John Quincy Adams

Rating:
Summary: Too much Freud at the begining.
Review: Full disclosure. John Quincy Adams is one of my heroes. I eagerly grabbed this book but almost didn't finish it. The strong later chapters which effectively describe the Adams election, administration and later time in congress are paid for by a load of psycoanalisys of Abagail Adams, John Quincy to the point where the reader just wants to say ENOUGH!

When the writer calls Adams is a poor father and follows it up with a description of him informing his sons they should work hard, avoid drinking, and follow religion I must conclude that he doesn't want me raising children either. When he lambasts Adams for wanting to raise his sone the way he was raised saying that he should know better, he ignores that the method used produced one of the greatest statemen in the history of this country.

Later on it gets better the author rightly hits Adams as a poor pol but extols the virtues of his honesty and single minded devotion to what he believed was right. His chapters on Adams vision and his fight against the gag rule are great reading as are all chapters from the point that Adams serves in the Monroe administration.

The author's bias' are plain and the lens that he sees Adams life is apparent to any reader, but that lens can't cloud the life of the man, it can only make reading this story an annoyance for a time.

I suggest going right to 1816 and reading from there. The book is worth reading but it was enough to convince me that I would avoid this author in the future.

Rating:
Summary: A superb short biography of the "other" President Adams
Review: I am really excited about this new series of books edited by Arthur Schlesinger. Many are aware of the scholars' poll that Schlesinger has overseen since 1948, in which many leading American scholars rate the overall success or failure of all the presidents. This series of books sets out to provide a short biography of each American president, almost always by a major presidential scholar or historian. The first volume in the series, for instance, was on James Madison by Garry Wills, and the second on Theodore Roosevelt by Louis Auchincloss. What excites me most about this series is the fact that many of the less well known presidents, like James Tyler and Benjamin Harrison and Zachary Taylor, will all get their own biographies.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS is the second volume in the series, and is written by distinguished antebellum historian Robert V. Remini, famous for his biography of Andrew Jackson among other works. There is no question that this book, while not terribly long, is a very high quality, surprisingly in depth study of the life of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States. More than most presidents, the story of JQA (as Adams referred to himself), is an especially sad one. The child of two famous parents, John Adams and Abigail Adams, Adams was from a child sensitive to the fact that great things were expected of him, a fact continually reinforced by his overbearing mother. He quickly showed himself to be a gifted and brilliant child, as well as intensely self-critical and perfectionistic. He was a gifted scholar, and actually became a professor at Harvard before embarking on a life of public service.

Although remembered today as one of our less successful presidents, JQA was for the most part an astonishingly successful public servant. Few Americans can match JQA for his overall contribution to American life. As a very young man, after serving a term in the U.S. Senate, he served as an ambassador to various European countries, and eventually became ambassador to Prussia. He was one of the individuals responsible for negotiating the treaty with England ending the War of 1812. After a series of diplomatic successes, Adams became the Secretary of State under Monroe. Remini states that JQA was arguably the finest Secretary of State the United States has ever had. Among other things, he was the primary architect of what became known as the Monroe Doctrine, which more accurately could be called the John Quincy Adams Doctrine. Furthermore, after leaving the presidency, he spent the remainder of his life serving in the House of Representatives in a highly distinguished fashion. It was only as a president that he was a disappointment.

His presidency began with one of the least admirable elections in US history. Although Jackson won both the popular vote and electoral vote, he didn't gain a plurality, which threw the election into the House of Representatives. There Henry Clay machinated an Adams victory. Jackson's supporters forgave neither Clay nor Adams, and before it began, Adams presidency was doomed. He exacerbated matters with a series of political blunders. The tragedy is that Adams entered the presidency with one of the most ambitious visions of the role of government in the lives of individuals. Today, his vision would not be considered at all extreme, but at the time few were willing to accept government's playing the kind of role he imagined.

All in all, this is a moving portrait of a marvelous public servant whose presidency failed to match his many other successes. I strongly recommend it to all interested in either American history or the lives of the presidents. I look forward to additional volumes in this series.

Rating:
Summary: A good book about 'Old Man Eloquent'
Review: I join the other reviewers who have reported reading and enjoying this book by Robert Remini. Here are a few of the 'pearls of wisdom' that I noted in this informative little book:

1. Every man should have a child, write a book, and plant a tree.
2. JQA's father advised him early in life to maintain a daily dairy. Initially he made only brief, irregular entries; later on his dairy became an addiction and he sometimes spent as many as 6 hours in a day on it. These dairy entries, maintained over his long life, became one of his great legacies. They were eventually published in a 12-volumn work.
3. By age 16 JQA was a world traveler, spoke several foreign languages, and could intelligently converse on world literature, history, the arts and sciences, and others.
4. JQA's mother, Abigail, was very domineering and quite reluctant to 'let go' of her children.
5. JQA noted that his father's devotion to public service had cost him much - personal wealth, extended separations from his home, family and friends, political enemies, etc. Nevertheless JQA chose a similar life for himself.
6. JQA acknowledged at 18 that he was addicted to books 'beyond moderation.' His extensive reading, however, broadened and nourished his interests in history, literature, languages , etc., and provided him a lifetime of inexpensive pleasure.
7. JQA played the flute.
8. JQA graduated from Harvard (1786) second in his class of 51.
9. Thomas Jefferson, who lived on his plantation like a king, opposed any strong federal government or institutions (like a national bank). He advocated states' rights and personal liberty.
10. Abigail Adams warns JQA not to marry until he can properly support a wife and family. Being an obedient son he passes up the true love of his life.
11. JQA has no respect for Andrew Jackson, whose record includes dueling, brawling, home-wrecking, bigamy, adultery, executions, a failed governorship in Florida, and probable collusion with Aaron Burr, a traitor.
12. JQA defines himself: 'devoted his entire life and soul to the union and to the improvement - physical, moral and intellectual - of the people'.
13. JQA on the role of the federal government: 'it should improve man's condition on Earth'. This included building roads, canals, bridges, creating a national university, a naval academy, establishing standard measures of weights and measurements - and increasing the happiness of the people.
14. JQA's Republican opponents advocated 'strict constructionism', personal liberty, no protective tariffs, and no canal in Panama.
15. JQA was at various times described as: a worrier, depressed, a walker, a swimmer, a skilled diplomat, an accomplished linguist, studious, abrasive, a stern, demanding father, lacking in charisma, humane, and pessimistic.
16. JQA agreed with George Washington: the U.S. could lose its own freedoms and independence if it pursued dominance and power abroad.
17. JQA (not uncommonly for the times) refused to personally pursue public office, or to actively campaign for office. He had no time for kissing babies, or waving and smiling at strangers.
18. Historians rate JQA as an inept president, because he made poor appointments, failed to create efficient working coalitions, and refused to replace efficient partisan government officials with partisan supporters,
19. JQA had a healthy routine: he rose around daybreak, walked 3-4 miles, and read 3 chapters in the Bible - before breakfast. After his daily presidential duties he'd walk another 3-4 miles before supper- or swim in the Potomac - then retire around 11-12 o'clock.
20. JQA, like all presidents, was subjected to insults and criticism: he was accused of making exorbitant ('Royal-like") purchases for White House furnishing and was called a 'Pimp of the Coalition' and a 'Pimp for the Czar'.
21. A. Jackson introduced a new form of uncivil presidential behavior when he refused to pay a courtesy call on the outgoing JQA - because, said Jackson, JQA had supported the slanderous remarks made during the campaign of 1828 against Jackson's mother and his diseased wife. JQA reciprocated by boycotting Jackson's inauguration ceremony.
22. JQA's answer to depression or life's tragedies: "Regularity, regularity, regularity!" i.e., one must stick to his normal routine and exercise 'self-discipline and Christian prayer'.
23. JQA led the fight when the first petition to abolish slavery was introduced in the House in 1835. The debates lasted 6 weeks and were so bitter that some House members carried knives for protection.
24. President Jackson on JQA: "He's a madman from Mars!"; "He belongs in a hospital for the demented!"
"Expel him!"
25. JQA on slavery: "It will take civil war or the slave owners' consent to abolish slavery. The Emancipation movement can't do it!"
26. James Smithson, the illegitimate son of an English duke, willed one-half million dollars to 'increase and diffuse knowledge' in the U.S. JQA chairs the commission that eventually (1846) creates the Smithsonion Institute. Some rank JQA second after Benjamin Franklin for the promotion of science in early America.
27. JQA opposed statehood for Texas (it was admitted as a slave state in 1845 under President Polk) and he opposed the U.S. declaration of war against Mexico (1845).
28. JQA fought the 'gag rule' (that restricts unlimited, free speech and debate of issues) for over a decade before the House finally voted to disallow it in 1844.
29. In 1839 JQA successfully pleads the case before the Supreme Court of 39 African slaves who commandeered their ship, the Amistad - thereby securing their freedom.
30. JQA's sons were a disappointment to him: the oldest, George Washington Adams, was indolent, a drinker and probably committed suicide; his second son, John Adams II, died of alcoholism; his youngest son, Charles Francis, simply failed to live up to the Adams family standards.
31. Reflecting back on his life JQA noted this: "My career in life has been, with severe vicissitudes, on the whole - highly auspicious."
32. JQA's last words, spoken in the nation's capitol (21 February 1848) following a fatal stroke, were: "This is the end of Earth, but I am composed."

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing in places but still good
Review: I was rather disappointed by this book. While it is factually correct in most places (I address the factual errors below), I do not agree with some of the characterizations. These are somewhat disappointing as Professor Remini has generally adhered to a high standard of scholarship in his previous works.

My main problem is what I believe to be sources that Professor Remini has used to write this book. These sources tend to be critial of the homelife of John Quincy Adams and fault the nagging and hectoring letters written by his mother Abigal as being one reason for his failure to develop fully as a emotionally well put together human being. The problem that I have with this line of thought is that no one in the 18th century aspired to that emotional state, certainly not in New England and not to the offspring of Puritan scions (both John and Abigal Adams fit this description). Had anyone suggested that a severe approach with one's offspring might not be the best approach, he or she would have been laughed at and taken for mad. No, it was a bit too early to hold parents responsible for not having read Dr. Spock.

The fault with this ahistorical approach is in the source material, particularly the Nagal biography of John Quincy Adams. The goal of this book is to prove that the Adams family was particularly disfunctional because no one got enough love in childhood. This is kind of like taking John Adams to task for not taking an aircraft to Philadelphia. Such concepts of family did not exist in the 18th century and it is a mistake to try and impose our standards on the unwilling 18th century. Despite this harsh homelife Adams seemed to have had a good relationship with his parents and archivists are unlikely to discover a Mommie Dearest manuscript by the the sixth president of the United States.

There is another bit of information that also is incorrect. Professor Remini has Adams reading the English Historian Macauley as a youth. While I am sure that someone of Adams education would have no trouble reading his essays as a very young person, Macauley was not born until 1800, he wrote no essays until the 1820s when Adams would have been in his 50s.

As far as the public life of Adams, Remini is generally on target. Adams, while a successful diplomat, our most successful Secretary of State and an effective congressman, he was a political pigmy and disaster as a president. Here he draws on the definitive Bemis biography for this views.

Rating:
Summary: JQA - The Overview
Review: John Quincy Adams is remembered today (if at all) as the first son to follow in his father's footsteps to the presidency. Adams, or "JQA" as historian/author Robert Remini refers to him, had a brilliant diplomatic and political career--albiet under his father's long shadow--before becoming president in a disputed election (the other similarity he shares with the current occupant of The White House). Among his other major accomplishments, Adams the second negotiated the end of the war of 1812 and as Secretary of State formulated the priciples that would later become known as The Monroe Doctrine. Unfortunately, Admas's skills as a diplomat were of little help during his largely unsuccessful presidency, in which he was overshadowed from the beginning by the popular Andrew Jackson, who bitterly opposed almost every move he made. The split between the two would revive America's two party system after over a decade of dormancy.

Remini documents all of the major events of JQA's life, from the "corrupt bargain" with Henry Clay that propelled Adams to the presidency to his unhappy personal life. For all of his brilliance, Adams was a tormented man, brutalized emotionally by his domineering mother (the otherwise revered Abigail) as well as by his failure to secure the hand of the one true love of his life. The equally overbearing upbringing he fostered upon his own sons resulted in tragedy for two of them.

The sense the reader gets from Remini's book is that JQA was one of the more fascinating and tragic figures ever to become president. Unfortunately, at only a brief 155 pages of narrative the book only scratches the surface of the man. Still, Remini is a first rate writer and historian, and his easily readable prose makes this a very accessible work of history.

Overall, a breezy historical account documenting the life of an often overlooked president.

Rating:
Summary: Good short biography
Review: John Quincy Adams was the first son of a President to become President himself. Although his family connections didn't hurt, they also weren't overly helpful; his break from his father's Federalist connections means that JQA had to attain the nation's highest office based primarily on his own resume, not his father's.

Ironically, Adam's tenure as President was in some ways, the low point in his career of public service. Prior to then, he was one of the best foreign relations people in American history, one of the primary authors of the Treaty of Ghent and the Monroe Doctrine. In his post-Presidential life, he was a prominent Congressman noted for his anti-slavery work (including his winning defense in the Amistad case) and his part in founding the Smithsonian Institute. As a President, however, he was at best mediocre and ineffective, his four years marred from the start by his controversial election and his unwise appointment of Henry Clay as Secretary of State (for Clay, it was equally unwise to have accepted the position).

Having read Remini's three volume biography of Jackson, it was interesting to read his depiction of one of Jackson's principal political enemies. Remini does a good job, but this is not as strong an effort as his other biographical works. The brevity of the book (which I believe was imposed by the American Presidents Series editors) makes this book more of an overview than a full biography. Remini does cover most of the major points, however, and does deal with Adams's personal life as well.

As stated before, John Quincy Adams was not a very significant President, but he is an important part of early U.S. history. This book is a good introduction to the man often recognized as the best Secretary of State ever. For a more detailed biography, however, Paul Nagel's recent work is a worthwhile read.

Rating:
Summary: John Who? Adams
Review: John Quincy Adams was the sixth President of the United States, but much less well known than his father John Adams, the second President of the USA.

In this splendid biography, Robert Remini has provided us with a concise volume detailing the life of John Quincy Adams. Within this book, it is easily seen why JQA is rated as "below average" as a President, but highly regarded as an international diplomat.

Remini has done a spectactular job in describing the whole life of John Quincy Adams, and helps us to understand why Adams' life is being reclassified as more successful than previously recognized, despite the fact that his Presidency was a failure.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone that is looking for a basic understanding of Adams the man, not just as the President.

Rating:
Summary: an error about an error
Review: Referring to Marshall Newman's review. The Macaulay that JQA read and Remini mentions was Catherine Macaulay (1731-1791), an historian and a distant relative of T.B. Macaulay (1800-1859).

Rating:
Summary: A little dry, but still good
Review: Remini writes well but can be a little dry in places, so be warned. He does spend adequate time reflecting upon JQA's prodigious intellect. It's a matter of debate who was our most intelligent President: Lincoln, Madison and Jefferson would certainly garner their share of votes. But John Quincy Adams warrants serious consideration: he was an intellectual titan with an astounding breadth of intellect. He was impossibly well-read, sober, amazingly articulate with a rapier-like ability to demolish opponents or defend his position. It's debatable whether he was, in fact, America's most brilliant President, but this book goes a long way in making that case.

Remini wisely delves into Adams' private side and quotes extensively from his own words. If you are looking for a glum recitation of Adams' political life, look elsewhere, this is a more human biography. There was a refreshing amount of material focusing on Adams' boyhood, and the chapters covering his Congressional years are especially interesting. His story reads like something from a novel: failed President transformed into one of the most influential Congressmen who ever serve in the House.

My only minor criticism is that Remini does not sufficiently explore or explain Adams' brilliant son, Henry, who grew up to be a caustic and clever chronicler of the late 10th century. Otherwise, this is a solid book, well-written, thoroughly researched and illuminating.

Rating:
Summary: John Quincy Adams and American Nationalism
Review: Robert Remini's brief study of John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) is part of the American Presidency Series edited by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The series has the commendable aim of introducing the reader to each of the Presidents in a volume of short scope. The broader aim, I think, is to reawaken an appreciation of the history of our country and to stimulate reflection on the American experience. Thus, each volume tries to present a story of a life and also to explain briefly what is unique about each President and makes him worthy to be remembered.

Remini gives an excellent discussion of John Quincy Adams's service to the United States, both during his Presidency and before and after it. The aspect of JQA's public service that stands out, both in his Presidency and outside it, is his commitment to American Nationalism. By this I mean a devotion to creating a strong, united nation for all the people to promote the public welfare. JQA worked diligently to advance the interests of the entire American people, as he saw these interests, rather than to be a tool of any faction or party or momentary passion. Much of the time, he succeeded.

As President, JQA advocated the creation of public works and improvements to link the country together. He was a strong supporter of education, scientific advancement, and learning. He wanted the Federal government to play an active role in supporting these ends and worked towards the creation of an American university. (After his Presidency he was a strong advocate for the creation of the Smithsonian Institution.)

Before he assumed the Presidency, Adams served as the Secretary of State under James Monroe. He worked for the goal of American Nationalism by expanding the boundaries of the United States through a skillful exercise of diplomacy until they extended to the Pacific Ocean. JQA also was instrumental in the formulation of the Monroe Doctrine.

Following his presidency. JQA served as a Congressman from Massachusetts. He distinguished himself in working for the anti-slavery cause and, specifically, by his tireless opposition to the "gag rule" which aimed to prevent critical discussion of slavery-related issues in the halls of Congress.

Remini presents his material in a way that focuses on this theme of JQA's public service and on its nationalistic aspirations . He also points out how and why JQA failed to realize many of his goals, particularly during his term as the sixth President (1825-1828) Adams was named President by the House of Representatives in a highly contested election. It was alleged that he struck a "corrupt bargain" with Henry Clay, who became Adams's Secretary of State. This "corrupt bargain" doomed the Adams Presidency and tarnished both Adams's and Clay's careers.

Adams was also highly opinionated and stuffy and gave the impression of aloofness. He was not a good politician and lacked a certain ability to compromise or to work cooperatively with others. At one point Remini writes (p. 110): "It is really impossible to think of any other president quite like John Quincy Adams. He seemed intent on destroying himself and his administration. By the same token, it is difficult to think of a president with greater personal integrity." JQA was defeated for a second term by Andrew Jackson in a bitterly fought campaign. Among other things, Jackson possessed abundant popular appeal and charisma, in sharp contrast to JQA's aloof, intellectual character.

While Adams's Presidency failed, his goals and ideals were good. They lived on and deserve studying and remembering.

Remini also gives a good summary of Adams's personal life, adopting some of the psychohistory of JQa's recent biographers. He points out the stresses that Adams endured from his famous father and mother and the pressures placed upon him and his brothers for high achievement. JQA also imposed these pressures and expectations, alas, on his own children. There is a good discussion of Adams's failed love affair as a young man --probably the one passion of his life -- and of his subsequent marriage to Louisa Johnson. Remini describes JQAs extensive intellectual interests, his tendencies to anger and to depression and he links these traits in a sensible way to the failings of Adams's Presidency.

This is an excellent study of JQA which captures in short compass the essence and character of his contribution to the United States. Readers who want to learn more about JQA -- with a focus on his service as Secretary of State and as Congressman from Massachusetts may wish to read the two-volume study by Samuel Flagg Bemis: "Joh Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy" (1949) and "John Quincy Adams and the Union" (1956).