QUINCY

(This entry is part of my American Presidential Series, which I have returned to, in commemoration of the Election week. A large portion of this series was posted on my blog in June 2011, and earlier on January 18, 2011. My previous double posting on James Monroe was also part of that series.)

John Quincy Adams, the son of John Adams and the sixth President of the United States, cannot be called a founding President, but he truly deserves a special mention anyway, as one of America’s best Presidents of the early era, one of her greatest diplomats ever and a dedicated champion of the fight against slavery, who paved the way for Lincoln’s Proclamation of Emancipation. One of the most remarkable events in his life, in fact, epitomizing it in essence, was his sudden collapse and death on the floor of the Congress, during an impassioned deliberation regarding the issue of honoring US Army officers who had fought in the recently concluded Mexican-American War, which Adams considered a “most unrighteous war.” This happened on February 21, 1848, as he was serving his second (post-Presidency) stretch in Congress. Amidst a chorus of enthusiastic Ayes, his No! rang out loud and clear, after which Adams collapsed. He was eighty years of age at the time.

Quelle belle morte! What a great American spirit!… Nurtured by such heroic stories, who can blame me for having been naïve about America?!

Known as a great diplomat (Ambassador under George Washington, John Adams, and James Madison, and Secretary of State under Monroe), his great plans for America’s modernization and education reform during his Presidency were all squashed by his political enemies in Congress thus making him at first sight a failed president. But such a view would be too narrow and at bottom erroneous, as, in addition to the four years in the White House, his whole record of distinguished public service must be taken into account.

In the history of American Presidency, John Quincy Adams was the only American ex-President continuing his public service as an elected member of the House of Representatives of the United States Congress. His famous nickname ‘The Abolitionist’ refers to his passionate opposition to slavery in America and his never-ending fight for slave emancipation, which did not stop with his physical death, but went on, culminating in Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, which posthumously fulfilled Quincy’s dream.

Ironically, Adams was by no means a happy, outgoing man, of which he speaks in his brutally honest diary, which he used to keep most of his life.

“I am a man of reserved, cold, austere and forbidding manners; my political adversaries say a gloomy misanthropist, and my personal enemies, an unsocial savage.” (Diary, June 4, 1819.)

“My whole life has been a succession of disappointments. I can scarcely recollect a single instance of success to anything that I ever undertook. Yet, with fervent gratitude to God, I confess that my life has been equally marked by great and signal successes which I neither aimed at nor anticipated.” (Diary, August 9, 1833.)

To his further personal credit, he honored his father and mother with literal Biblicality. It is therefore most appropriate for us to pay a brief tribute to the second “First Lady” of the United States, wife of John Adams and mother of John Quincy Adams (also lauded in McCullough’s biography of Adams) Abigail Adams, in her son’s uncharacteristically affectionate words:

“There is not a virtue that can abide in the female heart but it was the ornament of hers. She had been fifty-four years the delight of my father’s heart, the sweetener of all his toils, the comforter of all his sorrows, the sharer and heightener of all his joys.” (Diary, November 2, 1818.)

Intellectually brilliant and morally upright, Adams was a bad politician (which I consider a compliment for any honest man). Unwillingly involved in a political scandal during his first Presidential Campaign against the ultimate populist politician and a victorious war general Andrew Jackson (in 1824-1825) which he won, he was defeated by the selfsame Jackson in the battle for his second term. Thus ironically with John Adams his father he would share the dubious honor of being the only two one-term presidents among the first seven (including the first six plus Andrew Jackson), the rest having all served two terms each.

But, in spite of his political failings, I am judging him highly by my criterion of the “Spirit of 1776,” and in my book he belongs among the great American Presidents no matter what. It is therefore with him, and not with the last Founding Father-President Monroe, nor with the insanely popular, yet relentlessly polarizing figure of Andrew Jackson, but with him, John Quincy Adams, that I am winding up the continuity series of the early period of American Presidency.