1828 - Chapter Five - THE CORE PROBLEM

I want to introduce you to a peculiar man in a peculiar city. The night was Monday, 21 May , 1827.  And if his home had not been so close to the year-old Athenum on the southwest corner of St. Paul and Lexington streets in downtown Baltimore, I doubt if State Senator Roger Brook Tawny (above) would have attended the meeting. It was not the dark streets which discouraged Tawney. What unnerved him was the prospect of facing the 17 fellow human beings in an enclosed space. 

You see, Roger Tawney suffered from Prosopagnosia, the inability to recognizing human faces, “...unless I had seen it frequently, or there was something striking about it.” As he later admitted, “I felt awkward entering a room, for consciousness of this defect” And yet most of the prominent Marylanders were coming to this particular meeting , in large part to see and hear him.

They called themselves “The Central Committee” - this was their first meeting - and Tawney was quickly elected their Chairman. He was “a tall square shouldered man, flat chested...with a stoop that made his shoulders seem more prominent, a face without one good feature, a mouth unusually large, in which were discolored and irregular teeth.” He “dressed always in black, his clothes sitting ill upon him...in a word a gaunt, ungainly man.” And when he spoke, his faint voice “was hollow, as the voice of one who is consumptive.” His hands remained at his sides or in his pockets. He used no alliteration, and approached a monotone. But when men heard what he said, they believed him, “so clear, so simple, so admirably arraigned were his low voiced words.”

Within four months Roger Tawny would be chosen Attorney-General of Maryland by universal acclimation. He would later write, presaging the Tea Party reactionaries by 150 years, that the Constitution “...must be construed now as it was understood at the time of its adoption.” And this man who freed those slaves he had inherited from his father, providing pensions for those too old to work, would also write “We must look at the institution of slavery as publicists, and not as casuists. It is a question of law, and not a case of conscience.” This was the best legal defense for slavery one of the best legal minds in America could conceive, in effect saying, slavery was just because it was judged just by our fathers. And illuminated by the flicker of whale oil lamps, these 18 Marylanders, lead by Roger Tawney, met this night to begin working to elect Andrew Jackson, slaveholder, as the next President of the United States.

Maryland was the most northern slave state, and its capital of Baltimore in 1827 was a very peculiar place. This industrial harbor of 80,000 was known as the 'city of transients', where free labor, white and black, mixing with black slave labor, produced a hybrid - “Term Slavery”. Baltimore streets were teaming with so many free blacks, escape was easy for the black industrial slave. It was here that Fredrick Douglas stole himself from his master. For the white and black free workers it was harder, much harder.

Slaves were 20% cheaper than freemen, and suppressed the fee man's wages. Thus, less than 30% of the residents were paid enough to even pay taxes themselves. It was a capitalist's dream market, where workers easily replaced and controlled. Except , where the line between slave and free worker was so blurred, the slaves could not be whipped to build clipper ships on the Fells Point ways, or blow glass in the Maryland Chemical Works, established in 1825. Here the slave had to be negotiated with, even given guaranteeing manumission after a number of years of labor. But here, also, seamstress invented the phrase “living wage” to describe their desperate need for a subsistence income - 15% of the cities' households in 1827 were headed by women. And they did not get it the increase they begged for.

On two February, 1827, two dozen capitalist royalty, met to incorporate the nation's first commercial railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio. The city was 100 miles further west than any other East Coast port, and thus might compete with New York's Erie Canal. Maryland quickly approved their $5 million capitalization, and just a year later, at about 11 on the morning on 4 July, 1828, the first stone was ceremonially laid by 90 year old Charles Carrollton, the last surviving signer of Jefferson's Deceleration of Independence. 

Within two more years the mighty Tom Thumb would be puffing up the first 13 miles of track to Elliot's Mills, Maryland. A second revolution was remaking America, and making slavery economically uncompetitive.

As first glance Tawny and his slave owner allies seemed in a prime position to profit from this revolution. While the election of 1824 saw Maryland's votes almost evenly split, with about 14,000 votes for both Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, the electoral college results were more comforting, as it apportioned Jackson 7 votes to Adams 3. (Crawford got 1 elector and Henry Clay received none.) And while those vote totals were a mere fraction of Maryland’s 1,600,000 population, the plantation owners could still rely on the state's over 107,000 slaves to drown out the white voters. The slaves voices were silent, and this seemed to guarantee the tobacco plantation aristocracies' electoral clout.

However Tawny saw ominous clouds gathering. With growing pressure for universal white male suffrage, and with a growing wave of immigration – largely Irish at this point – and higher wages drawing the vast majority of those immigrants north to the free states, slaves states like Maryland seemed destined to fall behind in the electoral college. In fact,. Maryland would lose one electoral vote in the upcoming 1830 census. Tawny, and the other members of  the tobacco aristocracy, were beginning to realize the box their peculiar institution had put them in.

In 1821, an impetuous United States Naval Lieutenant named Robert F. Stockton (above) marched into the jungle of the Alligator coast of Africa, pursuing a reluctant chief he knew as King Peter. Stockton finally fell upon the native retreat, and tried to restart negotiations to buy a strip of coastline. King Peter had been willing to sell the land, until he learned Stockton wanted it as home for freed American slaves. Most coastal tribes profited from the slave trade, and touching the “peculiar institution” was no more welcome in Africa than it was in Maryland. King Peter now hotly ordered Stockton and his small expedition to leave at once. Whereupon Stockton pulled a pair of pistols and, Ala “The Godfather”, made King Peter an offer he couldn't refuse. With a cocked gun to his head, King Peter agreed to sign the deal, and thus the nation of Liberia was born.

Indirectly Liberia was the dream of Henry Clay, of Kentucky. In 1816 the Speaker of the House - who in 1824 would negotiate the “corrupt bargain” to make Adams President and himself Secretary-of-State and next presumptive President - had helped to form The Colonization Society, whose goal was to recruit free African-Americans to return to Africa, thus removing freed slaves from cities like Baltimore. Lt. Stockton's mission was the implementation of Clay's dream. It had the political and financial support of Christian societies, north and south, such as the Quakers, and northern abolitionists And it would fail.

By 1830 there were about 2 million black humans held in slavery in America. No African tribes were willing to accept such a flood of humanity, and the United States saw no way to finance a black homeland. And more importantly, the freed slaves did not want to go. After even several generations in humiliating bondage in America, they no longer thought of themselves as Africans, anymore than second generation Irish-Americans thought of themselves as Irish. Having inhaled the air of America since birth, they were Americans. They would fight for the nation they claimed, even as those who kept them in slavery grew more uncomfortable in their presence. There was something about the idea Thomas Jefferson, slave owner, had put on paper that got into people’s DNA, even a slave's DNA, and ennobled them in ways that horrified Tawny and even Jefferson. The black slave in America -  even more importantly the freed black slave, was a reality everyone would have to deal with, one way or the other.

Roger Tawny's way of dealing with it, was to deny and resist. This man who was originally a Federalist like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, as a young lawyer had eloquently defended a local minister, arrested for preaching abolition from the pulpit. But Tawny had now grown so frightened by the prospect of cultural change, he had come to insist slaves were not really humans. Later in his life he would write, “It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in regard to that unfortunate race which prevailed...when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted...They... (were) regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Those were the words of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Tawny, in the 1857 Dredd Scott v John Sandford decision. It was this decision, which the Albany New York Evening Journal observed, “...converted the Supreme Court...into a propagandist of human Slavery”, just as Tawny had insisted they must become 30 years before. The newspaper warned, “The Legislation of the Republic is in the hands of...Slaveholders...The body which gives the supreme law of the land, has just acceded to their demands.” But the Albany Evening Journal then went on to issue a call to action. “All who love Republican institutions and who hate Aristocracy, compact yourselves together for the struggle which threatens your liberty and will test your manhood!” Using the law to defend an extreme position, Roger Tawny would give his opponents no choice but to become extremists as well.

And the next step in that march, begun this night in 1827 with what would become the oldest state Democratic Party organization in America, which was determined to see Andrew Jackson, slave owner, elected President in 1828

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1828 - Chapter One - A PUNCH IN THE NOSE

I am still angry with John Quincy Adams (above). Yes, he has been dead for 174 years, perhaps the only man to have died in the offices of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. But  I still want to go back to 1828, and just slap him. Its not that he was without honor. He remains the only President who left the White House and then served 18 years in the lower house of Congress. 

And the current craze for large expensive Presidential libraries began with the modest one built in his honor (above), by his son Francis. But then, I guess Francis felt the need to honor his father, since he was partly responsible for John Q. being a one term President. Not that Charles was to blame, but he was responsible. John Quincy Adams was the Adams to blame for his abbreviated Presidency.

See, in 1809, John Quincy Adams was the first American Ambassador to Russia (above, S. Petersburg). But as a diplomat John Quincy had only two qualifications. First, he was very, very smart. And second, he was his father's son. Having accompanied John Adams to Paris to represent the Continental Congress during the revolution, and after the war, to England, John Q was the best trained diplomat in America. On the negative side, neither his father nor John Quincy had the personality for the job. 

He would later describe himself in his own diary as a “man of reserved, cold, austere, and forbidding manners.” If it hadn't been for his wife, the vivacious and politically astute English-born Louisa, (above) John Q. would have been a complete failure as a diplomat. But even she found the Adams men “cold and insensitive”. Louisa's regrets, and her migraine headaches, may have had something to do with John Quincy's parenting skills. He had none. Both of his older sons became alcoholics.

Anyway, when in 1809 President James Madison appointed John Quincy as ambassador to Russia, Louisa had to leave the older boys at home, and drag two year old Charles on the 80 day sea voyage to St. Petersburg. Louisa brought along her chambermaid, Martha Godfry, who would also serve as Charles' nurse. John Q described Martha as “a very beautiful girl”, and it seems she must have been pleasant as well. In any case, Martha also played her part in the future political troubles of President John Q.

Martha was from a servant class family, and sent a letter back to her mother in Boston, saying she had arrived safely, and how magnificent the Romanov court was, and how handsome the Czar (above) was, and how the women at court practically fainted if he looked at them. Well, the Russian secret police were just as efficient in the 19^th century as they would be under the Communists and Putin, and they opened Martha's letters. And since the writing was complementary of the Czar, they showed copies to Czar Alexander I. The Czar was flattered, and hearing the girl was pretty, he concocted a way to meet her. He contrived to have the daughter of one of his visiting in-laws, the young princess Amelia of Baden, invite Charles to a play date. And when Martha arrived with the boy, the Czar just happened to stop by for a quick visit. He brought along his German wife, Elizabeth (below), as cover.

Alexander spent a few minutes talking to the boy, and tried to strike up a conversation with the beautiful Martha. But either she was too nervous or too naive, or he did not find her as attractive as John Q did, or maybe the Czarina smelled the testosterone in the room, but in any case after this brief encounter, Charles and Martha were never invited back. Alexander went back to his mistress, Maria Antonovna Naryshkina, and Czarina Elizabeth went back to her lover, Adam Czartoryski. As for Martha, after she was debriefed by John Q. - who managed to miss the entire subtext of the encounter – she was allowed to retreat to her bedroom, where she composed a detailed letter to her Mother of the exciting day she actually spoke to the Russian Czar. The secret police must have been sorely disappointed with that month's American diplomatic pouch.

All of that, remember, was twenty years in the past, when Federalist President John Quincy Adams arrived in Baltimore on the afternoon of Sunday, October 14, 1827 – 5 months after Roger Tawny and friends met to plot the President's defeat.

The President had sailed down the Chesapeake Bay to dedicate a memorial to the 1814 Battle of Baltimore (above), but took the opportunity to do a little politicking. Noting the town was also constructing the nation's first memorial to George Washington, he called Baltimore the “city of monuments”, knowing the phrase would stick. He even stayed over an extra day, to attend the funeral of Revolutionary War hero, General John Edgar Howard. And that night John Q spent three hours shaking hands and speaking with some 2,000 locals.

In 1824 Baltimore had gone heavily for Democrat Andrew Jackson, but logic seemed to dictate the town should support Adams in 1828. The city was the starting point for the Cumberland Highway, now called the National Road (above). This had been the dream of George Washington, and already snaked west through the mountains toward Pittsburgh. Paid for with high tariffs on imported goods, 

John Q wanted to push it across the Ohio border to the Mississippi River, binding the nation together ideologically and economically. And Baltimore would be the national port for everything that came down or went up that road.

And then there was the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (above); also partly paid for with tariff revenues, and well begun in 1827, snaking west to the headwaters of the Ohio River. It also began in Baltimore, and, with the Wabash and Erie Canal in far off Indiana, would draw corn and pork grown on the frontier down its stone lined walls to be shipped through Baltimore, and then to the world. 

And now, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, raising funds and laying plans, intended, someday, to connect by iron rails the farms and mines of the Mississippi Valley directly back to Baltimore. The Baltimore American newspaper urged the city to “imitate the spider and spread her lines towards every point of the compass...The present generation are able to pay interest; let the next generation pay the principle.”

That last sentence was a perfect encapsulation for John Q's “American System”, and a century later, President Eisenhower's interstate highway system - investing in infrastructure today, so future generations could enjoy the harvest. The next evening, after another full day, John Q was the guest of honor at a dinner of the Society of the Cincinnati, named after the Roman Senator who left his plow to lead soldiers of the Republic, and then returned to his farm. This night John Q gave the final toast, to “Baltimore, the Monumental City (above) - may the days of her safety be as prosperous and happy as the days of her danger have been trying and triumphant!” 

It was an optimistic view of the nation's future. But there were men, like Roger Tawny (above), who saw nothing but threats in the future. Threats to their social status. Threats to their political power. Threats to black slavery, upon which it all rested.  And they would do whatever needed to be done to ensure the future did not come.

In far off Concord, New Hampshire, resided a man often accused of being demented, insane and mad – the lunatic's name was Isaac Hill (above). He had been owner and editor of the weekly newspaper, The Patriot, since 1809, and while serving  in the New Hampshire legislature had developed a reputation as a gadfly and political arsonist. He was a Jackson supporter and also saw nothing promising in the future. Readers were entertained by his vitriol, vendettas and conspiracy theories.  

He called Secretary-of-State Henry Clay, "The Great Compromiser)  “...a shyster, pettifogging in a bastard suit before a country squire" - the squire being President, John Q. Adams.”  Hill saw the National Road as a violation of the Constitution, because it spent tariffs collected in New England, to build a road in Pennsylvania. He saw Adam's American System of internal improvements as a power grab. You get the feeling he hated Adams more because Adams was popular in New England, while Isaac Hill was not.

And it was as the election of 1828 approached, that The Patriot ran a biographical sketch of Andrew Jackson, in which the 38 year old Isaac Hill told the world John Quincy Adams was a pimp. It seems, said Hill, that while serving as America's ambassador to Russia, John Q had presented an innocent American servant girl, to be ravaged by the Czar. 

The accusation exploded across anti-Adams newspapers like a wild fire. The story had everything for Adams haters – sex, as only a puritan New Englander could enjoy it, with disapproval -  degenerate European royalty – who prayed to a bizarre God at that - Adams as a stuck up prude willing to compromise his scruples for success, and a innocent American maiden, giving up her naked body only to force. Why, said the Democratic newspapers, Adams ought to be hung from the nearest tree.

It took John Q (above) a little time to figure out Hill was the origin of the story about Martha Godfry, and her innocent brief encounter from twenty years earlier. But when he did, the truth was rushed into print. The only problem was, the truth had no sex, no degenerate royalty, no tension or dramatic structure. And thus the truth made for really bad politics. And Adams did not speak out about it, did not address the smear in public, nor did he demand that Jackson denounce Hill as a fraud and madman. And, in much the same way as in 2004, when candidate Senator John Kerry did not denounce the so called Swift Boat Veterans and POW's for Truth, the case against him sat as an unanswered accusation. In the latter case a decorated military veteran had his courage questioned. And in 1828, a long standing patriot, John Quincy Adams, had his honor questioned.

Somebody should have punched John Q right in the nose. Because he thought it was beneath him,  to defend himself against such an accusation.  And that just made the accusation appear true.  

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1828 - A PUNCH IN THE NOSE

I am still angry with John Quincy Adams (above). Yes, he has been dead for 164 years, perhaps the only man to have died in the offices of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. But whenever I think about what he did not do, I want to go back to 1828, and just slap him. Its not that he was without honor. He remains the only President who left the White House and then served 18 years in Congress. And the current craze for large expensive Presidential libraries began with the modest one built in his honor, by his son Francis. But then, I guess Francis felt the need to honor his father, since he was partly responsible for John Q. being a one term President. Not that Charles was to blame, but he was responsible. John Quincy Adams was the Adams to blame for his abbreviated Presidency.

See, in 1809, John Quincy was the first American Ambassador to Russia. But as a diplomat John Quincy had only two qualifications. First, he was very, very smart. And second, he was his father's son. Having accompanied John Adams to Paris to represent the Continental Congress during the revolution, and after the war, to England, John Q was the best trained diplomat in America. On the negative side, neither his father nor John Quincy had the personality for the job. He would later describe himself in his own diary as a “man of reserved, cold, austere, and forbidding manners.” If it hadn't been for his wife, the vivacious and politically astute English-born Louisa, (above) John Q. would have been a complete failure as a diplomat. But even she found the Adams men “cold and insensitive”. Louisa's regrets, and her migraine headaches, may have had something to do with John Quincy's parenting skills. He had none. Both of his older sons became alcoholics.

Anyway, when in 1809 President James Madison appointed John Quincy as ambassador to Russia, Louisa had to leave the older boys at home, and drag two year old Charles on the 80 day sea voyage to St. Petersburg. Louisa brought along her chambermaid, Martha Godfry, who would also serve as Charles' nurse. John Q described Martha as “a very beautiful girl”, and it seems she must have been pleasant as well. In any case, Martha also played her part in the future political troubles of President John Q.

Martha was from a servant class family, and sent a letter back to her mother in Boston, saying she had arrived safely, and how magnificent the Romanov court was, and how handsome the Czar (above) was, and how the women at court practically fainted if he looked at them. Well, the Russian secret police were just as efficient in the 19^th century as they would be under the Communists, and they opened Martha's letters. And since the writing was complementary of the Czar, they copied Martha's letters, and showed the copies to Czar Alexander I. The Czar was flattered, and hearing the girl was pretty, he concocted a way to meet her. He contrived to have the daughter of one of his visiting in-laws, the young princess Amelia of Baden, invite Charles to a play date. And when Martha arrived with the boy, the Czar just happened to stop by for a quick visit. He brought along his German wife, Elizabeth (below), as cover.

Alexander spent a few minutes talking to the boy, and tried to strike up a conversation with the beautiful Martha. But either she was too nervous or too naive, or he did not find her as attractive as John Q did, or maybe the Czarina smelled the testosterone in the room, but in any case after this brief encounter, Charles and Martha were never invited back. Alexander went back to his mistress, Maria Antonovna Naryshkina, and Czarina Elizabeth went back to her lover, Adam Czartoryski. As for Martha, after she was debriefed by John Q. - who managed to miss the entire subtext of the encounter – she was allowed to retreat to her bedroom, where she composed a detailed letter to her Mother of the exciting day she actually spoke to the Russian Czar. The secret police must have been sorely disappointed with that month's American diplomatic pouch.

All of that, remember, was twenty years in the past, when President John Q arrived in Baltimore on the afternoon of Sunday, October 14, 1827 – 5 months after Roger Tawny and friends met to plot the President's defeat. The President had sailed down the Chesapeake Bay to dedicate a memorial to the 1814 Battle of Baltimore, but took the opportunity to do a little politicking. Noting the town was also constructing the nation's first memorial to George Washington, he called Baltimore the “city of monuments”, knowing the phrase would stick. He even stayed over an extra day, to attend the funeral of Revolutionary War hero, General John Edgar Howard. And that night John Q spent three hours shaking hands and speaking with some 2,000 locals.

In 1824 Baltimore had gone heavily for Jackson, but logic seemed to dictate the town should support Adams in 1828. The city was the starting point for the Cumberland Highway, now called the National Road. This had been the dream of George Washington, and already snaked west through the mountains toward Pittsburgh. Paid for with high tariffs on imported goods, John Q wanted to push it across the Ohio border to the Mississippi River, binding the nation together ideologically and economically. And Baltimore would be the Atlantic port for everything that came down that road.

And then there was the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal; also partly paid for with tariff revenues, and well begun in 1827, snaking west to the headwaters of the Ohio River. It also began in Baltimore, and with the Wabash and Erie Canal in far off Indiana, would draw corn and pork grown on the frontier down its stone lined walls to be shipped through Baltimore, and then to the world. 

And now, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, raising funds and laying plans, intended, someday, to connect by steel the farms and mines of the Mississippi Valley directly to Baltimore. The Baltimore American urged the city to “imitate the spider and spread her lines towards every point of the compass...The present generation are able to pay interest; let the next generation pay the principle.”

That last sentence was a perfect encapsulation for John Q's “American System”, and a century later, President Eisenhower's interstate highway system - investing in infrastructure today, so future generations could enjoy the harvest. The next evening, after another full day, John Q was the guest of honor at a dinner of the Society of the Cincinnati, named after the Roman Senator who left his plow to lead soldiers of the Republic, and then returned to his farm. This night John Q gave the final toast, to “Baltimore, the Monumental City (above) - may the days of her safety be as prosperous and happy as the days of her danger have been trying and triumphant!” It was an optimistic view of the nation's future. But there were men, like Roger Tawny, who preferred to look backward and saw nothing but threats in the future. And they would do whatever needed to be done to ensure the future did not come.

In far off Concord, New Hampshire, resided a man often accused of being demented, insane and mad – the lunatic's name was Isaac Hill (above). He had been owner and editor of the weekly newspaper, The Patriot, since 1809, and while serving  in the New Hampshire legislature had developed a reputation as a gadfly and political arsonist. He also saw nothing promising in the future. Readers were entertained by his vitriol, vendettas and conspiracies - he was a sort of Michelle Bachmann in knee britches. He called Secretary-of-State Henry Clay, “a shyster, pettifogging in a bastard suit before a country squire" - meaning the President, John Q. Adams.”  Hill saw the National Road as a violation of the Constitution, because it spent tariffs collected in New England, to build a road in Pennsylvania. He saw Adam's American System of internal improvements as a power grab. You get the feeling he hated Adams more because Adams was popular in New England, while Isaac Hill was not.

And it was as the election of 1828 approached, that The Patriot ran a biographical sketch of Andrew Jackson, in which the 38 year old Isaac Hill told the world John Quincy Adams was a pimp. It seems, said Hill, that while serving as America's ambassador to Russia, John Q had presented an innocent American servant girl, to be ravaged by the Czar. The accusation exploded across anti-Adams newspapers like a wild fire. The story had everything for Adams haters – sex, as only a puritan New Englander could enjoy it, with disapproval- degenerate European royalty – who prayed to a bizarre God at that - Adams as a stuck up prude willing to compromise his scruples for success, and a innocent American maiden, giving up her naked body only to force.

It took John Q a little time to figure out Hill was writing about Martha Godfry, and her innocent brief encounter from twenty years earlier. But when he did, the truth was rushed into print. The only problem was, the truth had no sex, no degenerate royalty, no tension or dramatic structure. And thus the truth made for really bad politics. And Adams did not speak out about it, did not address the smear in public, nor did he demand that Jackson denounce Hill as a fraud and madman. And, in much the same way as in 2004, when candidate Senator John Kerry did not denounce the so called Swift Boat Veterans and POW's for Truth, the case against him sat as an unanswered accusation. In the latter case a decorated military veteran had his courage questioned. And in 1828, a long standing patriot, John Quincy Adams, had his honor questioned.

Somebody should have punched John Q right in the nose. Because he thought it was beneath him,  to defend himself against such an accusation.  

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