John Adams

by David McCullough

“Why have I been preserved at more than three quarters of a century, and why was that fair flower blasted so soon, are questions we are not permitted to ask.”

in later years Rush would become known as the father of American psychiatry.

speculating that what Rush had written would surpass the writings of Franklin in the good it would do.

The last twelve years “in solitude” had been the pleasantest of all. “Yet where are they?”

The universe, he told John Quincy, was “inscrutable and incomprehensible.”

What grounds have we to expect or to hope to be excepted from the general lot. . . .

Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave.

“I mourned over the fallen city, and even its fallen conquerors, because I was a man and a Christian, but their fate would neither sharpen nor mitigate my private woe.”

“Rejoice always in all events, be thankful always for all things is a hard precept for human nature, though in my philosophy and in my religion a perfect duty.”

Nabby was so emaciated as to be almost unrecognizable; her suffering was extreme. Opium provided her only relief.

Now Adams wrote to Jefferson, “The love of God and His creation, delight, joy, triumph, exultation in my own existence . . . are my religion.”

On April 1, 1814, at St. Petersburg, John Quincy received word that he had been appointed a peace envoy to negotiate an end to the War of 1812, and was to proceed at once to Ghent in Flanders (Belgium).

It seemed as though history was repeating itself, with John Quincy taking up the same role his father had played at Paris in 1782.

He had seen Congress “chased like a covey of partridges” from Philadelphia, and “we had ropes about our necks then.”

Jefferson had offered to sell his private library to the government in Washington to replace the collection of the Library of Congress destroyed by the British when they burned the Capitol. It was both a magnanimous gesture and something of a necessity, as he was hard-pressed to meet his mounting debts. After prolonged debate in Congress, a figure of $23,950 was agreed to, and in April 1815 ten wagons carrying 6,707 volumes packed in pine cases departed from Monticello.

When Adams learned what Jefferson had done, he wrote, “I envy you that immortal honor.”

He longed particularly, he said, for a work in Latin available only in Europe, titled Acta Sanctorum, in forty-seven volumes, on the lives of the saints compiled in the sixteenth century. “What would I give to possess in one immense mass, one stupendous draught, all the legends, true and false.”

To her claim that government must be simple, for example, he answered, “The clock would be simple if you destroyed all the wheels . . . but it would not tell the time of day.”

“Your father’s zeal for books will be one of the last desires which will quit him,” Abigail observed to John Quincy in the spring of 1816, as Adams eagerly embarked on a sixteen-volume French history.

At the July 4 celebration in Boston that summer of 1816, Adams looked about and realized he was nearly the last of the generation of 1776, and the only “signer” present.

IN THE HISTORY of the Adams family there was probably no more joyous homecoming than took place in the heat of midmorning on August 18, 1817, when John Quincy, Louisa Catherine, and their three sons came over the hill from Milton in a coach-and-four trailing a cloud of dust.

At age fifty, he had already served as minister to the Netherlands and Prussia, as United States senator, Harvard professor, minister to Russia and Great Britain, and was soon to assume the second-most-important office in the government.

October 28, 1818.

The aged Adams standing before the painting, gazing silently at “the great scene in which he had borne a conspicuous place,” was a sight long remembered.

In composing the picture, Trumbull had placed Adams at the exact center foreground, as if to leave no doubt about his importance.

confronted all at once with so many faces from the past, he was reminded of the all-important man whose face was not to be seen.

When the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 added Spanish Florida to the United States, the old President in Quincy proclaimed it a blessing “beyond all calculation,” largely for the ways it might serve American naval operations.

But he could still ride horseback, at nearly eighty-five,

“The Psalms of David, in sublimity, beauty, pathos, and originality, or in one word poetry, are superior to all the odes, hymns, and songs in any language,” he told Jefferson.

Adams boldly offered an amendment guaranteeing complete religious freedom in the commonwealth.

I have had occasion to be acquainted with several gentlemen of your nation and to transact business with some of them, whom I found to be men of as liberal minds, as much as honor, probity, generosity, and good breeding as any I have known in any seat of religion or philosophy.

but he detested Hamilton and my whole administration.

but a struggle between the states over slavery “might rend this mighty fabric in twain.”

“This enterprise is for the young,” he wrote to a young Albemarle County neighbor who was freeing his slaves and urged Jefferson to “become a Hercules against slavery.”

When, in his next letter, Adams suggested that in addition to the military academy at West Point, which had been established during Jefferson’s presidency, there ought to be a naval academy, Jefferson replied at once in agreement.

Once construction was under way, he kept watch from his mountaintop by telescope.

and there was much about each of their lives that they kept to themselves.

Jefferson told Adams nothing of the new house he had built at his other plantation, Poplar Forest, or that Monticello, as visitors noted, was going to decay.

He made no mention of his worsening financial straits and said not a word ever on the subject of Sa...

The question of how two of his sons, Charles and Thomas, could have so sadly fallen by the wayside, while John Quincy so conspicuously excelled could only have weighed heavily on Adams’s mind.

He had his library room, where he slept now among his treasured books.

IN 1824, with James Monroe due to retire from the presidency, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was nominated as a candidate to replace him, exactly as long predicted.

John Adams was a great admirer of Andrew Jackson, but the prospect of his adored son winning the highest office was thrilling and a strong reason to stay alive.

To compound the excitement of the summer of 1824, the Marquis de Lafayette returned for a triumphal tour of America, causing a sensation.

Afterward, Adams is said to have remarked, “That was not the Lafayette I knew,” while Lafayette, saddened by the visit, reportedly remarked, “That was not the John Adams I knew.”

He saw the old man at one of those happy moments when the intelligence lights up the wasted envelope.”

For though Andrew Jackson received more popular votes, no candidate had a majority in the electoral count.

So again the decision was left to the House of Representatives, where Speaker of the House Henry Clay used his influence to make John Quincy Adams president. The deciding vote took place in Washington on February 9, 1825.

In the course of conversation, my mother compared him to that old man who was pronounced by Solon to be the highest of mortals when he expired on hearing of his son’s success at the Olympic games.

ON FRIDAY, March 4, 1825,