Professional Documents
Culture Documents
How John Quincy Adams Built Our Continental Republic
How John Quincy Adams Built Our Continental Republic
Pages 6-7
American Almanac
domination, the fight led by John Quincy Adams against this self-same
enemy of civilization more than 150 years ago, is most instructive.
A Son of the American Revolution
John Quincy Adams was a son of the American Revolution. His father, John
Adams, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a leading figure of
the Revolution, a champion of the new Constitution, the first Vice President
and second President of the United States.
As remarkable as was the father, the son accomplished even more. John
Quincy Adams shaped the foundations of American foreign policy, and the
future of the United States as a continental republic. For almost five decades, he played a leading role in the development of the young republic.
It was Adams who was most responsible for extending the United States
beyond the Mississippi River, over the Rocky Mountains and to the Pacific
Ocean. In 1803, he urged Thomas Jefferson to go ahead with the Louisiana
Purchase from France, and he was the only senator from the Northeastern
states who voted for it. Adams was the negotiator, in 1815, who accomplished the return of the area south of the Columbia River in the Oregon
Territory to the United States after the War of 1812. As secretary of state in
1818, he negotiated the purchase of Florida from Spain.
Finally, and most important, during the period of 1817 to 1825, Adams
ensured that most of the Pacific Coast of America would become part of the
United States. Each of these accomplishments was, for Adams, a battle in a
larger wara war between the forces of republicanism in the Americas and
Europe, versus the Holy Alliance powers of Russia, Austria, and Great
Britain. Adams knew that the United States was the bulwark against the
Holy Alliance's attempt to restore the rule of "legitimacy"i.e. the divine
right of the oligarchy to rule over the affairs of this world.
John Quincy Adams was born in 1767. At the age of eight, he read his
father's letters written from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia about
the newly issued Declaration of Independence. In 1774, young John Quincy
joined the local militia in musket drill. A year later, in 1775, he witnessed
the Battle of Bunker Hill. The Adamses were descendants of New England
Puritans, the first of whom settled in Massachusetts in 1640. John Quincy's
mother, Abigail Adams, was one of the most important women of the Revolutionary period. She was probably the best-educated woman in America at
the time.
and later, his five years in St. Petersburg as U.S. ambassador to Russian from
1809-14. There he learned first-hand the mortal danger which the feudal
oligarchical system represented to the young republic of the United States,
and especially that of the Russian Empire.
Third Rome: Make the Pacific A Russian Lake
As this newspaper has repeatedly documented, the 20th-century Russian
empire of Lenin, Stalin, and Gorbachev is nothing but a continuation of a
policy, originating in the late 15th century, of making Moscow a Third and
Final Roman Empire, destined to rule the world forever. During the early
18th century, Russia's imperial designs included efforts to make the North
Pacific Ocean into a Russian lake.
Russian policy at this time was to expand Russian America (as it was called
at the time), which already extended from the Aleutian Islands to the gates of
San Francisco, to complete control over the entire western shore of the
Americas. At the same time, plans were being laid to seize Hawaii. Yet
before Russia could even begin to think of taking control of the Pacific, it
had to reach it. At the time of the promulgation of the Third Rome policy,
the vast expanse of Siberiathousands of miles of wildernessstood
between Moscow and the Pacific Ocean.
To the West, the superior culture and economic-military power represented
by Western Europe acted as a firm barrier against Russian expansion. But
the sparsely settled and backward regions of the eastern two-thirds of the
Eurasian land mass, proved to be a relatively easy conquest for Moscow.
Expansion began in the 1550s, with Ivan the Terrible, the first of the czars to
dedicate himself to the Third Rome doctrine. By the mid-15505, Ivan's
armies had reached the Caspian Sea. By 1628, the Russians had reached the
Lena River in Siberia. In 1637, they established a fort at Yakutsk, and in
1639 they reached the Pacific Ocean in the neighborhood of Okhotsk. By
the middle of the 17th century, Russia controlled all of Siberia.
About 4,500 miles of eastward expansion had been accomplished in 100
years. The attempt to go south was, for the time being, thwarted by a
powerful Manchu Empire in China.
In 1715, Czar Peter the Great, on a visit to Paris, learned about the general
ignorance in Europe of the North Pacific. He decided to send out an expedition from Siberia to learn whether Siberia was connected by land with North
America. He chose the Dane, Vitus Bering, a captain in the Russian Navy,
as his commander. When Peter died in 1725, his widow Catherine I carried
out his program. After many false starts and delays, Bering finally made a
serious voyage in 1741. This voyage discovered the Aleutians and the
Alaska mainland.
Territorial Claims and Adjustments on The Pacific Coast, 1818-67
While official Russian policy toward the American West Coast in the late
1700s was one of neglect, fur traders drawn by the enormously rich trapping
areas of Alaska established one settlement after another. Kodiak and Fort
Alexander were established in 1784 and 1787 by Gregory Ivanovich
Shelikov. Shelikov was running a very large fur business, and in 1789
pleaded with Catherine directly to send a large ecclesiastical mission to the
Alaska settlements. He also outlined plans for establishing trading relations
with the entire American and Asiatic sea-coast, and outlined the plan for
moving into the Amur Valley of China, which, based on his plan was
realized with the founding of Vladivostok sixty years later.
Nicholas Petrovich Rezanov (1764-1806), a noble at the St. Petersburg court
was to become the spokesman for the implementation of Shelikov's program. Rezanov convinced Czar Paul in 1799 to found the Russia-America
Company, which was modeled on the British East and West Indies Companies. The company was authorized to make "new discoveries not only
north of 55 but also further to the south and to accept the lands which it
discovered under Russian government." This was a clear statement of intent
to exclude the British and the Americans from the Pacific area. The RussiaAmerica Company was to be the official arm of St. Petersburg in the North
Pacific.
Czar Paul was assassinated in 1801, bringing Alexander I to the throne.
Alexander was more aware of and favorable to the plans of Shelikov.
Alexander took the company under his protection.
In 1790, Shelikov appointed Alexander Andreyevich Barzanov to run the
Kodiak colony. Barzanov became the outstanding man in Russian America.
Soon, an ecclesiastical mission arrived in Kodiak and began converting the
natives to the Russian Orthodox Church. By 1805, Barzanov, now the
official governor in Alaska, had established a Russian colony in Sitka,
almost 1,000 miles south Kodiak.
In 1805 Rezanov visited Barzanov in Alaska. After assessing that the
miserable existence of the small colonies would never realize their plans,
Rezanov determined to transfer the entire colony to the region of the
Columbia River. An exploratory party was sent out, but word came of the
Lewis and Clark expedition, so they by-passed the Columbia and landed at
San Francisco.
west: Astoria, seized by the British during the war, was to be returned to
American control; British traders were not allowed to trap and hunt below
the Columbia River; and the entire Oregon Territory was placed under joint
control.
This agreement was the substance of a new treaty negotiated by Adams in
1818. The 1818 treaty specified that the joint occupation of the Oregon
Territory, north of the Columbia and south of the 55th parallel, was to run
for ten years. This treaty was renewed in 1827 and 1837.
Meanwhile, the Russians, having conceded the Oregon Territory to the
Americans and the British, were more determined than ever to take
California. In 1811, Ivan Kuskov, number-two man to Barzanov, began
building Fort Ross near Bodega Bay, 30 miles north of San Francisco, with
the strategic aim of driving the Spanish out of California entirely.
It was while the Russians were building up their California settlement at Fort
Ross, that they made their move on Hawaii, already a strategic choke-point
in world politics. The islands lie across the main routes between the American Pacific Coast and the main ports on the eastern shores of Asia. In the
days of sailing ships, even those going to American ports after rounding
Cape Horn would stop at Hawaii for supplies and rest, since Spanish authorities in South America were not too hospitable.
Since no manpower or military backup would be forthcoming from St.
Petersburg, Barzanov decided on a plan of gradual infiltration into the
islands. All went well until he sent a German, Dr. George Anton Schaefer,
who had been in Alaska for some time, to Hawaii to negotiate with the
Hawaiian king. Schaefer, after ingratiating himself by his services to the
king, then moved too fast. A gift of land from the king to Schaefer in 1816
was immediately turned into a fort and the Russian flag was raised. This
was too much for the king and his American friends. The Americans
attacked his fort, captured Schaefer and his crew and put them on a leaky
ship. Schaefer barely made it back to Sitka.
This ended the Russian threat to Hawaii. Czar Alexander was, at that time
trying to strengthen the Holy Alliance in Europe and continue to build the
Fort Ross settlement in California. He had no need of a new crisis with both
his Holy Alliance partner Great Britain and with America, over Hawaii.
America, of course, was watching the California and Hawaii thrusts by
Russia. In 1817, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams sent an emissary to
Astoria to officially take it back from the British, as agreed upon in the
Treaty of Ghent.
Adams Takes On the Holy Alliance
Adams was still in Russia when Napoleon invaded in 1812, and watched
with fascination as the Russian in-depth capabilities were gradually
unleashed against the French army. In a letter to his father, Adams
expressed his belief that such a country as Russia was too formidable even
for a Napoleon. Forever fixed in his mind from these experiences was the
idea that the Russian system was absolutely incompatible with that of
America. It was also in Russia that Adams first formulated the idea that the
United States should be a continental nation, stretching from the Atlantic to
the Pacific.
In June of 1811, he wrote to his mother:
If that Party [the Federalist Junto of New England] are not
effectually put down in Massachusetts, as completely as they
already are in New York, and Pennsylvania, and all the southern
and western states, the Union is gone. Instead of a nation,
coextensive with the North American continent, destined by
God and nature to be the populous and most powerful people
ever combined under one social compact, we shall have an
endless multitude of little insignificant clans and tribes at
eternal war with one another for a rock, or a fish pond, the sport
and fable of European masters and oppressors.
In 1815 Adams was the chairman of the American delegation that negotiated
an end to the War of 1812. From 1815 to 1817, he was the U.S. ambassador
to Great Britain. He returned to America in 1817 to assume the duties of
secretary of state in the administration of James Monroe. For the next eight
years, the United States was favored with the best, toughest, and most farsighted secretary of state in its history.
In Europe, the Holy Alliance among Britain, Austria, and Russia ruled, with
the sole purpose of crushing republicanism, both in Europe and the Americas. Adams had no illusions about the nature of the Holy Alliance, or about
the fundamental conflict between the oligarchical system it represented, and
the republican system favored by the United States. In his Fourth of July
address of 1821 Adams said:
The Lewis and Clark Northwest expedition of 1803-06: This etching of the
explorers meeting with Indians was published in 1807; the Whitman Mission,
established in the Oregon Territory by Marcus Whitman in the 1830s; a
scene from John C. Fremont's report on his 1843-44 exploration of the
Oregon Trail.
"essential rights." It would not, he said, close it, but just keep everyone 100
miles out.
Adams told Poletica that the United States would not for one moment
acquiesce to this policy. It would never admit the Russian claims or give up
the right of its citizens to freedom of the seas and to trade in the Northwest.
It was after this exchange that the czar backed off from enforcing his edict.
At this point a New England opium trader began agitation to force the
United States government to take more aggressive action on the Oregon
question. This was Capt. William Sturgis (1782-1863), founder of the
shipping and trading firm Bryant and Sturgis. The Sturgis family was part of
the Boston Perkins syndicate and was directly related to the British-Swiss
Baring banking empire.
William Sturgis had explored the Northwest Pacific Coast as early as 1798,
and for more than 30 years played a Jesuitical role in the Oregon dispute. In
1822, Sturgis wrote a series of articles in the Boston Daily Advertiser. In
these articles, he promoted establishing a naval post in Puget Sound to
protect American trading and merchant ships (i.e. his company's opium
trade), and deprecated the idea of ever establishing an American settlement
on the Columbia River. He said it would be wrong to encourage any settlement of American emigrants in the Oregon Territory because the region was
too remote to ever be part of the United States. This, of course, was the
exact opposite of Adams's outlook and policy.
Sturgis unleashed a tremendous publicity campaign for his views. He
repeated and elaborated his plans in another article in October 1822 in the
North American Review.
Sturgis's intervention at this time, while motivated by his opium-trading
interests and the interests of the British bankers to prevent any permanent
American settlement, had a quite different result than he intended. Up to
this time, the Pacific Northwest was not a subject of wide interest in the
country. Adams now used the popular interest in Oregon to further his
policy of knocking both the Russians and the British completely out of the
territory.
Adams knew that a serious conflict with Britain over the Northwest coast at
this time would be premature. Yet, all the agitation in Congress and by
Sturgis was forcing him to act.
of Russia, spokesman for the Holy Alliance, would intervene with France to
support Spain to recover her now lost-colonies.
At a cabinet meeting in November, to discuss both the proposal from
Canning and the threat from Russia, Adams stated:
It affords a very suitable and convenient opportunity for us to
take our stand against the Holy Alliance and at the same time to
decline the overture of Great Britain. It would be more candid,
as well as more dignified, to avow our principles explicitly to
Russia and France, than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake
of the British man-of-war.
Monroe agreed.
On Nov. 20, Adams put forward in exact terms what the world would soon
know as the Monroe Doctrine.
My purpose (he told the cabinet) would be in a moderate and
conciliatory manner, but with a firm and determined spirit, to
declare our dissent from the principles avowed in those communications; to assert those upon which our own Government is
founded, and, while disclaiming all intention of attempting to
propagate them by force, and all interference with the political
affairs of Europe, to declare our expectation and hope that the
European powers will equally abstain from the attempt to
spread their principles in the American hemisphere, or to
subjugate by force any part of these continents to their will.
Having formulated the fundamental ideas to be set before the nations of the
world, that the United States was now to directly challenge the oligarchical
system of Europe, and that of Russia in particular, Adams responded to the
Russian threats. On Nov. 27, he read to the Russian minister his "Observations on the Communications recently received from the Minister of Russia."
At the time, Adams considered this the most important state paper he had
ever written. The government of the United States, stated the document,
recognized the right of nations to establish and modify their own governments according to their own judgments. While espousing the republican
principle, it had not sought by the propagation of its own principles to
disturb the peace or to meddle with the policy of any part of Europe. It had
recognized the established independence of the former Spanish colonies, and
entered into political and commercial relations with them. In the existing
contest between these states and their mother country, the United States
would remain neutral as long as the European powers, apart from Spain, did
so.
The "Observations" closed with a direct challenge to the Russian intention of
intervening in America:
The United States of America, and their Government, could not
see with indifference, the forcible interposition of any European
Power, other than Spain, either to restore the dominion of Spain
over her emancipated Colonies in America, or to establish
Monarchical Governments in those Countries, or to transfer any
of the possessions heretofore or yet subject to Spain in the
American Hemisphere, to any other European power.
Just a few short days elapsed before President Monroe delivered his annual
message to Congress on December 2, 1823, known today as the Monroe
Doctrine.
The Russians and the British were shocked by Monroe's announcement.
Both realized that they had been outflanked by Adams; but there was little
they could do, since their mutually conflicting aims in the Americas
prevented joint action against the United States.
Kicking Russia Out of North America
Adams's negotiations with the Russians proceeded smoothly, and an
agreement was signed on April 5, 1824, which was almost exactly what he
had proposed the year before. Russia gave up her pretensions to be the lord
of the North Pacific (at least for the time being). She accepted her boundary
with the United States to be 54 40", and did not insist upon a recognition of
Russian sovereignty north of that parallel. As far as the Russians were
concerned, Adams's non-colonization principle was intact. What this
agreement also did was to squeeze the British out of the North American
Pacific entirely, at least on paper.
About a year later, with Adams now President of the United States, the
Russians and British came to an agreement, which set their respective
boundaries in the region at the lines that define the borders of Alaska today.
Monroe's 1823 speech in doing so. It was finally time for the showdown
with the British over the northern boundary question. Adams, of course,
supported the President.
But, fearful of a double war (with Britain and, to the south, with Mexico),
Polk "flinched," as Adams put it. Polk accepted Britain's latest offer: the
line of 49 through to salt waterAdams's fallback option of 25 years
earlier. There is no question that, had Polk not "flinched," the British could
have been forced as far north as 54 40". The treaty making the 49th parallel
the boundary between American and British territory was signed in 1846.
John Quincy Adams had made possible the Oregon Treaty of 1846. As a
young senator from Massachusetts, home of the treasonous Essex Junto, he
had helped Jefferson acquire the Louisiana Territory, thereby holding to the
latitude of the Lake of the Woods (49th parallel) instead of the source of the
Mississippi as the future point of departure westward. As Minister to Russia
he held the area gained on the Northwest Coast by American explorers and
traders. As negotiator at the Treaty of Ghent he returned Astoria to American hands. As Secretary of State he drew the parallel of 49 west to the
Rocky Mountains. Then, with the Transcontinental Treaty with Spain he set
the Spanish boundary at 42 from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, which
was the first treaty acknowledgement of American title on the Pacific Coast.
He created the Monroe Doctrine, which set in motion the process by which
the United States would drive the Russians and British from the Americas.
He put through the Russian Treaty of 1824, narrowing down the Oregon
Question to the United States and Britain. He and his associates held the
line above the Columbia River against Britain through the years when it
would have been given away by traitors.
America Purchases Alaska
Before we conclude, we must wrap up the history of the Russian presence on
the American shores. By 1833 there were fewer than 200 people at Fort
Ross. Americans were pouring into the region, and it was merely a matter of
time before Russia's California dream would come to an end. In 1841 the
Russia-America Company sold the entire settlement to John Sutter, who had
built his own fort just 20 miles away.
Finally, the Russians were out of California; out of Hawaii; and pushed
north to 54 40" in Alaska.
Then, with the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 between Russia on one
side, and Britain and France on the other, the fear that the British would
attempt to take Alaska dominated Russian thinking. In typical oligarchical
fashion, the Russians and British came to an agreement during the war to put
their American possessions "off limits" to hostilities for the duration. With
the end of the war in 1856, selling Alaska became official Russian government policy. In 1861, negotiations for the sale to the United States were
frozen for the duration of the American Civil War. They resumed again in
1864, as the Russians became confident of the Union's victory. The sale was
completed in June 1867.
Russian Third Rome policy for the Pacific then shifted gears. Blocked and
pushed out on the American side, they began to move south on the Asiatic
side. Using a combination of trading operations and outright military conquest, the Russians took the Amur and Ussuri regions from China and
founded the city of Vladivostok (the ruler of the east). Shortly thereafter, an
agreement with Japan gave Russia the island of Sakhalin. With this, Russia's
position on the Asiatic side of the North Pacific was stabilized and consolidated.
An 1859 letter to St. Petersburg from the director of the Russia-America
Company underlines the importance, today, of acting on the foreign policy
principles established by John Quincy Adams. Indicating that the Russians
would not be easily dissuaded from their aspirations in the Pacific, the
director wrote:
Our interests are on the Asiatic coast and we must direct our
energy to that. There we are on our own territory and have for
exploitation the production of a large, rich region. We will take
part in an extraordinary activity, developing from the Pacific
Ocean, our institutions will rival those of other nations and with
the care which our most august Sovereign is giving to the
maritime part of Amur, we must not lose the possibility of
acquiring in this ocean a great significance, worthy of Russia.