In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Most Extraordinary Man on God’s Footstool
  • Ralph Ketcham (bio)
Paul C. Nagel. John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. xi + 432 pp. Illustrations, sources, and index. $30.00.

In 1774, as John Adams prepared to attend the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia, he wrote his wife, Abigail, at home in Braintree with four youngsters, of the duty to “mould the Minds and Manners of our Children. Let us teach them not only to do virtuously, but to excell. To excell they must be taught to be steady, active, and industrious.” When Abigail reported that her eldest son, John Quincy (age seven) read to her from Rollins’ Ancient History, John urged her as well to “fire [the children] with Ambition to be usefull,” to have contempt for “little and frivolous” objects, and to begin the study of French. John Quincy wrote at the same time in his first surviving letter to his father that he hoped to “grow a better Boy” and that he worked hard at his studies. 1

Indeed he was diligent, always. And he strove to “grow better,” and applied himself, and excelled. The relentless Adams upbringing, in his case, worked. John Quincy served his country for seventy years, beginning in 1778 when he went to Europe with his father, and ending in 1848 in the House of Representatives. As a teenager he acted as secretary to his father in Amsterdam, Paris, and London, and to Francis Dana in St. Petersburg. After a few restless and unhappy years in Massachusetts studying at Harvard, learning law, and attempting to practice it, President Washington appointed him, in 1794 at age twenty-seven, minister to Holland, and later to Prussia. Returning home in 1801, he was elected senator from Massachusetts, and in 1809 Madison appointed him minister to Russia, after which he helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent (1814) and served as minister to England until 1817. Then, in Monroe’s cabinet for eight years he became the premier secretary of state in American history. Following four frustrating years as president, he “retired” briefly, but, beginning in 1831, he sat in the House of Representatives for eighteen years until he was stricken fatally ill at his desk there, still fighting the “slavocracy” he believed disgraced the nation. Along the way he was also a political pamphleteer, professor of rhetoric at Harvard, a Madison appointee [End Page 521] to the Supreme Court (Adams declined), and virtual founder of the Smithsonian Institution. He was, as a South Carolina congressman remarked in 1842, “the most extraordinary man on God’s footstool.” 2

It is impossible in reviewing any book about John Quincy Adams not to include a summary of his remarkable career—matched in longevity and sustained devotion to public service only by that of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Paul Nagel has again told this long story of the public career, and added to it the fullest account we yet have of the personal, “inner” life that JQA revealed so unsparingly in letters to his family, and especially in his four-million-word diary kept fullsomely throughout most of his adult life. Nagel’s well-informed, well-written biography, kept to manageable length, is the best single volume available on this “Extraordinary Man.”

Simply to master the manuscript sources on JQA is a staggering prospect: they fill 340 reels of the Adams papers microfilms, including forty-eight reels for his diary alone. Though various members of the Adams family used these materials for historical writing for a century or more, and scholars have had access to them since the creation of the Adams Trust at the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1956, the bulk and high cost of the microfilm has remained daunting. It is clear, even without providing detailed citations for the hundreds of quotations and other specific usages in this book, that Nagel has combed this mass of papers (especially the diary) thoroughly enough to leave the reader assured that the essentials, the kernels, and the nuggets, have been mined and presented. By following the young JQA all around the western world for the first half-century of his life (he lived in...

Share