John Quincy Adams

“ The memorial tablet inside the church bears upon it the words "Alteri Sæculo,"—surely never more justly or appropriately applied to any man than to John Quincy Adams, hardly abused and cruelly misappreciated in his own day but whom subsequent generations already begin to honor as one of the greatest of American statesmen, not only preëminent in ability and acquirements, but even more to be honored for profound, immutable honesty of purpose and broad, noble humanity of aims. ”

“ Henry A. Wise
From a photograph by Brady, in the Library of the State Department at Washington.
Autograph from the Chamberlain collection, Boston Public Library.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS (p. 001) CHAPTER I YOUTH AND DIPLOMACY
On July 11, 1767, in the North Parish of Braintree, since set off as the town of Quincy, in Massachusetts, was born John Quincy Adams. Two streams of as good blood as flowed in the colony mingled in the veins of the infant. If heredity counts for anything he began life with an excellent chance of becoming famous—non sine dîs animosus infans. ”

“ Of Unitarian laymen who were loyal to the ideal of freedom, the list may properly open with the name of Josiah Quincy, afterwards mayor of Boston and president of Harvard College, who began as early as 1804 his opposition to slavery, and carried it faithfully into his work as a member of the national House of Representatives soon after. The fidelity of John Quincy Adams to freedom during many years is known to every one, and his service in the national House has given him a foremost place in the company of the anti-slavery leaders. ”

“ It is served by the New York, New Haven & Hartford railway, and by an interurban electric line. To a large degree Quincy is a residential suburb of Boston. The birthplaces of John Adams, built in 1681, and of John Quincy Adams, built in 1716, are still standing. The Stone Temple, or First (Unitarian) Congregational Church, is the burial-place of the two Adamses. Quincy was also the home of Charles Francis Adams. John Adams gave to the town his valuable private library, and in 1822 founded here the Adams Academy for boys (now closed) . ”

“ We should see the spirit of liberty awaking the conscience of the nation to the sin and danger of slavery, whose advocates had inherited and kept alive the old anarchic spirit of disunion. We should trace the progress of that great struggle from the days when John Quincy Adams stood in the House of Representatives, like a lion at bay, defending the sacred right of petition ”

“ LIFE OF JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. 39 "Do n't distress yourself about any malicious attempts to injure me in the estimation of my countrymen. Let them take their course, and go the length of their tether. They will never hurt your husband, whose character is fortified with a shield of innocence and honor, ten thousand-fold stronger than brass or iron. The contemptible essays, made by you know whom, will only tend to their own confusion. ”

“ Such were the qualities which made him a great statesman; but unfortunately we must behold a hardly less striking reverse to the picture, in the faults and shortcomings which made him so unpopular in his lifetime that posterity is only just beginning to forget the prejudices of his contemporaries and to render concerning him the judgment which he deserves. Never did a man of pure life and just purposes have fewer friends or more enemies than John Quincy Adams. ”

“ It seems almost impossible to the race to come squarely up to truth and honesty, in word or act, in any transaction, as a man or as a people. Sinister and subtle, expediency, and not principle, seems to be their universal rule of action. Cold and passionless, incapable of generous emotions, he is necessarily vindictive and cruel. Patient and persevering, bigoted and selfish, eschewing as a crime an honorable resentment, he creeps to his ends like a serpent, with all his cunning and all his venom.
John Quincy Adams, in his nature, was much more like his mother than his father. ”

“ He had the Puritan's restraint, self-scrutiny, and self-condemnation. "I am," he writes, "a man of reserved, cold, austere, and forbidding manners." Nor can this estimate be pronounced unjust. He was a lonely man, communing with his soul in his diary more than with a circle of admiring friends. It was not easy for men to love John Quincy Adams. The world may respect the man who regulates his course by a daily dead-reckoning, but it finds it easier to make friends with him who stumbles towards rectitude by the momentum of his own nature. ”

“ To the names of Augustine, Xavier, Fenelon, Milton, Newton, Locke, Lavater, Howard, Chateaubriand, and their thousands of compeers in Christian faith, among the world's wisest and noblest, it is not without pride that the American may add, from among his countrymen, those of such men as WASHINGTON, JAY, PATRICK HENRY, and JOHN QUINCY ADAMS." [Footnote: Preface to "Letters of John Quincy Adams to his Son, on the Bible and its Teachings."] ”

“ We will be soon on board, and may God prosper our voyage in every stage of it as much as at the beginning, and send to you, my dear children, and all my friends, the choicest blessings!
"So wishes and prays yours, with an ardor that neither absence, nor any
other event can abate,
"JOHN ADAMS.
"P. S. Johnny sends his duty to his mamma, and his love to his sisters and
brothers. He behaves like a man."
"He behaves like a man!"—Words which gave presage of the future character of John Quincy Adams. ”

“ His ample learning and various accomplishments were rivalled among American public men only by those of John Quincy Adams, and during all the fury of political passion in which he lived there was never a whisper or suspicion of his political honesty or his personal integrity. ”

“ Excusably Anglican in the bygone days of Genet's mission, they now remained still Anglican, when to be Anglican was to be emphatically un-American. As one reads the history of 1807 and 1808 it is impossible not to feel almost a sense of personal gratitude to John Quincy Adams that he dared to step out from his meek-spirited party and do all that circumstances rendered possible to promote resistance to insults and wrongs intolerable. In truth, he was always a man of high temper, and eminently a patriotic citizen of the United States. ”

“ He thought the report of John Quincy Adams on weights and measures one of the ablest works in political literature.
The tendency of his mind and character was wholly practical. Common sense was his polar star. He must be judged not as a scholar or a lawyer or a statesman merely, but as a man of business who was required to accomplish a given purpose. If that purpose was to be accomplished by writing, he took up his pen; if by speech, he rose at the bar and pleaded the case, or in the senate and made a speech. ”

“ My own strong convictions on this Presidential pretension were aroused in a conversation which it was my privilege to enjoy with John Quincy Adams, as he sat in his sick-chamber at his son’s house in Boston, a short time before he fell at his post of duty in the House of Representatives. In a voice trembling with age and with emotion, he said that no public man could take gifts without peril ”

“ It was midsummer when the Neptune dropped anchor in the harbor of Kronstadt. There Gallatin and Bayard were joined by John Quincy Adams, Minister to Russia, who had been appointed the third member of the commission. Here was a pureblooded American by all the accepted canons. John Quincy Adams was the son of his father and gloried secretly in his lineage: a Puritan of the Puritans in his outlook upon human life and destiny. Something of the rigid quality of rock-bound New England entered into his composition. He was a foe to all compromise—even with himself ”

“ It is that of discarding every remnant of rancor against each other, of embracing, as countrymen and friends, and of yielding to talents and virtue alone that confidence which, in times of contention for principle, was bestowed only upon those who bore the badge of party communion.
During the administration of John Quincy Adams, he was really the Chief Magistrate. He submitted neither his reason nor his conscience to the control of any partisan cabal. No man was appointed to office in obedience to political dictation, and no faithful public servant was proscribed. ”

“ Adams had advantages in London which scarcely any American woman has ever had since; true, she had not wealth to make a great display, but her home was one of pleasant comfort, and enjoying as she did the society of one of the most intelligent of men, 249and of the best informed circle in the great capital, she had signal opportunities for cultivation. Charles King, in his eulogy on John Quincy Adams, speaks thus: “It was while Mr. Adams was Minister of the United States in London, that it was my personal good fortune to be admitted to his intimacy and friendship. ”

“ Adams inherited a large estate and acquired additional wealth. He was conspicuous in the town affairs of Quincy; the adoption of what is known as the "Quincy School System" being due to his efforts while on the school board. He was invited to a seat in President Cleveland's cabinet in 1892, but declined. Mr. Adams was a man of genuine ability, and of equally genuine indifference to what are termed "party honors." He attended the First Unitarian church of Quincy, beneath which are buried the remains of his illustrious ancestors, the two Presidents. ”

“ We are all living according to custom; we do as other people do, and shrink from an act of our own. Every such act makes a man famous, and we can all count the few cases—half a dozen in our time—when a public man ventured to act as he thought without waiting for orders or for public opinion. John Quincy Adams was a man of an audacious independence that always kept the public curiosity alive in regard to what he might do. None could predict his word, and a whole congress could not gainsay it when it was spoken. ”

“ John Quincy Adams belongs to neither of the prominent political parties, fights no partisan battles, and cannot be prevailed upon to sacrifice truth and principle upon the altar of party expediency and interest. ”

“ Adams, President John Quincy, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 384; minister to Holland, his marriage, 13; senator and minister to Russia, 14; minister to England and Secretary of State, 14; in Congress, 14; death and funeral of, 15-17; his feuds, 19; his character, 22, 37, 42, 89, 95; his relation to W. H. Seward, 88; his likeness to Earl Russell, 144; his diary, 343.
Adams, John Quincy the younger, 18, 210.
Adams, Louisa Catherine Johnson (wife of John Quincy Adams) , 7, 10, 11, 12-15, 34, 36.
Adams, Louisa Catherine (Mrs. Charles Kuhn) , 18, 28, 72, 73, 250, 251. ”

“ But other nations have had successful revolutions, and have set up free constitutions, and have yet sunk again under reinvigorated despotism. The CONSOLIDATION of the American Republic—the crowning act—occupied forty years, reaching from 1789 to 1829. During that period, John Quincy Adams participated continually in public affairs, and ultimately became the principal actor.
The new Government was purely an experiment. In opposition to the fixed habits of mankind, it established suffrage practically universal, and representation so perfect that not one Legislative House only, but both Houses ”

“ January 9 the Enforcement Act received the signature of President Jefferson.
Senator Pickering, of Massachusetts, alone profited by this audacious act of power; and his overwhelming triumph became every day more imminent, as the conservative forces of New England arrayed themselves under his lead. Since the departure of Rose, in March, he had basked in the sunshine of success and flattery. Single-handed he had driven John Quincy Adams from public life, and had won the State of Massachusetts, for the first time, to the pure principles of the Essex Junto. ”

“ Instead of loud acclamations, which succeeded the other toasts, it was followed by soft and interrupted interjections and aspirations, as if each individual was casting up an ejaculatory prayer, that the two illustrious sages might pass the remainder of their days in tranquillity and ease, and finally be landed on the blissful shores of a happy eternity.
In September, 1825, President Adams, with his family, left Washington, on a visit to his venerable father, at Quincy. He travelled without ostentation, and especially requested that no public display might be manifested. ”

“ During the next two years he continued to act as his father's secretary, accompanying him on his various public missions. In 1785, upon his father's acceptance of the appointment of minister to England, John Quincy returned to the United States, and after some preparatory study entered the junior class of Harvard college in March, 1786, and was graduated from that institution in 1787. Entering the office of Theophilus Parsons of Newburyport he applied himself to the study of the law, and upon admission to the bar in 1790 commenced practice in Boston. ”

“ No other American President, not even Thomas Jefferson, has equaled John Quincy Adams in literary accomplishments. His orations and public speeches will be found to stand for a tradition of painstaking, scholastic finish hardly to be found elsewhere in American orations, and certainly not among the speeches of any other President. As a result of the pains he took with them, they belong rather to literature than to politics, and it is possible that they will not be generally appreciated at their real worth for several generations still to come. ”