1836, stating that “the President approves the suggestion you make, and you are authorized to take such position, on either side of the imaginary boundary line, as may be best for your defensive operations. You will, however, under no circumstances, advance farther than old Fort Nacogdoches, which is within the limits of the United States, as claimed by this Government” (Globe, 9 May, p. 2, col. 7 – p. 3, col. 2). The Intelligencer at once pointed out that “old Fort Nacogdoches” was well within the territory over which Mexico under the Treaty had exercised jurisdiction (10 May, p. 3, col. 4). These developments brought from the President a denial that he had had any part in approving the boundary as defined in the Treaty: “Mr. Adams must have fallen into some mistake.... Globe, 10 May, p. 3, col. 1). The dispute would be carried forward without decisive issue by JQA on the floor of the House on 10, 12, and 13 May and by the Administration through the Globe on each day following. See Globe, 11 May, p. 3, cols. 5, 7; 13 May, p. 3, cols. 2, 5–6; 14 May, p. 3, cols. 3–4, 6; National Intelligencer, 16 May, p. 3, cols. 1–3; see also JQA, Diary, 7–10, 13 May.