Paul C. Nagel - John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life

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THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC .

Copyright 1997 by Paul C. Nagel

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

http://www.randomhouse.com/

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nagel, Paul C.
John Quincy Adams: a public life, a private life / by Paul C. Nagel. 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82819-4
1. Adams, John Quincy, 17671848
2. PresidentsUnited States
Biography. I. Title.
E 377. N 34 1997
973.55092dc21
[ B ] 96-49640

FRONTISPIECE: This profile of John Quincy Adams, age 75, was made on March 8, 1843, in a Washington daguerreotype studio. Much intrigued by the new technique, he sat for three exposures (of which only this one is known to survive), and found it incomprehensible that each required only thirty seconds. Lost until recently, the daguerreotype appears here by courtesy of Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, to which it was given by William Macbeth Gallery in New York City.

v3.1_r1

for

Joan Peterson Nagel,

my partner and pal

And for her namesake, our granddaughter,

Margaret Joan Nagel

On January 12, 1779, an eleven-year-old New England boy named John Quincy Adams started a diary that continued, rarely interrupted, for almost seventy tumultuous years. It opened with nothing more than the announcement: A Journal By Me JQA. Today most scholars agreealthough few have read more than segments of itthat Adams enormous diary is the most valuable historical and personal journal kept by any prominent American.

Eventually, Adams became a diplomat, poet, orator, writer, scientist, silviculturist, Harvard professor, U.S. secretary of state, legislator at both state and federal levels, and president of the United States. After leaving the White House in 1829, he was a congressman until 1848, when he died in the federal Capitol in his eighty-first year. It was a life of unmatched public service, and yet also one of tormenting private struggle. Adams first concern was to master his soul, seeking discipline, modesty, tolerance, calmness of spirit, and religious faithall virtues in which he was woefully weak, as he was the first to acknowledge. And he was heartbroken that he could not be a Cicero or a Shakespeare rather than a politician.

Biographers and historians have written much about the public John Quincy Adams but little concerning his private side; thus his personality remains misunderstood. This book will try to illuminate the entire Adams, private as well as public. It is, to my knowledge, the first biography that draws upon Adams massive manuscript diary. Earlier writers relied upon a published edition of the journal that was highly incomplete, omitting particularly many entries of a personal nature. But now Adams entire diary and his surviving letters and other jottings are available on microfilm. The chapters ahead have been built upon these sources.

While this book must, of course, follow Adams as a superb diplomat (a role he tolerated) and as a besieged president (an office he disliked), it will feature him in less familiar settings. Here a different Adams emerges from the cold, aloof figure often pictured by historians, one of whom recently wrote, In the long history of the republic, few men who have won high office have been as disagreeable as he. Such an opinion of John Quincy Adams does him and American history a disservice.

This biography will introduce the Adams whom four thousand citizens assembled in New York City in November 1840 to hear deliver his widely popular lecture on faith. When he is seen composing orations, hymns, and poetryespecially the charmingly erotic lines devoted to his wonderful wife, Louisathe unknown Adams appears, a presence that banishes the bitterness, austerity, and unfriendliness ascribed to him by history.

This very different Adams was, in fact, one of his eras most brilliant dinner companions. He delighted in accompanying old friends on fishing expeditions, he enjoyed singing songs in French with his granddaughters, and Harvard students cheered his lectures.

Some writers, of course, have sensed that there must have been more to John Quincy Adams personality than the familiarly dismal figure. One such was the distinguished scholar Samuel Flagg Bemis, who acknowledged with regret that he could not probe his subjects inner life and character. After publishing two remarkable volumes about Adams public life, Bemis said in 1956 that he was leaving the inner J. Q. Adams to be portrayed someday by others.

Thirty years later, no one had taken up Bemis challenge, not even Leonard L. Richards, who, ably writing in 1986 about Adams career in Congress, remarked that, despite the thousands of words written by Adams and about him, no one has discovered the formula that will fully explain his life. He remains in many ways an enigma.

Even members of Adams family admitted they were mystified by their kinsmans makeup. His son Charles Francis Adams once claimed that his fathers feelings were impenetrable, and that he hid himself behind an iron mask. Long years later, the historian Brooks Adams conceded of his grandfather: No one ever understood him, for he had a nature so complex as to be an enigma to contemporaries. Adams himself advanced the mystery by often speaking of his repulsive nature.

I pondered that enigma when I wrote two earlier books about the Adams family. After finishing these, I was certain I had not captured the elusive John Quincy Adams. Determined to try again, in 1990 I returned to his diary and other manuscripts. Thanks to their frank and revealing nature, I came finally to feel that I was living with Adams, sharing his thoughts and his doings. The iron mask was removed, and the inner J. Q. Adams stepped forward.

I found the key to the mask when I learned to understand the effects of a recurring major depression that dogged Adams life. And while he lived amid much personal travail, I came upon many occasions when his happy side emerged. He was never more cheerful than when he could escape politics and roam the Massachusetts seaside near his beloved home town of Quincy. Indeed, after completing this book I find myself not only admiring Adams for his many achievements but actually liking the mandespite his frequently exasperating behavior, now to be understood with sympathy.