Nation Builder

John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic

Charles N. Edel

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674744936
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

"America goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy"—John Quincy Adams's famous words are often quoted to justify noninterference in other nations' affairs. Yet when he spoke them, Adams was not advocating neutrality or passivity but rather outlining a national policy that balanced democratic idealism with a pragmatic understanding of the young republic's capabilities and limitations. America's rise from a confederation of revolutionary colonies to a world power is often treated as inevitable, but Charles N. Edel's provocative biography of Adams argues that he served as the central architect of a grand strategy that shaped America's rise. Adams's particular combination of ideas and policies made him a critical link between the founding generation and the Civil War–era nation of Lincoln.Examining Adams's service as senator, diplomat, secretary of state, president, and congressman, Edel's study of this extraordinary figure reveals a brilliant but stubborn man who was both visionary prophet and hard-nosed politician. Adams's ambitions on behalf of America's interests, combined with a shrewd understanding of how to counter the threats arrayed against them, allowed him to craft a multitiered policy to insulate the nation from European quarrels, expand U.S. territory, harness natural resources, develop domestic infrastructure, education, and commerce, and transform the United States into a model of progress and liberty respected throughout the world.While Adams did not live to see all of his strategy fulfilled, his vision shaped the nation's agenda for decades afterward and continues to resonate as America pursues its place in the twenty-first-century world.

1

THE FIRES OF HONORABLE AMBITION

The Education of John Quincy Adams

SHORTLY BEFORE BOARDING a ship in May 1785 that would take him back to America for the first time in seven years, John Quincy Adams asked his father “please to present my best respects to Mr. Jefferson … and all our friends in Paris. If you see the Marquis, you will inform him, that his Dogs are on board, and shall be well kept, if my attention to them has any effect.”¹ While this remark, which concluded a brief letter to his father, John Adams, detailing his seventeen-year-old son’s final preparations before setting sail, might have felt casual to the young traveler, it was anything but usual. These were not just any dogs, but seven hounds bred in Normandy by the Marquis de Lafayette and sent as a special gift to George Washington. The younger Adams had already served as his father’s personal secretary while he was concluding the final peace treaty that ended the American Revolution, knew Thomas Jefferson intimately, and had spent time living in the same house as Benjamin Franklin. At a young age, John Quincy Adams had already traveled to France, England, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, and Prussia, and at the age of fourteen moved to Russia as a part of a diplomatic mission to the court of Catherine the Great. It is no wonder his father referred to him as the “greatest Traveller of his Age.”² He knew the most important people in America, possibly had traveled more than any living American, and was well regarded everywhere he went.

Yet, as he set off for his native shores, he felt more trepidation than triumph. “I have been such a wandering being these seven years,” he confided in his diary, “that I have never performed any regular course of studies, and am deficient on many subjects.”³ In a sense, Adams was correct. He had received no systematic instruction prior to matriculating at Harvard in 1786. While he did attend schools in Paris, Amsterdam, and Leyden, the rest of his studies had been under the supervision of tutors. His formal education barely exceeded three years. Years later, as a United States senator, Adams acknowledged that his education had been haphazard, lamenting that “though I was always of a studious turn and addicted to books beyond bounds of moderation, yet my acquirements in literature and science have been all superficial, and I never attained a profound knowledge of anything.”⁴

This nagging sense of doubt seems to have been an Adams family trait: reflecting on his own education, John Quincy’s grandson, the famous historian Henry Adams, wrote that he had a tendency to exaggerate his “weaknesses as he grew older. The habit of doubt” seemed to come to him, as it did to his grandfather, quite naturally.⁵ While John Quincy’s assessment of himself was characteristically harsh, most of his contemporaries, thoroughly impressed by the young man, disagreed. Just a few months after he had written these nervous lines in his diary, his aunt reported, “I have already discover’d a strength of mind, a memory, a soundness of judgment which I have seldom seen united in one so young.… If his applycation is equal to his abilities he cannot fail of makeing a great Man.”⁶ Spending more time with him only confirmed these views. Young Johnny, she wrote, “is form’d for a Statesman.”⁷

But if Adams one day was to become America’s greatest secretary of state, he was a long way from there when at the age of nine he wrote his father, “my head is much too fickle, my Thoughts are running after birds eggs play and trifles, till I get vexd with my Self, Mamma has a troublesome task to keep me Steady, and I own I am ashamed of myself.”⁸ Adams was not born a statesman, but became one. His preparation for leadership required guidance and the pursuit of a position of “painful pre-eminence.”⁹ His personal development and the values and habits he acquired served as the foundation of his extraordinary record of achievement—and at times failure—as a policy maker. His actions and thought offer clues into the evolution of his theory of America’s place, and role, in the world.¹⁰

Any discussion of John Quincy Adams’s education must begin with his parents. John and Abigail Adams instilled in their eldest son the idea that he was destined for great things from an early age. As the two most important influences in his life, they labored to ingrain in him a sense of service to others, a thirst for knowledge, and the drive to excel.¹¹ Warning his son against complacency, John Adams once admonished young John Quincy that “you come into life with advantages which will disgrace you if your success is mediocre. And if you do not rise to the head not only of your Profession, but of your Country, it will be owing to your own Lasiness, Slovenliness, and Obstinacy.”¹² Abigail was even more blunt. Writing him just after his first Atlantic crossing, she instructed her son to become “an ornament to society, an Honour to your Country, and a Blessing to your parents.” She demanded that he strictly adhere to “those religious Sentiments and principals which were early instilled into your mind and remember that you are accountable to your Maker for all your words and actions.” In case this was not a serious enough admonition, she concluded, “dear as you are to me, I had much rather you should have found your Grave in the ocean you have crossed, or any untimely death crop you in your Infant years, rather than see you an immoral profligate or a Graceless child.”¹³

Evidence of parental pressure on John Quincy is overwhelming and frequently seems excessive. John and Abigail pushed their children to succeed, constantly reminded them of the advantages they had over others, and warned them against complacency. Their ambitions, for themselves and their children, certainly mark them as unique. But in the context of mid- to late eighteenth-century Massachusetts, which retained many of its Puritan folkways, their child rearing loses much, though certainly not all, of its distinctiveness. According to a historian of the period, this was a culture that thought the “first and most urgent purpose of child rearing was … the ‘breaking of the will.’ ”¹⁴ In such a culture, personal happiness and individual desires took a subservient role to familial duty and communal obligations.

While their admonitions might seem harsh, this was the Adams creed—through hard work and virtue, excellence, advancement, power, and fame would surely follow.¹⁵ This unwavering drive for excellence and devotion to duty was imprinted on the entire family, but most especially on John Quincy. Already at the age of ten he was parroting the line. “We are Sent into this world for Some end,” he informed his younger brother Charles. “It is our duty to discover by Close study what this end is & when we once discover it to pursue it with unconquerable perseverance.”¹⁶ It was not much of a mystery what the end was. From his infancy on, his parents repeatedly told him that service to the commonwealth was the first duty of citizenship. And they expected him to become a leader of their new country.

John and Abigail left an extensive written record not only of their own relationship, but also of their hopes, fears, and aspirations for themselves, their children, and their young country—all of which they believed were intimately linked.¹⁷ Not surprisingly, their correspondence is filled with questions of what they should teach their children. The Adamses sought to shape their children, and particularly John Quincy Adams, into statesmen who would play a leading role in the affairs of their new country. This education would be grounded in history, Christian ethics, and civic virtues. In a letter to Robert Livingston, the secretary of foreign affairs under the Articles of Confederation, John Adams described the model statesman. While it was a none-too-subtle hint that he was amply qualified for future diplomatic postings himself, what is more interesting is his description of the proper training for such an individual. The elder Adams thought that a statesman “should have had an education in classical learning, and in the knowledge of general history, ancient and modern, and particularly the history of France, England, Holland, and America. He should be well versed in the principles of ethics, of the law of nature and nations, of legislation and government, of the civil Roman law, of the laws of England and the United States, of the public law of Europe, and in the letters, memoirs, and histories of those great men, who have heretofore shone in the diplomatic order, and conducted the affairs of nations, and the world.”¹⁸

This was exactly the education that John Quincy was pursuing under his parents’ tutelage. He learned to speak ancient Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Dutch, and German. In Greek, he read Homer, Xenophon, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plutarch; in Latin, Suetonius, Livy, Virgil, Cicero, Tacitus, Juvenal, Horace, and Ovid. He plodded through European history, became versed in the various religions, and devoured political philosophy. He became a daily reader of the Bible and an avid fan of Shakespeare. The great Roman orators taught him wisdom and folly. The story of Abraham and his descendants highlighted “all the vicissitudes to which individuals, families, and nations are liable.”¹⁹ But it was the Bard of Avon who surpassed all others as “a teacher of morals.” Years later, Adams recalled that his “enthusiastic admiration” of Shakespeare commenced “before the down had darkened my lip.” That admiration, “little short of idolatry,” stemmed from his belief that the English playwright was “a profound delineator of human nature and a sublime poet.”²⁰ This broad reading was designed to teach him the varieties of human nature, to build his critical thinking capacity, and to teach him to command the English language and bend it to his purposes.

Reading history would stand at the heart of Adams’s education. The idea that history should occupy a central position in education was a common one in colonial and revolutionary America. In 1749, Benjamin Franklin wrote that encouraging the study of history was the best way that “the first principles of sound Politicks be fix’d in the Minds of Youth.” Thomas Jefferson believed that “history, by apprizing them [students] of the past, will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.”²¹ The founding generation had all read the same Greek, Roman, and British authors and absorbed their lessons. They believed that there were discernible laws of history that, much like the laws of nature, regulated political affairs. They thought that if they read widely and studied deeply, they could understand the patterns of behavior in men, societies, institutions, and governments. Their reverence for history was driven not by romantic nostalgia, but by practical considerations. By comparing historical events and analyzing the results, they believed they could develop a predictive tool for governance.²²

Among this historically conscious group, John Adams stood out for his views on the value of history as a policy tool. As a youth, he had decided he would form “an exact knowledge of the nature, end, and means of government.” He could accomplish this by comparing “the different forms of [government] with each other, and each of them with their effects on public and private happiness.”²³ These were the writings of an ambitious young attorney, but this concept stayed consistent throughout his life. His most mature work of political philosophy, the three-volume 1787 Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, was a historical survey of different types of governments in the ancient and modern world. Adams examined the democratic republics of the Low Countries and Switzerland and compared them to Athens and Thebes. He looked at the aristocratic republics in Zurich and Venice and measured their virtues and vices against Rome’s. He analyzed the monarchical republics of England and Poland in light of Homer’s monarchies. He considered the political ideas of the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Enlightenment, and the British Commonwealth men, drawing on authorities from Plato to Tacitus to Machiavelli to Locke and Milton. The point of this broad and often tedious work was to prove Adams’s insistence that “all nations from the beginning have been agitated by the same passions.” Comprehensively cataloguing those passions illuminated certain principles that were applicable to all men in all places at all times. Adams concluded that “nations move by unalterable rules” and that a close reading of history could reduce governing to a science.²⁴

As he developed his thinking on both the science of governing and the central importance of republican ideas, John Adams instructed his son on the importance of reading, above all other historians, Thucydides. “There is no History,” Adams wrote, “perhaps, better adapted to this usefull Purpose than that of Thucidides, an Author, of whom I hope you will make yourself perfect Master, in original Language, which is Greek, the most perfect of all human languages.… You will find in your Fathers library, the Works of Mr. Hobbes, in which among a great deal of mischievous Philosophy, you will find a learned and exact Translation of Thucidides.… You will find it full of Instruction to the Orator, the Statesman, the General, as well as to the Historian and Philosopher.”²⁵

This is an intriguing letter. Why does Adams say that Hobbes’s works contain “a great deal of mischievous Philosophy”? And why is Adams insistent that Thucydides serves a more useful purpose than any other author?

The first answer is fairly obvious. Leviathan, which was undoubtedly included in the works of Hobbes, was the standard text on absolute rule and the inviolability, once entered, of the social contract between subject and sovereign, no matter the abuses of the latter. Yet Adams deeply believed in the need to resist tyranny and struggle on behalf of liberty. The second answer rests on Adams’s view of Thucydides, suggesting that the ancient Greek historian offered much practical knowledge.

Thucydides intended his work to serve as an aide “to the understanding of the future … [and] not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.”²⁶ His work was meant to be didactic, not only to his contemporaries but also to future gener...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Fires of Honorable Ambition: The Education of John Quincy Adams
• 2. Clans and Tribes at Eternal War: European Diplomacy and American Politics
• 3. In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Extent and Limits of American Power
• 4. The Spirit of Improvement: Economic and Moral Development
• 5. A Stain upon the Character of the Nation: The Fight against Slavery
• 6. The Influence of Our Example: The Legacy of John Quincy Adams
• Illustrations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index