The most important, perplexing, and time-consuming duties then called for by the condition of public affairs happened to fall within Mr. Adams's department. Monroe's administration has been christened the "era of good feeling;" and, so far as political divisions among the people at large were concerned, this description is correct enough. There were no great questions of public policy dividing the nation. There could hardly be said to be two political parties. With the close of the war the malcontent Federalists had lost the only substantial principle upon which they had been able vigorously to oppose the administration, and as a natural consequence the party rapidly shrank to insignificant proportions, and became of hardly more importance than were the Jacobites in England after their last hopes had (p. 105) been quenched by the failure of the Rebellion of '45. The Federalist faith, like Jacobitism, lingered in a few neighborhoods, and was maintained by a few old families, who managed to associate it with a sense of their own pride and dignity; but as an effective opposition or influential party organization it was effete, and no successor was rising out of its ruins. In a broad way, therefore, there was political harmony to a very remarkable degree.
But among individuals there was by no means a prevailing good feeling. Not held together by the pressure exerted by the antagonism of a strong hostile force, the prominent men of the Cabinet and in Congress were busily employed in promoting their own individual interests. Having no great issues with which to identify themselves, and upon which they could openly and honorably contend for the approval of the nation, their only means for securing their respective private ends lay in secretly overreaching and supplanting each other. Infinite skill was exerted by each to inveigle his rival into an unpopular position or a compromising light. By a series of precedents Mr. Adams, as Secretary of State, appeared most prominent as a candidate for the succession to the Presidency. But Mr. Crawford, in the Treasury Department, had been very near obtaining the nomination instead (p. 106) of Monroe, and he was firmly resolved to secure it so soon as Mr. Monroe's eight years should have elapsed. He, therefore, finding much leisure left upon his hands by the not very exacting business of his office, devoted his ingenuity to devising schemes for injuring the prestige of Mr. Adams. Mr. Clay also had been greatly disappointed that he had not been summoned to be Secretary of State, and so made heir apparent. His personal enmity was naturally towards Mr. Monroe; his political enmity necessarily also included Mr. Adams, whose appointment he had privately sought to prevent. He therefore at once set himself assiduously to oppose and thwart the administration, and to make it unsuccessful and unpopular. That Clay was in the main and upon all weighty questions an honest statesman and a real patriot must be admitted, but just at this period no national crisis called his nobler qualities into action, and his course was largely influenced by selfish considerations. It was not long before Mr. Calhoun also entered the lists, though in a manner less discreditable to himself, personally, than were the resources of Crawford and Clay. The daily narrations and comments of Mr. Adams display and explain in a manner highly instructive, if not altogether agreeable, the ambitions (p. 107) and the manoeuvres, the hollow alliances and unworthy intrigues, not only of these three, but also of many other estimable gentlemen then in political life. The difference between those days and our own seems not so great as the _laudatores temporis acti_ are wont to proclaim it. The elaborate machinery which has since been constructed was then unknown; rivals relied chiefly upon their own astuteness and the aid of a few personal friends and adherents for carrying on contests and attaining ends which are now sought by vastly more complex methods. What the stage-coach of that period was to the railroads of to-day, or what the hand-loom was to our great cotton mills, such also was the political intriguing of cabinet ministers, senators, and representatives to our present party machinery. But the temper was no better, honor was no keener, the sense of public duty was little more disinterested then than now. One finds no serious traces of vulgar financial dishonesty recorded in these pages, in which Mr. Adams has handed down the political life of the second and third decades of our century with a photographic accuracy. But one does not see a much higher level of faithfulness to ideal standards in political life than now exists.