Quote of the Day (John Quincy Adams, Surveying His First Tumultuous Year in Office)

“The year has been the most momentous of those that have passed over my head, inasmuch as it has witnessed my elevation at the age of fifty-eight to the Chief Magistracy of my country; to the summit of laudable, or at least blameless, worldly ambition; not, however, in a manner satisfactory to pride or to just desire; not by the unequivocal suffrages of a majority of the people; with perhaps two-thirds of the whole people adverse to the actual result. Nearly one year of this service has already passed, with little change of the public opinion or feelings; without disaster to the country; with an unusual degree of prosperity, public and private.”—John Quincy Adams, diary entry for December 31, 1825, in Memoirs of John Quincy Adams: Comprising Portions of His Diary From 1795 to 1848, edited by Charles Francis Adams (1874)

As the final minutes of his last, tumultuous year ticked away, ambition, pride, peevishness and gloom vied for pride of place in the mind of John Quincy Adams, as they invariably did. Perhaps better prepared for the Presidency than any occupant of his office before or since, the sixth President noticed, to his deep chagrin, that “perhaps two-thirds of the whole people” opposed the outcome of the election of 1824 that had allowed him to reach his nation’s highest post.

In addition to serving as U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, Adams had labored in just about every important diplomatic post his young nation held, climaxed by two terms as arguably the greatest Secretary of State this country has ever had. (The latter post was particularly crucial, because three prior occupants--Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe--ended up becoming President.) These events gave him years of knowledge of leaders, events and other nations--and historians ever since an unparalleled insider account of the formation of the early republic.

In John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life, Paul C. Nagel termed Adams’ daily diary “the most discerning and useful personal journal kept by an American,” one that “deserves to rank near, if not next to, that of Samuel Pepys.” The President had jotted down impressions of the day haphazardly as a child and youth, at the urging of his father, John Adams, and with almost Puritan regularity since 1795.

But now the demands of his job--and the mental strain caused by the circumstances in which he became President--increasingly consumed the time and energy he needed to devote to his diary, a task he had more and more frequently regarded as necessary not simply as a record of events but as a means for correcting his faults.

No winner of the Presidency--no, not even George W. Bush--has been subjected to as many ferocious assaults over how he obtained the Presidency as the second Adams president. The situation was not only as bad as he depicted it in the above quote, but even worse.

In the four-way election of 1824--a contest whose heavy sectional results foreshadowed the even more ominous count 36 years later that produced Abraham Lincoln and the consequent secession of 11 Southern states--Adams had only placed second in terms of popular and electoral votes. But because neither he nor his rivals was able to muster a majority in the Electoral College, the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, where Adams became the winner.

The “Era of Good Feelings” under President Monroe was, in fact, a holiday from history, as far as partisanship was concerned. The collapse of the Federalist Party only scrambled the American tendency to form political factions.

Fatally, Adams did not recognize that the party system was returning with a vengeance. Like his father, he thought he could govern by appealing simply to the best interests of the nation, without resort to factions. Like his father, he would be turned out of office, after a single miserable term, for his well-intentioned error.

Backers of Andrew Jackson, the winner of the popular and electoral vote, were soon charging Adams with a “corrupt bargain” that made Henry Clay Secretary of State. (The Kentuckian, ruled out of consideration in the House because he placed fourth among the candidates, had swung the support of his state behind Adams.) It didn’t matter that Adams only extended the offer to Clay after the House vote had been taken, or that the incoming President, in an effort to unify the country, also asked Jackson and the other losing candidate in the election, William H. Crawford of Georgia, to join his Cabinet. (Both refused.)

Jackson supporters, who would eventually form the modern Democratic Party, were intent not only on blocking Adams’ re-election but on preventing enactment of any of his proposals--and he had many.

I can’t think of a President who has aimed higher--or been stymied so consistently by opponents--as Adams. His first annual message to Congress, submitted (as was the custom in those days, in writing rather than in person) just a few weeks before his last diary entry of the year, contained every bit of the “laudable, or at least blameless, worldly ambition” on which he prided himself.

With a fervor that no other President before him had displayed, he not only defended the necessity of internal improvements--e.g., roads, canals and the railroads then coming into existence--but the constitutional basis for their funding by the federal government.

Unfortunately, the sheer breadth of Adams’ visionary proposals--participation in the first Pan-American congress, internal improvements, a national university, even an astronomical observatory--stunned his entire Cabinet--even Clay, whose “American System” was fully embodied in the internal-improvements program. The program was virtually dead on arrival when it reached Capitol Hill, where the Jacksonians agreed to only a couple proposals: westward expansion of the Cumberland Road into Ohio and the building of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.

Adams being Adams, he couldn’t help but contrast his belief in the impact of his work (“an unusual degree of prosperity, public and private”) with the storms already swirling around his character (“little change of the public opinion or feelings”). A reader of the Latin classics, he believed that the kind of “base and formidable conspiracy” that undid the ancient Roman Republic was also undermining the young republic he now led.

The President lost so much weight during the next four years that his clothes hung loosely on him. It was with a kind of relief that he yielded the White House to Jackson, whom he now regarded, following his own losing re-election campaign, as a kind of barbarian.

In fact, Adams was able to achieve far more as an ex-President than as a holder of “the Chief Magistracy of my country.” Within two years, he was elected a Congressman from Massachusetts.

From this perch, he not only was able to champion the pursuit of knowledge and science by spearheading the formation of the Smithsonian Institute, but, in defying the infamous “Gag Rule” that stifled congressional debate on slavery, he struck a blow for freedom of speech and against the institution of slavery that, he increasingly believed, represented an “outrage upon the goodness of God.”

In recent years, scholarly and popular attention--including a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography and a Broadway play--has focused on Andrew Jackson. In his own way, however, Adams was every bit as fascinating as Old Hickory.

All the attributes--intellectual brilliance, independence of mind, ambivalence of office-seeking and office-holding, and mental depression--that informed his rise to the Presidency and frustration in the job are present in today’s “Quote of the Day.” By the time of his death in 1848---felled by a stroke on the floor of the House, where he was opposing the Mexican War as a kind of Trojan horse for expansion of slavery--he richly merited his nickname "Old Man Eloquent."