John Quincy Adams by Harlow Unger

interest in scholarly pursuits, including poetry. By spring, when the time came to return to Quincy, he had reread Childe Harold , Don Juan , and other works of Lord Byron—and written his own epic, 2,000-line poem titled Dermot MacMorrogh , on Henry II’s conquest of Ireland. He considered it his finest work and at least one publisher agreed, producing three successive editions. z On the way north, he stopped to see former President James Monroe, who was gravely ill in New York and destitute, living off the charity of his daughter and son-in-law at their New York City home.
    After his return to Quincy, town officials invited him to give the July 4 oration, and he set to work drafting a fierce attack on the doctrine of “nullification,” which had regained currency in the South in response to high federal tariffs on cotton goods. Thomas Jefferson had fathered the concept in 1798, when he was vice president and opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts of President John Adams. Declaring the Constitution only “a compact” among sovereign states, Jefferson insisted that the states retained authority to restrain actions by the federal government that exceeded its constitutional mandate. Jefferson persuaded the Kentucky legislature to approve a resolution allowing it to declare unconstitutional any federal government exercise of powers not specifically delegated by the Constitution. His protégé, James Madison, marched in lockstep and convinced the Virginia legislature “to interpose” its authority to prevent federal “exercise
of . . . powers” not granted by the Constitution. 5 Federalist legislatures in other states, however, declared the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions “mad and rebellious” and rejected them by declaring U.S. courts to be the sole judges of constitutionality.
    Vice President John C. Calhoun subsequently revived southern interest in the concept with an essay he called “South Carolina Exposition and Protest.” In it, he insisted that the Tenth Amendment gave every state the right to nullify a federal act that it deemed a violation of the Constitution. In his July 4 oration in Quincy, John Quincy countered by labeling the concept of state sovereignty a “hallucination” and nothing “less than treason”—a fierce charge that resounded across the country after an enterprising printer distributed more than 4,000 copies of his speech nationwide.
    As John Quincy delivered his oration, the President he had served for eight years died in New York—joining John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as the third of the first five Presidents to die on July 4. Asked to deliver a eulogy for Monroe at Boston’s Old South Church, John Quincy produced a stirring reminder of Monroe’s courage as an officer during the Revolution, “weltering in his blood on the field of Trenton for the cause of his country.” Then John Quincy turned to his own—and Monroe’s—favorite subject: public improvements. He urged mourners to “look at the map of United North America, as it was . . . in 1783. Compare it with the map of that same Empire as it is now. . . . The change, more than of any other man, living or dead, was the work of James Monroe.” John Quincy recalled how Monroe had scoffed at Congress for denying it had “the power of appropriating money for the construction of a canal to connect the waters of Chesapeake Bay with the Ohio.” 6 He portrayed the “unspeakable blessings” of Monroe’s vision of a transnational network of roads and canals. “Sink down, ye mountains!” John Quincy called out. “And ye valleys—rise!”
    Exult and shout for joy! Rejoice! that . . . there are neither Rocky Mountains nor oases of the desert, from the rivers of the Southern [Pacific] Ocean to the shores of the Atlantic Sea; Rejoice! that . . . the waters of the Columbia mingle in union with the streams of