This volume presents selections from thirty-one manuscript volumes of the diaries of John Quincy Adams, beginning with the first recorded entry, made on November 12, 1779, and concluding with the entry for March 3, 1821, the final day of the first term of the administration of James Monroe. (A companion volume presents selections from 1821 to 1848.) Adams recorded his diary in a total of fifty-one manuscript volumes, amounting to almost 15,000 pages, which are housed today in the offices of the Adams Family Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. Some of these volumes are bound journals or repurposed almanacs; others are pinned or stitched collections of loose sheets. Thanks to careful preservation by the author and his descendants, the editors of the Adams Family Papers conclude that all but a very few loose leaves of the diaries have survived. Collectively, they form an unrivaled personal record of historical events from the Revolution to the Mexican War by a figure prominently involved in them. As his son Charles Francis Adams, the editor of the first published edition of Adams’s diary, rightly observed, “It may reasonably be doubted whether any attempt of the kind has ever been more completely executed by a public man.”
Adams was a prolific diarist throughout his long life, but the degree of faithfulness with which he made entries varied over time, as did the manner in which he recorded them. Adams began his first journal on November 12, 1779, at the age of twelve, as he embarked on his second journey to Europe, carrying the record into a second journal that ended on January 31, 1780. He briefly kept a third from July 25 to September 30 of that year, while traveling from France to Holland, and again from June 9 to August 27, 1781, when he arrived in St. Petersburg, Russia. He resumed writing brief entries in early 1782, with significant gaps, and continued into December 1783. From December 6, 1783, to early 1785 there are only a few brief diary entries, during August 1784. He made mostly single-line accounts of the weather and short entries in almanacs from 1790 to June 1794, when he traveled to New York to receive his commission as minister to the Netherlands, the first major public office of his extraordinary career. It is from this period that the diary begins to assume the regular character that it retained for the remainder of his life. There are full entries for each day from January 1, 1795, to May 6, 1821, a remarkable feat that testifies to Adams’s extraordinary discipline and dedication. This accomplishment is more noteworthy still when one considers that he found writing physically difficult because of a hand injury suffered in his youth.
Adams often composed his diary “in arrears,” as he called it, especially during the busy years of his service as secretary of state from 1817 to 1825, using memoranda and abbreviated draft entries to help him reconstitute longer entries some days afterward. As he suggests more than once in the diary, the burden of bringing the record up to date in this way could be overwhelming. In 1816, he also began to compose, both retroactively and moving forward, a volume of line-a-day entries that acted as a monthly index to the larger work. So, for many dates there exist three different diary records: a detailed long-form entry fully composed in polished prose; a draft or short-form entry written in a more telegraphic style for future elaboration; and a highly abbreviated, single-line recap. The present edition generally presents Adams’s long-form entries, though some draft entries are included for dates for which a long-form record does not exist.
The diary served several purposes for Adams. Most practically, it was a resource to which he could return to confirm his own recollections and to substantiate, refine, or refute the claims of others about political events he witnessed or participated in. On January 15, 1831, for example, Adams wrote in his diary that “on further examination of my Diary of 1818, I thought it advisable to have extracts from it made of all those parts of it relating to the Seminole War, and the cabinet meetings concerning it. As the copy must be made by an entirely confidential hand, my wife undertook the task; she has often assisted me in the same manner before.” Confidentiality was required because observations and expressions of a frank and personal nature are interspersed throughout the diary. These were not meant to be read by anyone, at least not anyone outside of the immediate family.
After Adams’s death in 1848, his massive papers, including the diaries, were left to his sole surviving child, Charles Francis Adams, who at first granted limited access to the diaries to scholars and biographers, but who grew increasingly cautious about doing so as controversial entries began to circulate. Over time, as he began to conceive plans to prepare a published edition, further restrictions were imposed. It was not until his own public career ended in 1873 that Charles Francis Adams was able to turn to editing the diaries full-time, and when he did he adhered to a protective distinction between the public and the private. In the preface to the resulting twelve-volume edition, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1874–77), Adams laid out his editorial philosophy:
After careful meditation over the materials of this great trust . . . [i]t was very clear that abridgement was indispensable. Assuming this to be certain, it became necessary to fix upon a rule of selection which should be fair and honest. To attain that object I came to the following conclusions: 1st. To eliminate the details of common life and events of no interest to the public. 2d. To reduce the moral and religious speculations, in which the work abounds, so far as to escape repetition of sentiments once declared. 3d. Not to suppress strictures upon contemporaries, but to give them only when they are upon public men acting in the same sphere with the writer. . . . 4th. To suppress nothing of his own habits of self-examination, even when they might be thought most to tell against himself. 5th. To abstain altogether from modification of the sentiments or the very words, and substitution of what might seem better ones, in every case but that of obvious error in writing.
“Guided by these rules,” Adams concluded, “I trust I have supplied pretty much all in these volumes which the most curious reader would be desirous to know.”
Curiosity is inherently subjective, of course, and susceptible to change over time. Charles Francis Adams Jr., for one, found that his grandfather’s diary from the late 1780s, when John Quincy Adams was a young law clerk in Newburyport, Massachusetts, “greatly interested” him, notwithstanding his father’s decision to exclude it from the Memoirs because it “contains little of, so-called, historical value.” This led the younger Adams to publish Life in a New England Town: 1787, 1788. Diary of John Quincy Adams, While a Student in the Office of Theophilus Parsons at Newburyport (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1903). Charles Francis Adams Sr.’s selection of John Quincy Adams’s diary was by any standard generous—the twelve volumes present, in terms of word count, roughly half of the entire diary manuscript—but its excision of his father’s private and family concerns (“the details of common life”) can be said to have resulted in a one-dimensional picture of the man in the public mind, one that would predominate for a century or more.
By returning directly to the manuscript diaries and incorporating entries and passages excluded from the Memoirs, the current edition seeks to present a more rounded portrait than has heretofore been available to the general reader. The previous reader’s edition of the diary, prepared by the historian Allan Nevins in 1928, arose from his concern that the Memoirs, this “unrivalled treasury for the social and political history of the time, has long been out of print and is now rather rare and extremely costly. Its ponderous bulk, moreover, makes it forbidding to the general reader, and difficult of use by the ordinary student.” To remedy this, Nevins “selected from it those passages which seem of the greatest permanent worth, giving emphasis to the materials which throw light on the social background of the period, on J. Q. Adams’s character, and on the more dramatic political and diplomatic events of the time.” The Diary of John Quincy Adams, 1794–1845: American Political, Social and Intellectual Life from Washington to Polk (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928), his 600-page volume of selections from the Memoirs, was reissued in 1951 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Excerpts from the Memoirs were also included in Adrienne Koch and William Peden, eds., The Selected Writings of John & John Quincy Adams (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946).
When Charles Francis Adams died in 1886 he left his papers, and those of John and Abigail Adams, and of John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams, to his four sons, one of whom, the aforementioned Charles Francis Adams Jr., later became president of the Massachusetts Historical Society. In 1902 Charles Francis Adams Jr. had the family papers moved from the Stone Library, a separate fireproof building his father had built on the grounds of the family estate in Quincy, to the Massachusetts Historical Society building in Boston, and in 1905 he created the Adams Manuscript Trust to ensure continued family ownership and control of the papers for the next fifty years. In 1954 the Adams Manuscript Trust entered into an agreement with the Massachusetts Historical Society and Harvard University Press to publish the family’s papers through the year 1889. The Adams Manuscript Trust was dissolved in 1956 after it transferred ownership of its papers to the Massachusetts Historical Society, which began to identify and photocopy Adams documents in repositories outside of the family archive. The collection was microfilmed from 1954 to 1959. Publication of the Adams Family Papers began in 1961 and has proceeded in several series since, including a letterpress edition, Diary of John Quincy Adams, David Grayson Allen, Robert J. Taylor, Marc Friedlander, and Celeste Walker, eds., 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), which presents Adams’s diaries from November 1779 to December 1788.
In 2005, the microfilm of the entire diary was scanned and published online as The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection: http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/php/, the source for texts used here. The present edition replicates as closely as possible the manuscript original in ways that depart slightly from the approach taken in the 1981 letterpress edition, and substantially from that taken in the Memoirs and the works derived from it. Judging by his own editorial guidelines, Charles Francis Adams found many instances of “obvious error in writing” in the diaries, for he systematically emended his father’s more idiosyncratic eighteenth-century style, characterized by capitalization of common nouns, liberal use of dashes, and British spellings, to bring it into conformity with the prevailing Victorian style. The current edition, by contrast, retains John Quincy Adams’s spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, including his use of dashes to separate sentences or sentence fragments. These dashes, which in the manuscript can vary in length, have been standardized as em-dashes. The editors of the 1981 edition chose to interpret the combination of a period and a dash as a paragraph break; this edition does not. It has been necessary in certain instances to supply punctuation for clarity, as for instance with Adams’s casual and inconsistent use of quotation marks when rendering dialogue. The end of the page often served for Adams as a marker of medial or terminal publication, and commas and periods have been added accordingly. To minimize hand lifts, Adams sometimes incorporated commas into the preceding words, as slight dots, bulges, or, if the word ends in an r, overhangs. When it is unclear whether a comma was intended, one has been added only if it improves clarity. Commas and periods are often indistinguishable in the manuscript and are rendered here in the way most conducive to clarity. Except for the suffixes to numerals, and Mr., Mrs., and Dr., superscripts have been converted to contractions (Coll. becomes Col’l). Other contractions, such as altho’ and return’d, have been retained, as have ampersands. Given the length and complexity of Adams’s diary, it is remarkable how rarely he crossed out or otherwise corrected his manuscript. On the rare occasions when he did, the current edition silently adopts his correction. It also silently omits inadvertent repeated words and adds dropped words in brackets, in the latter case only if the omission affects clarity.
For more on the diaries and their history, see Diary of John Quincy Adams, David Grayson Allen et al., eds., 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), I:xvii–l and David Waldstreicher, “John Quincy Adams: The Life, the Diary, and the Biographers,” in Waldstreicher, ed., A Companion to John Adams and John Quincy Adams (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 241–62.