John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

In the impenetrable citadel of a good man’s consciousness, unseen by mortal eyes, there stands the Palladium of Justice, radiant with celestial light; mortal hands may make and mar; this they can mar not, no more than they can make. Things about the man can others build up or destroy; but no foe, no tyrant, no assassin, can ever steal the man out of the man. Who would not have the consciousness of being right, even of trying to be right, though affronted by a whole world, rather than conscious of being wrong and hollow and false, have all the honors of a nation on his head?

  AS A CHRISTIAN, ADAMS HAD LONG SINCE RECONCILED HIMSELF TO his own demise—thus the stoical last words. But as an Adams, and as a man deeply immersed in the classics and in the antique world, he felt that he constituted only a single link in a great chain. When he planted another tree at Mount Wollaston, he felt that he was partaking of a history that stretched back to Pilgrims and forward to . . . he knew not where. Family members had owned Mount Wollaston since very close to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Adams had passed it on intact—indeed, improved—to the next generation. It would remain in the family until the 1880s, when it was sold and subdivided. The next generation would also begin to sell the hundreds of acres and the many outbuildings that John Adams had assembled as Peacefields and that John Quincy had preserved, selling some properties and adding others. When Charles Francis’ last surviving son, Peter, died in 1927 and deeded the family home to the state of Massachusetts, only a few dozen acres came with it.

  Property, however, was not so precious to Adams as the sacred family name. He never stopped worrying about whether the great chain that stretched back far beyond his own father would be snapped in the next generation. Would his children—would Charles Francis—sustain the honor of the name of Adams? Charles Francis felt that burden, as his father had felt it before him. He would prove worthy, as his father had. As a state legislator, as the editor of the Whig in Boston, and as a leader of the Conscience Whigs, Charles Francis carried forward his father’s politics of conviction, above all on the question of slavery. He would go on to run for vice president on the Free Soil ticket in 1848 (with, of all people, the unsinkable Martin Van Buren); enter Congress, in 1858, as a Republican; and serve, between 1861 and 1868, as Lincoln’s ambassador to England, the same post both his father and his grandfather had held.

  The distinctive form in which Charles Francis took on the burden of preserving the family name was as literary executor. The Adams family mythos is a matter of words as much as deeds; Charles Francis gave those words to the public. While still in his thirties he produced a volume of Abigail Adams’ letters, which were widely quoted in the eulogies for John Quincy Adams. He wrote the biography of John Adams his father had proved conspicuously unable to produce, perhaps because John Quincy felt disabled by his own uncritical reverence. Charles Francis loyally characterized the work as “begun” by his father and only “completed” by himself. He also published his grandfather’s papers and the monumental twelve-volume version of his father’s diary. In 1870 Charles Francis built a stone library, more like a temple, to house his father’s fourteen thousand books. Both his father’s remains and his father’s beloved books have been encased in a stone vault to defy the ravages of time.

  Charles Francis and Abby Brooks had seven children; three of them—Charles Francis Jr., Brooks, and Henry—became prominent writers and political activists. As John Quincy had served as his father’s private secretary in Europe, so Charles Francis employed Henry in London. Henry Adams became the Harvard scholar his grandfather perhaps wished he had been. Among his great works is the nine-volume History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, an indispensable source for the students of this era of national consolidation. He wrote biographies of Albert Gallatin, a great friend of his grandfather and great-grandfather, and of John Randolph, a fierce enemy of both. In the Autobiography of Henry Adams, published in 1907, he subjected the family breeding ground of old New England—“troglodytic,” he called it—to the searching scrutiny of an anthropologist. 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.” This immensely self-conscious work marks the Adams family’s exit from the archaic cosmos of colonial Massachusetts and into the quicksilver world of modernity.

  The Adams name rolled on in gently ebbing waves of distinction. Charles Francis Adams III, who married the granddaughter of the secretary of the navy under President John Quincy Adams, served as Herbert Hoover’s navy secretary. (He had prepared for the role by successfully defending the America’s Cup.) His son, Charles Francis Adams IV, served as president of the aerospace firm Raytheon. The Roman numerals have marched all the way down to our own day in the form of John Quincy Adams VII, surely one of the very few “VII”s in a nation that has forsworn a hereditary aristocracy. This John Quincy Adams has a blog.

  Even leaving aside the IIIs and IVs, it is safe to say that no other family in American history has produced great men, or even near-great men, in so many consecutive generations. It is a record that defies the typical diminishing effect that prominent men have on their sons.

  Louisa Catherine Adams, wearied by life though she was, outlived her husband by four years, dying in 1852 at the age of seventy-seven. She was buried in the family vault in the Stone Temple—next to her father-in-law, whom she adored; her mother-in-law, whom she feared; and her husband, whose soul she had penetrated as no other mortal had and whom she found exasperating, tendentious, intolerant, self-absorbed, and yet, in the end, magnificent.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit quite literally could not have been written without the help of my research assistant, Homa Hassan, who spent countless hours combing through the thousands of letters written to and from Adams. Whatever light the book manages to shed would have been far dimmer without the editorial guidance of my son, Alexander Traub. And I never would have thought of writing it in the first place had my wife, Elizabeth Easton, not urged me to stop writing books about current events and find a good dead person to write about instead.

  I was incredibly fortunate to have as my editor Lara Heimert, now the publisher of Basic Books. Lara read my manuscript with a scrupulosity that I thought had vanished from the world of publishing. Without her efforts, this book would have been much longer and much woolier. The historian Richard Bernstein saved me from several egregious errors and quite a few slightly less mortifying ones. Roger Labrie edited the manuscript with such penetration and tact that I eagerly submitted to (almost all of) his counsel.

  All biographers of Adams depend on the Adams Papers, the extraordinary archive of Adams material housed within the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. However, James Taylor, director of the Adams Papers, and his colleagues have made such progress in digitizing the archive that I barely had to leave my office in order to read Adams’ journal and many of the letters among family members. What a boon to students of the Adamses!

  Several scholars, including Thomas Bender, Lynn Parsons, and Adam Brandenburger, read portions of my manuscript and gave me useful guidance.

  My agent, Andrew Wylie, rarely took more than sixty seconds to respond to my occasional panicked email, though I am among the littlest of his fishes. I am perpetually grateful to him.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  xii“highly as I reverenced the authority: John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (New York: Harper, 1956).

  xii“the sober second thought: Pittsburgh Daily Advocate and Advertiser, November 18, 1843.

  xiiidiplomat-scholar George Kennan: John Lukacs, George Kennan: A Study of Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 120.

  xivYuval Levin has divided Americans: Yuval Levin, The Great Debate (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

  xiv“the great object of the institution: John Quincy Adams, First Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1825.

  xv�
��comprehensive grand strategy”: Charles N. Edel, Nation Builder: John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

  xvi“has probed deeply into the arcana: Philip Hone, The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–51 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1910), 288.

  xvii“a listlessness which without extinguishing: The Diaries of John Quincy Adams (hereafter Diaries), March 8, 1814, Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/php.

  xvii“I am a man of reserved, cold austere: Diaries, June 4, 1819.

  xvii“I feel that I could die: Diaries, “Day,” end of July, 1823.

  CHAPTER 1: THE FLAME IS KINDLED (1767–1778)

  4“witnessed the tears of my mother: John Quincy Adams (hereafter JQA) to Joseph Sturge, April (no date given) 1846, in Adams Papers Microfilm, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. See also Abigail’s letter to John Adams (hereafter JA), June 18, 1775, in L. H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlaender, Richard Alan Ryerson, and Margaret A. Hogan, eds., Adams Family Correspondence (AFC) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). All subsequent letters cited in this chapter are from AFC.

  5“no bankruptcy was ever committed: David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Touchstone, 2001), 414.

  6they were not yokels: As recounted in Charles Francis Adams, History of Braintree, Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1891).

  6“held every species of Libertinage: L. H. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1961), vol. 3, 260–261.

  6“I mount this moment: JA to Abigail Adams (hereafter AA), February 14, 1761.

  7“my Scruples about laying myself: Butterfield, Diary and Autobiography, vol. 3, 288.

  7Adams wrote much later: “Abigail wept at Preston.”

  8“Female education,”: AA to Lucy Cranch, April 26, 1787.

  8“I hereby order you: JA to AA, October 4, 1762.

  8“a tye more binding: AA to JA, August 14, 1763.

  8“I would have been a rover: AA to Isaac Smith, April 20, 1771.

  9“I have a curiosity: Ibid.

  9“Electricity, Magnetism Hydrostatics: G. J. Barker-Benfield, Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 172.

  9“The flame is kindled: AA to Mercy Otis Warren, December 5, 1773.

  9“that we cannot be happy: AA to Warren, February 3 (?), 1775.

  9“You had prepared me: AA to JA, July 6, 1775.

  9“the Sword is now: AA to Warren, February 3 (?), 1775.

  10“The sound I think: AA to JA, March 2, 1776.

  10“Education has made a greater difference: JA to AA, October 29, 1775.

  11“think of forming the Taste: JA to AA, July 7, 1776.

  11“Every man in a republic: Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–87 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969).

  11“I have always thought: AA to JA, September 16, 1774.

  11“brotherly love, sisterly affection: AA to Abigail Smith, February 21, 1791.

  12“What Bias Nature: AA to Warren, July 16, 1773.

  13“I hope that you will remember: JA to JQA, April 18, 1776.

  13“it will become a necessary: JA to AA, February 18, 1776.

  13“Which character he esteems: JA to JQA, March 16, 1777.

  15“Adhere to those religious Sentiments: AA to JQA, June 10 (?), 1778.

  16“seeing large things: McCullough, John Adams, 200.

  16“rolled in the grass: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (London: Oxford University Press, 1999), 13.

  16“My head is much too fickle: JQA to JA, June 27, 1777.

  17“snares and temptations”: AA to John Thaxter, February 15, 1778.

  CHAPTER 2: HIS THOUGHTS ARE ALWAYS RUNNING IN A SERIOUS STRAIN (1778–1780)

  18“The Heavens frown: H. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1961), vol. 4, 6.

  19“Fully sensible of the Danger,”: Ibid., vol. 4, 15.

  20“What is the course of it?”: Ibid., vol. 2, 277.

  21The gardens surrounding their cottage: As described in Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America (New York: Henry Holt, 2005).

  21“learned more French in a day: Butterfield, Diary and Autobiography, vol. 4, 60.

  21“which I believe will rouse: John Quincy Adams (hereafter JQA) to Abigail Adams (hereafter AA), April 20, 1778, in L. H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlaender, Richard Alan Ryerson, and Margaret A. Hogan, eds., Adams Family Correspondence (AFC) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). All letters in this chapter are cited from AFC.

  21He wrote to his cousin: JQA to William Cranch, May 31, 1778.

  21“All the actresses,”: JQA to Lucy Cranch, June 1, 1778.

  21“Pappa won’t let me go: JQA to Abigail Smith, September 27, 1778.

  22“stern and haughty Republican: John Adams (hereafter JA) to AA, April 12, 1778.

  22“much rather be among the rugged: JQA to AA, June 5, 1778.

  22“Your business & mine: JQA to Charles Adams, June 6, 1778.

  22“Improve your understanding,”: AA to JQA June 10 (?), 1778.

  22“Your son is the joy: JA to AA, December 2, 1778.

  23“in the first place: AA to JQA, March 20, 1780.

  23“one so rational, ingenious and curious: JQA to Charles Adams and Thomas Boylston Adams, October 3, 1778.

  23“Altho I shall have the mortification: JQA to AA, September 27, 1778.

  24“correcting the pronunciation: Butterfield, Diary and Autobiography, vol. 2, 385.

  24“body-politic . . . is a social compact: David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Touchstone, 2001), 221.

  25“the events that happen to me: JA to AA, September 27, 1778.

  25Johnny wrote of his own trip: The Diaries of John Quincy Adams, November 30, 1779, Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/php.

  25“I never experienced any Thing: Butterfield, Diary and Autobiography, vol. 2, 426.

  26“disobedience and impertinence: Rector Roger Verheyk to JA, November 10, 1780.

  26“confine yourself to proper hours: JA to JQA, December 28, 1780.

  27Another letter proposed: JA to JQA, May 18, 1781.

  27“I hope, my dear boy: AA to JQA, May 26, 1781.

  27She gently chided: AA to Charles Adams, May 26, 1781.

  CHAPTER 3: AS PROMISING AND MANLY A YOUTH AS IS IN THE WORLD (1781–1785)

  29He and Dana traveled eastward: Described in W. Cresson, Francis Dana: A Puritan Diplomat at the Court of Catherine the Great (New York: Dial, 1930), 160–166.

  29tolling off the pages: The Diaries of John Quincy Adams (hereafter Diaries), January 27, 1782ff, Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/php.

  29“The Sovereign,”: John Quincy Adams (hereafter JQA) to Abigail Adams (hereafter AA), September 10, 1783, in L. H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlaender, Richard Alan Ryerson, and Margaret A. Hogan, eds., Adams Family Correspondence (AFC) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). All letters in this chapter are from AFC unless otherwise noted.

  30“Yet even this mistress: AA to JQA December 26, 1783.

  30“car je suis tout à fait: JQA to John Thaxter, July 22, 1782.

  31“Has the cold northern region: AA to JQA, November 13, 1782.

  31“I must beg your pardon: JQA to AA, July 30, 1783.

  31“His Britannic Majesty acknowledges: The text of the Treaty of Paris is available online: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Paris_(1783).

  31“He is grown a man: AFC, vol. 5, 218.

  32“I beg you would let me: JQA to Peter Jay Munro, November 10, 1783, in Adams Papers Microfilm (hereafter APM), Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

  32“that wonderful, wonderful: JQA to Munro, November 4, 1783, in APM.

  33“I
go pretty often to the Plays: JQA to Munro, December 7, 1783, in APM.

  33Oh love, thou tyrant: JQA to Munro, April 12, 1784, in APM.

  33“to be condemned: JQA to Elizabeth Cranch, April 18, 1784.

  33“Let your observations: AA to JQA, December 26, 1783.

  34“no man knows: L. H. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1961), vol. 3, 152.

  34The sole inhabitant they encountered: JQA describes in letters to Munro, November 3 and 16, 1784, in APM.

  34“He was in fine spirits,”: Butterfield, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, vol. 3, 152.

  34“his ideas are all striking: JQA to JA, June 6, 1784.

  34“Whenever a great able: JA to JQA, June 21, 1784.

  35“Don’t fatigue yourself: JA to JQA, June 6, 1784.

  35“the greatest traveller of his age: JA to AA, July 26, 1784.

  35“This place offers a vast fund: Diaries, March 17, 1785.

  36“whom I love to be with: Ibid., March 10, 1785.

  37“The table is covered: David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Touchstone, 2001), 325.

  37“If you were to examine him: Ibid.

  37“no man would have wished: JQA to Munro, February 29, 1784, in APM.

  38“I am determined: Diaries, April 26, 1785.

  38“with such feelings: Ibid., May 12, 1785.

  CHAPTER 4: YOU ARE ADMITTED, ADAMS (1785–1788)

  40“to form some opinion: The Diaries of John Quincy Adams (hereafter Diaries), August 11, 1785, Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/php.

  40“the best Company: Ibid., September 3, 1785.

  40even to describe his feelings in his journal: Ibid., August 28, 1785.

  40“he enters into characters: Mary Cranch to Abigail Adams (hereafter AA), September 7, 1785, in L. H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlaender, Richard Alan Ryerson, and Margaret A. Hogan, eds., Adams Family Correspondence (AFC) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). All subsequent letters in this chapter are from AFC.