John Adair (January 9, 1757 – May 19, 1840) was an American pioneer, slave trader, soldier, and politician. He was the eighth governor of Kentucky and represented the state in both the U.S. House and Senate. A native of South Carolina, Adair enlisted in the state militia and served in the Revolutionary War, during which he was twice captured and held as a prisoner of war by the British. Following the War, he was elected as a delegate to South Carolina's convention to ratify the United States Constitution.
After moving to Kentucky in 1786, Adair participated in the Northwest Indian War, including a skirmish with the Miami Chief Little Turtle near Fort St. Clair in 1792. Popular for his service in two wars, he entered politics in 1792 as a delegate to Kentucky's constitutional convention. Adair was elected to a total of eight terms in the state House of Representatives between 1793 and 1803. He served as Speaker of the Kentucky House in 1802 and 1803, and was a delegate to the state's Second Constitutional Convention in 1799. He ascended to the United States Senate to fill the seat vacated when John Breckinridge resigned to become Attorney General of the United States in the Cabinet of Thomas Jefferson, but failed to win a full term in the subsequent election due to his implication in a treason conspiracy involving Vice President Aaron Burr. After a long legal battle, he was acquitted of any wrongdoing; and his accuser, General James Wilkinson, was ordered to issue an apology. The negative publicity kept him out of politics for more than a decade.
Adair's participation in the War of 1812, and a subsequent protracted defense of Kentucky's soldiers against General Andrew Jackson's charges that they showed cowardice at the Battle of New Orleans, restored his reputation. He returned to the State House in 1817, and Isaac Shelby, his commanding officer in the War who was serving a second term as governor, appointed him adjutant general of the state militia. In 1820, Adair was elected eighth governor on a platform of financial relief for Kentuckians hit hard by the Panic of 1819, and the ensuing economic recession. His primary effort toward this end was the creation of the Bank of the Commonwealth, but many of his other financial reforms were deemed unconstitutional by the Kentucky Court of Appeals, touching off the Old Court–New Court controversy. Following his term as governor, Adair served one undistinguished term in the United States House of Representatives and did not run for re-election.
Early life
John Adair was born January 9, 1757, in Chester County in the backcountry of the Province of South Carolina, a son of Ulster immigrants Baron William of Lisburn and Mary [Moore] Adair of Ballyclare. Baron William was born in 1729 in Ulster and emigrated to Charleston in 1752, where he soon made his way to the backcountry He was educated at schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, and enlisted in the South Carolina colonial militia at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. He was assigned to the regiment of his friend, Edward Lacey, under the command of Colonel Thomas Sumter and participated in the failed Patriot assault on a Loyalist outpost at the Battle of Rocky Mount and the subsequent American victory at the Battle of Hanging Rock.
During the August 16, 1780, Battle of Camden, Adair was taken prisoner by the victorious British army. He contracted smallpox and was treated harshly by his captors during his months-long imprisonment. They had twelve children, ten of them daughters. In 1786, the Adairs migrated westward to Kentucky, settling in Mercer County. Adair was a slaveowner and slave trader.
Service in the Northwest Indian War
Enlisting for service as a captain in the Northwest Indian War in 1791,
Recognizing his bravery and fighting skill, Adair's superiors promoted him to lieutenant colonel. Upon the state's admission to the Union, he was elected to the Kentucky House of Representatives, serving from 1793 to 1795. He was promoted to major general and given command of the 2nd Division of the Kentucky Militia on December 16, 1799. He was elected to the Kentucky House again from 1800 to 1803. In 1802, Adair succeeded Breckinridge as Speaker of the House by a vote of 30–14 over Elder David Purviance, the candidate preferred by Governor James Garrard. He continued to serve as Speaker for the duration of his tenure in the House. Adair's was the seventh name submitted by Garrard to the state Senate for the position; his approval by the Senate marked the end of a two-month imbroglio between Garrard and the legislature over the appointment. Although Henry Clay supported Brown's re-election, Adair had the support of Felix Grundy. During the trip, he consulted with many prominent politicians, Adair among them, about the possibility of wresting Mexico from Spain. Harry Innes presided over the trial, which commenced November 11. Although the legal battle between the two spanned several years, the court found that Wilkinson had no solid evidence against Adair and ordered Wilkinson to issue a public apology and pay Adair $2,500 in damages. Shelby asked Adair to serve as his first aide-de-camp. Future Kentucky governor and U.S. Senator John J. Crittenden was Shelby's second aide, and future U.S. Senator and Postmaster General William T. Barry was his secretary. Shelby praised Adair's service and in 1814, made him adjutant general of Kentucky and brevetted him to the rank of brigadier general. James Taylor, Jr., then serving as quartermaster general of the state militia, took out a $6,000 mortgage on his personal land to purchase boats to transport Adair's men. Many did not have weapons, and the ones who did were primarily armed with their own civilian rifles. John Thomas, to whom Adair was an adjunct, fell ill just before the battle commenced, leaving Adair responsible for all the Kentuckians present at the battle.
On January 7, 1815, Adair traveled to New Orleans and requested that the city's leaders lend him several stands of arms from the city armory to arm his militiamen. The officials agreed under the condition that the removal of the arms from the armory be kept secret from the citizenry. At Adair's suggestion, his men were placed in reserve and located centrally behind the Tennessee militiamen under William Carroll. When they arrived in New Orleans, they were told that the city's arms had already been shipped to Adair. The citizens collected what weapons they had —mostly old muskets in various states of disrepair —and gave them to Davis' men. The main American line held and repulsed the British attack; in total, only six Americans were killed and seven wounded. Meanwhile, Davis' Kentuckians on the west bank had, upon their arrival in Morgan's camp, been sent to meet the advance of a secondary British force. Davis' men insisted the report was based on Jackson's misunderstanding of the facts and asked that Adair request a court of inquiry, which convened in February 1815 with Major General Carroll of Tennessee presiding. The court's report found that "[t]he retreat of the Kentucky militia, which, considering their position, the deficiency of their arms, and other causes, may be excusable," and that the formation of the troops on the west bank was "exceptional", noting that 500 Louisiana troops supported by three artillery pieces and protected by a strong breastwork were charged with defending a line that stretched only while Davis's 170 Kentuckians, poorly armed and protected only by a small ditch, were expected to defend a line over long. On February 10, 1816, the Kentucky General Assembly passed a resolution thanking Adair for his service at the Battle of New Orleans and for his defense of the soldiers accused by Jackson.
thumb|left|upright|alt=A man with graying, wavy hair wearing a high-collared black military jacket with gold epaulets and buttons|Andrew Jackson and Adair engaged in a public dispute over the conduct of the Kentucky militiamen at the Battle of New Orleans
Jackson approved the court's findings, but they were not the full refutation of Jackson's report that many Kentuckians —including Adair —had wanted. This ended the matter until June 1815 when H. P. Helm, secretary to John Thomas, forwarded to a Frankfort newspaper remarks from "the general" that had been annexed to the official report. He wrote to the Kentucky Reporter at that time, denouncing the remarks as a forgery. Adair believed Jackson's references to the remarks as a "forged dish, dressed in the true Spanish style" was a thinly veiled reference to Adair's alleged participation in the Burr conspiracy. As ostensible proof that he was not predisposed against Kentuckians, Jackson also implied that he had not reported additional dishonorable behavior by Kentucky militiamen during the battle. This letter thrust the dispute into the national spotlight and prompted Adair to resume correspondence with him both to defend Davis's men and refute Jackson's charges of conspiracy. In his May 1817 response, he reasserted his defense of the Kentucky militiamen at New Orleans and dismissed many of Jackson's allegations as unimportant and untrue. He flatly denied the existence of a conspiracy, and chastised Jackson for making charges without supporting evidence. Responding to Jackson's allusion to Spain, Adair recalled that Jackson had also been implicated with Burr. His response, delayed by his treaty negotiations with the Cherokee, was printed September 3, 1817, and used complicated calculations based on spacing and distance, to argue that Adair had only half the number of men he claimed to have commanded at the Battle of New Orleans. Either Adair had given a foolish order, or he did not have as many men in his main force as he claimed. Adair's October 29, 1817, response was delayed, he said, because he was awaiting documents from New Orleans that never came. He also defended his account of the number of troops under his command, which he had consistently reported as being near 1,000, and asked why Jackson had not challenged it until now. Tradition holds that this letter prompted either Adair or Jackson to challenge the other to a duel, but friends of both men averted the conflict after assembling to watch; no written evidence of the event exists. Tensions between the two eventually eased, and Adair came to comfort Jackson after his wife Rachel's death in 1828. Adair also campaigned for Jackson during his presidential campaigns in 1824, 1828, and 1832.
In the aftermath of the Panic of 1819 —the first major financial crisis in United States history —the primary political issue of the day was debt relief. The federal government had created the Second Bank of the United States in 1817, and its strict credit policy hit Kentucky's large debtor class hard. The Second Party System had not yet developed, but there were nonetheless two opposing factions that arose around the debt relief issue. The first —primarily composed of land speculators who had bought large land parcels on credit and were unable to repay their debts due to the financial crisis —was dubbed the Relief Party (or "faction") and favored more legislation favorable to debtors. Adair garnered 20,493 votes; U.S. Senator William Logan finished second with 19,497, fellow veteran Joseph Desha received 12,419, and Colonel Anthony Butler mustered only 9,567 votes. Proponents of debt relief measures also won majorities in both houses of the General Assembly.
The state's other bank, the Bank of Kentucky, adhered to more conservative banking practices. Legislators also exempted from forced sale the items then considered necessary for making a living —a horse, a plow, a hoe, and an ax. Adair denounced this decision in an 1823 message to the legislature, warning against federal and judicial interference in the will of the people, expressed through the legislature. Emboldened by Adair's message, Relief partisans sought to remove the three justices of the state Court of Appeals, as well as James Clark, a lower court judge who had issued a similar ruling, from the bench. The fund was to be available, proportionally, to each of the state's counties for the establishment of "a system of general education". In the tumultuous economic environment, however, legislators routinely voted to borrow from the Literary Fund to pay for other priorities, chiefly the construction of internal improvements. It also concluded that the Literary Fund alone was insufficient for funding a system of common schools. During his term, he made only one speech, and it was so inaudible that no one knew what position he was advocating.