When President George Washington named John Quincy Adams “Minister Resident for the United States of America with their High Mightinesses the States General of the United Netherlands” on May 30, 1794, the nominee, both surprised and humbled, was uneasy about his credentials. “Neither my years, my experience, my reputation, nor my talents,” he fretted to his father, “could entitle me to an office of so much responsibility.”1
Actually, George Washington’s choice was inspired. At 27, John Quincy was a world traveler and remarkable linguist—he spoke not only French and Dutch, but at one time or another studied Italian, Spanish, German and Russian, apart from reading and translating Latin and Greek. He was a graduate of Harvard College with Phi Beta Kappa honors, a lawyer and noted essayist of vibrant controversy in significant political circles. He knew from early youth onward Europe’s and America’s renowned emissaries, including Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette, and he counted Thomas Jefferson a dear family friend.2
He even looked the part. The American artist John Singleton Copley paints him in flowing cravat, his dark hair grazing the collar of his fine, caped coat, as the quintessential young Gainsborough nobleman, though in truth he was instinctively and habitually careless about his dress. At five foot seven inches and inconveniently inclined to be stout, he resembled his mother, Abigail Adams. His face had her clarity, her lean, defined nose, her wide, lofty brow, fair complexion, resolute chin and “black eyes of such keenness” that they pierced the beholder.3
In personality, character and interests, however, John Quincy was astonishingly like his father. Not only a born-and-bred patriot of spotless integrity, brilliant, fiercely independent, intensely introspective, he was, on occasion, impatiently undiplomatic and pitiably sensitive. As was his father’s way, he questioned his own yearning ambition, agonized over his passionate nature, was suspicious of praise but wounded by criticism and suffered a near-fatal flair for denigrating his own accomplishments. His family never doubted his talent. But “the warmth of his temper” was a concern. His beloved sister Nabby told him he was too impulsive, too positive, a little inclined to judge rather prematurely and “to condemn without sufficiently considering the for and against.”4
With the announcement of his new post, his uncle Richard Cranch predicted his nephew would be “the greatest American Traveller of his Age.” He did not exaggerate. John Quincy first sailed for Europe, not quite 11, in 1778, as companion and eventually secretary to his father, one of the three United States Commissioners in Paris. After a brief return home to Braintree, Massachusetts, he and his father headed back to Paris when Congress named John Adams to negotiate peace and commercial treaties with Great Britain. His father’s next assignment, to negotiate a loan for the United States from the Netherlands, took John Quincy to Amsterdam and Leyden. In three years he had attended two schools in Passy, where he became fluent in French, and studied in both Amsterdam and Leyden.5
Cultivated in the arts far beyond his years, he was a perceptive and confident critic of painting, sculpture, architecture, music and theater. At age 11, he wrote from Europe to his sister Nabby that Italian comedy was “sprightly and agreeable enough” but “the language the wit the passions the sentiments the oratory the poetry the manners and morals are at the French Comedy.”6
In July 1781, 14-year-old John Quincy left Amsterdam for Russia to be secretary and interpreter for Francis Dana, America’s newly appointed minister, who knew little if any French, the language of the Russian court. While still a teenager, he crossed and recrossed the Atlantic Ocean and the English Channel, journeyed thousands of miles in raging storm and blinding snow, by leaky ship, slippery ferry, perilous iceboat, mule, carriage and horseback from Spain to France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, the German states, Russia and Great Britain.
Later, with his father as the nation’s first vice president, John Quincy’s abilities became well known to President Washington. The two families thrived on “terms of much Friendship,” visiting each other often in New York, the nation’s first capital, where the Adamses lived near MacDougal Street. Washington undoubtedly appreciated the young man’s published essays eloquently reinforcing the president’s position of neutrality in the war between France and England.7
John Quincy’s commission as minister to the Netherlands followed in 1794. Washington’s confidence in John Quincy only deepened as he tracked his protégé’s career. It was the president’s “decided opinion, that Mr. Adams is the most valuable public character we have abroad, and that he will prove himself to be the ablest of all our diplomatic corps.”8
As the first president of the United States understood the genius of John Quincy Adams, so did the thirty-fifth. John F. Kennedy wrote of his fellow Bostonian that he “held more important offices and participated in more important events than anyone in the history of our nation.” During his long lifetime—encompassing the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the early and late Napoleonic Age—John Quincy would serve as minister to The Hague, Prussia, Russia and England, and would head the American mission at Ghent to negotiate peace with England and conclude the War of 1812. In the period between his early diplomatic service and ministerial appointments, he was a professor at Harvard, a Massachusetts state senator, and then a United States senator. He turned down an offer to serve on the Supreme Court and made his final journey home upon his appointment as secretary of state for both terms of President James Monroe. Chosen to be the sixth president of the United States in 1824 by the House of Representatives after a contested election, he served only one term. He returned to elected office as a member of the House from November 1831 until his death in February 1848. During his late political career, he became the stirring defender of the slaves of the notorious Amistad rebellion.9
Despite this superlative career, John Quincy, like his father, was haunted by a sense of failure. Having never met the impossibly Olympian standards of his puritan conscience and his demanding intellect, he would conclude at the age of 70 that his “whole life has been a succession of disappointments. I can scarcely recollect a single instance of success in anything that I ever undertook.”10
Kennedy wrote in Profiles in Courage that “the lifetime which was so bitterly deprecated by its own principal has never been paralleled in American history.” With sympathy, Kennedy recognized “the fascination and nobility” of this man, “unbending, narrow and intractable,” who judged himself more severely than his enemies did and possessed an integrity unsurpassed by major political figures. He “gave meaning, consistency and character to the early days of the American Republic.”11
Kennedy applauded the man who loved liberty and the law for standing up for his convictions as a minority of one, for his nonpartisan approach, and for his tireless energies in the struggle against slavery. Had John Quincy served in the contemporary Senate, Kennedy said, “we would have admired his courage and determination,” but Kennedy was not so certain “that we would like him as a person; as it is apparent that many of his colleagues, on both sides of the aisle, did not.”12
This, in essence, is the dilemma of John Quincy’s life. Respecting him as a statesman, as “Old Man Eloquent” was one thing. Liking him was another. John Quincy’s self-portrait was no more forgiving. He saw the awesome, towering figure he had become as a cold, austere and forbidding character. Sadly, in age and fame, his memory of the small boy’s pressured wartime life and of the dedicated, brave and adventurous diplomat with tender concern for family, friends and country was forgotten or, worse, made to seem irrelevant.
In the judgment of his son, Charles Francis, John Quincy, with rare exception, never had a private life after his entry into public service. A patriot by ancestry, birth, duty (that word again and again) and parental expectation, his destiny was foreordained, almost as tangible as a pewter spoon in his mother Abigail’s cupboard. At times insufferably lonely, his faraway travels made him feel like “a limb lopt off” from home, family and friends. As he tired of his “wandering, strolling kind of life,” he grew acutely sensitive to any and every thought of separation. Life was painfully peripatetic. He wasn’t with people long enough to trust them, and if he did make friends, they came and went probably never to be seen again. Those few he called friends, he fervently wished he might “Grapple to my heart with hooks of steel.”13
This is what drew me to John Quincy. I met him while writing about the lives of his mother and his father, came to admire him as a classics scholar, scientist, linguist, diplomat, bibliophile, but also as a son, husband and father, and as a great, flawed and vulnerable humanitarian. More recently, as a result of a close reading of his diary in his own hand, I have also discovered the extraordinary historian, reporter and memoirist—the panorama his pages unfold of Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic Europe are “probably unsurpassed.” John Quincy considered “as the business and duty of my life to write” and kept a journal of his thoughts because on occasion he wished to record the “fleeting reflection which originates in some transient occurrence.”14
He wrote about what he knew, what he saw and how he felt over a period of 65 years. As a result, “No other American diarist,” the historian Allan Nevins has said, “touched life at quite so many points, over quite so long a period, as John Quincy Adams.” To his contemporaries “he was a frigid and icy New Englander; but we who have seen his diary can perceive that at heart he was really of a hot and passionate nature, volcanic in his hates, intense in his loves . . . the emotionalism of the diary is indeed one of its most appealing qualities.”15
“We who have seen his diary”—that’s the hitch. Unless you have read the unexpurgated version you cannot possibly know, understand or appreciate John Quincy Adams in full. One is grateful to the Massachusetts Historical Society for the first two volumes of the diary, published in the original, which cover his life up to his twenty-first year. More recently, the Society has made it possible to read the diary in John Quincy’s own hand online, a fascinating and demanding experience. By far the most influential source prior to this time had been the 15,000-page, 51-volume diary compressed by his son Charles Francis into the 12 volumes of Memoirs published between 1874 and 1877. Edited under stringent self-imposed guidelines, it was clear to Charles Francis—given the superabundance of materials, including public and private correspondence, that he feared would equal the hundred volumes of Voltaire—that abridgment was indispensable. It became necessary “to fix upon a rule of selection” with the diary, “to eliminate the details of common life and events of no interest to the public. . . .” Faithful to this rule, Charles Francis trusted he had supplied pretty much “all in these volumes which the most curious reader would be desirous to know.”16
In fact, he managed just the reverse—draining the works of intimate feelings, tender, conflicted or painfully candid. In the 12 volumes, John Quincy’s wife, Louisa Catherine, is barely present, mentioned only 22 times in 6,576 pages. Charles Francis skips almost all references to births and illnesses, to some of the most challenging and moving moments of John Quincy’s life. John Quincy’s response, for instance, to the death of his infant daughter leaves the reader of his unabridged diary feeling like an apologetic intruder. One fears for him and for Louisa Catherine, both so wounded.
Nor, unfortunately, do the seven volumes of John Quincy’s correspondence, titled Writings, bring you any closer. Worthington Chauncey Ford, editor of the Massachusetts Historical Society at the establishment of the family trust in 1905, set out to include in those volumes “what is of permanent historical value, and what is essential to a comprehension of the man in all the private and public relations. Nothing is suppressed which can contribute to this purpose and the text is printed as it was written.” Accordingly, salutations and entire passages are eliminated, as in the case of John Quincy’s detailed, stirring reports from Ghent, wherein the reader would never know he addressed the letters to his wife and expressed his concerns for her well-being. As a result, the John Quincy Adams of Ford’s Writings “is a bloodless creature, a mere writing machine, and his wife, though a highly articulate woman, is . . . a wraith,” commented Lyman H. Butterfield, editor in chief of The Adams Papers.17
Nor did John Quincy’s wife, the tantalizing, tragic Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, help to improve her husband’s public image. She had a cosmopolitan upbringing—she spoke English with a British lilt and French as a native, having been born and reared in England and France. Her father was from Maryland, her mother was British, yet people spoke improbably of her Southern charm. Louisa was “charming, like a Romney portrait,” with cherubic cheeks, pleading eyes and dark cascading curls, a woman of immeasurable private wounds and astonishing complexities, mercurial, depressive and gifted, and, at least to her admirers, her gracious manner and fondness for romantic poetry and novels were said to have “compensated for her husband’s angular northeast manner.” At 50 and again at 65, in punishing depression, pathetically aware of a “constitutional irritability” that was trying to her friends and painful to herself, she wrote two memoirs: first the incorrigibly inventive Record of a Life (1825) about her childhood and parents, and second, the embittered, corrosive Adventures of a Nobody (1840) in which she aired her disdain for mere worldly honors shared with her husband—honors, she said, purchased at a most bitter expense of duty to her children and personal suffering to herself. Most tragically, these memoirs have won her a host of sympathetic followers at the terrible cost of inscribing her husband’s harsh reputation.18
One is hard pressed to think of a more unsuitable partnership, this marriage between the romantic and the puritan, yet Louisa Catherine was a faithful and beloved wife to John Quincy through the half century of their troubling marriage. Despite her complaints to the contrary, the surprise in reading John Quincy’s unpublished diary and letters is the discovery of a sympathetic, attentive, concerned husband, at his wife’s bedside in times of illness, at his desk, when far away, in the fullness of his confidence in her, confiding the stormy negotiations at Ghent that would mark the end of the War of 1812. Heartening as well is the warmth, constancy and intimacy of his affectionate relationship with his proud parents and with his loyal brothers and sister.
John Quincy expressed reservations about his papers. He had found his father’s journals deeply interesting but altogether unfit for public inspection. As he predicted that his own journal would “be of the same character,” he seemed to think it ought to be confined to an intimate readership, unsuspecting that he might one day attract a far larger audience. To the contrary, he might have been amazed and possibly amused to find that his name and writings live on, and with great flair in contemporary society. “JQA, Twitter Celebrity,” the headline of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s in-house publication proclaimed five years ago in recognition of the minimalist format of his line-a-day alternate diary.19
Brief or dense, as I discovered in reading the diary pages, the very humanity that John Quincy and his editors felt inappropriate to share with readers is precisely what enormously enhanced my appreciation of the statesman and his insights into his tumultuous times, meaningful these centuries later. The valiant traveler and devoted husband and father won my affection as well as my admiration. It is my hope that this memoir of the education of John Quincy Adams shows that the man at the center of so much that formed our young nation had much to say beyond the filtered public utterances of “Old Man Eloquent.”