John Quincy Adams — Book Review & Quotes

Review

I’ve had the chance to read a lot of biographies over the last few years of founding fathers, but none have I found so much perspective on myself as I did with John Quincy Adams. There are many things that he was (or wasn’t) that don’t apply to me; genius, terrible dad, etc. But his attitudes about life felt very close to home.

Throughout the biographies I’ve read, there was a common thread of Federalists vs. Jeffersonians during this period of history; where Jeffersonians felt that the only role of government was to limit itself as it maximized the personal freedoms of every citizen, whereas Federalists saw the inherent tendency to screw things up that most people have, and saw a need for government to protect citizens from each other, or often from themselves. John Quincy Adams was in the latter camp, but didn’t approach his skepticism of human beings with pessimism, but rather strategic optimism.

“John Adams (John Quincy’s father) had pronounced ideas about education, but they were not his alone. The men who were to found the United States understand that while a nation of masters and servants needed only to elevate the one and abase the other, a nation of free men needed to cultivate the gifts of all its citizens.”

What I saw in John Quincy that so closely resonated with me was a sense of self-deprecation and intense desire to succeed as productively and efficiently as possible. When I read about the schedule he attempted to keep as a young diplomat, I feel a pang of envy:

“The new Adams would be diligent, disciplined, scholarly; he would wake earlier and write more. He noted his daily schedule: rise at six; read ‘books of instruction’ until nine; breakfast; read the papers and translate Dutch state papers until eleven or twelve; dress, write letters, and attend to other business until two or three; walk until three thirty; dine until five; read ‘works of amusement’ until eight or nine; walk again; light supper, cigar, and bed by eleven. Adams would keep these monthly accounts of his daily schedule for much of the rest of his life — a spur to self-improvement and a reminder of discarded resolutions.”

John Quincy would often state that his ‘superpower’ (my word) was a keen tolerance for ‘drudgery’ (his word.) While I’m never perfect, and often give in to a weekend’s siren song of laziness, the desire to be a maximum amount of hard working and productive in the face of any task has always been something I strive towards. He obviously accomplished a great deal by squaring his shoulders and getting things done.

One area that he very often did not excel at was as a parent (depending on who you ask.) I actually had read John Adams’ biography, but was drawn to seek out John Quincy’s when I read about his parenting in a book review of ‘First Dads: Parenting and Politics from George Washington to Barack Obama.’ John Quincy was born of solid intellectual stock, with his parents being two of the more impressive people I’ve read about.

“Had [John Quincy Adams] any gift at all for small talk or bonhomie, he might have quickly improved on his bearish reputation and made friends who could prove useful to him. But in this regard, he was incurable. Adams recorded the following strange observation in his journal: ‘I went out this Evening in search of conversation,’ he recorded, ‘an art of which I never had an adequate idea. Long as I have lived in the world I never have thought of conversation as a school, in which something was to be learned. I never knew how to make, to control, or to change it. I am by Nature a silent animal, and my dear mother’s constant lesson in childhood, that children in company should be seen and not heard confirmed me irrevocably in what I now deem a bad habit.’”

With all due respect Mrs. A, I disagree. As a strong proponent of women’s progressive move towards equality, Abigail could so readily see the benefit that women would offer to the conversation were they allowed in, but what about the contribution of children? The idea of making children a part of the conversation from as early as possible feels key to starting to lift their sense of importance, feeling that they’re heard.

John Quincy’s parenting is uniquely inadequate, in my opinion, in the harshness of his expectations and demeanor. Many of his children were afraid of him, whether he intended that intimidation or not. Of his three sons, only one was successful in life, his youngest son Charles.

“Charles wrote, ‘My father has unfortunately such a cold manner of meeting this sort of feeling that I am surprised at the appearance of it at any time among his supporters.’ Another time he remarked, ‘He makes enemies by perpetually wearing the iron mask.’ Charles was the only one of the boys who had grown up with his father as a little boy, had held his hand on long walks, and had at on his lap at the circus. The iron mask had no powers to frighten him.”

For me, it shed light on the idea that we ought to let our children into our hearts to give them perspective on why we do what we do. My mother, whenever she made mistakes or felt she’d been too hard on me, she would say “I’m sorry, I’ve never been a mother before.” That honesty always reminded me of the human reality of who my mother was. As a boy, Charles may have seen that humanity in his father that his brothers did not. An opportunity that very well could have changed the way Charles took his fathers harsh correction; never taking it personal and always recognizing the value in it.

As harsh as he was as a parent, this is the same man who “subjected the boys to private exams, George in Algebra and Plato, John and Charles in Greek and Latin,” and “every morning before eight he and George took turns reading to each other four chapters of the Bible, and then father and son talked about the meaning of the passages.” He and his youngest son “ took walks together almost every day, and the father spent hours listening to the four-year-old son read La Fontaine’s Fables in the original [French], and teaching him to read in English.” I wouldn’t say that parenting was completely absent in his mind and priorities.

Later in Charles’ life, he would pick up a robust correspondence with his father about how best to improve his writing ability and general knowledge. And rather than the rugged disciplinarian you might expect, his focus was on expanding Charles’ mind, no matter the direction.

“[John Quincy] urged Charles to keep writing about whatever thoughts his reading prompted. ‘We shall not always agree in opinion, but each os us may rectify his own opinions by weighing those of the other.’ And so they did, not only over great matters of history but over the most fundamental question of all — how to live.”

Finally, the following story is of John Quincy Adams looking for materials to shine a negative light on his political opponent, Andrew Jackson. A small anecdote, but I couldn’t help but weepingly chuckle at the parallels to today:

“Now a hunt was on among Adams’ supporters for real specimens of Jackson’s semiliterate prose and explosive temper. Secretary Barbour went rummaging through the files of the War Department and brought to the White House a Jackson letter that Adams described as ‘still more ferocious than barbarous in style and composition.’ Adams’ allies hoped to get this one published as well. A few weeks later the letter was printed in the National Intelligencer, but the high-minded Gales and Seaton insisted on correcting the errors first, much to Adams’ frustration. Of course, the whole episode was founded on the archaic assumption that Americans would not respect a man who couldn’t spell or hold his temper.”

Turns out, that still isn’t true.

Some Highlighted Quotes From The Book

“Adams was also a hard man. He did not aim to please, and he largely succeeded. He drove away many of his old friends and offended most of one-time allies. He frightened his children and exasperated his long-suffering wife, Louisa. He was that rare politician who is happiest alone. He knew this and perpetually rebuked himself for his bearish manner, but he did not really wish to be otherwise. He lived according to principles he considered to be self-evident.”

“Kennedy cites Adams’ defiant assertion that, ‘highly as I reverenced the authority of my constituents…I would have defended their interests against their inclinations, and incurred every possible addition to their resentment, to save them from the vassalage of their own delusions.”

“Adams was a brilliant man who seemed to know everything about everything. Philip Hone, a diarist of the era, wrote that Adams ‘has probed deeply into the arcana of all sciences, understands and can explain all subjects, from the solar system down to the construction of a tooth-pick. He has the Holy Scripture at his fingertips, knows every line of Shakespeare, can recite Homer in the original Greek.’”

“He was a polymath who distributed his gifts profusely but idiosyncratically.”

“For Adams, no form of expression was so precious as the writing he did for himself alone, often late at night by candlelight. His memoirs allowed him to commune with himself, to examine his own thoughts and feelings, to say to himself what he would not say to others. They are the record of a solitary man.”

“To know Adams is not to love him. It is, however, to admire him greatly.”

“John Quincy Adams understood, as a very young boy, that his life belonged not merely to himself, but to his country and its cause. He would never forget that a life properly lived required commitment to principle, sacrifice, and suffering.”

“‘Education has made a greater difference between man and man, than nature has made between man and brute,’ John wrote Abigail in 1775. ‘It should be your care, therefore, and mine to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them a habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue.’ Abigail and John would have recoiled at the idea that intellect could be taught in the absence of morality, for they believed that the goal of education was to produce both goodness and usefulness.”

“John Adams had pronounced ideas about education, but they were not his alone. The men who were to found the United States understand that while a nation of masters and servants needed only to elevate the one and abase the other, a nation of free men needed to cultivate the gifts of all its citizens.”

“If there was a curricular core to the emerging education for citizenship, it was the study of ancient history — Cicero, Tacitus, Plutarch, Sallust, and of course Thucydides, the great historian of ancient Greece. ‘The classics’ was not a subject, like geography or history, but rather a lens through which to examine and understand the life around you.”

“For the first thirteen years of his life, John Quincy Adams had been educated in the most direct and explicit way possible: first his mother and then his father had, in effect, opened up his head and filled it with fixed principles, stern admonitions, heroic characters, great ambitions. He had faithfully absorbed every syllable. And then, at what was still a very tender age, he was thrown into the world, and he began to profit from his own experience and observations. This premature self-reliance may account for the extraordinary certainty and assurance that would mark his later life.”

“His father sent a volley of letters, with the usual admonitions: Never be too wise to ask a question.”

“No many knows what he can bear until he tries.”

“John Adams had had to bull his way into the realm of public affairs by sheer force of talent and ambition; his son was welcomed there as by right. He would struggle against a status he felt he had not earned.”

“At the same time, Adams really did buckle down. Until now, his haphazard studies had been left largely to his own taste and that of his tutors. But the habits his father had drilled into him had made hard work second nature, while his mother’s perpetual evangelizing on the virtues of self-mastery had made the young man proof against distraction — as least as proof as a young man could be.”

“He deeply admired several of his classmates, liked most, and despised a few. He set himself the task of producing character sketches of them — all forty-six, produced in alphabetical order over a period of months, listing the birth date and home of each. Few of them escaped unscathed from Adams’ harsh judgment.”

“In a forensic over the question of equality, he took the view that the laws could offer no protection if every citizen felt free to change them.”

“Though John Adams, too, had suffered from what he called, ‘the blue devils,’ he had never been paralyzed as his son now was. A self-made man, John Adams had been the agent of his own success and the author of his own ambition. The situation with his son was almost the opposite. John Quincy had known since the earliest childhood that he had a destiny to fulfill. It was not for him to choose a path through life. And since he had been given everything he needed to succeed, failure would be unforgivable. Worse still, should he fall short, he would be failing not himself, but his parents, his nation, his Christian obligations. Is it any wonder that, with youth and college behind him, and the future for which he had long been prepared before him, he gave way to despair? On the contrary: the wonder is that he didn’t buckle altogether beneath the weight of expectations. His brothers would do so, as would, in turn, his own sons. Unlike them, John Quincy was able to summon the will to become the person his parents had told him he must be.”

John Quincy’s cousin made the observation, “‘He is determined to be great in every particular.’ The ambition his parents instilled in him was eating him up.”

“Over time Adams’ most debilitating symptoms of depression would subside, while the self-accusation, the expectation of bad endings, would prove almost impervious to contrary experience. He would, after all, succeed greatly. But John Quincy Adams was not fashioned to be happy.”

“He would depend not on genius, but on perseverance. First Harvard and then his own languishing career had cured him, he felt, of the delusion of his own genius.”

“‘I have often thought he was more product at 27 than his father was at 58,’ John wrote to Abigail that spring.”

“People would say that he had been singled out not for his talent but for his family name. The fact that this might not actually be true scarcely mattered; reputation depended not only on what a man did but on what he was seen to have done.”

“And he wrote to his friend Daniel Sargent to say that even justified outrage was no grounds for a way that would be bound to prove ruinous: ‘If resentment were a good or a safe foundation for policy measures, few Americans perhaps would be disposed to go farther than I should. But of all the guides that a nation can follow, passion is the most treacherous, and prudence the most faithful.’ Years abroad had cured Adams of the American habit of thinking about the world in romantic terms and habituated him to the blunt European language of raison d’etat.”

“The new Adams would be diligent, disciplined, scholarly; he would wake earlier and write more. He noted his daily schedule: rise at six; read ‘books of instruction’ until nine; breakfast; read the papers and translate Dutch state papers until eleven of twelve; dress, write letters, and attend to other business until two or three; walk until three thirty; dine until five; read ‘works of amusement’ until eight or nine; walk again; light supper, cigar, and bed by eleven. Adams would keep these monthly accounts of his daily schedule for much of the rest of his life — a spur to self-improvement and a reminder of discarded resolutions.”

“Adams did not trust Louisa to master the etiquette of a diplomatic wife, which worried him a great deal; worse still, he appeared to have no sense of how she would feel to learn how little he trusted her. ‘For your own happiness,’ he wrote her, ‘endeavor to acquire the faculty not merely of acquiescence in unavoidable inconveniences, but even of a cheerful conformity to things which must be endured, and above all establish as an invariable rule for your conversation, to express no general or national reflections.’ In other words, no opinions. And, he added, she would have to ‘suppress some of the little attachments to splendor that lurk at your breast.’ That drew a reposte: Louisa said that she had no idea why he “erroneously supposed me dazzled with what you stile rank.’ Adams asked for a truce on explanations between them. His parents had never needed a truce, for they had been raised in the same world and understood one another intuitively.”

“She was not altogether daunted and sometimes held a mirror to his foibles, whether his excessive concern for dignity or his withdrawal into solitude and books…Self-critical as he was, Adams could not accept even the loving, rallying form of advice…In short, he could criticize her, but she could not criticize him.”

“But the discovery that she had brought nothing to the marriage — nothing, that is, save herself — made her feel unworthy of her brilliant husband, who, she imagined, could have made a far more advantageous match. Adams loved Louisa, and there is no evidence that he regretted the match he had made, but neither did he have warmth enough, or perhaps understanding enough, to melt her fears. Adams did not, after all, expect happiness from life. Louisa had, but life had taught her otherwise. Between them, over the years, there would be respect and compassion and sometimes love — but never the sense of perfect trust and mutuality that allows couples to surmount whatever problems life puts in their way.”

“Louisa fell ill as soon as she boarded the ships; she had a frail constitution.”

“She learned to survive by herself at parties, for her bored husband would sometimes leave her to make it home on her own.”

“He was endlessly curious about how things worked, including things that didn’t turn a profit.”

“A politician in t his country must be the man of a party. I would fain be the man of my whole country.”

“But Louisa was not quite as frail as she appeared, either to the Adamses or to herself. She was a woman of uncommon intelligence who would later dabble in writing poetry, drama, and fiction. She was emotional and expressive, where her husband was rational and withdrawn. She needed friends, and she had a gift for making them.”

“Adams rebuked Jean-Jacques Rousseau for his naivete: ‘To form principles of government upon too advantageous an estimate of human character is an error of inexperience.’”

“Within months of arriving in the US Senate, Adams had become its most iconoclastic member. He would not barter votes or join coalitions or make small sacrifices of principle in order to win larger victories — that is, he would not legislate. He sometimes carried principle to the point of eccentricity.”

“Not only had he studied the classic works on the subject, as many educated men had, but he had heard the great masters in Congress, in Parliament, and in the pulpit. He had tried — and failed, he would have said — to form himself into a great orator. The subject mattered deeply to him. Beyond all that, the professorship would give a purpose to his vast but aimless reading.”

“‘I feel,’ he wrote, ‘a distressing consciousness of my own weakness of capacity, together with a profound and anxious wish for more powerful means. I lament the want of genius, for I want a mighty Agent for the service of my country.’ In fact it wasn’t genius Adams lacked but the gift of leadership, and yet he needed to find a way to lead.”

“Adams knew very well that for many of his students ‘rhetoric’ described a set of hurdles and obstacles and obscure regulations designed to limit the torrent of writing and speech to an orderly stream. Adams intended to rescue this ancient art from its modern slumber. In Adams’ richly stocked mind, now fortified with months of study, rhetoric and oratory constituted a point of convergence of the classical, the Christian, and the republican — the three orienting points of his life. Had not God given Aaron to the tongue-tied Moses in order to speak his law to the Israelites? For the ancients, of course, ‘the talent of public speaking was the key to the highest dignities.’ That was no longer true, not because eloquence was a form of decoration with which moderns could dispense, but because moderns, unlike the citizens of Rome and Athens, no longer governed themselves through the kinds of ‘deliberative assembles’ in which the gifted orator could shape the destiny of a nation. Since America was the one nation in which a vestige of those republics survived, it needed eloquent men as no other, lesser nation did. Men of the cloth, of course, still swayed their congregation through oratory; so did men of the bar.”

“Adams spent the spring and early summer practicing the law in his desultory way, reading, and seeing to George’s education, as his parents had seen to his. Every morning before eight he and George took turns reading to each other four chapters of the Bible, and then father and son talked about the meaning of the passages. He showed the countries of the world on a map. He took George and John to a performance of Hamlet.”

“The St. Petersburg winter drove everyone inside — but not the American minister. Even in the dead of winter, when the temperature often fell to 23 below zero, Adams donned his bearskin coat, his fur hat, and his thick mittens and trudged out into the blinding whiteness along the Neva Prospect and the river, alone save for the occasional hunched-over figures zipping by in sleds — and the emperor. Alexander liked to travel around the city with only his carriage driver for company, often stopping to talk to his subjects, and he kept up this habit even in the winter.”

“Adams and Charles Francis took walks together almost every day, and the father spent hours listening to the four-year-old son read La Fontaine’s Fables in the original, and teaching him to read in English.”

“Adams spent more and more time with Charles Francis, who was outgrowing the nursery. Louisa was too distracted with grief even to attend to her little boy. Father and son took long walks together, went on sleigh rides, and gawked at the exotic sights of the winter carnival. And Adams lavished his pedagogical ambitions on his youngest child. By the spring of 1812, he was spending at least three hours a day with his son, who, several months shy of his fifth birthday, was reading French, German, and English. By the end of that year, Charles was reading from the Book of Common Prayer.”

“The year before, he had begun writing an extraordinary series of letters to George about the Bible. They were pitched far above the understanding of even a very bright and bookish ten-year-old. Adams understood this; he expected George to read the letters with the help of Tom and others, and to refer to them later in life. Perhaps he was thinking of the letters, deeply soaked in Scripture, which his own mother had once sent him, but these long and carefully argued texts felt much more like essays composed by a man who has pondered a subject deeply and feels the need to put his thoughts in order.”

“Adams regarded the Bible not as infallible text but as a human narrative inspired by revelation — the greatest of all works of literature.”

“No record survives of George’s response to this masterpiece of exegesis. But the letters tell us a great deal about his father. Adams was a passionate scholar and a relentless intellectualizer who believed that deep study illuminated every subject, whether the jumble of weights and measures or the mysteries of the Christian faith. He was a man of science, and it would have been contrary to his nature to believe that the dictates of reason and of faith contravened one another. His rationalism, in turn, made him skeptical about narrow or doctrinal religious claims and predisposed him to tolerance. (This was the same man who had refused to sign an oath of religious belief at Harvard.) Yet he comfortably accepted what a deist like Jefferson might not: that revelation marked a point beyond which reason could not go. Adams was a New England Puritan raised in the spirit of Enlightenment reason.”

“She offered gentle little sketches of Louisa’s boys: John the fiery one, called ‘Hotspur’ by his friends, and George the quiet scholar who went to his books when school was over. Adamses did not indulge in despair. Creatures of oak, they bent with the years and withered, but they did not break.”

“Adams wrote to his father to say that he no longer felt like much of a Massachusetts man. ‘My system of politics more and more inclines to strengthen the Union and its government.’ New England factionalism had reduced the Federalist Party to a disgruntled rump of secessionists.”

“‘But if the question was dubious,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘it was better to err on the side of vigour than on the side of weakness’ — a telling sentiment. Better to err defending a heroic officer than the rights of America’s enemies, and better to err on the side of executive power than to apologize for exercising it.”

“Had her husband any gift at all for small talk or bonhomie, he might have quickly improved on his bearish reputation and made friends who could prove useful to him. But in this regard, he was incurable. Adams recorded the following strange observation in his journal: ‘I went out this Evening in search of conversation,’ he recorded, ‘an art of which I never had an adequate idea. Long as I have lived in the world I never have thought of conversation as a school, in which something was to be learned. I never knew how to make, to control, or to change it. I am by Nature a silent animal, and my dear mother’s constant lesson in childhood, that children in company should be seen and not heard confirmed me irrevocably in what I now deem a bad habit.’”

“Disquisition is not, of course, the same thing as conversation, which depends on mutually pleasurable exchange. Conversation with Jeremy Bentham was worthwhile, but the same could not be said for the drawing room. If Adams wasn’t actually learning something, he felt that he was wasting his time. ‘I am scarcely ever satisfied with myself, after going into company, and always have the impression that my time at home is more usefully spent.’ One imagines Adams sitting silently at one of Louisa’s dinners, all too obviously revolving his own thoughts in his own mind while the prattle twirled around him — just as he had in the court of St. Petersburg. Louisa admitted that her husband’s ‘habits of study have unquestionably given a sort of coldness to his manners which to those who do not seek his acquaintance and only see him in public make him seem severe and repellant.’”

“In his own mind, Adams was raising his boys with the same unforgiving rigor with which he himself had been brought up. He did not wish, and perhaps could not wish, that his parents had treated him any other way. He expected his sons to excel just as it had been expected of him. He was not given pause by the fact that the paternal techniques had self-evidently failed with Charles and had scarcely spurred Tom to high achievement. And Adams brought to the task of child rearing a grim and humorless determination that made him a harsher taskmaster than even his own parents had been. Louisa preferred to raise the boys with honey rather than vinegar, but, she reflected, ‘he ruled his children, and I quietly acquiesced to his right of control.’ Adams could not relax. If he wasn’t meeting with the cabinet or writing diplomatic dispatches, he was working on his study of weights and measures, keeping up his journal, writing letters.”

“And he subjected the boys to private exams, George in Algebra and Plato, John and Charles in Greek and Latin. He was not particularly impressed, though he acknowledged to himself that his worrying over them was inveterate. ‘None of them will probably ever answer to my hopes,’ he wrote sourly. ‘May none of them ever realize my fears!’”

“America’s Founding Fathers had been unified in the belief that political parties were inimical to republican government, on the grounds that they served as vehicles for selfish or sectional interests as opposed to national and collective ones. Party spirit had nevertheless arisen in the struggle between Federalists and Republicans, but once the Federalists shrank into insignificance, the nation had returned to a one-party, or in effect no-party, rule.”

“The absence of organized parties meant that interests gathered around individuals and thus that the inevitable clash of interest and ideology would be intensely, and often brutally, personal.”

“Monroe was an extraordinarily good man, but he was not a brilliant man. His mind was ‘neither rapid nor rich,’ wrote William Wirt, and thus he moved slowly and warily in the face of new information. Monroe made few important decisions without consulting Madison and Jefferson; the latter, especially, felt free to offer his advice on almost everything, though always with disclaimers about his remoteness from men and events, and so forth. The president laid out all issues before his cabinet and was prepared to wait patiently for consensus to form among them. This habit did not sit well with his decisive secretary of state. In his journal, [Adams] noted, ‘There is slowness, want of decision and a Spirit of procrastination in the President which perhaps arises more from his situation than his personal character.’”

“When he wasn’t working, Adams wanted to be alone in his study. He treasured the little time he had to work on the papers of the 1787 federal Constitutional Convention, which seemed hopelessly snarled, or the report on weights and measures, or a solitary effort to bring the books of the State Department up to date. (Adams had taught himself double-entry bookkeeping, which he also deployed in order to make sense of his own finances.) Sometimes he daydreamed of a life of study. After meeting a man who had invented a means of efficiently converting steam to power, he thought how very fine it would be to devote one’s life to the study and classification of metals or perhaps to write a history of inventors and their characters. Ought not the secretary of state devote himself to improving the Patent Office? Yes, but there was no time, and it was all he could do to keep up with the press of business.”

“Louisa reported that Tom had returned but was too unwell to speak until the following morning. Perhaps he was sleeping off a bender; Adams would have veiled such a squalid truth even from his own diary.”

“Tom’s slow downward spiral, and his ultimate humiliation, offers a pointed reminder of how very hard it was to be an Adams. The family lacked the wealth that served as a safety net for the less lucky or gifted or driven members of other prominent families. At the same time, a merely ordinary disposition, much less a tender one, could not survive the pressure of family expectations. John Quincy had been forged in the first and emerged whole and hard; neither Charles nor Tom had proved so fortunate. John Quincy Adams had put his own children through the same thresher, and that generation, too, would see a terrible winnowing.”

“Monroe’s presidency continued to feel like an interval of consensus and has continued to be seen that way in the national imagination, but in fact it was an era when men began to feel that their interest clashed irreconcilably. The era of good feelings was also the seedbed of conflict.”

“And perhaps he had also glimpsed in the abolition of slavery the great cause that he, who had been born too late to fight and had once accepted that his generation should resign itself to placing the laurel on the heads of those who had come before, could embrace with the will to heroism and self-sacrifice that had always lain so deep in his soul.”

“Louisa’s insight into Henry Clay was penetrating but notably sympathetic: ‘If you watch his character,’ she wrote, ‘you almost immediately discover that his heart is generous and good, and that his first impulse is almost always benevolent and liberal. But a neglected education, vicious habits and bad company, united to overweening ambition, have made him blush to act the better part.’”

“‘The blast of mediocrity,’ he gloomily reflected, ‘is the lightest of evils, which such characters portend.’ The greatest of evils, which he knew all too well from his own brother Charles, was self-destruction, with the accompanying shame to a great family.”

“Adams had come to view himself as a dray horse, long broken to the harness. ‘The operations of my mind are slow,’ he wrote; ‘my mind is sluggish, and my powers of extemporaneous speaking very inefficient. But I have much capacity for and love of labor.’ He set himself the task of making an index of his journals from 1795 to 1809 and then felt thoroughly disgusted at what seemed to him the pedestrian cast of his mind. The work, he reflected, ‘contains scarcely ever, either observation of reflection — incident or character — grave remark, or sally of humor.’ Surely, he concluded, the great mass of material ‘will never be fit for exposure to any eye but my own.’ Adams had something harsh to say about almost everyone, but the person he was most consistently unfair to was himself. His journals survive today not only as a precious resource for historians but as one of the great works of American political literature.”

“When Adams finally sent the massive report to the publisher in January 1821, Louisa wrote, with an almost audible sigh of relief, ‘Thank God we hear no more of Weights and Measures.’”

“For Adams, Clay’s views smacked of a dangerous unreality, a commitment to principle in absence of history, politics, national habit, and character. Like Burke, Adams reasoned from what men did, not from what one wished they did or imagined they might have done in an ideal setting. A foreign policy based on a priori assumptions about the world rather than a rigorous understanding of men and nations was bound to overreach and lead to grief.”

“Adams is the fountainhead of realism not only because he distinguished so sharply between American interests and universal goods, but because he expressed such a deep skepticism about America’s capacity to do good abroad. Those who now caution against ‘humanitarian intervention’ or regime change or even democracy promotion have good reason to cite his words. He was, after all, the same man who had warned in his address at Plymouth against founding government upon ‘too advantageous an estimate of the human character.’”

“John Quincy Adams came from a tradition in which one ‘stood for’ rather than ‘ran for’ office. To actively seek an elective office was to demonstrate your unfitness for it. It was widely assumed that Adams wanted to be president, just as it was widely assumed that William Crawford and Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun wanted to be president. But Adams never said so, either to the public or even to his close friends. Would-be supporters began to approach Adams about his plans even before Monroe won reelection in 1820, and he gave them all the same answer: ‘The principle of my life had never been to ask the suffrage of my country, and never to shrink from its call.’ He would, that is, accept a call to the highest office in the land, just as he had done with more modest offices. The doctrine was admirably suited to the era of George Washington and, in fact, to the person of George Washington.”

“Newspapers had long been propogandized for political candidates. But in recent years they had vastly increased in number and reach. The second decade of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of the American small-town paper. Almost every new town cleared from forest and swamp was bound to have not just a bank and a dry-goods store but a printer, and that gentleman, after making a living turning out handbills, would soon be publishing a newspaper as well. The United States had four hundred papers in 1810 and double that number by 1825. Great Britain, with twice the population, had half as many newspapers. Improved postal routes spread these local products across the country, so that a concerned citizen could find out what people were thinking and doing all over America. John Quincy Adams read thirty to forty newspapers a day — a remarkable fraction of the total, since most papers were then weeklies. By this time newspaper editorials had largely replaced the open letter or pamphlet as the chief instrument of influencing public opinion. The journals of the day were ‘outrageously partisan,’ as one historian of the medium notes, and played a central role in organizing the factions into which the country was becoming divided. Politicians and editors learned that they could not get along, and need not get along, without each other.”

“John Calhoun spoke to Adams about his high-minded plan of starting a politically independent paper in Washington. Adams laughed; any such endeavor, he said, ‘would be beset on all sides by slander, obloquy, and probably assassination.”

“‘There will be candidates enough for the Presidency without me, and if my delicacy is not suited to the times, there are candidates enough who have no such delicacy.’”

“Hopkinson accused Adams of adopting the policy of the wavering Macbeth when he says ‘If chance will have me king, why chance will crown me / Without my stir.’ When Louisa showed the letter to her husband, a combination of literary playfulness and a deep sense of resolution moved him to respond with a letter he titled ‘The Macbeth Policy.’ Had Macbeth only adhered to such a policy Adams observed, ‘no tragedy.’ In any case, Adams went on, in a democracy what matters is the choice of voters, not the will of would-be leaders. He then imagined Hopkinson responding that the choice was, in fact, being made by ‘politicians and newspapers,’ whom the candidate needed to cultivate. ‘Here we come to the point,’ Adams wrote, throwing off the mask of irony. ‘He who asks or accepts the offer of friendly service contracts the obligation of meeting it with a suitable return… If he asks or accept the aid of one, he must ask or accept the multitude.’ The only choice is to ask or accept nothing. The first alternative is ‘virally and essentially corrupt.’ The latter is ‘the only principle to which no exception can be taken.’ Here was true republicanism, as John Quincy Adams understood it.”

“Adams would, of course, become president, and he would do so by finally throwing off the Macbeth policy. He would relax his iron principles in order to be president, and that compromise would come to haunt him.”

“I have not much esteem for the enthusiasm which evaporates in words,’ Adams wrote. The discussion came to naught, just as Adams had hoped. It had foundered on practicalities, but for Adams the deep issue was whether the goal of American foreign policy was to shape a better world or to advance American interests. ‘Enthusiasm’ — public passion — dictated the first; the lonelier counsels of prudence, the latter.”

“The Adams voice was too skeptical to appeal to an increasingly self-confident and self-righteous people. Henry Kissinger once wrote that the American people will not accept a ‘realist’ president. But Adams’ warning against reckless adventure abroad has always had important adherents. It may offer more to the American people today than it ever has before.”

Having to vote for the ‘lesser of two evils’ has always been around — “The two made it clear that a vote for Crawford was a vote for Jackson, and a vote for Jackson was a vote for mad populism and social tumult — a calamity for a man of property like him.”

“The genius of America’s federal system allowed states to govern themselves within their own sphere, while at the same time sending eminent men to the nation’s capital to learn to respect one another’s views.”

“[Adams] listened carefully and made a great many changes to his first draft. But he insisted on including the more far-reaching proposals — without actually expecting them to be passed. He blithely informed Clay that while he understood that this Congress, filled with Jeffersonian and Jacksonian rivals, would never endorse a national university, ‘I would look to a practicability of a longer range than a simple session of Congress.’ Adams would make the strongest possible case for the program he believed the nation needed and then would wait for public and political opinion to catch up.”

“While Europe makes exciting discoveries almost every year, ‘are we not cutting ourselves off from the means of returning light for light while we have neither observatory nor observer upon our half of the globe and the earth revolves in perpetual darkness to our unsearching eyes?’”

“‘The spirit of improvement is abroad upon the earth,’ Adams grandly declared. ‘While dwelling with pleasing satisfaction upon the superior excellence of our political institutions, let us not be unmindful that liberty is power; that the nation blessed with the largest portion of liberty must in proportion to its numbers be the most powerful nation upon earth.’ The promise of national greatness was there to be seized — unless, Adams admonished, timid legislators proved to be ‘palsied by the will of our constituents.’”

“When he said that ‘liberty is power,’ he meant that democratic freedom was not limited to the right of each citizen to cultivate his own garden — what we now call ‘negative liberty’ — but also included the collective power to forge greatness. The instrument of that power was the state.”

“But Adams’ greatest inadvertent gift to the opposition was that unfortunate phrase ‘palsied by the will of our constituents.’ Here was Federalism in its rankest form: the political leader does not represent the will of the voter but rather guides it from above and ignores it when need be. Perhaps John Adams could claim to rule on behalf of its citizenry; his son, in the far more democratic atmosphere of 1825, could not.”

“John Quincy Adams awoke in darkness almost every day of his tenure in the White House. He rose as early as four in the summer and perhaps an hour later in the winter. He would dress and then leave the White House for a long, solitary walk — a habit he cultivated for many years.”

“The president would have seen few people, if any, on these journeys through the darkened city. That suited Adams perfectly well. He was a solitary man who was most comfortable in his own company, brooding over his own thoughts, reflecting on his own destiny, reminding himself of his failures, praying for success in his ventures.”

“Adams had a back-breaking reading load, for he received newspapers, letters from around the country, reports from the various cabinet departments, ‘memorials, petitions, solicitations for office,’ requests for personal loans or subscriptions. He had to approve every court-martial and appoint military officers and postmasters. If a message to Congress was to be written, there was no one to write it but him. And of course he had to keep up his journal and his personal correspondence. After dinner at around five, he might play some billiards and then go back to his papers. IT was often midnight before he extinguished his candle. He had so little time for himself that on three separate occasions he simply stopped keeping his journal, leaving gaps of nine months in his presidency. Adams was then fifty-seven years old, but his stamina was undiminished. He had worked a killing pace his whole life; he thought of himself as a man whose greatest gift was his capacity for ‘drudgery.’”

“And yet the men worked together with nothing like the rancor that divided Monroe’s cabinet, at least in the second term. Cabinet members disagreed openly but without bitterness. Even as Virginia’s leaders grew openly hostile to the Adams administration, Wirt and Barbour, the two Virginians in the cabinet, remained completely loyal. And Clay discovered that he enjoyed working for a man he had long viewed as an ill-tempered puritan. Adams was not a micromanager; he let Clay’s diplomatic messages go out with far less editing than Monroe had imposed on Adams himself. After only a month on the job, a slightly amazed Clay wrote to a friend, ‘There is entire coincidence between Mr. Adams and me on public affairs.’”

“Adams had long viewed Clay as a rogue, and Clay had thought of Adams as a prig, but working together every day let them see beyond their preconceptions.”

“But unlike her husband, [Louisa] needed companionship, and the First Lady languished in her solitude. She was, she wrote to George, ‘unpleasant to myself and to everyone else.’”

“Of all the things he had been in his life, he had been none so faithfully and unerringly as a dutiful son. He had governed his life by the precepts handed down by his parents and had feared doing anything to disappoint them. He had nothing to reproach himself for. Yet he had, in so many ways, lived for them, and now they were gone. He must have felt terribly lonely.”

“Charles wrote, ‘My father has unfortunately such a cold manner of meeting this sort of feeling that I am surprised at the appearance of it at any time among his supporters.’ Another time he remarked, ‘He makes enemies by perpetually wearing the iron mask.’ Charles was the only one of the boys who had grown up with his father as a little boy, had held his hand on long walks, and had at on his lap at the circus. The iron mask had no powers to frighten him.” — Let your children into your heart to understand the reason for what you do.

**“In late 1827 Charles asked his father to help him develop a suitably elegant and grave writing style. Adams immediately responded with a reading list — Cicero and Pliny, Madame De Sevigne and Voltaire, Pope and Pascal. And Charles went out and bought the volumes. His father was so pleased that wrote with yet more books. And when Charles wrote back with his thoughts on Pascal’s Provincial Letters, Adams discovered that he had something he had craved without even realizing it — an intellectual friend and partner. One night he stayed up until midnight writing a long letter about the great writers on ethics, modern and classical. He had, he said with obvious delight, been driven to open up the beloved friends gathering dust on his shelves. Over the next six months, while his political career was, so far as he could see, drawing to an ignominious close, Adams spent countless hours writing to his son about books, the great comfort of his life. While George was writing to admit that he had fallen $1,000 in debt to a complete stranger, Charles was writing to question the idea that genius exists. Adams responded to the one with a check and a very harsh lecture, and to the other with quotes from Socrates, Milton, the Comte de Buffon, and Periander, the second tyrant of Corinth. In a later letter Adams expounded on Cicero, whose wisdom he had long revered as the highest human achievement save for the revelation of Scripture. ‘Make him the study of your whole life,’ he advised. And Charles kept pushing back — on the virtues of early rising, on the moral value of political engagement, even on Cicero.”***

“And he urged Charles to keep writing about whatever thoughts his reading prompted. ‘We shall not always agree in opinion, but each os us may rectify his own opinions by weighing those of the other.’ And so they did, not only over great matters of history but over the most fundamental question of all — how to live.”

“Calhoun alleged that ‘a scheme has been formed to perpetuate power in the present hands.’ Once power has been transferred by ‘corrupt patronage,’ elections will come to be seen as a ‘farce,’ and the people will soon come to accept the ‘transmission of Executive power by hereditary principle, in the same imperial family.’It is striking — in fact, it’s astonishing — that not only political schemers and pro-slavery advocates and reactionary ideologues but one of the nation’s greatest political thinkers had come to adopt a conspiracy theory about the president with no obvious foundation.”

“His ideas were bold and forward-looking, but he had formulated them at a moment when most Americans were seeking liberty rather than power. He was a man both behind his time and ahead of them. The British historian George Dangerfield summed up Adams’ presidency as ‘a rather conspicuous example of a great man in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the right motives and a tragic inability to make himself understood.”

“Fueled by an unquenchable sense of outrage over the ‘corrupt bargain’ that had kept him from office, Jackson had gathered his confederates around him and planned his campaign. In the spring of 1827, eighteen of his leading supporters formed a Central Corresponding Committee in Nashville to black ‘falsehoods and calumny, by the publication of truth’ — a ‘war room’ in a time when the news cycle ran in weeks rather than hours.”

“He was struck, and of course disgusted, by the monetization of politics, the consequence of which was ‘to render elections altogether venal.’”

“All of Adams’ senses, and his great intellectual faculties, were fastened on the harmless, enclosed world of the garden and on the microscopic process of growth, development, and decay, while the world beyond his gate connived at his downfall.”

“These projects also suited the opposition’s political interests: the new Democratic Party was going to do whatever it could to win over wavering states and to purchase available votes. Nor did these avowed enemies of patronage omit the opportunity they now had to patronize their friends: the contracts for the printing of the laws in Washington was taken away from the neutral National Intelligencer and given to Duff Green’s Telegraph. The new Congress, like many later iterations, opposed government spending in principle but not always in practice.”

“Jackson was sure to win, since slander couldn’t be refuted. But then he would fail. ‘He is incompetent both by his ignorance and the fury of his passions,’ Adams said of the man he had once championed as a national hero. His sycophants will fall upon one another.”

“Adams felt as if he were fighting a hydra — the many-headed monster of the aroused and confident opposition. The two houses of Congress, he wrote to Charles, ‘are united by a spirit of bitter, unrelenting, persecuting malice, against me individually, and against the Administration, which they conspired to overthrow.’ For once, Adams was not exaggerating. The opposition really was bent on his destruction.”

“Calhoun was right in the sense that a tariff bill — any tariff bill — split the country along geographic and economic lines, and accelerated the rise of a new ‘sectional’ politics.”

Can’t help but weepingly chuckle at the parallels to today — “Now a hunt was on among Adams’ supporters for real specimens of Jackson’s semiliterate prose and explosive temper. Secretary Barbour went rummaging through the files of the War Department and brought to the White House a Jackson letter that Adams described as ‘still more ferocious than barbarous in style and composition.’ Adams’ allies hoped to get this one published as well. A few weeks later the letter was printed in the National Intelligencer, but the high-minded Gales and Seaton insisted on correcting the errors first, much to Adams’ frustration. Of course, the whole episode was founded on the archaic assumption that Americans would not respect a man who couldn’t spell or hold his temper.”

“William Crawford wrote from Georgia to tell Clay that he shouldn’t have joined the Adams government: ‘It appears to me that he is destined to fall as his father did, and you must fall with him.’ Clay responded equably that when one chooses between two alternatives, time develops the consequences of the one chosen and not of the other. He could not be provoked against Adams, though he certainly had cause; he would go down with the ship rather than scramble off.”

“The canal authorities would be breaking ground immediately outside of Georgetown, and they had decided to do so on July 4. For once, Adams agreed to attend the kind of ritual events he deprecated, with bunting and huzzahs and jolly crowds.”

“The president of the company made a brief speech and handed a spade to Adams, who began to address the two thousand or so onlookers. But in that distant era no advance man was available to ensure that nothing unexpected or actually spontaneous happened, and Adams found that the first strike of his spade clanged against the stump of a tree. So did the second and the third. At this point, Adams later recorded, ‘I threw off my jacket’ — perhaps for the first time in public — ‘and, resuming the spade, raised a shovelful of earth, at which a general shout burst from the surrounding multitude, and I completed my address, which occupied about fifteen minutes.’ By the time Adams returned to the White House that night, he was exhausted. He felt relieved that he hadn’t made a fool of himself. And he realized that the real event of the day had been not the speech but the doffing of his jacket. This was the kind of folksy gesture politicians made even then — but not men of Adams’ generation or background. He was shocked at the effect. ‘It struck the eye and fancy of the spectators more than all the flowers of rhetoric in my speech.’ At age sixty, Adams had discovered politics. He might even have been good at it, but it was a little late.”

“Louisa had been preoccupied with death, and actively yearned for it, since the death of her infant daughter fifteen years earlier. At times she blamed her husband for her deep depression, though at other moments she accused herself, with equal abandon, of having given up on life.”

“Adams did not feel humiliated by his defeat, but he did feel abandoned by his country. ‘The sun of my political career sets in deepest gloom,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘But that of the country shines unclouded.’”

“In the spring of 1829, ex-president John Quincy Adams settled into a new life as a private citizen in Washington, D.C. He found his new routines surprisingly agreeable. Meridian Hill was large, comfortable, well-situated. Adams had a study upstairs whose window overlooked a garden and a nursery of young trees he delighted to gaze at. Then he would turn his attention back to the letters he was writing or rather frivolous novel he was reading.”

“Thus did John Quincy Adams savor his retirement, ‘After 14 years of incessant and unremitting employment,’ he wrote, ‘I have passed to a life of total leisure.’”

“Adams did not in fact feel responsible for George’s torment or his death. A few months earlier he had written to Charles to defend himself from the charge of cold-heartedness. ‘You and all my children know that while my speech is sometimes harsh, my temper is not bad.’ He lacked charm, but he failed ‘more by overindulgence than by asperity.’ Neither his children nor his wife would have been likely to accept this self-assessment. Adams was not a good father; he was, in truth, difficult to live with. But that is not to say that he was responsible for George’s dreaminess, his fecklessness, or of course his ultimate psychic break.”

“Charles wrote his father a long and uncharacteristically confessional letter in which he said he was very conscious of the ‘responsible position’ he now occupied and was determined to do something useful with his life. As yet, he admitted, he had accomplished nothing. Now he had a settled home life, a house in Boston thanks to his generous father-in-law, and ample time for study. He had set himself three projects: to study the eloquence of the ancient writers, to improve his own writing style, and to master the history of his own nation. But how to go about it? Charles admitted that he felt overwhelmed. His father, utterly delighted, wrote back professing his wholehearted approval and suggesting a program of self-improvement. Try your hand at different forms — the oration, the sermon, the dissertation. Vary the style. Once your’e satisfied, publish it anonymously, and then learn from the reaction. He proposed that they once again begin reading Cicero together. Charles, who had reached an age and a stage in life when he no longer felt the need to resist his overbearing father, eagerly complied and wrote long letters with his thoughts, which often differed from his father’s. ‘Your epistles and those of Cicero are my delight,’ the elder man wrote back.”

“Adams awoke before dawn every day, read the Bible and Cicero, went swimming and riding, walked over his land, wrote letters to Charles and to dozens of friends and strangers and tended to Louisa, who was afflicted with one of the worst outbreaks of erysipelas she had ever suffered. He wrote down absolutely everything in his journal, in a hand that had become so tiny, if still perfectly legible, that he often squeezed 650 words into a single small page. But it wasn’t enough. He was bored and restless. ‘My leisure is now imposed on me by the will of higher powers,’ he reflected. ‘Shall I never do better?’”

“Richardson himself came to Adams to confirm that he would run and helpfully observed that should Adams do so, he would raise the office rather than degrade himself. Adams replied stiffly that he didn’t think an ex-president would be degraded ‘by serving as a selectman of his town, if elected thereto by the people.’”

“The job was not beneath his dignity, but a campaign would be.”

“No president before Adams had ever gone on to serve in the House; no president after him ever would. (Andrew Johnson would serve briefly in the Senate after his tenure as president.)”

“He told Philip Fendall, an essayist who hoped to write a biography of him, that Jackson’s opposition to internal improvements and domestic manufacture was bound to be more popular than the American System because the first reduced the need for revenue, while the second increased it. ‘Of the two systems,’ he wrote, in words today’s liberal Democrats would find all too familiar, ‘that of the Administration sacrifices the future and remote benefits to the present, and therefore addresses itself more to the prejudices and feelings of the people.’”

“Hayne now showed his hand, insisting, as Calhoun had, that in a confederated union ultimate sovereignty rested with the states. Now the issue had been joined. Webster rose to deliver a majestic rebuttal in which he argued that the Constitution had been a pact not among states but among people, who had collectively agreed to establish a federal state. This was the speech that ended, ‘Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable!’”

“Now he pondered whether to use this chance to expose the speciousness of the nullification doctrine. ‘Shall I speak my thoughts,’ he asked himself, ‘or shall the fear of man deter me?’”

“Adams then proceeded to make the very odd argument that the Articles of Confederation had failed not because citizens had refused to surrender enough sovereignty to the federal government, but because the state legislatures had insisted on retaining absolute power rather than sharing it with the national government. The Constitution had corrected the error.”

“Adams had turned nullification on its head: far from a response to the tyranny of an overweening federal government, as its adherents claimed, the doctrine was in fact a form of legislative tyranny.”

“Adams turned sixty-four in 1831. This hardly made him a fossil by the standards of the day: George Washington was still president at that age, and John Adams was just exiting. But John Quincy Adams had turned old when he was still young; to men who met him for the first time, he had the remote majesty of a mountain seen in the distance.”

“Adams himself was ‘sober, almost to gloom or sorrow,’ his eyes inflamed, short, bald, slightly corpulent. He was dressed simply, in an olive frock coat, and seemed to be wearing as well a fine layer of learned dust. ‘It was obvious that he was a student,’ Seward wrote, ‘just called from the labor of his closet.’”

“Occasionally, Seward noted, ‘he rose into a temporary earnestness, and then a flash of ingenuous ardor was seen, but it was transitory, and all was cool, orderly and deliberate…As I left the house, I thought I could plainly answer how it happened that he, the best president since Washington, entered and left the office with so few devoted personal friends.’ But Adams remained a formidable presence. Elsewhere Seward wrote, ‘His vigor and his resolution astonished me,’ and said that he had taken inspiration from the old man’s slow-burning fire.”

“He would not oppose a policy simply because it advanced the views and interests of the ruling party.”

“Adams began by taking exception to a phrase from the annual message: ‘The wealth and strength of its country are its population, and the best part of the population are the cultivators of the soil.’ Adams insisted that the ‘cultivators’ Jackson had in mind were not Jefferson’s yeomanry but rather the wealthy landowners of the South who constituted America’s feudal order. He insisted that the entire system envisioned in the president’s annual message was designed to serve the interest of that order. Echoing Jackson’s own language, he asserted that the president wished to reduce the federal government to a ‘simple machine.’ Simplicity, Adams declared, ‘is the essential characteristic in all slavery,’ for all men are either masters or slaves. The government of a free people is bound to be complex, for relations among them, the play of their interests, must be complex. Here was a new weapon in Adams’ rhetorical armamentarium: the play on words, t urning the word ‘simple’ against itself, as he had earlier with ‘machine.’”

“Idleness often turned Adams morbid; he needed occupation.”

“What is striking is how persistently he returns to the theme that the slaveholders expected to enjoy in Congress the same mastery they exercised over their slaves, and thus treated Adams himself as an ‘inferior’ impertinently demanding the rights of an equal. Polk, he notes, ought to have defended the right of free speech; ‘but the Speaker was a master.’ In 1820 he had reflected that the need to defend slavery had warped as fine a mind as Calhoun’s. Now, in his letters, he recalled Jefferson’s observation that slavery degraded the master by accustoming him to dominion over his fellow men. Adams’ own fury must have been stoked by the condescension he felt from these pampered young sons of slave-borne privilege.”

“[Lundy] had moved out of his rooms and stored all his belongings in Pennsylvania Hall. He had little that mattered to him save his papers. They were all consumed by the fire. Yet that very morning this faithful Quaker was able to write to a friend, ‘I am not disheartened, though everything of earthly value (in the shape of property) is lost. Let us persevere in the good cause. We shall assuredly triumph yet.’”

“Adams believed that the state needed to foster cultural and scientific institutions as well. In the most eloquent passages of his futile inaugural message to Congress in 1825, he had declared that God himself had enjoined upon society the obligation to improve man’s ‘moral, political, intellectual’ condition. Adams had listed first among his proposals the establishment of a national university as well as academies for the propagation of knowledge, especially in ‘geographical and astronomical science.’ If, as Adams believed, national greatness was to be measured not merely in wealth and military power but in enlightenment and understanding, the United States could not passively watch as the great powers of Europe made strides in scientific understanding.”

“Adams always overprepared. He had gone over his argument again and again, committing to memory the vast flow of logic and of rhetoric. He was consumed with anxiety, as he always was before public performances of great consequence; perhaps his hands shook, Adams began his address, as he often did when speaking before the public, with an exposition of first principles.”

“In a letter to Clay the following year, Adams wrote bitterly that ‘the idea that a nation destined by the Creator to be the mightiest that ever existed on the face of the Globe…should, with deliberate purpose, have so constituted itself as to cripple all its powers of self-improvement, has always appeared to me a Doctrine the depravity of which is mitigated only by its stupidity.’”

“Adams had shattered the overweening confidence of the South. Giddings overheard Marshall tell a colleague, ‘I would rather die a thousand deaths than again to encounter that old man.’”

“Adams would send Giddings a letter with a short poem: ‘We seek, with searching ken to find / A soul congenial to our own / I sought, and found at last — in thee.’ Giddings would remain in office until 1859, taking over from the elderly Adams the leadership of the anti-slavery movement in Congress.”

“Speeches gave Adams the opportunity to formulate, and disseminate his views both on urgent matters like the perfidy of the Tyler administration and on the question of history and political thought that he often turned over in his mind.”

“In his biography, Henry Adams recalls an incident that took place when he was six or seven years old, which is to say in 1844 or the year after. The family had moved for the summer into his grandparents’ home in Quincy. Henry, the fourth child of Charles Francis and Abigail Brooks, was throwing a tantrum in the hope of being permitted to skip school and was, he recalled, ‘in a fair way to win,’ when the door to the upstairs library opened and his grandfather, known around the house as ‘the President,’ came slowly downstairs. ‘Putting on his hat,’ Henry writes, ‘he took the boy’s hand without a word, and walked him, paralyzed by awe’ — the boy, that is — ‘up the road to the town.’ They walked the mile to the school in perfect silence. Only then, before the schoolhouse door, did John Quincy Adams release his grandson’s hand. Such an episode could have scared the daylights out of a little boy, but what Henry Adams recalled, decades later, was his gratitude that his grandfather ‘had uttered no syllable of revolting cant about the duty of obedience and the wickedness of resistance to law.’”

“To dictate a diary entry is, in a way, to cease to write a diary at all, at least in the sense that in a journal the author speaks to himself only. The subsequent entries are shorter and more public, and thus less vital and self-revealing, than the earlier ones.”

“In his own diary, Charles Francis recorded his father’s words to him. ‘He said that his diary was closed,’ Charles Francis wrote. ‘He would never write any more of it. He would place it in my hands, to do with it what I thought proper, at the same time distinctly stating that it had never been written for extended publication, and it was not his wish that such publication should be made.’”

“Philip Hone offered a more balanced judgment in his diary: ‘Thus has ‘a great man fallen in Israel’ — in many respects the most wonderful man of the age; certainly the greatest in the United States — perfect in knowledge, but deficient in practical results. As a statesmen, he was pure and incorruptible, but too irascible to lead men’s judgment. They admired him, and all voices were hushed when he rose to speak, because they were sure of being instructed by the words he was about to utter; but he made no converts to his opinion, and when President his desire to avoid party influence lost him all the favor of all the parties.’”

“His greatest intellectual faculty was memory, and he showed little foresight. In what, then, did John Quincy Adams’ greatness lie? In this, Parker said: that throughout all his words and acts ran a ‘golden thread’ — ‘an intense love of freedom for all men.’”

“So remote is Henry Adams from the world of his forebears that he described politics, the profession of all of them, as the ‘systematic organization of hatreds.’”