John Quincy Adams (2 page)

Sent to Europe by President James Madison, John Quincy Adams negotiated the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812. Later, as President James Monroe's secretary of state, he engineered the seizure and annexation of Florida and wrote the core provision of the Monroe Doctrine ending foreign colonization in the Americas. An eloquent lawyer, he argued brilliantly before the Supreme Court to prevent Congress from criminalizing political dissent. In another case before the high court, he won freedom for kidnapped Africans on the slave ship
Amistad
, saving them from a life of bondage
.
A strong supporter of scientific advances, he was the first American President to have his face and figure impressed for posterity by a startling new process called photography.

As an independent congressman, John Quincy Adams scorned party affiliations, helped found the Smithsonian Institution, defeated state efforts to nullify federal laws, and forced the House of Representatives to restore free speech and citizens' right to petition Congress. During his sixteen years in the House, he was argumentative and politically unpredictable but consistent in his fierce and constant defense of justice, human rights, and the individual liberties that his father and other Founding Fathers had fought for and won in the American Revolution. With support from Illinois freshman congressman Abraham Lincoln, John Quincy Adams forced the House of Representatives to repeal the so-called Gag Rule that banned debate over slavery. He then stunned Congress—and the nation—by demanding
that Congress extend constitutional liberties to Americans of African descent by abolishing slavery.

A witness to sixty-five years of critical American history, John Quincy Adams bequeathed to the nation one of its most important literary and historic treasures—his diary. Started when he was only ten, his eyewitness account remains the most complete, personal, day-to-day record of events and life in the New World and Old, from the 1770s to the 1840s—14,000 pages in all, dating from the eve of the Revolutionary War to the eve of the Civil War. A sweeping panorama of American history from the Washington era to the Lincoln era, the story of John Quincy Adams follows one of the greatest, yet least known, figures of the early republic, beginning with a boy's-eye view of the slaughter on Bunker's Hill and a precocious teenager's dinner conversations with Franklin, Jefferson, Lafayette, and other eighteenth-century luminaries. From age ten to his late seventies, Adams describes his adventures crossing the Atlantic through storms and British cannon fire; his travels across Europe; his life as a Harvard student and professor; his early romances; his marriage and warm family life; and his contacts with an incredible number of giants in American and European history: John Hancock, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, the Marquis de Lafayette, James Madison, James Monroe, John Marshall, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, Napoléon, the Duke of Wellington, Czar Alexander I, King George III, and many others—including his own illustrious father and mother, John and Abigail Adams. His diary reveals the surprising twists in negotiations that ended the War of 1812; the vicious, behind-the-scenes machinations of the “barbarian” Andrew Jackson to undermine the John Quincy Adams presidency; and his tragic loss of two beloved brothers, two sons, and a cherished infant daughter.

And near the end of his life, John Quincy Adams risked death to lead the antislavery movement in the House of Representatives. With a roar that still echoes under the Capitol dome, he demanded passage of the first federal laws to abolish slavery in the United States. He died on the floor of the House of Representatives, fighting for the rights of man.

John Quincy Adams was one of the most courageous figures in the history of American government, ranking first among the nine great Americans whom John F. Kennedy singled out in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book
Profiles in Courage
. He will almost certainly rank first in the minds of readers of the pages that follow.

“Mr. Adams!” the old lady shrieked. “You're embarking under very threatening signs. The heavens frown, the clouds roll, the winds howl, the waves of the sea roar upon the beach.”
¹

Ten-year-old John Quincy Adams looked up at his father, who nodded to the lady, smiled and excused himself, then whispered reassurances in his son's ear: the woman, was “a good lady . . . an Adams with very delicate health . . . much afflicted with hysterical complaints . . . often a little disarranged in her imagination.”
²
With that, father, son, and their servant boarded the barge and bounded over the angry waters toward the twenty-four-gun frigate
Boston
that waited in the bay to take them across the Atlantic to France. All but echoing the lady's warning, the waves lapped the sides of the barge—slapping passenger faces, stinging John Quincy's eyes with salty spray, and filling him with fear of impending disaster at sea.

Several days later, the captain of the
Boston
confirmed the boy's fear—shouting to crewmen and pointing to the horizon: three British navy frigates had climbed into view. Heeling over with sails full, the
Boston
fled and lost sight of two ships, but the third stayed in sight, pursuing the entire day,
night, and all next day, intent on capturing the American ship and its famous passenger.

“Our powder, cartridges and balls were placed by the guns,” John Adams recalled, “and everything made ready to begin the action.”
³
As night fell, the enemy “was gaining on us very fast,” and John Quincy knew that if the British captured them, his father faced summary hanging from the yardarm, while the boy himself faced impressment and a life of servitude in the British navy.

Nightfall only added to their danger as winds picked up and swelled into a hurricane. The Adamses went below to their cabin, where “it was with the utmost difficulty that my little son and I could hold ourselves in bed with both our hands . . . bracing ourselves with our feet.”

Then, “a sudden, tremendous report” rocked the ship. Adams and his boy had no way of knowing “whether the British frigate had overtaken us and fired on us or whether our guns had been discharged.”
⁴

As they waited for the sea to smash through the door and rush into their cabin, John Adams held his frightened little son in his arms, but said nothing, as the last-minute thoughts and regrets of every man facing death raced through his head. Of all his regrets, he rued his decision to take his boy on the Atlantic crossing—a foolhardy decision for an adult, let alone a child, in midwinter. But Adams and his son had been apart for nearly two years; John Quincy needed paternal attention, and John Adams missed the joys of nurturing his oldest son. On learning he would have to go to France, he thought the trip a perfect opportunity for the two to grow close again—and to expose “Johnny” to the glories of French and European culture, with their history, art, music, architecture, and languages. The American Revolution had deprived the boy of most educational and cultural advantages, not to mention his father's attention. Now the boy and his father faced death together at sea in each other's arms.

 

John Quincy Adams had been born a decade earlier, when the first seeds of the Revolution were sprouting; periodic riots erupted in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other American towns. Britain's Parliament had raised
taxes on goods shipped to the colonies, then it shredded the Magna Carta and ordered admiralty courts in Canada to try American smugglers—without juries of their peers.

“And this sequence of events,” John Quincy explained, “was to affect the fortunes of no single individual more than those of the infant then lying in his cradle in the little village of Braintree, in the Massachusetts Bay.”
⁵

That infant was the second child and first son of John and Abigail Adams, of Braintree, Massachusetts, a farming community about six miles south of Boston, later renamed Quincy. At birth, John Quincy was the most recent in a long line of illustrious forebears who helped shaped the destiny of the English-speaking world. The first recorded Quincy sailed with William the Conqueror across the English Channel from Normandy in 1066 to crush English forces at Hastings. A century and a half later, in 1215, Saer de Quincy, Earl of Winchester, rode to Runnymede and helped force King John to sign the Magna Carta, which guaranteed English freemen the right to trial by a jury of their peers.

Subsequently, the Quincy and Adams clans
^a
produced a host of distinguished noblemen, churchmen, physicians, and scientists—among the last, Thomas Boylston, a renowned English surgeon who emigrated to Massachusetts with his son, Zabdiel Boylston, who pioneered smallpox inoculation in the New World. The Adams family also included ordinary craftsmen, of course—among them, John Alden, who may have been the
least significant until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow rhymed him into poetic immortality in
The Courtship of Miles Standish
. A cooper on the
Mayflower
, Alden caught Longfellow's odic fancy by wedding Priscilla Mullins. John and Priscilla Alden's granddaughter would marry Joseph Adams Jr., great-grandfather of John Quincy Adams. His son, Joseph Adams III, tied his family's academic future to Harvard College, becoming the first of a long line of Adamses to study there. The second was John Adams, John Quincy's father, who graduated in 1755 at the age of twenty.

Harvard was the first college established in the New World, and within a decade of its founding in 1636, it had evolved into more than a mere college: it was a “school of prophets”—a divinity school engaged in “a noble and necessary work”
⁶
to create and lead a new sort of nation conceived in liberty. From the first, its students and graduates were extraordinaries—and Americans recognized them as such.
^b
Their motto was “Veritas”—a “truth,” enhanced by the divine, that gave Harvard men the wisdom of both God and man to transform America's wilderness into a Paradise.

Although John Adams's parents hoped he would enter the ministry after Harvard, the school broadened its curriculum to include secular studies, and he opted for teaching at first, then law. After winning admission to the bar, he settled in Braintree to practice law, fell in love, and, on October 25, 1764, married Abigail Quincy Smith. Abigail was the second of three daughters of the Reverend William Smith of nearby Weymouth and granddaughter of Colonel John Quincy, longtime Speaker of the Massachusetts colonial legislature. Unlike the illustrious Quincys, many of the Smiths lived in the shadows of humanity—victims of genetically transmitted mental illnesses, including alcohol abuse, that usually led to premature death. Abigail Smith's brother, William Smith Jr., suddenly and inexplicably abandoned his wife and children to poverty and plunged into humanity's gutter—whoring, drinking, and finally dying at an early age. In raising
her own children, Abigail Adams resolved to instill in them principles of self-discipline and prayer to protect them from alcohol and other sins. “Nothing,” she believed, “bound the human mind but religion.”
⁷

 

Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, America's second President, and mother of John Quincy Adams, America's sixth President. Her family's roots stretched back to the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215.
(NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE, ADAMS NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)

Deprived of formal education as a woman, she more than compensated by devouring the books in her father's huge library of religious and literary works, including Shakespeare's plays, the English poets, and a wide range of classical tales that gave her a broader education than that of most men. Indeed, Harvard's young John Adams found Abigail more than an intellectual equal as well as a romantic match. Nine months after she married John Adams, she gave birth to their first child, a daughter they named Abigail
but called “Nabby” to distinguish her from the senior Abigail. Two years later, on July 11, 1767, Abigail's second child was born—a son they named John Quincy Adams, after the infant's father and maternal grandfather.

 

The ninety-five-acre Adams family farm, in Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts, with the birthplace of John Quincy Adams on the left, the birthplace of his father, John Adams, to its immediate right, and John and Abigail Adams's retirement “mansion” on the far right. In the rear is Penn's Hill, where Abigail Adams took seven-year-old John Quincy to witness the Battle of Bunker's Hill.
(NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE, ADAMS NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)