John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams was a United States senator, secretary of state, president, and member of Congress. The eldest son of John and Abigail Smith Adams, he was born in Braintree, Massachusetts. In 1778 he accompanied his father to France, where he studied French and Latin at an academy in Passy, and attended the Latin School of Amsterdam. He matriculated at Leyden University in January 1781, but soon interrupted his studies to serve in Saint Petersburg as secretary to America's minister to Russia. Returning to the Hague in 1783, he resumed the study of classics before returning to the United States, where he entered Harvard as a junior. In 1787, Adams graduated from Harvard and began his legal apprenticeship in Newburyport. He was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1790.
In 1779 young Adams began a diary that he continued to keep throughout most of his life. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, comprising Portions of his Diary from 1795 to 1848was published in twelve volumes from 1874 to 1877, and was followed in 1903 by Life in a New England Town , his diary for the years 1787-1788. Taken as a whole, the diary is an extraordinary record of places and events experienced during an exceptional life. Adams's first publication, an erudite reply to Paine's Rights of Man (1791), which first appeared in the Columbian Centinel for June-July 1791 and later as a pamphlet in Edinburgh (1792) and London (1793), caused a stir at the time partly because the anonymous tract was attributed to the senior Adams. During the 1790s, John Quincy Adams contributed to and translated for a French language newspaper in Boston and wrote a series of political essays under the pseudonyms Publicola, Marcellus, Columbus, and Bosneveld, on the subjects of the French Revolution, the controversy surrounding Charles Genêt's arrival in America as French ambassador in 1793, and the wisdom of American neutrality in European affairs. These literary efforts attracted the favorable attention of President Washington and in 1794 won their author a commission as minister to the Netherlands. On 26 July 1797, while on a diplomatic mission to England, Adams married Louisa Catherine, daughter of Joshua Johnson of Maryland.
In 1803 Adams was elected to the U. S. Senate, where he served less than one full term, until June 1808. His support for President Jefferson's positions on British aggression against neutrals, theChesapeake affair, and the Embargo of 1807 earned him the enmity of fellow Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering and other New England Federalists. Pickering was able to bring about the premature election of a new Massachusetts senator, thus forcing Adams to resign from the Senate. He retired temporarily to devote his full time to the chair of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard that he had held since 1803. President Madison appointed him ambassador to Russia in 1809, and from Saint Petersburg in 1811 Adams declined an already confirmed appointment to the U. S.Supreme Court. Beginning in 1814 he served as one of the ambassadors to negotiate an end to the War of 1812 with Great Britain, and he served as Ambassador to the Court of Saint James's until 1817, when he became Madison's secretary of state. In that office he was responsible for conceiving the foreign policy stance that became known as the Monroe Doctrine. In 1824 Adams won a close race for President, one decided in the House of Representatives, and he served a single term before being defeated for reelection by Andrew Jackson.
In some ways, the most distinguished facet of Adams's long career came after his defeat in the 1828 presidential election. On 31 March 1831 he was elected to Congress and served there for eight consecutive terms, eventually dying at his desk. During that time he was an independent voice for such causes as the abolition of slavery and the restraint of imperialistic ambitions in Texas. Some of his most stirring writings came as explanations of his moral stands to his constituents. Among these, the Address of John Quincy Adams, to his Constituents of the Twelfth Congressional District (1842) is the most memorable for its explanation of his antislavery principles and its vindication of his twelve years in Congress. Adams's writings have both historical and autobiographical value. Dwelling on links between the classic past and his own times, he also used his experiences and access to public men and public documents fully. His extraordinary memory and erudition make for sometimes dry, but always instructive, reading.
Adams's diary or journal, which he kept assiduously until a few years before his death, is a remarkable contribution to the recordof his times, unmatched for its period in breadth and length. The twelve volumes published as Memoirs of John Quincy Adams were intended and survive as a monument to the good intentions and noble ideas of a man who, in a moment of deep anguish, contended that in his long life he could remember almost no example of success in any of his major endeavors. Adams sought to leave his son and successive generations a record that would gain him the admiration he felt wanting during his life.
Adams's literary productions beyond his diary were prodigious: state papers, speeches, writings on political philosophy, history, autobiography, and polemical tracts are bewildering in number. He even wrote and published poetry, including an epic poem entitledDermot MacMorrogh (1832), perhaps unfortunately for those who have read it and for Adams's literary reputation. It is the Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, however, that remains of enduring value for its revelations of the erudition and wisdom of a wise and well-educated man. It documents the experiences of a statesman who participated in the great events and decisions of Europe and America for over sixty years. The literary quality of his writing is high, even by the standards of a family that produced so many great men and women of letters as his.