Charles Edel’s “Nation Builder: John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic”: Two Roundtables Published January-February 2016
Charles Edel, an Associate Professor of Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College, is currently serving as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow working at the Department of State as a Member of the Policy Planning Staff
H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XVII, No. 13 (2016)
R.M Barlow, University of Virginia; Seth Center, U.S. Department of State; Christopher McKnight Nichols, Oregon State University; William Weeks, San Diego State University; Author’s response by Charles Edel, U.S. Naval War College
Introduction by Thomas R. Maddux, Emeritus, California State University Northridge
John Quincy Adams played an increasingly significant role in the history of American diplomacy from the American Revolution through the continental expansion that culminated in the United States extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. Every scholar who has written on aspects of this period, especially during Adams’s service as Secretary of State under President James Madison and as President in 1820–24, has discussed Adams’s contributions, starting with his role as a personal secretary to his father John Adams, the first U.S. Minister to Great Britain, and continuing service by Adams as Minister to Great Britain, Russia, Prussia, and the Netherlands. As President Madison’s Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams significantly influenced the post-War of 1812 direction of U.S. policies in dealing with the European powers as well as taking advantage of emerging opportunities for U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere, most notably the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 to oppose European colonization, and to lay the groundwork for U.S. expansion to the Pacific through negotiations with London and a pressure-oriented policy with respect to the declining Spanish empire from Florida to the Southwest. The most influential foundational studies include Samuel Flagg Bemis’s books, and one of the reviewers in the roundtable, William Earl Weeks, has contributed three recent studies that discuss Adams’ views and role in U.S. expansion.[1]
Edel brings a different approach to a study of Adams’s diplomacy, that of grand strategy from the field of international relations, and integrates it with history. As the author explains his approach, he “explores how Adams conceived of his own and the nation’s rise to power, discusses what he did to promote his and the nation’s advancement, assesses where he succeeded and where he failed, and examines the contemporary applicability of Adams’s thinking” (5) Historians may get a little nervous with the terms “contemporary applicability” and “grand strategy,” but Edel is careful to evaluate Adams within his historical context, relying extensively on Adams’s extensive official writings and his diary of nearly seventeen thousand pages as well as the secondary literature on Adams and U.S. diplomacy. Furthermore, Edel applies a concept of grand strategy that is understandable — “a comprehensive and integrated plan of action, based on the calculated relationship of means to large ends”(5), — and he notes the importance of setting priorities among competing objectives and Adams’s necessary ability to adjust tactics as circumstances changed (10).
The reviewers agree that Edel has enhanced scholars’ understanding of Adams’s diplomacy through the grand strategy concept and principles that he develops. As Seth Center emphasizes, “Edel examines a grand strategist working at his craft … through Adams’s stressful, lifelong process of trying to grasp the nature of domestic and international affairs, understand the strengths and weaknesses of allies and enemies, recognize change, decide when to parry, thrust, and fold; and judge when to stand on principle and when to stuff principle in the corner.” Christopher McKnight Nichols also appreciates how Edel highlights Adams’s “over-arching strategic vision centered on two-overriding goals: reducing security risks to the U.S. and ‘vindicating republicanism’ as the best form of government to ensure progress as well as liberty.” Yet Nichols notes the “perplexing paradox” of Adams developing a grand strategy but having difficulty, as Edel notes, “translating his vision into policy” (304). By emphasizing the importance of the “deliberate pursuit” of power and expansion by Adams and other U.S. leaders, Edel may weaken the importance of grand strategy, Nichols concludes: “perhaps this history of flexible thinking, nimble policymaking, failures, successes, and unintended consequences, also reveals the limitations of thinking in terms of grand strategy as an organizing concept, in politics as well as history.” Rhonda Barlow suggests that Edel perhaps gives Adams too much credit as the “first grand strategist,” noting the earlier visions of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. Although William Weeks would have preferred a more “topical breakdown of Adams’s political philosophy,” he does appreciate the extent to which Edel presents Adams’s comments from his diary and his views.
The reviewers would have welcomed more analysis of some of Adams’s views and policies. Barlow, for example, questions when Adams shifted from the “New England emphasis on the Atlantic trade for the Jeffersonian vision of western expansion.” Weeks agrees with Barlow on the absence of freedom of the seas and naval power as a significant principle for Adams in Edel’s analysis. Continental expansion as a defensive measure to bolster security with respect to the European powers downplays, from Weeks’ perspective, the degree to which expansion also promised a “large internal market.” Nichols suggests a couple of “minor quibbles” with respect to Adams’s views as a negotiator of the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812 and on Adams’s considerations on European power politics as he negotiated with Spain on Florida and the western boundary of the U.S.
If Adams had significant success as a negotiator and strategist, why did he end up as a self-admitted failure as president? The reviewers are intrigued by this question. Edel notes Adams’s personality and his tendency to slip into periods of depression. They returned when he encountered problems with domestic politics in the White House and his vision of leadership and the right course for the federal government gave way to the turmoil of democratic politics and a one-party system with too many aspiring presidential candidates. As Center notes, Adams’s skill in foreign-policy strategies and negotiations owed much to the fact that they are “simply less complicated to execute than anything requiring domestic political mobilization, legislative action, and treading on state and local interests.” Nichols agrees that “Adams as president comes across as stubborn and a poor communicator, unable to perceive regional and local interests, often misjudging allies and opponents alike.”
Adams did not attend the inauguration of his successor Andrew Jackson, and headed home for Massachusetts. Yet this was not the end of Edel’s story for Adams or for his grand strategy. In November 1831 Adams was elected to Congress and his personal distaste for slavery and concern about its threat to the ideals of independence and republicanism prompted him to turn publicly against slavery, against efforts to prevent debate on slavery in Congress — the Gag Rule battle over preventing petitions against slavery from being received or discussed in the House of Representatives — and finally the conflict over the expansion of slavery into new territories acquired in the West. Weeks considers Edel’s chapter, “A Stain upon the Character of the Nation: The Fight against Slavery” the strongest in the book, concluding that “For Adams, ending slavery in the U.S. was a type of internal ‘Manifest Destiny,’ a domestic ‘extension of the area of freedom’ that had to occur if the nation was to fulfill its presumed providential destiny as the world’s leading advocate of human freedom.” This confirms Edel’s emphasis on “vindicating Republicanism” as one of Adams’s overriding goals, yet at a cost that Adams did not have to face.
[Read the H-Diplo Roundtable Here]
A Roundtable on “Charles N. Edel, Nation Builder: John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic”
Thomas W. Zeiler, University of Colorado; Daniel Hulsebosch, NYU School of Law ; Andrew Preston, Cambridge University; William Inboden, University of Texas; Daniel Walker Howe, Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus at Oxford University and Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles; Author’s Response by Charles N. Edel
Introductory Essay by Thomas W. Zeiler
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader,” John Quincy Adams proclaimed. That adage sounds like marketing for one of the trendy courses in leadership at my university. But consider it in conjunction with his most famous quote, “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” and one conclusion, surely in line with the argument in this superb book by Charles Edel, is that Adams thought profoundly, and on occasion inspirationally, about ensuring America’s place, safety, and potential in the world. Deeply thoughtful and well researched, Nation Builder contends that Adams put forth a grand strategic philosophy for the United States that the young and vulnerable nation grew into over time.
The author believes that Adams was a statesman par excellence. I would go further to label John Quincy Adams a second-generation Founding Father. He was born too late to be one of the originals, but he the next best thing: the son of a Founder, who went on to carve out his own vision for American greatness. The reviewers in this forum and the book’s blurbers agree with Edel that Adams was one of the key strategists — and a mostly successful one at that — who built on the work on John Adams and the other half-dozen Founders and helped establish an independent, viable, and dynamic new nation. He had his failures (namely, his one-term presidency), and historians are wont to treat him more like a Herbert Hoover (as William Inboden notes here) — a brilliant, accomplished, and competent statesman who did not do as well in the political limelight of the nation’s highest office as he might have been expected to. Yet put aside the presidency, and Adams, like many of the Founders, seemed the perfect mix for a statesman: he was a visionary who was also hard-headed and pragmatic, and a realist who was motivated to ponder and project in sweeping ideological terms and by and large succeeded in his mission.
Edel focuses on how this Founding Father Jr. set out the doctrines that he believed should guide the country. He enmeshes the narrative in the complexities of Adams’s thought and in the controversies of his times. Our four reviewers assert that he does a magnificent job of explaining Adams’s thought and times, even though each of them disagrees with him and diverges from fellow commentators on occasion when assessing the consequences of Adams’s overarching diplomatic strategy.
The book also shows that people matter, even though such a focus might not be in keeping with historiographical trends in our field. Edel enters Adams into the pantheon of great American leaders despite his political shortcomings. but his treatment of Adams is unique in that he places him in the pantheon as a towering statesman whose strategic outlook guided the young nation for decades, if not centuries. It is a positive treatment that also has sobering implications, as the panel of reviewers makes clear.
Despite his voluminous writings, Adams, we learn, never set out this grand strategy in explicit detail. Edel does that for us. It is clear that Adams sought national expansion, but without the sort of overextention that would ruin the democratic experiment. Thus, however grand, his grand strategy was, Edel’s Adams emerges as a realist, a cautious nation builder who envisioned the same goals of greatness and power for the country as did idealistic expansionists. He just got there in a different way. He did not seek monsters to destroy but rather urged neutrality vis-a-vis the big show in Europe and a turn inwards (at least toward the Norther American continent) to unite the nation in the common causes of security, prosperity, and democracy. That approach would result in the careful, step-by-step construction of a republican nation. The process minimized security risks and enabled the country to do the right thing morally.
The reviewers were uniformly captivated by Edel’s treatment and, on the whole, as impressed as the author by Adams himself, if not as awed. Upbringing counts, as Daniel Walker Howe notes, and Adams’s seems to have been everything a New Englander could expect: a severe parental coldness coupled with stimulating intellectual pursuits. Howe also notes that Adams was no contented bureaucrat; his personal ambitions and presidential aspirations went hand in hand with his visionary outlook. Yet Adams was both a man of his times and, perhaps most important, a man of the future. He predicted American greatness and dominance but also forecast problems with race, gender, and other social issues.
Andrew Preston compares Adams to later diplomats and strategists and likens him to a combination of Henry Kissinger, the brilliant strategist and supposed realist, and Dean Rusk, the modest, realist public servant. Like the other reviewers, Preston is taken by Edel’s portrayal of Adams as a leader who might have erred in settling America on a course of destruction through expansionist policies that allowed for the spread of slavery. But more than the other panelists, Preston detects the legacy of the Founding Fathers in Adams. Like them, he was an energetic nationalist with confidence in the American federal project. Yes, such enthusiasm resulted in arrogance and a tendency to overreach and use power in untoward, exploitative ways. To be sure, there are contradictions in Adams that Preston is justified in pointing out and that Edel recognizes as well. Being a combination and Rusk does that a person!
Daniel Hulsebosch and William Inboden wrestle with the notion of nation building, and specifically, the rational figure who lays out a strategy and follows kit. Hulsebosch explores Edel’s conceptualization of grand strategy and asks, what is grand startegy, and how do we distinguish between the ways Adams got to those goals and the goals themselves? Intriguingly, he does not question Edel’s finding but instead examines the theory of grand strategy from a historiographical position. He wants to know precisely how and why grand strategists choose the projects they do. Do they take national politics into account when weighing what strategy to pursue? Helsebosch argues that Adams’s ill-fated presidency and his achievements as a congressman indicate that unless grand strategy can capture the political, it might not be able to explain presidential designs. Perhaps the answers lie in the politics of the era or, as Hulsebosch suggests, in an area neglected by Edel: the treaties and other legal guidelines that led Adams to interpret the events of the day, especially territorial issues, in a certain way. Edel responds to the critique of grand strategy as a framework and methodology in his rejoinder to the panelists.
For his part, Inboden targets the historical contexts in which Adams made his judgments and drew up his policies and finds that Adams gets high marks as a figure from the past and perhaps would do so today as well. He points both to the landmark Monroe Doctrine and the proscription against intervening will-nilly abroad as particularly sage approaches that have withstood the test of time. Inboden does ask whether there was even more to Adams than Edel lets on. For instance, the interplay between his religion (as Preston notes, Adams had a messianic belief in the providential destiny of American greatness) and his nation-building efforts provides a potentially fruitful way to expand our understanding of grand strategy in a moral sense. After all, Adams did say that the “highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.” Still, Inboden points to what may be the essential Adams, who, rather than following fixed rules, adapted to various circumstances and context, using history as a guide, while maintaining his principles as best he could. Maybe that realistic balancing act is one reason that Adams can be considered even more than just the offspring of a Founding Father. Despite his political toils, he deserves recognition as a forward and far-reaching thinker. Charles Edels give him his due.
