The Diary of John Quincy Adams, 1794-1845

by John Quincy Adams

1928

This volume is a discovery in biography. Originally published ... in a twelve-volume set [1874-1877], the diary of John Quincy Adams passed out of print in 1880, neglected by an America little interested in its own heroes. Allan Nevins has brought it to light again. Shortened by the omission of non-essential material, the book speaks Adams' mind and soul on the panorama of America from Washington to Stephen A. Douglas. "No other American diarist," says the editor, "touched American life at quite so many points, over so long a period, as John Quincy Adams." The only son of a President to succeed his father in the office [until George W. Bush]; minister to Russia, Prussia, Holland, Sweden, France, and Great Britain; Secretary of State for eight years; twice a United States Senator and for twenty years a member of the House of Representatives; author, poet, professor at Harvard; honored, flattered, successful; on his forty-fifth birthday John Quincy Adams confided to his diary: "Two-thirds of a long life are passed and I have done nothing to distinguish it by usefulness to my country or to mankind, : Later he prayed fervently that he might be preserved from "indolence and despondency and indiscretion." Aloof, hyper-sensitive, uncompromising, belligerent, quick tempered, Puritanical, Adams was never hypocritical, never a poseur--and, although inclined to weep at his prayers, not a prig. Revisiting Paris after an absence of several years, he remarks drily: "The tendency to dissipation at Paris seems irresistible ... I am as ill-guarded as I was at the age of twenty." Judging others severely, he is not lenient with himself: "By some negligence of mine, which I should think inexcusable in another ... sometimes the most important details of an argument escape my mind at the moment when I want them, though I am ever ready to present them before and after ... There are many differences of sentiment, of tastes and of opinions between us (Adams and his wife). There are natural frailties of temper in both of us; both being quick and irascible, and mine being sometimes harsh." Often there is a delicious pungency in his remarks: "Princes Galitzin, venerable by the length and thickness of her beard" ... "Mr. Clay lost his temper, as he generally does" ... "Mr. Jefferson tells large stories. He knows better than all this, but he loves to excite wonder." ... "The races at length are finished, and the Senate really met today." ... "It is, I believe, the law o nature that the servant shall spoil or plunder the master." ... Describing the Indian chiefs smoking the pipe of peace with General Washington, he remarks that the Indians "appeared to be quite unused to it," and thought they were complying with the white men's customs. John Quincy Adams has left a fascinating record of fifty years of American history as it appeared to those who made it