John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  They had four children. The only girl, Louisa, died at age one and carried away with her a great deal of her mother’s vivacity. Only one of the boys, Charles Francis, lived to carry on the great Adams name. (The historian and memoirist Henry Adams was his son.) His father was hard on him and harder still on his older brothers, George and John, neither of them made from sturdy Adams stock. As young boys, they had to do without their parents, then abroad on diplomatic missions. Adams, the very model of a self-defeating parent, wrote George, the eldest, long letters on biblical exegesis. When they were together, Adams worried that Louisa would spoil them; Louisa feared that she hadn’t been mother enough to them. Both would die young. John Quincy and Louisa would reconcile over their own shared suffering and over his devotion to her well-being.

  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 the sciences, understands and can explain all subjects, from the solar system down to the construction of a tooth-pick. He has the Holy Scriptures at his fingertips, knows every line of Shakespeare, can recite Homer in the original Greek.” Adams’ output of written work was similarly prodigious—and eccentric. What other president wrote an epic poem set in medieval Ireland (Dermot MacMorrogh)? Or a treatise tracing the history of units of weight and measurement? Or a travelogue on Silesia? He was a polymath who distributed his gifts profusely but idiosyncratically.

  Over the course of his life Adams produced one imperishable work of political literature—his journals. He started keeping a diary at age twelve, wrote intermittently for a few years, and then devoted himself virtually every day of his life to the recording of whatever he did, said, saw, thought, and felt—about fifteen thousand pages in all. No other president, and perhaps no other public figure in American history, kept a diary so vigilantly. Public men, after all, tend to care most about public forms of expression. 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.

  Adams’ journal is as mutable a document as any lifelong record would be. As a young man, he wrote about the girls who caught his eye, though he was much tougher on their petty vanity than most young men would be. As a diplomat, he studied deeply the behavior of princes like Tsar Alexander of Russia, as well as the ludicrous fripperies of court etiquette. As secretary of state, he wrote about the great issues that divided the cabinet of President Monroe. As president, he gave a running account of his lost battles.

  The journal allows us to know this guarded and taciturn man and to occupy his world. At times Adams suffered from debilitating bouts of depression; he writes of “a listlessness which without extinguishing the love of life, affects the mind with the Sentiment that life is nothing worth.” Though notorious for his withering summations of all his leading contemporaries, Adams was no less brutal when he looked in the mirror: “I am a man of reserved, cold austere and forbidding manners; my political adversaries say a gloomy misanthropist, and my personal enemies, an unsocial savage.” The agony he suffered over the death of baby Louisa and then George and John was terrible, but he hid it from everyone save his wife—and his journal. He hid, too, his moral romance—his giddy fantasy of throwing himself into the breach of a great cause. When he introduced a treaty to ban state-sponsored piracy—the kind of global code of conduct that would not emerge until the twentieth century—he wrote, “I feel that I could die for it, with joy.” The same sense of glory in a great cause propelled him as he prepared for the Amistad case. Few men, if any, knew this Adams.

  In his letters and political pamphlets, Adams sometimes reached the Augustan heights of a Burke or a Samuel Johnson. He was one of the most celebrated speakers of America’s golden age of public speech. But the journal, which he told his son Charles Francis he wished to keep forever private, is Adams’ great literary gift to posterity. Charles ultimately published twelve volumes of his father’s diary; they cover barely 40 percent of the total.

  WHY WRITE—OR READ—ABOUT THIS MAN, ARCHAIC EVEN IN HIS own time? Adams and his contemporaries studied history as a record of eternal truths and above all of moral truths, whether about the nature of justice, personal honor, or patriotism. With our own sense of history as a narrative of progress, if a very uneven one, we are more skeptical that the past can speak to us directly about our own experience, or even that moral truths are fixed. But writing about the past is almost never a purely antiquarian exercise; we can’t help but see ourselves in our forebears. Writing about John Quincy Adams is a way of recovering something vital in American experience, all the more so because it has been obscured by time.

  We are all Jacksonians—all democrats, very much including Republicans. Our leaders are proud to say that they are led by public opinion. Yet proclamations of faith in the wisdom of the American people are all too often a species of pandering. Politicians in thrall to special interests cloyingly remind us of their obligation to “listen to their constituents.” Adams despised such evasion. Leadership, for him, meant indifference to party affiliation and, as John F. Kennedy observed, freedom from the preferences of his own voters. Adams’ contemporaries shook their heads at his antique principles: a fellow legislator once told him that he seemed to regard political propositions with the purity of a Euclidean theorem, an observation Adams proudly recorded in his journal.

  Adams, in short, represents a defunct evolutionary line in American political life. It is easier for us to recognize his faults than his virtues. But we need his virtues. We need to hear Adams’ voice. So much of the joy of writing this book, for me, was listening to, and then evoking, that voice, scouringly truthful, unforgiving even of himself. To know Adams is not to love him. It is, however, to admire him greatly.

  PART I

  HE IS FORMED FOR A STATESMAN

  CHAPTER 1

  The Flame Is Kindled

  (1767–1778)

  ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 17, 1775, JOHN QUINCY ADAMS walked with his mother, Abigail, to an orchard atop Penn’s Hill, the highest point near their home in Braintree. The air was filled with the roar and crash of artillery, for at dawn British forces had begun their cannonade of Bunker Hill, which stood at the crown of a peninsula immediately north of Boston. Abigail and her four children had been cowering at home; her husband, John Adams, was three hundred miles away, at the second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. But so much turned on this long-awaited battle that Abigail felt she had to see it for herself. Perhaps she felt that her eldest son, then not quite eight years old, should see for himself the mortal consequences of the fight his father and his fellow colonists had undertaken, or perhaps she was simply very frightened and needed company. It was a clear, hot day, and even from ten miles away Johnny, as his parents called him, could see the flash of cannon fire from British ships in the harbor, the smoke from the colonists’ muskets, and the great wall of flame as the wooden houses and churches of Charlestown, at the very tip of the peninsula, burned beneath a hail of British incendiary shells. The noise was deafening, and the panorama of destruction must have been even more terrifying to the boy than to his mother.

  The battles of Lexington and Concord, two months earlier, had been skirmishes; Bunker Hill was the opening encounter of a war. The British lost almost five hundred men in desperate charges straight up the hill and along its flank, but the militias mustered from Boston and the small towns nearby had neither the men nor the ammunition to resist for long and ultimately fled back home over the narrow causeway of Charlestown. Word reached Braintree later that day that Joseph Warren, thirty-three years old, a fiery orator, a military leader, and an admired doctor, had died in the final charge. While others had fled, Warren had chosen to make a last stand amid the ruined fortifications. Warren was the Adams’ family physician.

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nbsp; A moment so rich with elation, fear, reverence, and grief would have made a deep impression even on a boy far less precocious that John Quincy Adams. In a letter written seventy years later, he recalled that he had “witnessed the tears of my mother, and mingled them with my own, at the fall of Warren, a dear friend of my father, and a beloved Physic to me.” Warren was a friend, but he was also a hero, a brave man who had died defending the cause of American liberty—the same cause, as his mother never failed to remind him, his own father had gone to Philadelphia, under the most trying circumstances, to advance. Every night during these months, his mother instructed him to repeat, along with the Lord’s Prayer, an ode to martyred soldiers written by the British poet William Collins: “How sleep the brave who sink to rest / By all their country’s wishes blest!” In the letter, Adams wrote out all twelve lines of the ode and observed to his correspondent that even after all those years he hadn’t forgotten a word.

  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.

  ABIGAIL ADAMS GAVE BIRTH TO A SON ON JULY 11, 1767. AT THE request of her mother, Elizabeth Smith, she and John named him after Elizabeth’s own father, Colonel John Quincy, then very close to death. (Both the family name and the town were pronounced “Quin-zee.”) The Quincys, who traced their roots in England back to the era of William the Conqueror, had arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony soon after its founding; they had owned the land on Mount Wollaston, the family compound, since 1635. They had given their name to the town in which they lived. Abigail was raised in the finest house for miles around. And the Quincys were as respectable as they were prosperous. Elizabeth married a minister, William Smith, who served for forty-five years as pastor to the nearby town of Weymouth. They had three daughters—Mary, Abigail, and Elizabeth—all of whom also married well. Only the one boy in the family proved to be a mortifying failure: William Jr. died a wastrel, leaving behind a wife and children whom John and Abigail would take into their household.

  The Adamses were every bit as venerable as the Quincys, if less grand. The family had arrived in Massachusetts in 1632 and had served quietly as deacons and selectmen and sheriffs in and around Braintree ever since. John Adams’ father, known as Deacon John, had married Susanna Boylston, from a family no less illustrious than the Quincys. Still, the Adamses had not attended college; Deacon John was a farmer and a shoemaker. But John Adams was immensely proud of his family—not of their social position but of their moral uprightness. In one of his bristlingly defensive moods, he wrote a friend that his family had lived in Braintree for 160 years, and during all that time “no bankruptcy was ever committed, no widow or orphan was ever defrauded, no redemptor intervened and no debt was contracted with England.” For a man like Adams, a descendant of New England’s Puritan founders, “standing” was not a social but a moral attribute. The Adamses, like the Quincys, had been upright figures since Englishmen had arrived on the continent. They were the aristocracy of the new world, and John Adams’ extensive exposure to the aristocracy of the old world later on in life only deepened this conviction.

  John Quincy Adams was born in a modest wood-frame cottage about a mile from the village of Braintree and two miles from the ocean. Next door was the house in which his father had grown up and his grandmother still lived. On its ground floor the Adams’ house had four rooms wrapped around a steep staircase: a small, square parlor; a narrow kitchen running the length of the house in the rear; a dining room; and another front parlor, which John had turned into his law office. The staircase led to two bedrooms in the front of the house and two tiny rooms squeezed under the eaves in the rear—the house was steeply gabled. The upstairs would have been very crowded at night, since all four children lived there: Abigail, known as Nabby, born in 1765; John Quincy; Charles, born in 1770; and Thomas Boylston, born two years later.

  Johnny and his brothers and sister grew up on a modest ten-acre farm. The Adamses kept chickens, sheep, and cows as well as horses for plowing; grew their own fruit and vegetables; and chopped down their own trees for firewood. The family’s income came from John’s law practice, but the farm supplied most of their needs; they were self-sufficient, as city folk were not. John worked on the farm, and while Abigail had a servant, there was little the servant did that Abigail couldn’t, and didn’t, do herself.

  Beyond the Adams property lay other small farms with their orchards and fields, their stables and sheds and cider mills. Braintree rolled toward the ocean in gentle hills, though at its southwestern edge a steep hill of granite served as the quarry for the region and furnished the stone from which many of the fine homes of Boston were built. The life of Braintree revolved around the church, Puritan until 1750 and Unitarian thereafter. The only other building in the village not devoted to farming was the store, from which Abigail could buy anything from a carton of pins to a glass of rum, as the sign in the window read. And yet the great city of Boston, with a population of perhaps fifteen thousand, lay only ten miles away down the coastal road. The people of Braintree were modest farmers, but they were not yokels.

  No one among them had pressed more eagerly into the larger world than John Adams, a figure of great gifts, boundless energy, focused ambition. As a Harvard student, he identified the other bright young men, got to know them, read what they read. As a lawyer, he combined tireless preparation with passionate advocacy. Adams had a strict, Calvinist sense of morality and propriety. But as a young man he was scarcely the dour figure conjured up by the word “Puritan.” He had, by his own admission, an “amorous disposition” and loved nothing more than spending an evening in the company of ladies. But he never committed an indiscretion, for which he thanked his own parents, whom, he said, “held every species of Libertinage in such contempt and Horror, and held up constantly to view such pictures of disgrace, of baseness and of ruin, that my natural temperament was always overawed by my principles and Sense of decorum.” That was Adams—passion kept in check by principle, like the wooden staves of a barrel held together by copper hoops.

  John Adams was voluble, buttonholing, argumentative, headlong. He could talk and write a blue streak. In one of his first letters to Abigail, in 1761, when they were pledged to one another but not yet married, the twenty-five-year-old attorney wrote, “I mount this moment for the noisy, dirty town of Boston, where parade, Pomp, Nonsense, Frippery, Folly, Foppery, Luxury, Politicks and the soul-Confounding wrangles of the law will give me the Higher Relish for Spirit, Taste and Sense at Weymouth, next Saturday.” Adams had a dim view of his fellow man but did not yet suffer from the splenetic temper of his later years. He published a series of mock-rural letters, in country vernacular, under the name Humphrey Ploughjogger. He wrote little sketches of the people he met at inns and in the courts for Abigail’s amusement.

  But Adams was also a politically conscious man, and in 1764, when the English began to impose a series of onerous taxes on the colonies, culminating in the Stamp Act, Adams responded by publishing a legal essay titled A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law. Soon afterwards, in the Braintree Instructions, he gave voice to the townspeople’s decision to defy the Stamp Act as a violation of their rights as Englishmen not to be taxed without representation. Forty other towns, including Boston, adopted the instructions, thus catapulting the fiery young lawyer into the first ranks of patriotic activists. Adams soon found that he had to choose between opportunities to capitalize on his legal gifts and his patriotic convictions. And he never hesitated. In 1768, with his family growing, he was offered a lucrative post in the Court of Admiralty. He immediately refused, as he had refused such offers in the past, owing to “my Scruples about laying myself under any restraints, or Obligations of Gratitude to the Government for any of their favours.” When he explained that he held opinions contrary to those of His Majesty’s government, he was told that he would remain
perfectly free to express those views. He still said no.

  Politics inexorably drew Adams away from the quiet life of a prosperous lawyer. When a detachment of British soldiers in Boston fired on a mob of young men on March 5, 1770, killing three and wounding two—the riot that came to be known as the Boston Massacre—Adams agreed to defend Thomas Preston, the senior British officer. Abigail burst into tears when he told her that he would take the case—or so Adams wrote much later in his Autobiography—for he appeared to be bent on destroying the finest legal prospects in Massachusetts. Nevertheless, she agreed that he could not act otherwise. The right to counsel was precisely the kind of principle enshrined in England’s unwritten constitution, which the colonists insisted must apply to themselves. Beyond that, the sacrifice of interest in the name of principle lay at the very core of the moral order John and Abigail held dear. Many of Adams’ friends were bewildered by his decision but ultimately embraced it as an act of exalted patriotism. Thanks to Adams, Thomas Preston was acquitted; only two of the eight other soldiers were found guilty, and they on reduced charges.