John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit

by James Traub

Overview

"Penetrating, detailed, and very readable. . . . A splendid biography." — Wall Street Journal

Few figures in American history have held as many roles in public life as John Quincy Adams. The son of John Adams, he was a brilliant ambassador and secretary of state, a frustrated president, and a dedicated congressman who staunchly opposed slavery. In John Quincy Adams, scholar and journalist James Traub draws on Adams's diaries, letters, and writings to evoke his numerous achievements-and failures-in office. A man of unwavering moral convictions, Adams is the father of foreign policy "realism" and one of the first proponents of the "activist government." But John Quincy Adams is first and foremost the story of a brilliant, flinty, and unyielding man whose life exemplified admirable political courage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465093830
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	10/10/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	656
Sales rank:	99,297
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

James Traub has spent the last forty years as a journalist for American's leading publications, including the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. He now teaches foreign policy and intellectual history at New York University and at NYU Abu Dhabi, and is a columnist and contributor at Foreign Policy. He is the author of six previous books on foreign and domestic affairs. His most recent work is John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Part I: He Is Formed for a Statesman
1. The Flame Is Kindled (1767–1778)
2. His Thoughts Are Always Running in a Serious Strain (1778–1780)
3. As Promising and Manly a Youth as Is in the World (1781–1785)
4. You Are Admitted, Adams (1785–1788)
5. Friend of the People (1788–1794)
6. I Shall Be Much Mistaken If He Is Not Soon Found at the Head of the Diplomatique Corps (1794–1795)
7. A Young Lady of Fine Parts Accomplishments (1795–1797)
8. President Adams' Political Telescope (1797–1801)

Part II: War and Peace
9. I Feel Strong Temptations to Plunge into Political Controversy (1801–1803)
10. Curse on the Stripling, How He Apes His Sire (1803–1804)
11. The Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory (1804–1807)
12. If We Must Perish, Let It Be in Defense of Our Rights (1807–1809)
13. A Bull-Dog Among Spaniels (1809–1812)
14. Restoring the Peace of the World (1812–1814)
15. A Card of Invitation to a Dress Party at the Prince Regent's (1815–1817)

Part III: Territorial Expansion
16. A Line Straight to the Pacific Ocean (1817–1819)
17. The Bargain Between Freedom and Slavery Is Morally and Politically Vicious (1819–1820)
18. She Goes Not Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy (1820–1822)
19. If He Wishes for Peace with Me, He Must Hold Out the White Flag (1822–1812)
20. The Most Important Paper That Ever Went from My Hands (1822–1823)
21. Who Can Hold a Fire in His Hand by Thinking on the Frosty Caucasus? (1823–1824)
22. I Tread on Coals (1824–1825)

Part IV: Internal Improvement
23. The Spirit of Improvement (1825)
24. An Arrow to the Heart (1825–1827)
25. A Great Man in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time (1825–1826)
26. Cultivating His Garden (1826–1827)
27. The Sun of My Political Career Sets in Deepest Gloom (1828–1829)

Part V: The Slavocracy
28. Stay Thy Hand, God of Mercy (1829–1831)
29. Our Union: It Must Be Preserved (1831–1833)
30. The Ark of Our God Is Falling into the Hands of the Philistines (1831–1835)
31. Am I Gagged? (1835–1836)
32. I Am Not to Be Intimidated by All the Grand Juries in the Universe (1837)
33. Among the Most Illustrious of the World's Benefactors (1837–1838)
34. The Captives Are Free! (1838–1840)
35. Io Triomphe! (1840–1842)
36. The Sober Second Thought of the People (1842–1845)
37. I Say Now, Let It Come (1843–1845)
38. The End of Earth (1845–1848)
39. Obsequies

Editorial Reviews

"A splendid new biography.... Reliably thorough, blissfully bereft of jargon, and nicely paced."—Joseph J. Ellis, New York Times Book Review

"James Traub does justice to both the man and his times, with a historian's sense of complexity and a writer's eye for drama and detail."—Sean Wilentz

"By rights, John Quincy Adams should be one of America's most famous presidents. His life story is remarkable, the son of one of the nation's founding presidents, the only one to serve in an elected office after leaving the White House, and a man of vast intelligence and political courage who died while debating in the House of Representatives. Yet he's an obscure figure. James Traub has rectified this in a book worthy of its subject."—Fareed Zakaria, Fareed Zakaria GPS

"Traub's work is a reminder to Americans that politicians can be devoted to national issues, promote their principles, and still maintain their integrity."—Choice

"Well-written and highly readable biography...highly accessible work."—Chronicles

"[An] excellent biography.... [John Quincy Adams'] life is worth meditating on, and Traub's biography is an indispensable resource for doing so."—Washington Free Beacon

"James Traub has admirably captured the man inside the public figure, giving us a view of a typical New England grandee, puritanical at his core, molded as a traditionalist republican with no love for pure democracy, convinced that governing was intended for the class born and bred for it."—The Arts Fuse

"Traub thoroughly, even quite engagingly, follows Adams through the years during which he served in the diplomatic corps, building up the reputation as the new republic's best representative abroad."—Booklist,starred review

"[An] essential biography of a complex man.... Traub shows that without imperiling national unity, Adams's persistent, perspicacious opposition to slavery 'shattered the overweening confidence of the South' and confirmed his place in America's history."—Publishers Weekly,starred review

"Traub depicts a fully fleshed character, an extraordinary man driven by his birthright principles, a voluminous diarist, scholar, poet, polymath, eccentric, and iconoclast. The author also offers a masterly portrait of Adams' wife, Louisa. An impassioned biography of 'a coherent and consistent thinker who adhered to his core political convictions across his decades of public service.'"—Kirkus

"James Traub's new biography of John Quincy Adams is exceptionally strong. Adams was a complicated hero, a patrician visionary but also, as Traub puts it, a militant spirit, one of the most important diplomats in all of American history and, finally, slavery's greatest enemy in American politics."—Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of AmericanDemocracy: Jefferson to Lincoln

"John Quincy Adams was a great statesman and a heroic crusader for freedom, whose finest hours, ironically, came both before and after his time as president. James Traub does us a service by bringing him to life again for a new generation. With a journalist's touch, Traub paints a vivid portrait of the man in all his complexity."—Robert Kagan, author of Of Paradise and Power

"In lucid prose and with canny insight, James Traub illuminates the life and political career of John Quincy Adams. Driven by grim purpose and consistent values, Adams was hard to love but demanded respect as he matured into a champion of liberty for all. Traub admires Adams [and is] tinged with sadness for the absence of his type in our own times."—Alan Taylor, author of The Internal Enemy:Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832

From the Publisher

…[a] splendid new biography…Traub begins with the assumption that the career should be folded into the life, not the other way around. He therefore makes Adams's journal his central source, the prism through which to view the man…Which is to say that we glimpse Adams swimming with nothing but goggles in the Potomac at dawn, writing an epic poem about early Ireland, planting hundreds of fruit trees on the trips back to Quincy and, most important of all, interacting awkwardly with Louisa Catherine Adams, his wife of 50 years…Traub appears to endorse her final judgment as his own, concluding that John Quincy Adams should be found "exasperating, tendentious, self-absorbed and yet, in the end, magnificent."

The New York Times Book Review - Joseph J. Ellis

★ 02/01/2016
Foreign policy specialist Traub (The Freedom Agenda) synthesizes the extensive writings of John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) alongside a broad spectrum of primary and published sources in this essential biography of a complex man. “Guarded and taciturn,” Adams walked his own path, and despite his long and productive career as a statesman, he remains relatively obscure. Traub sees him as a “coherent and consistent thinker” who regarded America as the “greatest experiment in government the world had ever known.” Traub’s Adams is also “astringently realistic..., never confusing what he wished to be true with what he believed to be true.” As a problem solver, he had few equals. As a diplomat, he played a central role in negotiating the treaty that ended the War of 1812. As secretary of state, he gave the Monroe Doctrine its insistence that “American policy serve American interests.” Traub quotes British historian George Dangerfield, who noted that as president, Adams’s belief in a firm, active government made him a “great man in the wrong place, at the wrong time.” But in his 17 subsequent years in the House of Representatives, Adams became the foremost—and cleverest—Congressional opponent of the “slavocracy.” Traub shows that without imperiling national unity, Adams’s persistent, perspicacious opposition to slavery “shattered the overweening confidence of the South” and confirmed his place in America’s history. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

02/15/2016
Traub, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of The Devil's Playground, offers a lengthy and comprehensive account of the political and diplomatic contributions as well as the personal plight of John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), the sixth U.S. president and a major figure in early 19th-century history. Drawing primarily from Adams's diaries, letters, and political writings along with contemporaneous newspaper articles and previously published research and analysis, Traub provides a meticulous study of the statesman's public service and private life. Adams surfaces as an ambitious intellectual with deeply held convictions striving to hold his family together through illness, tragedy, and financial woes while relentlessly promoting a strong, active federal government as the young but rapidly expanding and diversifying nation grappled with geographic sectionalism and political partisanship. This rich and occasionally slow account emphasizes Adams's distinguished early career tenure as diplomat and secretary of state, the heated 1824 presidential election resulting in Adams defeating longtime personal and political foe Andrew Jackson, and his tireless effort to force the issue of slavery onto the Congressional floor as a postpresidential member of the House of Representatives. VERDICT As with Fred Kaplan's recent and similarly exhaustive John Quincy Adams: American Visionary, this scholarly book will interest serious readers of U.S. politics and history.—Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia

Library Journal

2015-12-21
The life of an early American statesman and president who served as the young nation's strenuous conscience. Traub (Foreign Policy/New York Univ.; The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy (Just Not the Way George Bush Did), 2008, etc.) thoroughly explores the life of John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), a "hard man" of deep erudition and conviction who descended from the American aristocracy and learned at the knees of an exacting father and mother what the great American governing principles meant for world leadership and peace. The author emphasizes his subject's long, somewhat reluctant middle career as a diplomat, from his first posting in 1794 to the Hague to St. Petersburg and then to the Court of St. James during a turbulent time in European history. Breaking with his father's Federalist Party over its Anglophilism at a time of trade and shipping tensions with Britain, Adams pursued an admirable, if tendentious, course of nonpartisanship over the course of his political career, from senator to secretary of state (under James Monroe) to one-term president to Massachusetts congressman (he was the first and only ex-president to serve in Congress). Traub examines how much Adams contributed to what became known as the Monroe Doctrine. "What Adams may have contributed most…was its astringency," writes the author. Although Adams was a proponent of American expansion, he became intensely concerned at the question of admission of slave versus free states in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. During the latter part of his life as a congressman, he "seized the role of chief tormentor of the slavocracy" and represented in front of the Supreme Court the mutinous African captives aboard the Amistad. Most of all, Traub depicts a fully fleshed character, an extraordinary man driven by his birthright principles, a voluminous diarist, scholar, poet, polymath, eccentric, and iconoclast. The author also offers a masterly portrait of Adams' wife, Louisa. An impassioned biography of "a coherent and consistent thinker who adhered to his core political convictions across his decades of public service."

Kirkus Reviews