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CHAPTER 1

A Privileged Young Man

Toward the end of the presidential campaign of 1824, John Quincy Adams, one of the four candidates for the office, left his duties as secretary of state in Washington and returned to his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, there to roam around the cemetery and look at tombstones of his ancestors and meditate on the past and future. He walked among the graves of the four generations of his father's family. He singled out the tomb of Henry Adams, the first to come from England and settle in Braintree, now Quincy, around 1640; then there was Joseph Adams, Sr., and his wife, Abigail Baxter, and Joseph Adams, Jr., and his second wife, Hannah Bass.

John Quincy Adams paused for a bit and gazed at the grave of his paternal grandfather, John Adams, Sr., and his wife, Susannah Boylston. The family continues to grow, he mused. Now, in 1824, there were three succeeding generations of male Adamses still living: his father, John Adams, the former president; himself, the present secretary of state, and his brother, Thomas Boylston; and then the third generation, among whom were his children: George Washington, John II, and Charles Francis. "Pass another century," Adams noted in his diary, "and we shall all be mouldering in the same dust." I wonder, he added, "who then of our posterity shall visit this yard? And what shall he read engraved upon the stones?"

Since then another century and more have passed and surely those who look upon the graves of this family cannot but recognize that here lie the remains of supremely gifted men and women who served their country with distinction and added to its luster.

The secretary did not mention his mother's ancestors in his musings — and that could be an important key in understanding his character and personality — but they too brought a degree of greatness to the family tree. He was named after his maternal great-grandfather, John Quincy, who "died on the 13th of July, 1767, the day after I had received his name in baptism," the secretary later wrote. His mother, Abigail Smith, the daughter of the Reverend William Smith and his wife, Elizabeth Quincy Smith, both descendants from distinguished Massachusetts clergymen, was a feisty woman of remarkable intelligence and determination, a woman of high moral standards who set goals for her offspring that they spent their lives trying to achieve.

It was especially difficult for John Quincy Adams. He was the oldest boy in the family, born July 11, 1767, but his sister Abigail, called "Nabby" by the family, had preceded him by two years. Another sister, Susanna, followed him but died the following year, in February 1770; then came Charles who arrived on May 29, 1770, and Thomas on September 15, 1772. Johnny, as the family called him, was perpetually lectured about how he was the oldest son and had to set an example for his siblings. He had been born with gifts few others enjoyed, they told him, and was expected to live up to them and become a "great man." Over and over, year after year, his parents reminded him that he was privileged by birth and education, that he was destined to be "a Guardian of the Laws, Liberty and Religion of your Country," and that he must achieve a distinction in this life that would add to the family's already illustrious record of accomplishment.

Abigail actually took Johnny to Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, to witness the famous battle so that he could better understand the price of freedom and the trials necessary to gain and defend it. He was all of seven years of age. Years later he still remembered "Britannia's thunders ... and witnessed the tears of my mother and mingled with them my own" over the death of "a dear friend of my father," Dr. Joseph Warren, who fell in the conflict. It seems unbelievable, but this young boy was made to stand and watch the killing of men he knew! It must have been traumatic. From that moment on Abigail "taught me to repeat daily, after the Lord's prayer, before rising from bed, the Ode of Collins on the patriot warriors who fell in the war to subdue the Jacobite rebellion of 1745."

What a terrible burden to lay on a child. And because his parents relentlessly spelled out his duties, reprimanded him when he failed to live up to them, and corrected every move he made that seemed to contradict their expectations of him, it is not surprising that he developed into a very introverted, self-critical individual of enormous pride and low personal esteem who suffered periodic and deep mental depressions. In later years he admitted that he was "a man of reserved, cold, austere and forbidding manners." He recognized that people saw him as "a gloomy misanthropist" and "a social savage," but, he added, "I have not the pliability to reform it."

He really yearned for the life of the mind. Literature, the arts, and science were what genuinely interested him. Instead the family decreed a life serving the law (which he hated) to be followed by public service, an essential component for the recognition expected of him. Although he had few political talents and refused throughout his life to do that which would actively advance his public career, still he loved the influence that came with high office. He loved the power by which he could advance the well-being of all the people, and he loved the accompanying acclaim that naturally flowed from it.

His parents also drilled into him the importance of religion in his life and the obligation of maintaining strict observance of Christian moral values. When he took his first long trip away from home at the age of ten, Abigail admonished him to "adhere to those religious sentiments and principles which were early instilled into your mind, and remember that you are accountable to your Maker for all your words and actions." She had seen her own brother succumb to alcohol and debauchery, desert his family, and leave them penniless. If it took every ounce of strength in her body, she meant to protect her children from a similar fate. "Your passions are strong and impetuous," she told her son, "and tho I have sometimes seen them hurry you to excesses, yet with pleasure I have observed ... your Efforts to govern and subdue them." All his life he kept up a lively battle "to govern and subdue" his passions, but his efforts never fully satisfied him. Johnny's father, one of the first New England Unitarians, weighed in on the subject by reminding him that "Your Conscience is the Minister Plenipotentiary of God Almighty in your Breast. See to it, that this Minister never negotiates in vain. Attend to him, in Opposition to all the Courts in the World."

Like the dutiful son he remained through life, John Quincy Adams adhered to these admonitions and, as an adult, read the Bible each morning for an hour in English, French, or German. According to his lights, it was the proper way to start the day. He regretted not knowing Hebrew so he could enjoy the original. And on Sunday he invariably attended two and sometimes three church services of different denominations, depending on his evaluation of the minister's intellectual strengths and preaching ability. "There is scarcely a Sunday passes ...," he later wrote in his diary, "in attendance upon divine service, I hear something of which a pointed application to my own situation and circumstances occurs to my thoughts. It is often consolation, support, encouragement — sometimes warning and admonition, sometimes keen and trying remembrance of deep distress." Raised as an independent Congregationalist, he finally joined the Unitarian Church in Quincy upon his father's death in 1826.

Naturally Johnny's education received special attention, particularly since he was expected to rise to greatness. He never went to school in Quincy but was educated at home by tutors: James Thaxter, his cousin, and Nathan Rice, one of his father's law clerks. Of course his parents took a very active role in his education. His father regularly instructed Abigail on Johnny's training. Fix his "Attention upon great and glorious Objects, root out every little Thing, weed out every Meanness," make him "great and manly." John Adams urged his son to revere scholarship as his "preeminent entertainment." Latin and Greek constituted the basic foundation for any educated man in the eighteenth century, and Johnny diligently memorized their grammar and vocabularies. In addition his father advised him to read history so that he could be better equipped to recognize evil and treachery in the world; and by all means he must study Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War in the original, "the most perfect of all human Languages," he was told. At the age of seven he wrote his father and said, "I hope I grow a better Boy and that you will have no occasion to be ashamed of me. ... Mr. Thaxter says I learn my Books well — he is a very good Master. I read my Books to Mamma."

Not surprisingly, considering his education at the hands of such God-fearing, New England Puritan descendants as Abigail and John Adams, their son developed a towering guilt complex and throughout his life readily admitted to his many failings. Even at an early age Johnny had begun berating himself for his inadequacies. "My Thoughts are running after birds eggs play and trifles, till I get vexed with my Self," he wrote at age ten. "Mamma has a troublesome task to keep me Steady, and I own I am ashamed of myself."

It is amazing that he did not rebel over the demands placed upon him. Whatever anger raged within him, if such did exist, remained under tight control, although at times he later showed marked disrespect to his mother when he failed to answer her letters despite her frequent demands for a response. Toward his father he never seems to have had anything but the greatest respect and reverence. After all, John Adams was an extremely successful Boston lawyer, a man of the highest integrity who turned to politics when the British government passed the Intolerable Acts in 1774, which, among other things, closed the port of Boston and the courts of law. Sucked into the revolutionary stirrings rapidly developing, John Adams hurried off to Philadelphia to attend the Continental Congress where he joined a committee with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to write a Declaration of Independence.

With the Revolution now in full swing the Congress appointed a diplomatic commission, consisting of Benjamin Franklin, Arthur Lee, and Silas Deane, to obtain European assistance for the country's struggle to gain its freedom from England. But when the Congress recalled Deane to answer charges of improper conduct at the French court, it replaced him with Adams.

Although crossing the Atlantic Ocean would be extremely dangerous because of the presence of British frigates patrolling the coastline, the family decided that young Johnny was of an age where he needed a father's "example and precepts" so that "the foundations of a great man" could be laid. Besides, the experience abroad would be invaluable in shaping his future career. As for Abigail and the other children, they would remain at home.

So in February 1778 the new commissioner and his son boarded the frigate Boston and headed into a stormy ocean. Despite a harrowing crossing, they arrived safely in Bordeaux on April 1. Seven days later they reached Paris where Benjamin Franklin, already in residence, invited them to stay at his home in Passy, a suburb near the Bois de Boulogne. Johnny entered a private boarding school at Passy run by Monsieur Le Coeur where he studied French, Latin, and mathematics, along with fencing, dancing, and drawing. Several other American boys attended the school, including William Templeton Franklin and Benjamin Franklin Bache, the grandsons of Benjamin Franklin. Classes began at 6 in the morning and continued for two hours, after which they were given a sixty-minute respite for breakfast and play. Then there were classes from 9 to noon, 2 to 4:30 P.M., and 5 to 7:30. In between times the students were allowed recreation and meals. They retired at 9 P.M.

Although thousands of miles away, Abigail reached across the ocean to remind her son never to "disgrace his mother" and be "worthy of his father." "Dear as you are to me," she wrote, "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." Just remember, "you must keep a strict guard upon yourself, or the odious monster will soon loose its terror by becoming familiar to you."

She never let up. But she need not have concerned herself. Always conscious of his moral duties, Johnny also proved to be a diligent scholar and demonstrated remarkable progress in his studies. He mastered the French language quite rapidly, much to his father's delight, and the talent served him well for the remainder of his life.

Johnny learned to love something else in France: theater. It was an enthusiasm that provided him with lifelong pleasure. He also enjoyed concerts and opera and soon developed a taste for the music of Bellini and Rossini.

Unfortunately the two Adamses did not remain long in Europe. When they arrived, John Adams found that the other commissioners had already signed treaties of commerce and alliance with France on February 6, 1778. As a consequence Congress recalled him, and he and his son left Paris on March 8, 1779, and boarded the French frigate Sensible, which set sail for America on June 17. Accompanying them aboard the ship was the Chevalier de la Luzerne, France's first envoy to the United States, and his secretary, Barbé Marbois. During the voyage Johnny tutored the two Frenchmen in the English language and they found him an absolute delight. As John Adams recorded in his diary, they "are in raptures with my son. ... The Ambassador said he was astonished at my son's knowledge; that he was a master of his own language, like a professor."

Father and son arrived back in Boston on August 2. But they had hardly unpacked their belongings and settled down to the routine of daily life at home when Congress ordered Adams to return to Europe. Spain had offered to assist in arbitrating a peace treaty between England and France, and Congress wanted Adams present to make certain the negotiations guaranteed American independence. Congress appointed him minister plenipotentiary.

This time the new minister did not intend to take Johnny with him to Paris, and his son was just as pleased to remain home. The lad wished to attend Andover Academy to prepare for admission to Harvard, just as the family had decided. But Abigail had other ideas. She flatly informed Johnny that another tour in France would awaken in his mind "the character of the hero and the statesman." In all "human probability," she added, "it will do more for your education to go back to France with your father than to prepare for college at Andover." Besides, he was incapable "of judgeing what was most for your own benefit." In addition, Johnny's younger brother, Charles, would accompany him, along with Francis Dana, the secretary of the peace commission, and John Thaxter, private secretary to the minister, who would also act as tutor. It would make for a splendid balance of family and friends who would watch over the boys and teach and guide them. The opportunities were too obvious and valuable to be lost.

He must go, she announced, and that ended the discussion. Just make certain "that your improvements ... bear some proportion to your advantages," she lectured Johnny. "Nothing is wanting with you, but attention, dilligence and steady application. Nature has not been deficient."

Dutifully Johnny agreed, and, as required, asked his father for permission to accompany him. John Adams readily consented and urged his son to keep a diary so that he could record all the important events he would experience and people he would meet in Europe. The exercise would also help improve his penmanship, something his father insisted upon. "My Pappa enjoins upon me to keep a journal, or diary of the Events that happen to me, and of objects that I See, and of Characters that I converse with from day to day, and altho I am Convinced of the utility, importance & necessity of this Exercise, yet I have not patience and perseverance enough to do it so Constantly as I ought."

True, Johnny was at first very haphazard about keeping this journal and six months passed before he actually made an entry. But with the passage of several years he became more addicted to it and sometimes spent six hours a day recording not only his thoughts and ideas but who he had seen or spoken with, where he went, what he read, who he liked and (mainly) disliked, what he ate and drank, what churches he attended, what historic places he visited, the merit of the sermons he heard, what the weather was like, and on and on. The complete diary is an absolute treasure trove of information about the early nineteenth century. John Quincy's son, Charles Francis Adams, edited and published this enormous manuscript in twelve volumes, omitting certain parts that he deemed personal and private. Later, nineteen reels of microfilm were necessary to contain this gargantuan record. No work of history about the antebellum period of U.S. history can afford to neglect it. It is one of the many blessings John Quincy Adams left to posterity.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "John Quincy Adams"
by .
Copyright © 2002 Robert V. Remini.
Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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