From Son of the Revolution to Old Man Eloquent

John Quincy Adams was a witness to the birth of the American republic. The son of the statesman most responsible for the independence of the United States, he spent his formative years in a Massachusetts abuzz with the excitement of rebellion or abroad working on behalf of his country’s interests in the hostile courts of Europe. Aside from the actual leaders of the Revolution, perhaps no contemporary of those events was better placed to understand and articulate their greater meaning.

The Library of America has already done a great service by publishing an edition of Adams’s famous diaries, which provide perhaps the most intimate view of his long career in American public life. Now the publisher has followed it up with a new edition of Adams’s Speeches and Writings, edited by David Waldstreicher, collecting some of his most important addresses to an American people he loved but perhaps never fully understood. Although by no means a complete collection, this volume provides an excellent introduction to the thought of our sixth president.

Tracing his career from his heady days as a Harvard undergraduate, to the disappointing single term of his presidency, and ultimately to his strange position as an elder statesman in the House of Representatives, these documents reveal John Quincy Adams was a man of immense moral clarity and penetrating intellectual powers. But ultimately, he was only half-suited to the tacking and trimming necessary to democratic statesmanship. The paradoxical sort of revolutionary conservatism Adams represented can, therefore, serve as both a true inspiration and a cautionary tale for today’s champions of the American Founding.

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