Table Of ContentTable of Contents
Title Page
Author’s Note
Prologue
Chapter One - Favored Son of the Revolution
JUNE 1791, BOSTON
APRIL 1801, BERLIN
Chapter Two - The Road to the Presidency
Chapter Three - An “Agony of Mind”
SUNDAY, JANUARY 9, 1825, WASHINGTON
1824, WASHINGTON
MARCH 4, 1825, WASHINGTON
Chapter Four - The Freshman Congressman
DECEMBER 5, 1831, WASHINGTON
Chapter Five - A Worthy Cause
Chapter Six - Adams, Science, and the Smithsonian Institution
Chapter Seven - Lightning Rod of Congress
JANUARY 1837, WASHINGTON
Chapter Eight - “True and Honest Hearts Love You”
JUNE 1838, WASHINGTON
Chapter Nine - The Amistad
Chapter Ten - “Old Nestor”
Chapter Eleven - Triumph
Chapter Twelve - A New War and Decline
NOVEMBER 20, 1846, BOSTON
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 1848, WASHINGTON
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
Epilogue
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright Page
Author’s Note
American presidents rarely diverge from the ancient example of Cincinnatus, the
Roman consul who, after serving as dictator during a national emergency,
returned home to his plow. George Washington was the American exemplar of
this model of public service, and his successors, for the most part, have adopted
the practice of retiring to their home place.
Ex-presidents often become living ghosts of their formerly famous selves. We
see them at ceremonial functions, but otherwise they are invisible to us. We
picture them in their studies, organizing their papers and spending a couple of
hours a day writing their memoirs, or golfing, sailing, or riding horses—
indulging in the private pursuits that they often sacrificed while they were busy
serving the public.
In my lifetime, presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton broke with this
archetype to devote their post-presidencies to humanitarian and other public
causes. Previously, William Howard Taft, president from 1909 to 1913, was
appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1921 and served nine years as its chief
justice. After losing a third-party bid for the presidency, Theodore Roosevelt
explored Brazil’s River of Doubt, a place visited (at least figuratively) by all
presidents at one time or another. Andrew Johnson, impeached and nearly
convicted, was subsequently elected to the Senate but died after serving only
four months.
But no ex-president can match the astonishing record of John Quincy Adams.
His presidency, generally regarded as a failure, was of only one term’s duration
—he and his father, John Adams, were the only one-term presidents among the
first seven chief executives. Adams appeared destined for anonymous retirement
in his native Massachusetts when something serendipitous happened; his friends
and neighbors sent him to the House of Representatives. This book focuses on
Adams’s amazing seventeen years in the House of Representatives. No recent
Adams biography, and few of any vintage, has made his congressional career its
primary subject; books on the second Adams tend to recount his life as a rising
narrative climaxed by his dismal presidency. His congressional career is usually
presented as an afterthought. While this book relates Adams’s extraordinary
early life as a diplomat, son of the Revolution, and secretary of state, his actions
during these years and his presidency are here presented as a prelude to his entry
into the House of Representatives in December 1831.
Adams entered the House as a freshman congressman at the age of sixty-four,
believing that if the people summoned him, he was obligated to obey that
summons. This was an antiquated notion that did not fit with the raw political
ambition and slash-and-burn politics of the Jackson era. In the seventeen years
that followed, Adams largely redeemed his presidential record by becoming
Congress’s leading champion of the First Amendment right to petition and its
first great opponent of slavery. He also became a passionate advocate for the
sciences and oversaw the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution, ensuring
that James Smithson’s generous bequest to the United States was not
squandered. Most importantly, Adams became Congress’s conscience—a
prickly, sarcastic, and highly articulate voice of reason. His allies fondly referred
to him as “Old Man Eloquent”; his enemies not so kindly called him the
“Madman of Massachusetts,” and worse.
Few public figures have been as highly principled or as extraordinarily
intelligent as Adams. Few have worked as hard as he. Adams knew the ropes of
the House better than his longer-serving colleagues. He used that knowledge to
torment the slave power during the 1830s and 1840s, to condemn the
government’s cruel removal of eastern Indian tribes, to uphold the right of
women to participate in the political process, and to argue against the war of
aggression against Mexico.
Why is John Quincy Adams relevant now? Today, we Americans regard our
government with weary cynicism and distrust. We need to be reminded that it
needn’t be this way.
America once produced a fearless, combative, highly principled “man of the
whole country” in the person of John Quincy Adams, and she can do it again.
We need to listen for his or her clear, reasonable voice amid the din of
equivocating, obfuscating, and temporizing politicians. The byword that Adams
had engraved on his signet ring is a good enough admonition: We must “Watch.”
Prologue
“And so I am launched again upon the faithless wave of politics.”
—Former President John Quincy Adams, upon being nominated for the 12th Congressional District
SEPTEMBER 18, 1830, BOSTON
The unlikely courtship ritual began with an unsigned paragraph in the Boston
Daily Courier proposing that John Quincy Adams, eighteen months removed
from a disappointing single-term presidency, represent Massachusetts’s
Plymouth District in Congress.
On this mild late-summer day, the stout, severe-looking scholar, poet, amateur
scientist, devout Christian, master diplomat, and sixty-three-year-old son of the
Revolution, indifferently attired as usual, traveled to the Worcester home of
Congressman John B. Davis for the ritual’s next phase.
Well versed in the antiquated gentlemen’s politics of George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson, and his father, John Adams, John Quincy Adams knew what
the summons to Davis’s home meant and what his answer would necessarily be.
The sixth president’s hometown, Quincy, had recently been gerrymandered into
the 12th Congressional District (also known as the Plymouth District), now
represented by the Reverend Joseph Richardson of Hingham. Members of
Richardson’s Unitarian congregation had grown impatient with his long
absences in Washington over the past three years and were now pressuring him
to forego another congressional term so that he could devote more time to
church matters.
Richardson’s quandary notwithstanding, Adams was certainly not honor-
bound to uphold the National Republicans’ standard in Congress. No former
president had ever returned to elective office, much less Congress. Adams’s
unhappy tenure as chief executive and the surpassingly vicious 1828 re-election
campaign that had supplanted him with the “military chieftain,” Andrew
Jackson, had surely curdled any vestiges of ambition in him.
At Davis’s home, Congressman Richardson, as expected, informed Adams
that he had resolved to return to his parish and would not seek a third term.
Would Adams consent to run in his place? The office, said Richardson, was not
Description:Following his single term as President of the United States (1825–1829), John Quincy Adams, embittered by his loss to Andrew Jackson, boycotted his successor's inauguration, just as his father John Adams had done (the only two presidents ever to do so). Rather than retire, the sixty-two-year-old f
