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“The Champion of the Fenians”

The Democratic Nominee of Massachusetts

This cartoon parodies the incongruous situation of the Anglophile and
patrician Charles Francis Adams, the former U.S. minister to Britain,
nominated for governor by the Massachusetts Democratic Party, whose constituency
was heavily Irish-American (particularly in Boston). Interpreting
the nomination as one of shameless political self-interest, Nast adorns the dour Adams
with Irish hat, pipe, harp, and shamrocks.
"Fenians" is a term referring to Irish nationalists. The
image also includes a campaign button reminiscent of
Nast's 1871 cartoon of Boss Tweed's thumb descending on New York City. Charles
Francis Adams, the son of President John Quincy Adams and grandson of
President John Adams, was born in 1807 in Boston, Massachusetts.
He graduated from Harvard in 1827 and became a member of the
Massachusetts bar two years later. He spent years on scholarly
projects, writing historical essays, contributing reviews of other
historical works to North American Review, and editing the
correspondence of his paternal grandparents, President John Adams and
First Lady Abigail Adams, which were published, respectively, in
1850-1856 and 1840-1848.
Charles Francis Adams entered
politics in the early 1830s as an Anti-Mason, opposing the rites of the
Masonic Order as religiously heretical. After endorsing Democrat
Martin Van Buren in the 1836 presidential election, he later found favor
with the Whigs for criticizing Van Buren's policies. Initially
Adams believed that the U.S. Constitution protected slavery in the
Southern states, but the congressional gag order against antislavery
petitions and other events in the late 1830s convinced him
otherwise. He served in the Massachusetts House (1841-1843) and
Massachusetts Senate (1843-1845).
In the state legislature, Adams
quickly assumed leadership of the antislavery faction that became known
as the "Conscience" Whigs (versus the "Cotton"
Whigs). In 1846, he founded the party organ, the Boston Whig,
which he edited for its first two years. When the Whigs nominated
slaveowner and Mexican War hero General Zachary Taylor for president in
1848, Adams called for Conscience Whigs to hold their own national
convention. In August, they joined antislavery Democrats to form
the Free Soil Party, which opposed the expansion of slavery into the
Western territories. The new party nominated Van Buren for
president and Adams for vice president. They won 10% of the vote
and no electoral votes in the November election.
In 1856, Adams joined the new
Republican Party, which was also dedicated to halting the expansion of
slavery. In 1858, he was elected as a Republican to the first of
two consecutive terms in the U.S. Congress. In 1860, Adams
enthusiastically supported Senator William Henry Seward of New York for
the Republican nomination, but dutifully campaigned for Abraham Lincoln
in the general election. During the secession winter of 1860-1861,
Adams served on a special House committee established to craft a
compromise to save the Union. After Lincoln appointed Seward as
secretary of state, the New Yorker persuaded the president to name Adams
as U.S. minister to Great Britain, a position formerly held by his
father and grandfather.
Adams faced a difficult
situation in London. Many British officials assumed that
Confederate independence was inevitable, that the Civil War could
degenerate into a race war, and that the British economy would suffer
from prolonged fighting. A major diplomatic crisis began on
November 8, 1861, when a Union ship, the San Jacinto, stopped a
British vessel, the Trent, in international waters, and arrested
two Confederate diplomats aboard. Tensions in British rose to a
war fever pitch, and the British government demanded an apology.
On December 26, the Lincoln administration agreed to release the men,
and a calm Adams explained the American policy to the British, who
accepted it as an apology even though, strictly speaking, it was not.
The construction and refitting
in British shipyards of vessels used by the Confederate Navy tested
Adams's reserve, but he eventually convinced the British government to
change their policy. After the Civil War, much of Adams's time was
dedicated to dealing with the conflict caused by American demands that
the British government grant financial restitution to the United States
for damage done by the British-built Confederate ships; this was known
collectively as the Alabama claims. By the time Adams
resigned on April 1, 1868, his diplomacy was well respected in both the
United States and Britain. In 1871, he was appointed as the United
States representative at the Geneva tribunal that arbitrated the
financial award for the Alabama claims.
Upon
returning to the United States in the 1868, Adams became a critic of
Radical Republican policies for Reconstruction.
He warned against the centralization of political power, and
argued against granting black voting rights until federal troops were
withdrawn from the South.
Adams was one of the leading contenders for the presidential
nomination at the Liberal Republican Convention
on May 1-2,
1872.
He led in the early balloting, but lost to New York Tribune
editor Horace Greeley on the sixth ballot.
A number of factors had worked against Adams, including his
aloofness, advanced age (65), pro-British views, questionable commitment
to reform, and close association with the unpopular Senator Carl Schurz
of Missouri.
In early 1876, Schurz, having returned to the Republican fold, joined
Henry Cabot Lodge and other liberals to encourage the Republican Party
to nominate Adams for president. The
diplomat was uninterested, though, and the movement never gained
momentum. A few months
later, Adams endorsed the Democratic presidential nominee, Samuel J.
Tilden, who instructed his supporters in Massachusetts to work for
Adams’s nomination for governor.
Although selected by the Massachusetts Democrats, Adams did not
want the office and refused to campaign.
Tilden had assumed that having Adams at the top of the Democratic
ticket in the Massachusetts would boost his own chances to carry the
state in the presidential sweepstakes. In fact, Adams polled 2500 votes less than Tilden in the
November elections, and lost to the Republican nominee, Alexander
Hamilton Rice. A major factor was probably the defection of
Irish-Americans, especially in Boston, to the Republican candidate.
Adams continued his scholarly work, revising a
two-volume biography of his grandfather, John Adams, and publishing 12
volumes (1874-1877) of the memoirs of his father, John Quincy Adams.
He died in 1886.
Robert C. Kennedy
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