Really Cool Stuff about JQA
1. Not only was John Quincy a celebrated diplomat, President, and Congressman but he also worked at Harvard with a professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory. Throughout his life, he would teach while practicing law and being a politician.
2. While he was minister plenipotentiary to Russia, Madison nominated JQA as a Supreme Court Justice. However, JQA enjoyed working with Czar Alexander so much that he declined the position. (He also didn’t really care for law.)
3. Alcoholism was rampant in the Adams family and was a leading cause of death. JQA’s two brothers, Charles and Thomas, died from it and also his two eldest sons. George Washington Adams, John Quincy’s eldest, never lived up to his father’s impossibly high expectations for him. He became an alcoholic and gambler and finally decided that suicide was preferable to his father’s harangues after he impregnated Eliza Dolph, a young chambermaid. He died on April 30, 1829. JQA’s second son, John Adams II, aged thirty-one, died of alcoholism only years later on October 23, 1834. “This curse [alcoholism] had certainly locked the Adams family in its fearful grip” (p. 135).
4. It is commonly thought that as Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, wrote most of the Monroe Doctrine. It was his idea that President Monroe give the address without the approval of the British and to openly declare America’s principles. “What Adams had done was advance the ideas of noncolonization and nonintervention by Europe (or any other country or continent) in the New World, the two basic concepts that would form the core of the later Monroe Doctrine” (p. 60).
5. As President of the United States, John Quincy swam nude nearly every day in the Potomac. He had a strict schedule which included a daily swim and a daily ride, besides his official duties.
6. It was during JQA’s presidency that the first child was born in the White House. His son, John Adams II, and Mary, his wife, had a daughter there.
7. John Quincy Adams was the leading defense attorney in the famous Amistad case. As a Congressman, Adams had earned a reputation as a defender of human rights and so when the Amistad case found its way in front of the Supreme Court, Adams took on the defense of the slaves aboard the ship. If anyone has seen the recent movie, Amistad, we know that Adams indeed wins the case.
8. John Quincy’s youngest son, Charles Francis, would run as the vice presidential candidate on Martin Van Buren’s Free Soil ticket in the 1848 election.
9. John Quincy Adams was a prolific writer. His father encouraged him to keep a diary at a young age and JQA was adamant about writing in it his entire life. “The complete diary is an absolute treasure trove of information about the early nineteenth century. John Quincy’s son, Charles Francis Adams, edited and published this enormous manuscript in twelve volumes, omitting certain parts that he deemed personal and private. Later, nineteen reels of microfilm were necessary to contain this gargantuan record. No work of history about the antebellum period of US history can afford to neglect it. It is one of the many blessings John Quincy Adams left to posterity” (p. 9).
Come on. You just gotta love John Quincy Adams. Whether it’s his blatant misanthropy, his unusual upbringing, or his sheer staying power in the political realm—John Quincy is just not a boring guy. Let’s face it—he did it all! He had a famous father which made it easy to include JQA on diplomatic missions. Granted he was only eight years old at the time. He then was able to learn several foreign languages, study at premier academies, and even co-lead a diplomatic mission to Russia all before he was eighteen years old. He graduated from Harvard, continued his diplomatic missions through 4 presidents (daddy included), was a Senator, a Professor, and a lawyer. He reached the pinnacle of his foreign service career as Secretary of State and then trumped that by becoming the sixth President of the United States. Even though his presidency did not go well, nobody liked him, his sons kept dying, and he seemingly couldn’t do anything right, he still managed to pull himself out of the gutter to become a US Congressman and the most famous antebellum human rights advocate of his time.
You may not like the man but his resume is seriously impressive.
Honestly, when I write out the summary of his accomplishments, I am truly stunned. As was quoted earlier, JQA rates below average in presidential polls but if you take out his mistakes as President, he was a truly brilliant gem in the phalanx of leaders that our country had put forth so far. Unfortunately, in spite of his fame and frenetic accomplishments, I gather that John Quincy was an unhappy man.
Remini blames this on one person and one person only, Public Enemy Number One, Abigail Adams. Dun-Dun-Dun….. Yes, the woman that we are all taught to adore at an early age is apparently evil incarnate to her eldest son. Before I get into more detail, I do want to bring up the fact that although I did not see this coming, I had an idea that JQA would not be a “normal” guy. In my critique of John Adams, I noted that with an absentee father, it was no wonder that John Quincy and his brothers and sister did not turn out as planned. But now that I’m looking at their situation I see that it was even harder than I imagined with John Adams always away and Abigail left to raise four children by herself, during a war! The fact of the matter is, however, that John Quincy, though attaining the highest office of our land, did not have a happy childhood or adult existence.
So we’re back to the role that Abigail played in all this. When Johnny was seven years old, Abigail begins her son’s education by making him watch the Battle of Bunker Hill. There Johnny watched friends die but Abigail needed him to know the price of freedom. “What a terrible burden to lay on a child. And because his parents relentlessly spelled out his duties, reprimanded him when he failed to live up to them, and corrected every move he made that seemed to contradict their expectations of him, it is not surprising that he developed into a very introverted, self-critical individual of enormous pride and low personal esteem who suffered periodic and deep mental depressions” (p. 3). Whoa—well that’s JQA in a nutshell, I suppose. It is true though that much was expected of John Quincy and Abigail’s letters of correction and advice follow him throughout his life and around the world. “Both Abigail and John never wrote their son without instructing, criticizing, berating, warning, or admonishing him—all for his own good of course” (p. 13). Through all this, John Quincy never complained or stood up for himself.
Thus, and it is almost inevitable, that John Quincy would similarly be a catastrophe as a husband and father. “If Abigail was a calamity as a mother, John Quincy Adams was a disaster as a father—and as a husband” (p. 63). There is evidence of how harsh he was with his own boys, holding them up to unreasonable expectations and never allowing them to take their own paths. “He was always after them, always reminding them to study, to work hard, to keep a journal, to pray, and to exercise self-discipline. What particularly displeased him was the knowledge that none of the boys seemed destined for distinction. None displayed the unique talents of an Adams, and that delinquency offended hiss sense of family pride” (p. 63). The oldest two boys would turn to alcohol and both would eventually die from it but John Quincy merely threw himself harder into his work.
Although John Quincy’s personal life was a shambles, it does not mean we should lose sight of all the really wonderful things he did for our country. It is hard to establish blame or guilt on the Adams family because so much of what they did was done for the good of our nation. The Adams’ literally threw their lives away (and the lives of their children) so that the United States of America could be all that it should be.
But at what a price.
I liked this book. Remini did a great job of giving us all the facts and yet letting John Quincy stand for himself. He painted a gloomy picture of life for this young American boy and an adult life that most people could either envy or distain. He took us through “Johnny’s” youthful moments into the maelstrom of “JQA’s” political existence. It was a seamless and well-researched source on a President that no one seems to care for or acknowledge. With all that John Quincy gave up for his country, the least that we can do is recognize that his sacrifices were all for our benefit today.
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