John Adams

7 Key excerpts on "John Adams"

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  Profiles In Courage

  • President John F. Kennedy(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Golden Springs Publishing

    (Publisher)

  “I am forty-five years old. Two-thirds of a long life have passed, and I have done nothing to distinguish it by usefulness to my country and to mankind....Passions, indolence, weakness and infirmities have sometimes made me swerve from my better knowledge of right and almost constantly paralyzed my efforts of good.”

  And finally, at age seventy, having distinguished himself as a brilliant Secretary of State, an independent President and an eloquent member of Congress, he was to record somberly 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.”

  Yet the lifetime which was so bitterly deprecated by its own principal has never been paralleled in American history. John Quincy Adams—until his death at eighty in the Capitol—held more important offices and participated in more important events than anyone in the history of our nation, as Minister to the Hague, Emissary to England, Minister to Prussia, State Senator, United States Senator, Minister to Russia, Head of the American Mission to negotiate peace with England, Minister to England, Secretary of State, President of the United States and member of the House of Representatives. He figured, in one capacity or another, in the American Revolution, die War of 1812 and the prelude to the Civil War. Among the acquaintances and colleagues who march across the pages of his diary are Sam Adams (a kinsman), John Hancock, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Lafayette, John Jay, James Madison, James Monroe, John Marshall, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Hart Benton, John Tyler, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Lincoln, James Buchanan, William Lloyd Garrison, Andrew Johnson, Jefferson Davis and many others.

  Though one of the most talented men ever to serve his nation, he had few of the personal characteristics which ordinarily give color and charm to the personality. But there is a fascination and nobility in this picture of a man unbending, narrow and intractable, judging himself more severely than his most bitter enemies judged him, possessing an integrity unsurpassed among the major political figures of our history, and constantly driven onward by his conscience and his deeply felt obligation to be worthy of his parents, their example and their precepts.

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  A Companion to John Adams and John Quincy Adams

  • David Waldstreicher(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  and realism in his politics was then demonstrated by the side he took in the slavery controversy. The slave power had, indeed, gotten out of hand and was trampling on the constitution and the Declaration of Independence; the meaning of America was at stake (Lipsky, 1950: 121–127, 212, 278, 316–317).

  Lipsky helped solidify the “foundations” upon which Bemis would complete his monument to John Quincy Adams and the Union in 1956. The emphasis here was on Adams’s

  spectacular Second Career: as Minority President with visions of a consolidated Union of Liberty with Power, then in Congress as a crusader in crescendo for human rights against the expansion of slavery – abolitionist at heart but constitutionalist in practice – until he fell at the climax of his life a dying gladiator on the floor of the House of Representatives. (Bemis, 1956: ix)

  Looking forward, Bemis now found himself fully able to assimilate the seemingly failed presidency to a larger second-career story. In 1824 no one was better qualified for the presidency, as Adams rightly realized. He kept quiet on slavery; his discretion on this issue and on the tariff helped him get elected by the House of Representatives in “an implicit but certainly not corrupt bargain.” The union had to be preserved and expanded before anything could be done about slavery (Bemis, 1956: 11, 58, 63).

  But the election itself, and Adams’s policies, changed things. The opposition to him was sectional. His plan for a great national government was a threat to slavery, and understood as such by Southern leaders like John Randolph (1956: 70–71, 88, 90–91). This shaped his presidency and his defeat. In a passage that seems to be ignored by recent historians of the election of 1828 (Parsons, 2008; Cole, 2009), and even in recent scholarship on the politics of slavery, Bemis insisted that “The most significant issue on the Presidential campaign of 1828 was the hidden issue … the issue of slavery.” While neither candidate said anything about it for fear of antagonizing real or potential supporters, “the hidden issue silently transformed the Presidential Question of 1828 into an underlying sectional contest.” Van Buren successfully courted “the vested interests of the slavery capitalists” and created the Jacksonian cross-sectional coalition (Bemis, 1956: 150, 152).

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  The American Story

  Conversations with Master Historians

  • David M. Rubenstein(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Simon & Schuster

    (Publisher)

  Nothing happened on July 4. That’s the date on the document. And all those people weren’t assembled to sign it. They signed it when they were in town, as it were. Some of them signed in the fall, some were signing all the way up to Christmas. And the furniture in the painting is wrong. The room, the decorations of the room are wrong.

  The only thing that’s right, and it’s what’s most important, are the faces. They were all representative of individual Americans—free, independent Americans—who are stating their political faith and who are accountable. In other words, they can’t hide anymore. There they are. Proudly, but not without courage to do that.

  Adams wrote that day or the next day: “The 2nd day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as a day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.”

  “Just the thing for a Child to have!” Commemorative 1850s broadside of Adams’s passionate letter, July 5, 1776, about the importance of the Declaration of Independence.

  Think about it for a minute. He’s saying, “From one end of the continent to the other.” The country at that point didn’t even reach the Allegheny Mountains. And he’s seeing this dream, this ambition. Like John F. Kennedy saying, “We will go to the moon.” This is an American moment, and it is more than just legally interesting or legally important, profound, and unprecedented, which it was. And Adams had that capacity.

  Adams was short, and he was not very handsome, and he comes right after the presidency of the tallest, most glamorous, important figure in the world then, George Washington, and before the glamorous Thomas Jefferson. And to me, it’s very interesting that it’s the same situation with Harry Truman. He comes after Franklin Roosevelt and is succeeded by Dwight Eisenhower, two of the most luminous figures of that day. But you have to wait for the dust to settle, and you begin to see who really did matter.

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  Hidden Treasures; Or, Why Some Succeed While Others Fail

  • Harry A. Lewis(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  The same writer makes the following remarks on his general character: "His nature was too susceptible to emotions of sympathy and kindness, for it tempted him to trust more than was prudent in the professions of some who proved unworthy of his confidence. Ambitious in one sense he certainly was, but it was not the mere aspiration for place or power. It was a desire to excel in the minds of men by the development of high qualities, the love, in short, of an honorable fame, that stirred him to exult in the rewards of popular favor. Yet this passion never tempted him to change a course of action or to suppress a serious conviction, to bend to a prevailing error or to disavow one odious truth."

  In these last assertions we do not fully concur. They involve some controverted points of history; however, they may be made with far more plausibility of Mr. Adams than of the greater portion of political men.

  There is much in the life of John Adams worthy of careful consideration. He rose from poverty to distinction; he was a capable man, capable of filling the highest place in the estimation of his posterity, yet his serious faults led to his political ruin. The careful perusal of his life will enable one to understand the principles of the two great parties of to-day, modified though they be, the fundamental principles remaining the same.

  Thomas Jefferson .

  The subject of this narrative was born in Virginia, in the year 1743, on the 2nd day of April. As young Jefferson was born to affluence and was bountifully blessed with all the educational advantages which wealth will bring, many of our young readers may say—well, I could succeed, perhaps, had I those advantages. We will grant that you could provided you took means similar to those used by Jefferson, for while we must admit that all cannot be Jeffersons, nor Lincolns, nor Garfields, still we are constantly repeating in our mind the words of the poet:—

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  Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy

  • Charles A. Beard(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Dover Publications

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER XI THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF John Adams 1 D URING the election of Washington’s successor it became apparent that the country was sharply divided and that the dissatisfaction with Federalist policies was deep and fervent. It is true, a sturdy Federalist, John Adams, carried the day, but his victory over Jefferson was won by a margin of three electoral votes — a fact which stung him like a nettle. Moreover, he knew that many who voted for him, including no less an important person than Hamilton, had accepted his candidature with reluctance as a lesser evil. Yet, un-propitious as were the signs, the election of 1796 was a victory for the party that had framed the Constitution and carried it into effect. Whatever may have been the objections brought against Adams on personal grounds, it could not be said that his system of politics was unknown to those who had occasion to vote for presidential electors in the autumn of 1796. On the contrary, Adams, unlike Jefferson and Washington, had published a large work in which he had elaborated with great pains and with copious details his theories of government, politics, economics, and democracy: A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America against the attack of M. Turgot in His Letter to Dr. Price, first issued in 1786. 2 This work, although too laborious and too prolix for popular interest; was nevertheless widely read and still more widely commented upon in American newspapers. Large sections, particularly those considered in this chapter, had been reprinted in full in several papers and had been the subject of friendly and adverse criticism by those interested in politics

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  Study Guide to The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

  • Intelligent Education(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Influence Publishers

    (Publisher)

  INTRODUCTION TO HENRY ADAMS   HENRY ADAMS: 1838-1918 Birthplace

  Henry Adams was born in Boston on February 16, 1838. Even at his birth the child seemed destined for greatness, at least as far as inheritance could provide greatness: his great-grandfather was John Adams, one of the writers of the Declaration of Independence and the second President of the United States, and his grandfather was John Quincy Adams, a brilliant statesman and sixth President of the country. If America had an aristocracy in the early nineteenth century, then surely the Adamses were a significant part of it; and if there was a cultural center in the nation, then that center was Boston. The family had a distinguished tradition of honorable, active service to their country, and all seven members of Henry’s generation were expected to take their places in this tradition. The Adamses had wealth, power, ability and education, but not one of them would have considered using these assets for purely personal gain.

  Quincy

  Henry was a member of a large, closely knit family. Some of his earliest memories deal with his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, who lived in nearby Quincy and who was then serving as a member of Congress. Henry and his brothers and sisters spent many summers in the big family house at Quincy, and they became steeped in the atmosphere of politics which was so prevalent there. The table talk, which the children were allowed at times to partake in (and which they always listened to), often consisted of the conversations of prominent historians, orators, politicians and educators. Many of these prominent men became friends of young Henry as well as of his father, and correspondence with some of them, notably the orator Charles Sumner, continued well into Henry’s young manhood. It was taken for granted that at least one of these young Adamses would serve his country in a high capacity; one of young Henry’s vivid memories, in fact, is of an Irish gardener who remarked to him, “You’ll be thinkin’ you’ll be President too!” This comment, which Adams includes in the Education

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  First Fathers

  The Men Who Inspired Our Presidents

  • Harold I. Gullan(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Trade Paper Press

    (Publisher)

  Despite Washington’s warnings against factionalism, the young nation’s political leaders had already separated into two distinct political parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. By inclination and affiliation a Federalist, Adams was no blind follower of any party’s inflexible tenets, another tendency that would be emulated by his son. From abroad, it was John Quincy who was most instrumental in helping his father to achieve the transcending triumph of his presidency—although it would be a triumph that doomed his reelection.

  Upon leaving office, Washington planned to transfer John Quincy, whom he now viewed as “the most valued public character we have abroad,” from the Netherlands to Portugal. Washington urged on his successor “that you will not withdraw merited promotion [for John Quincy] because he is your son.” Despite inevitable accusations of nepotism, Adams changed John Quincy’s destination to the more prominent position of minister to Prussia, although at the same salary. When his son showed hesitation, Adams reminded him, “The sons of Presidents have the same claim to liberty, equality, and the benefit of the laws with all other citizens.” From this more central listening post, John Quincy’s contacts in London and Paris provided his father with the intelligence to avert war with an increasingly unstable France.

  It was, however, a conflict the Federalists longed for—and expected Adams to champion. In 1799 he was at the height of his popularity. By 1800, with war averted and a new, skillful envoy placed in France, Adams was equally hated. Hamilton called him “an old woman.” He had placed the welfare of his country ahead of the emotion of the moment. When he ran again in 1800, he was a president without a party. Under the circumstances, his defeat by Jefferson, complicated by Aaron Burr, turned out to be surprisingly close. In the first forty years of the American republic, John Adams and John Quincy Adams were the only American presidents to be denied two terms.

  The Adamses did not linger in Washington to witness Jefferson’s inauguration. John had bought and refurbished a much larger house in Quincy, which he hopefully named “Peacefield.” Modest by the standards of European gentry, it was more than spacious compared to his original Braintree domicile. Here he half hoped for repose, but he still chafed over slights too recent to heal. He remained convinced that his contributions would be overshadowed by those of his more visible contemporaries. Now, Lord willing, he and Abigail would be together for the rest of their lives. Best of all, their boy, too, was coming home. In one of his last acts as president, John had recalled John Quincy.

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