John Quincy Adams declared that the Chinese had been at fault: “[T]he cause of the war is the Kotow!—the arrogant and insupportable pretentions of China, that she will hold commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind not upon terms of equal reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of relation between lord and vassal.”41 (A Kotow was when Westerners were forced to act in a deeply subservient manner to Chinese officials.)
