The Good Old Times: A Scuffle Between Monroe and Crawford

In Volume VII of the "Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of his Diary," there is a curious passage, showing how some of "the Fathers" could behave in a very undignified manner, on occasion. Mr. Asbury Dickens, on the 9th of December, 1826, told President Adams, writes the latter in his Diary, "that, a few weeks before the close of the Monroe Administration, some words used by Mr. Monroe to Mr. Crawford had induced the latter to abstain thenceforward from coming to the White House, or ever seeing Mr. Monroe again. When Mr. Southard, Secretary of the Navy, came in, I asked him if this fact had been known to him. He said, yes; that one day last winter, on coming here on business, he found Mr. Monroe walking to and fro across the room, in great agitation; that he told him Crawford, Secretary of the Treasury, had just left him; he had come to him concerning the nomination of certain officers of the Customs in the Northern ports; that Crawford recommended the nomination of several persons, against whom Mr. Monroe had expressed several objections; that Mr. Crawford at last rose in much irritation, and said, petulantly, 'Well, if you will not appoint the persons well qualified for the places, tell me whom you will appoint, that I may get rid of their importunities.' Mr. Monroe replied with great warmth, saying that he considered Crawford's language as extremely improper, and unsuitable to the relations between them; when Crawford, turning to him, raised his cane, as in the attitude to strike, and said, 'You damned infernal old scoundrel.' Mr. Monroe seized the tongs at the fire place for self-defence, applied a retaliatory epithet to Crawford, and told him he would immediately ring for servants himself, and turn him out of the house; upon which Crawford, beginning to recover himself, said he did not intend, and had not intended, to insult him, and left the house. They never met afterward. Mr. Southard does not recollect the precise day on which this happened. I told him that if I had known it at the time, I should not have invited Mr. Crawford to remain in the Treasury Department. It resembles the scene between Bolingbroke and Oxford in the last days of Queen Anne." At the time of this scene Mr. Crawford was fifty-three years old, and President Monroe was sixty-six.

Writing of Mr. Crawford, on the 4th of December, 1827, Mr. Adams said, "Treachery of the deepest dye is at the bottom of Crawford's character. It was, before his malady, combined with strong mental powers, little cultivated, and a desperate energy of soul. The whole composition was more like one of Milton's fallen angels than that of any other man I ever knew, excepting, that Milton has made his devils true to each other. Since his paralysis, Crawford has lost much of his memory, much of his judgment, and some of his address. What he has lost of these he has gained in nervous irritability and morbid energy."

On the 22d of February, 1828, Mr. Adams wrote of Mr. Calhoun, "Calhoun is a man of considerable talent and burning ambition, stimulated to frenzy by success, flattery, and premature advancement; governed by no steady principle, but sagacious to seize upon every prevailing popular breeze to swell his own sails; showering favors with lavish hand to make partisans, without discernment in the choice of his instruments, and the dupe and tool of every knave cunning enough to drop the oil of fools in his ears."

The more we look for those good old times in which all men were saints, and all women angels, the more do we succeed in not finding them.