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John Quincy Adams and a Republic of Virtue

Both Nations and Individuals, are . . . to be esteemed and admired, according as they fulfill the Purpose of the Deity in creating them; according as their virtues are great and numerous, and their Vices small and

few. Diary 2: 56, June 26, 1786

I implore that spirit from whom every good and perfect gift descends to enable me to continue to render essential service to my country, and that I may never be governed in my public conduct by any

consideration than that of my duty to God and men. Memoirs 1: 498, Dec. 31, 1807

Oh! God, my only trust was thou Through all life’s scenes before;

Lo, at thy throne again I bow, New mercies to implore. . . .

Grant active power, grant fervid zeal, And guide by thy control,

And ever be my country’s weal The purpose of my soul. . . .

Extend, all seeing God, thy hand, In memory still decree,

And make, to bless thy native land An instrument of me.

Memoirs, Sept. 21, 1817

God grant the wisdom to pursue the task before me and the peace of mind to complete it. Memoirs, Mar. 10, 1825, as Adams began his presidency

Very early on the morning of June 13, 1825, as was his daily custom, 57 year-old President John Quincy Adams went swimming in the Potomac. Instead of swimming near the bank as he usually did, Adams and his servant Antoine Guista decided to row an old boat tied at the bank across the wide river and swim back. When they were halfway across the river, the wind suddenly began to blow strongly, filling their boat with water and forcing them to jump overboard. Antoine, who was naked, easily swam to the other side. Adams, however, still wearing his long-sleeved shirt and pantaloons, gasped for breath and struggled to stay afloat as the loose sleeves of his shirt filled with water and “hung like two fifty-six pound weights” on his arms. After a long time in the water and many moments of terror, the exhausted president finally reached the shore. Putting on Adams’ outer clothes, Guista returned to Washington to find a vehicle to return the president to the White House. He had trouble obtaining help, and almost five hours elapsed before Adams made it back to his residence. Meanwhile, a passerby who saw part of the episode brought a garbled report to town spreading a rumor, picked up by some newspapers, that the chief executive had drowned. Adams promised never again to swim to show “what I can do” but instead to “strictly confine myself to purposes of health, exercise, and salutary labor.” That night the tired president wrote in his diary, “By the mercy of God our lives were spared, and no injury befell our persons.”1

Born in Braintree, Massachusetts on July 11, 1767, John Quincy was the second child of John and Abigail Adams. Even before the United States became an independent nation, they prayed, planned, and prepared their son for leadership. Impelled by his parents’ expectations, his sense of duty to God, and the needs of his nation, Adams sacrificed the possibility of financial gain, his desire to live a tranquil life as a man of letters, and marital happiness on the altar of service to his country. Because the founders took an active interest in him beginning in his

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teenage years, because his father (who was constantly placed before him as “the personification of virtue and wisdom) had played pivotal roles in the revolution and the new republic, because none of the other founders had sons who entered politics, and because of the alcoholism and dissipation of his two brothers, “no American bore a greater burden of history and destiny than John Quincy Adams.”2 He was the only American leader whose parents explicitly planned his life to occupy that role.3 The story of John Quincy Adams’ life is the story of America during the eventful years from the Revolution to the Mexican War. Born amidst the nation’s revolutionary struggles, Adams witnessed its crisis, course, and triumphant conclusion. The eldest son of America’s “preeminent revolutionary couple,” Adams viewed the battle of Bunker Hill, followed the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, participated as a senator in the controversy over the Louisiana Purchase, and as secretary of state, president, and a congressman wrestled with the moral and practical dilemmas of the nation’s treatment of its two principal minorities: Indians and blacks.4 The only major statesman the American founders produced, he served as the American ambassador to Holland, Portugal, Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain and helped negotiate the Jay Treaty of 1795 by which the British agreed to withdraw all their troops from American soil, the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, and the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819, which gave Florida to the United States. The last tie with the nation’s founders, his memorable death while serving as a congressman in 1848 marked the end of an era. As a call to the citizens of Washington for public mourning put it, “A Patriarch has gone to his rest—a link between the past and the present is broken—a sage has fallen at his post.”5

Adams embodied and expressed the concerns of many of his countrymen about the importance of a personal relationship with God, of morality to the well-being of the nation, and of creating a virtuous republic as a model for the world. Although not an evangelical Protestant, Adams incarnated and articulated many of the emphases and goals of the Second Great Awakening that occurred during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. During an era in American history when Christian values were stamped very deeply into the language, education, culture, and ethos of the United States, by personal example and verbal exhortation Adams accentuated the value of public worship, Bible reading, prayer, and an exemplary moral life.

It is impossible to understand Adams’ political philosophy or actions without comprehending how integral his faith was to his life. Adams, his contemporaries, and later historians all emphasized how significant Christianity was to him. Believing that the principles of religion were the only motive “sufficiently powerful to control the appetites of man or to dictate his actions,” he immersed himself in Christian worship and Bible study.6 Early in his presidency, when government officials were discussing what design should be placed on top of the Capitol, Adams suggested an anchor of hope to testify to Americans’ reliance on the “Supreme Disposer of events,” and a pedestal with the dates, July 4, 1776 and March 4, 1789, inscribed on it. This motif would declare to the world that the American union was founded on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, “supported by Justice in the past, and relying upon Hope in Providence for the future.”7 His faith, maintained a contemporary, was central to his convictions, character, and conduct.8 Few statesmen, added another, acted “with a more continual and obvious reference to religion as motive, as a guide, [and] as a comfort.”9 Numerous commentators labeled Adams a Christian statesman who pursued policies grounded on biblical tenets in an effort to construct a Christian commonwealth.10 It was hard to conceive, argued Richard S. Storrs, pastor of the First Congregationalist Church of Braintree, Massachusetts, of a person better suited than Adams to advance God’s purposes to make America “a refuge for the oppressed, an asylum for the persecuted, a bulwark for the defence of the liberties of the world,” and a model of constitutional government, equitable laws, and justice.11 “The crowning glory” of Adams’ character, declared fellow Massachusetts Congressman Charles

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Hudson, in summarizing his colleague’s sixty years of public service “was his devotion to the cause of his Redeemer.”12

“The premises of Christianity,” wrote political theorist George Lipsky, provided the foundation for Adams’ “entire intellectual system.”13 Historian William Weeks argues that Christian convictions guided Adams’ life “more than that of any other political leader of his age.” Unless we appreciate how deeply Adams was motivated by his belief that God had chosen the United States to do his work on earth, “much of his life is difficult to understand.” Adams was convinced that God had designated America as his redeemer nation and that he personally had a vital part to play in the mission of global redemption. The New Englander saw himself as the leader of a new generation called to continue what the founders had begun. In this role, Adams believed he was God’s instrument, and he attributed his achievements during his six decades in politics to divine inspiration and aid. God had given him “a trust, a special responsibility—indeed, a heavy burden—from which he expected neither profit nor enjoyment.”14

Throughout his long years of public service, Adams’ religious principles strongly influenced his political ideals and practices. Few American politicians more consistently connected the course of their personal lives and national and international affairs with God’s providential direction of history.15 As Adams began his work as secretary of state in 1817, he declared that he would continue to “rely upon the support of that Being whose signal favor has hitherto carried me through all the trials of my life, and upon whom alone safe dependence can be placed.” “I have but one formula suited to all occasions,” Adams told John C. Calhoun when they were both members of James Monroe’s cabinet: “‘Thy will be done.’” The day Adams was selected president, he wrote to his father, declaring that he would close the day “as it began, with supplications to the Father of Mercies that its consequences may redound to His glory and the welfare of my country.”16

Most biographers devote relatively little space to Adams’ four years as president, calling them by such titles as “The Worst of Times,” “The Tragic Presidency” and “Problems of a Minority President.”17 As Samuel Flagg Bemis puts it, Adams “had two notable careers” as a “diplomatic and continentalist” and as “a crusader in the House of Representatives against the expansion of slavery,” “separated by an interlude as President.”18 Given the significant role Adams played in American political life both before and after his presidency and the extent to which some of his views evolved, especially with regard to the rights of Indians and blacks, this chapter, more than others, will focus on Adams’ entire career.

The Faith of John Quincy Adams John Quincy Adams’ parents had a substantial impact on his faith. Stressing diligence, industry, piety, and education, they taught their children to excel in every area of life.19 From his early days, John Quincy’s parents had exceedingly high expectations for him, as excerpts from two letters indicate. His mother repeatedly reminded him that he must be “a guardian of the laws, liberty, and religion of your country, as your father . . . had already been.”20 His father wrote him in 1794: “You come into life with advantages which will disgrace you if your success is mediocre. And if you do not rise to the head not only of your Profession, but of your Country, it will be owing to your own Lasiness, Slovenliness and Obstinacy.”21

Although John Adams considered becoming a minister as a young man, he rejected Calvinism as a theological system and disavowed much of his Puritan heritage and instead espoused a “view of nature, man, and moral obligation that drew heavily on the enlightened views” of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke. He repudiated the doctrine of human depravity and original sin, denounced the concept of unconditional election as “detestable,” invidious,” and “hurtful,” and protested that the doctrine of limited atonement discouraged the “practice of virtue.”22 Adams proclaimed in 1811 that he had “been a church-going animal for

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seventy-six years, from the cradle,” and he did not criticize Christian orthodoxy publicly.23 For the nation’s second president, Christianity chiefly had utilitarian value; its emphasis on morality, justice, decency, and virtue helped provide the civility and order a republic required to flourish.24 As he put it in a letter to Benjamin Rush in 1811, “religion and virtue are the only foundation, not only of republicanism and of all free government, but of social felicity under all government . . . .”25 While rejecting many of the religious teachings of Puritanism, Adams accepted two basic Calvinist premises which he bequeathed to his son: human sinfulness required checks on people’s behavior and limits on their power and although people were prone to folly and evil, they were called to be God’s agents on earth and strive to promote lofty causes. Because humanity’s evil tendencies made constructing a righteous republic so difficult, both father and son were “often sorely tempted” to give up the quest, but neither did.26

Because serving his country kept John away from home so much, he entrusted the socialization of their children principally to Abigail, whose faith was more orthodox. The daughter of a Congregationalist minister, she relied on her faith to help her cope with raising children, illnesses, deaths, and long separations from her husband. Like her husband, she disliked theological debates and metaphysical subtleties, believed that God directed history, and considered religious faith and practice essential to the well-being of the republic.27 In his letters, John continually urged her to provide for their children’s moral, religious, and educational training, a charge Abigail took very seriously.28 When eleven-year-old John Quincy accompanied his father to France for his diplomatic mission, his mother wrote, “Adhere to those religious sentiments and principles instilled in your mind and remember that you are accountable to your Maker for all your words and actions.”29 Two years later she reminded him that “the only sure and permanent foundation of virtue is religion. Let this important truth be engraven upon your heart.”30 Abigail taught her son to believe that God was “infinitely wise, just, and good” and promised eternal life with him to all who lived virtuously on earth.31 Brooks Adams insisted that his grandfather’s “love and veneration for his mother . . . even passed the adoration of Catholics for the Virgin.”32 Living up to her expectations was paramount to him throughout his life. From his boyhood, John Quincy clearly saw himself as a child of destiny. “We are Sent into this World for Some end,” he later wrote his brother Charles. “It is our duty to discover by Close Study what this end is &. . . [then] pursue it with unconquerable perseverence [sic].”33 John Quincy accepted his parents’ belief that the United States could be a redeemer nation only if it were led by morally upright, well educated men. Therefore, to serve the republic was to serve both God and humanity.34 As an adult, he thanked his mother for teaching him that “the general superintendence of the Creator and Governor of the universe is indeed sufficient for the preservation and well-being of all His creatures.”35

No other president attended public worship more regularly or read the Bible more devotedly than Adams. Moreover in his letters, poems, political addresses, published essays, and especially his diary, Adams extensively discussed his views of the doctrines of the trinity, the atonement, human depravity, and salvation. He thought deeply and wrote extensively about the person and nature of Christ, the importance of virtue, and life after death. Although continually insisting that he detested theological debate and metaphysical argument, Adams took stances on many disputed issues. In addition, some of his positions changed over time and in some cases seem inconsistent with one another. This, coupled with the fact that he worshipped in a variety of churches, makes it hard to label him denominationally. The only congregation he ever joined, however, was the Unitarian church in Quincy, and he frequently worshiped at a Unitarian church in Washington. Thus, although he did not agree with all the doctrines of Unitarianism, attended the service of numerous denominations, and appreciated many theological perspectives, it seems accurate to label him a Unitarian.

Adams attended church rather perfunctorily during the first half of his life. He went more to fulfill social and political expectations than because of deep interest or belief. While serving as a minister to Russia, he periodically attended Catholic or Orthodox services since there were no

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Protestant churches.36 In later life, Adams lamented that he had not attended church very regularly while in Holland, Berlin, St. Petersburg, or France, and thereby had lost “rich opportunities” of obtaining religious, moral, political, and intellectual instruction.37 In 1819 Adams began attending church twice every Sunday, a pattern he continued for the rest of his life.38 When sickness or sessions of Congress required Adams to miss church, he complained that he felt “deep mortification” and “painful sensibility.” He usually went to the morning and afternoon services held in either the Hall of the House of Representatives, All Souls’ Unitarian Church, St. John’s Episcopal Church, or Second Presbyterian Church.39 Although many denounced Unitarians as infidels, he helped found and fellowshipped with this small Unitarian congregation in Washington.40 Believing that Christians of various denominations were traveling by different roads to the same destination, he worshiped in almost every church in Washington at least once. As a “frequent sinner,” Adams wrote, he needed to be admonished and “exhorted to virtue.” Since all Christian denominations did this, he felt comfortable worshiping anywhere.41

Although his forebears had belonged to the First Parish Church in Quincy (part of the liberal wing of Congregationalism that became Unitarian) for generations, Adams had been reluctant to join because of his continual residence in other places and his lingering doubts about his spirituality. Several months after his father died in 1826, Adams finally joined the church, publicly promising to live by the precepts of Christianity.42 He conceded he should have taken this step thirty years earlier, instead of permitting the “tumult of the world, false shame, [and] a distrust of my own unworthiness” to keep him from doing so. During the remainder of his life, Adams participated regularly in the activities of this church whenever he was in Quincy, frequently serving as its delegate at the ordination of ministers of neighboring congregations.43

Adams argued that corporate worship should enable people to confess their sins, give thanks to God, praise his transcendent perfections, and petition him to meet their spiritual and physical needs. Thanksgiving should spring from “a grateful sense” of God’s “innumerable blessings” and from “wonder and veneration, mingled with love, which the displays of infinite benevolence and unbounded power necessarily enkindle in the human heart.”44 By attending public worship, Adams wanted to experience “hope in the goodness of God, reliance upon His mercy in affliction, [and] trust in Him to bring light out of darkness and good out of evil.” From “the constant exhortations to trust in the Lord which abound in the Psalms, as well as the selection of hymns at the churches where I attend,” he declared while president, “I do gather strength and fortitude and a . . . confidence of . . . passing unhurt through the furnace that awaits me.” In 1838 Adams, then a congressman, complained that “the neglect of public worship” in Washington was “an increasing evil,” and that “the indifference to all religion throughout the whole country portends no good.”45 After he died, many lauded his faithful attendance of worship. As a Unitarian eulogist put it, “neither age and feebleness, nor storm and darkness, detained him from his accustomed place on the Lord’s day.”46

Having served as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard from 1805 to 1809, Adams had high standards for preaching, and in his diary, he regularly commented on both the delivery and content of the sermons he heard.47 Although preaching had been “the instrument of the worst abuses” of the Roman Catholic Church, it had been the “most effectual weapon” of the Reformation. For the past three centuries, sermons had “armed nation against nation” in battles over “speculative doctrine and ecclesiastical discipline,” but they continued to be among the world’s “most energetic instruments of power.” Preachers must help their hearers live more righteously and defend the Christian faith against the objections of atheists and deists. Because enlightening the mind was one of the “most effectual mean of amending the heart,” preachers must teach, refute error, attack vice, and exhort to virtue.48 Despite such comments, Adams clearly preferred sermons that focused on moral conduct rather than theology.49

Adams tried to limit his activities on Sundays to worship and spiritual reflection. While serving as a minister to Holland, Adams stopped attending a society of learned men when they started meetings on Sundays because he believed the Lord’s Day should be devoted to religious

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activities. After the ex-president was chosen president of the National Sabbath Convention in 1844, its members passed a resolution praising “the testimony he has borne to the importance of the Sabbath.”50 However, because he thought the government should not force people to obey the first four of the Ten Commandments, Adams, while serving as a congressman, opposed legislation designed to make Sunday a mandatory day of rest.

For much of his life Adams read four or five chapters of the Bible and often commentaries on these passages as well, usually reading the entire Bible each year.51 For an hour each morning, Adams perused the Bible in Greek, German, French, and English. He refused to allow any other responsibility to interfere with his “daily and systematic perusal” of the Scriptures. As one contemporary put it, he read his Bible “daily and critically and delighted in its study.”52 He wanted God’s word to “be accompanied with critical and explanatory notes” to help people understand it. Although there were many Bible commentaries, he argued, most were too voluminous and sectarian to help the average reader.53 Adams paraphrased all the Psalms and wrote commentaries on some of them. The Bible provided him with “light, strength, and comfort.”54 Adams insisted that the “Book of books,” which contained “the duties, the admonitions, the promises, and the rewards of the Christian gospel,” had been “a soothing consolation” to him.55 Despite his meticulous approach, Adams sometimes berated himself for his “careless inattention” in reading the Scriptures.56

His desire to make the Bible widely available and to encourage people to read it prompted Adams to serve as one of the vice presidents of the American Bible Society from 1824 until 1848 and to preside at a public meeting of the society in Washington in February 1844.57 “I believe that the respect and veneration of any person for the Bible,” wrote Adams, “will increase in proportion to the intimacy of his acquaintance with its contents.”58 He urged people of all ages to attentively read and mediate on several chapter of the Bible each day and to guide their conduct in this world and prepare them for the next.59 Adams insisted that people needed divine assistance to understand the Scriptures.60 One of his favorite biblical texts was Jesus’ admonition to Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation.” Adopting it as his motto, Adams had the text inscribed on a signet ring and composed a sonnet entitled “Watch and Pray.”61

Both Adams’ diary and his public addresses are replete with references and allusions to Scripture, testifying to his thorough knowledge of the Bible. In debates with opponents, he often used Scripture to support his argument. For example, Adams presented a petition in the House from a group of women opposing the annexation of Texas. When a congressman from Maryland rebuked these women for engaging in politics, Adams asked where his colleague got the idea that women could not have opinions about or take actions in political life. “Did he find it in sacred history”? Had he never heard of Miriam the prophetess, Deborah the judge, Jael the warrior, or Esther who saved her people by petitioning a king?62

From 1811 to 1813 while serving as the American minister in St. Petersburg, Adams wrote a series of letters on the importance of studying the Bible to his son George Washington who was residing with relatives in Massachusetts. By perusing the Bible, collections of sermons, theological works, and Greek philosophers to prepare these letters, Adams bolstered his own knowledge and faith.63 He exhorted his young son to read and reflect upon the Bible to become “wiser and more virtuous.” The more people studied God’s word, the more likely they would be “useful citizens,” “respectable members of society, and a real blessing to their parents.” Studying the Scriptures, Adams declared, helped “strengthen my good desires and subdue my propensities to evil.” He prayed that the Creator, who gave human beings the Scriptures to guide them, would use the Bible to inspire his son to perform good works. Adams emphasized that the Bible revealed God’s will and contained “a system of religion and morality” that people could “examine upon its own merits, independent of the sanction it receives from being the Word of God.” Adams lauded the Bible’s “unrivalled” moral code.64 Scripture taught people that they had duties to God, others, and themselves as encapsulated in the two great love commandments. He

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insisted that the Bible was a divine revelation because of its practical benefits to humanity, not its “metaphysical subtleties.”65 His esteem for the Bible led Adams to give inscribed copies to all his grandchildren.

Throughout his long life, Adams cultivated a close relationship with God not only by attending public worship and reading the Bible but through other forms of Christian piety including praying, striving to obey all biblical commandments, reflecting in his diary, writing poems, and composing hymns. If God created all things and his will was morally obligatory for humans, he contended, then piety was as rational as it was essential. It was “a reasonable service” to the God who formed and sustained the universe. Christ commanded his disciples to “aim at absolute perfection,” which involved “self-subjugation and brotherly love,” the “complete conquest of our own passions,” and benevolence to others, even “our most inveterate enemies.” Jesus demanded “unbounded” obedience—“infinitely beyond” what “the most absolute earthly sovereign” claimed over his subjects.66

Adams continually confessed that he depended on God for help and guidance. Like some other presidents, Adams had pivotal moments that solidified and strengthened his faith. At a New Year’s Eve party in Berlin in 1800, a young, handsome, popular, army officer suddenly dropped dead, prompting Adams to reassess “the vanity and frailty of earthly enjoyments” and to reevaluate his faith.67 This tragedy, coupled with the birth of his first child George Washington four months later, helped revitalize Adams’ relationship with God, which until this point had been rather perfunctory.68 After being nominated as secretary of state in 1817, Adams doubted whether he was competent for the position. As he typically did during times of personal anxiety, the statesman turned to God to help him deal with his uncertainty. “The disposer of every gift,” he wrote his mother, “can alone enable me faithfully and acceptably to perform my duties.”69 Reflecting on his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in 1822, Adams acknowledged his “dependence upon the overruling Power and declared, “Let me have strength but to be true to myself, to my Maker, and to man—adding Christian meekness and charity to Stoic fortitude . . . .” On his inauguration day, Adams wrote in his dairy, “I entered upon this day with a supplication to Heaven . . . . I closed the day as it had begun, with thanksgiving to God for all His mercies and favors past, and with prayers for the continuance of them to my country and to myself and mine.” A month after leaving office, Adams asked God to enable him to use the “remainder of the days allotted to me on earth” wisely.70

Adams prized prayer. He prayed constantly about all aspects of his life and frequently asked others to pray for him in the discharge of his public duties and in his afflictions and grief.71 When Adams refused in 1826 to overrule his dismissal from the army, a disgruntled physician, George Todson, threatened to kill the president. The incident reminded Adams of the “frail tenure” of human life, and he prayed that “the Spirit of God [would] sustain me and preserve me from any weakness unworthy of my station.” He declared, “My life is in the hands of a higher power than the will of man.”72 Near the end of his life, Adams wrote, “For I believe that there is a god who heareth prayer, and that honest prayers to him will not be in vain.”73 His pastor in Quincy, William Lunt, testified that Adams believed in the efficacy of prayer and recalled how moved he had been when Adams asked him to join him to beseech God in behalf of a dying child.74

Despite his personal commitment to prayer, Adams, unlike many other presidents, did not proclaim any national days of prayer and thanksgiving. When James Laurie, pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, asked him to do so in November 1825, he declined. All the members of his cabinet opposed the idea. Ignoring history, they objected that it was “a novelty,” which many would consider a political ploy and an imposition of “New England manners.”75

Adams also expressed his faith by writing religious verse, composing numerous hymns, and giving lectures to defend Christianity.76 After his death, a collection of his poems was published as Poems of Religion and Society.77 One hymnal used in the 1840s contained 22 of Adams’ compositions.78 Concerned about increasing skepticism and infidelity in the 1840s,

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Adams delivered an address on faith many times, arguing that Christians must believe in God, the Bible, Christ’s divine mission, and a future state of rewards and punishments.79 To Adams, the Bible’s “three fundamental pillars” were “the unity and omnipotence of God”; “the immortality of the human soul, and its responsibility” to the “Creator in a future world for all the deeds done in the present”; and a system of morals based on the commandments to love God with all one’s heart, mind, and strength and one’s neighbor as oneself.80 “I have at all times,” Adams wrote in 1843, “been a sincere believer in the existence of a Supreme Creator of the world, of an immortal principle within myself, responsible to that Creator for my conduct on earth, and of the divine mission of the crucified Saviour, proclaiming immortal life and preaching peace on earth . . ., the natural equality of all mankind, and the law, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’”81 Adams stressed the importance of the “Great Commission” of Matthew chapter 28, which to him meant teaching all nations the doctrine of eternal life and the new commandment to love one another.82 Observing the world verified what the Bible taught about God: “the Creator must also be the Governor of the Universe”; His power, wisdom and goodness must be unlimited; and He was a righteous God.83 To Adams, the wonders of the world and humanity itself provided overwhelming evidence for God’s existence. In “Lords of All Worlds” he wrote,

The fool denies, the fool alone, Thy being, Lord, and boundless might;

Denies the firmament, thy throne, Denies the sun’s meridian light; Denies the fashion of his frame,

The voice he hears, the breath he draws; O idiot atheist! To proclaim

Effects unnumbered without cause!84

Adams continually asserted that this all-powerful God providentially directed all human affairs. In 1809 he wrote to his brother that he could be content spending the remainder of his life as a college professor “if he who rules the destinies of men has so decreed.”85 In 1814 Adams asked God to make the Treaty of Ghent “propitious to the welfare, the best interests, and the union” of the United States.86 Reflecting on Napoleon’s defeat that year, he averred, “The interposition of Providence to produce this mighty change has been so signal, so peculiar, so distinct from all human operation” that people living in an earlier era might have considered it a miracle. “As a judgment of Heaven, it will undoubtedly be considered by pious minds now and hereafter.”87 Adams declared America’s Transcontinental Treaty with Spain in 1819 to be “the work of an intelligent and all-embracing Cause.” The shift in relations with Spain “from the highest mutual exasperation and imminent war to a fair prospect of tranquility and of secure peace” filled his heart “with gratitude unutterable to the First Cause of all.”88 In his inaugural address, Adams declared that “except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” With “fervent supplications for His favor, to His overruling providence,” the president concluded, “I commit, with humble but fearless confidence, my own fate, and the future destinies of my country.”89 In his First Annual Message to Congress, Adams announced that Americans owed “gratitude to the Omnipotent Disposer of All Good for the continuance of the signal blessings of His providence . . . .”90

Although Adams was convinced that God had the power to perform miracles, he questioned many of the ones recorded in Scripture. He did not completely reject miracles, but they made it more difficult for him to believe in the veracity of the Bible. “The miracles in the Bible,” he asserted, “furnish the most powerful of all objections against its authenticity, both historical and doctrinal.” Adams would have preferred to “take its sublime morals, its unparalleled conceptions of the nature of God, and its irresistible power over the heart, with the simple narrative of the life and death of Jesus, stripped of all the supernatural agency and all the marvelous incidents connected with it.”91 At the same time, though, Adams professed belief in

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the biblical account of creation and the historicity of the flood and the tower of Babel.92 When Unitarian minister Horace Holley argued in a sermon that the scriptural story of creation was no different than the fables of other ancient literature, Adams declared, “I could scarcely sit and hear him with patience.”93

While frequently affirming his faith in God the Father, throughout his life Adams deeply pondered biblical teachings about the trinity, never repudiating or affirming the doctrine. Adams noted that many Christian apologists distinguished between “things above reason, which, as mysteries of religion,” should be believed, and “things contrary to reason,” which “must be false.” On this basis, Protestants repudiated the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. However, Adams contended that the “Trinity, the Divinity of Christ . . . , the atonement, all miracles, the Immaculate Conception of Jesus, and a devil maintaining war against Omnipotence” were as contrary to reason as “the Real Presence of the Eucharist.” Like his father, John Quincy Adams especially liked the text from I Corinthians: “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty.”94 Although reason was “a guard and check” on people’s “religious appetite,” it would be presumptuous to make it “the umpire of our faith.”95 He admitted his own reason was as fallible as the pope’s and “probably much more so than the collective reason of an ecclesiastical Council.” Therefore, he could not reject a doctrine merely because his reason did not sanction it. The problem with the doctrine of transubstantiation was not its absurdity but “its pernicious tendencies to enslave the human mind, to subject it to the arbitrary dominion of the priesthood—weak, corrupt, and fallible men like ourselves.” If a person believed that priests had special power to “turn a wafer into a God” and a “cup of wine into the blood of my Redeemer,” then the “next and natural step would be to believe” that people’s “eternal weal or woe depended upon the fiat of the same priest,” which would encourage an individual to propitiate “not the Deity, but His minister.”96

Writing to his son in 1811, Adams complained that “There are so many passages, both in the Gospels and the Epistles, which countenance the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ and so many which appear incompatible with it, that to my judgment it is not among the things clearly revealed . . . . I therefore conclude it is one of those mysteries not be unfolded to me during this present life.”97 To Adams, whether Jesus Christ was “a manifestation of Almighty God in the form of a man, or whether he was but the only begotten Son of God, by whom he made the world, and by whom he will judge the world” was a “speculative question” upon which he refused to take sides.98 However, in a letter to his father two years later, Adams insisted that one could not call Christ “a mere man, without at the same time pronouncing him an Imposter.” “My hopes of a future life,” he added, “are all founded upon the Gospel of Christ . . . .” Jesus “sometimes positively asserted, and at other times, countenanced his disciples in asserting . . . that he was God. You think it blasphemous to believe that the omnipotent Creator could be crucified. God is a spirit. The spirit was not crucified. The body of Jesus of Nazareth was crucified. The Spirit whether eternal or created was beyond the reach of the cross. You see my orthodoxy grows upon me,” but “I still unite with you in the doctrine of tolerance and benevolence.”99

In September 1825 Adams talked for hours about religious issues, especially the concept of the trinity, with Presbyterian minister Samuel Cox as they traveled together by boat from New York to Boston. Using Scriptural passages and analogies, Cox tried to persuade the president of the reality of the trinity, but Adams remained unconvinced, asking, “How can I believe what I can not understand?”100 Ruminating about a sermon he had heard in a Unitarian church two years later, Adams wrote that no argument had ever convinced him that Christ’s divinity was “not countenanced by the New Testament.” However, it was not “clearly revealed” either. It was “often obscurely intimated” and sometimes directly and other times indirectly asserted, but, on the whole, the New Testament left the doctrine “in a debatable state, never to be either demonstrated or refuted” until another revelation cleared it up.101 That same year Adams reported hearing a sermon at Second Presbyterian Church on the sonship of Jesus, which he thought had

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been “chiefly preached for my special benefit, but it was wheat sown by the wayside.”102 In August 1827 Adams wrote that he did not subscribe to many of the doctrines of Robert Little, the pastor of All Souls’ Church, “particularly not to the fundamental one of his Unitarian creed. I believe in one God, but His nature is incomprehensible to me.” In the debate between Unitarians and Trinitarians, Adams had “no precise belief” because he had “no definite understanding.”103 When Daniel Baker, pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, pressed him on this point, he responded that he was not “either a Trinitarian or a Unitarian.”104

Upset by the contrasting claims of Unitarians and evangelicals during the Second Great Awakening, Adams rejected what he deemed the more extreme doctrines of both groups and sought to steer a middle course. He protested the attempt of some Unitarians such as Horace Holley to appeal to “the liberal class who consider religion as merely a system of morals.”105 On the other hand, Adams wished that evangelicals would acknowledge, as he did, that many theological questions could not be resolved.106 Adams wrote, after attending St. John’s Episcopal Church in 1838, “I have tried very hard and very sincerely to believe in the doctrine of the trinity, because there are passages in the New Testament which I cannot deny give countenance to it; but when a dogmatist gives me a text which to my naked reason furnishes an argument against it . . . and then threatens me with eternal damnation for not believing him, my spirit revolts against the yoke, and loses much of its reverence for him who would impose it.107 Adams’ approach to the doctrine was similar to that of early Unitarians who were reluctant to clearly state that Christ was not divine.108

When Baker visited Adams in March 1828 to discuss the trinity, the president told him that “I believed the nature of Jesus Christ was superhuman; but whether he was God or only the first [in rank] of created beings was not clearly revealed to me in Scripture.”109 It was apparent to him that Jesus came to earth to “preach repentance and remission of sins,” to proclaim God’s glory, and to reveal the nature of life and immortality. Jesus, Adam asserted, exuded “absolute perfection” throughout his life, under circumstances no other human ever faced, especially the agony of the cross. Although possessing “miraculous powers sufficient to control all the laws of nature, Christ expressly and repeatedly declined to use them” to save himself from suffering.110 Adams asserted that Jesus performed miracles and forgave sins to validate his authority as the Son of God. Moreover, after his crucifixion, he rose again from the dead and was seen by hundreds of disciples during a forty-day period. Adams protested in 1834 that the sermon he heard on Easter had not discussed the resurrection, a day which Christians should celebrate “with religious fervor.” Easter was more important than Christmas because it accomplished the purpose for which Christ came to earth and guaranteed that life was everlasting.111 Adams noted that Christ claimed to exist before Abraham and to be a prophet, priest, and king. “Jesus was a teacher sent from God, to reveal the doctrine of immortal life and future retribution, and to teach the way on earth of eternal blessedness in Heaven.”112

Adams considered Jesus the greatest human being and the consummate role model. Jesus, however, was much more than the master teacher or the great exemplar; he was the supreme revelation of God,113 whom Adams repeatedly called “my savior” and “my redeemer.” Comparing Jesus and Socrates, as Unitarian Joseph Priestley did in his book, Adams protested, was like comparing a “farthing candle and the Sun!”114 It is not clear, though, how Adams thought Jesus provided salvation. Reflecting on a sermon he heard on John 3:16 in 1828, Adams wondered why, if God loved the world, “was the gift of his only begotten Son the only way in which that love could be manifested? . . . How could belief in the Son of God save the believer from perishing and confer upon him everlasting life?”115 Adams argued that by their transgression, “the first parents of mankind” forfeited their “immortality, innocence, and happiness.” As a result, humanity could only be redeemed by “the intervention of a Saviour.” Christ’s blood had washed away “the pollution of our original sin,” and people could be assured of “eternal happiness in a future life” if they obeyed the will of God. In an 1840 lecture, Adams insisted that the “crucified Galilean” “was the Saviour of the world—the Redeemer promised at

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the expulsion of Adam from Paradise.” He had been “crucified as a malefactor—numbered with the transgressors of that very law which he came to fulfil [sic] and to abolish.”116 Summarizing his beliefs, Adams wrote, “I reverence God as my creator. As the creator of the world, I reverence him with holy fear. I venerate Jesus Christ as my redeemer; and as far as I can understand, the redeemer of the world. But this belief is dark and dubious.”117

Ultimately, Adams thought he did not need to take a definitive position on Christ’s deity because it did not affect what he considered the essence of religion—good works. He maintained that “the question of Trinity or Unity, or of the single or double personal nature of Christ,” had “no bearing whatsoever” on human conduct.118 For Adams, upright conduct depended on religious faith. One of the reasons he liked Unitarianism was because it strongly emphasized virtue. God had not prescribed one system of morality for the clergy and another for lay people, Adams argued; the divine precepts were the same for everyone. 119 Two months before he left the White House, the president ruminated upon his four years of frequent frustration and failure as the nation’s chief executive. In every situation, he wrote, people had a “line of conduct” which they were duty bound to pursue. Even if adversity kept them from doing good to others, they must still exercise those virtues that displayed the “dignity of human nature” and promoted the glory of God. Adams tended to emphasize the importance of moral virtue to salvation, arguing that “a future state of retribution, a resurrection of bliss to all who have done good, and of condemnation to all who have done evil” was “a fundamental article of Christianity.”120 In an address to the American Bible Society, Adams declared that God gave man the Bible “to enable him, by faith in his Redeemer, and by works conformable to that faith, to secure his salvation in a future world, and to promote his well-being in the present.”121

His belief that conduct was more important than doctrine and his ecumenical approach to worship led Adams not to completely affirm the beliefs of any particular denomination. Moreover, like Thomas Jefferson he despised internecine feuds among religious denominations and denounced the lack of religious tolerance some groups displayed. Adams strongly disliked debates over religious doctrine because he felt they were irresolvable, divisive, and distracted Christians from focusing on morality and service.122 He much preferred preachers to discuss conduct and the fruit of religion rather than discourse about dogma. “It is the doom of the Christian Church,” he wrote in 1840, “to be always distracted with controversy.” Unfortunately, he lamented, where religion was most honored, the sharpest conflicts occurred.123

The doctrine of the atonement especially troubled Adams. “That the execution, as a malefactor, of one person, the Creator of all worlds, eighteen hundred years ago, should have redeemed me . . . from eternal damnation” was “too shocking” to believe, “solemn nonsense,” and “inconceivable absurdity.”124 Adams complained in 1837 that a preacher had explicated the entire Presbyterian Creed in his sermon—the fallen condition of man, his utter inability to do anything for his own salvation, the necessity of a vicarious sacrifice to atone for irremissible crimes, and the ignominious death of Almighty God as malefactor.” “Why, in the counsel of Divine Providence,” Adams pondered, “His death was necessary, transcends my capacity of comprehension. That Omnipotence should suffer . . . by His own decree to save man, His own creature, from the penalty of his own law, is as inconceivable to me as that he should be His own Son.” That some deduced from the Gospel of John and Paul’s epistles “such a bundle of absurdities” that so many people accepted as true was “a mortifying and melancholy contemplation.”125 To Adams, Christ’s mission was “to teach all mankind the way to salvation. His death . . . was necessary to the universal spread of His doctrine. He died for mankind, as Curtius died for his country, as Codrus died for his people. In this sense I believe the doctrine of the atonement, and in no other. Christ died as a man, not as God.”126 Therefore, unlike the Apostle Paul, Adams could not glory in the cross of Christ. If the cross was truly necessary for people’s salvation, it was cause for mourning rather than glory.127 Unable to believe that Christ had paid for his sin on the cross, Adams struggled with whether or not he was saved and ultimately found comfort, despite his emphasis on works, in his

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belief in God’s mercy. In April 1830 Adams complained that “the general character of Presbyterian preaching” was “to terrify rather than allure. This does not altogether suit my temper. Believing in the goodness and mercy of the Creator, I disbelieve those who represent Him as existing only to hurl thunder . . . . Exhortations to righteousness and truth, brotherly kindness and charity,” motivated him more than “unceasing denunciations of vengeance and punishment.” After attending the Second Presbyterian Church on January 1, 1837, he wrote, “Whether I am or shall be saved is all unknown to me. I know that I have been, and am, a sinner,—perhaps, by the depravity of the human heart, an unreclaimable sinner; but I cannot . . . divest myself of the belief that my Maker is a being whose tender mercies are over all His works; that, having the power to make me both will and do, however He may chastise, He will not cruelly punish . . . .”128 Near the end of his life, Adams wrote, “I have daily and nightly warnings to be prepared for a sudden summons to meet my maker. My hope is of mercy.”129 In his poem “The Wants of Man,” Adams declared,

My last great Want—absorbing all— Is, when beneath the sod,

And summoned to my final call, The mercy of my God.130

While struggling to understand the nature of salvation, Adams repeatedly asserted his

belief in life after death. He asked God to help him prepare “for appearing in thy presence to give an account of the deeds done in the body” and to grant him “the hope and fruition of a blessed immortality.” “If the existence of man were limited to this life, Adams wrote, it would be impossible for me to believe the universe made any moral sense.”131 Like German philosopher Immanuel Kant, Adams reasoned that since on earth virtue was not always rewarded and vice was not always punished, there must be an afterlife where divine reckoning occurred.132 In the final analysis, however, everlasting life was incomprehensible and could not be proven philosophically. Therefore, people must “seek for proofs of our immortality” in the Bible.133

In addition to repudiating Calvinists’ conception of election, Adams also rejected their doctrine of human depravity. Yet he constantly bemoaned humanity’s weaknesses and moral deficiencies. Adams wrote to his father, “as much as I depend upon the dispensation of Providence, just so little is my confidence in the wisdom and virtue of men.”134 The ex-president complained in the 1830s that the “base and dirty tricks” his rivals had used to try to destroy his character and ruin him were “sorry pictures of the heart of man.” He even admitted that the doctrine of human depravity explained the motivations of his own heart quite well.135 On the other hand, he protested that orthodox clergy thought “most mercifully ill of human nature” and that some Calvinist pastors considered themselves to be chaplains “to a penitentiary, discoursing to the convicts.”136 How could “men of good understanding and reasoning faculties,” he wondered, sincerely believe in the absurd doctrine of “the universal depravity of mankind”? Adams lambasted an Isaac Watts’ hymn for portraying people as “more base and brutish than the beasts.” “If Watts had said this on a weekday to any of his parishioners, would he not have knocked him down?” (perhaps illustrating Watts’ point). The Bible’s declaration that the heart was “deceitful and desperately wicked,” Adams contended, should be interpreted figuratively. People had selfish passions, but they could learn to control them. In addition to contradicting Scripture and experience, the claim that all human beings were depraved, Adams argued, was harmful because it degraded people and hampered their efforts to be virtuous.137 Endowed with a basically good nature, people were capable of following the moral precepts Jesus taught. Through education and religious and moral training, he maintained, individuals could overcome their moral shortcomings and lead upright lives, as did a large portion of people in Christian countries.138

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Arguably, no president had a stronger sense of duty or was more introspective than Adams.139 His parents instilled in him a “republican culture of civic virtue,” which Adams dutifully strove to embody and pass on to his own children.140 Struggling with his sense of vocation in 1789, Adams beseeched God to “give me resoluteness to pursue my duty with diligence and application, so as to please both Thee and my beloved father.” Throughout his life, Adams prayed, “Let thy good Spirit ever nerve my will to thee, and man, my duties to fulfill.” Expressing his understanding of the relationship between duty and divine assistance, he prayed for “patience and perseverance, and that favor from above, without which no human industry can avail, but which without persevering industry, it is presumptuous to ask.” While a senator, Adams asked God to give him “a sound head” so that he could render “mighty service as an agent of this country.” Assuming his duties as secretary of state in 1817, Adams beseeched God: “Thy aid, O father, wilt thou lend? My thoughts wilt thou inspire?” As Adams began his presidency, he prayed, “God grant me the wisdom to pursue the task before me and the peace of mind to complete it.”141

During his long life, Adams experienced much disappointment, grief, sorrow, and depression. One of his children died in infancy and two others in the prime of life. His presidency was a painful ordeal, and he lost his bid for reelection to Andrew Jackson whom he had come to despise. On the final Sunday of April in 1829, James Laurie, a friend of Adams, preached on the trials of Job at Second Presbyterian Church, to a congregation that included both Adams and Jackson. His sermon and especially the last verse of his text, “But his flesh shall have pain, and his soul within him shall mourn” (Job 14: 22), deeply moved Adams. Soon after leaving the presidency, Adams prayed, “Almighty God, bestow upon me a spirit of gratitude, of humility, of cheerfulness, and of resignation. Of gratitude, for the numberless blessings which thou hast given me to enjoy . . . ; of humility, to be conscious of my own infirmities and unworthiness; of cheerfulness, to be contented with the favours thou art pleased to bestow; and of resignation to the dispensations of thy will.”142 Despite all his problems, Adams praised God for His gracious provision. “With blessings thou hast crowned my days,” he wrote in a poem.143

During the late 1820s Adams’ eldest son George Washington amassed sizable gambling and drinking debts. Worried that their son would follow the path of drunkenness that the president’s brothers had taken to their destruction, John and his wife urged George to eschew liquor, tobacco, and other vices. The president tried to persuade him to join the church, arguing it would encourage spiritual reflection, self-scrutiny, benevolence, and virtue. Shortly after Adams left office, George died, possibly by accidental drowning, but probably by suicide. Still mourning his loss to Jackson, Adams poured out his grief in his diary. Nevertheless, it did not shake his strong faith in God. About a month after his son’s death, Adams wrote:

At the close of the year the only sentiment that I feel to be proper is humble gratitude to God for the blessings with which it has been favored. Its chastisements have been most afflictive, but I have experienced mercy with judgment. The loss of power and of popular favor I could have endured with fortitude . . . . But my beloved son! Mysterious Heaven! Let me bow in submission to thy will! . . . Grant me fortitude, patience, perseverance, and active energy, and let thy will be done.144

Samuel Flagg Bemis concludes that meaningful activity and prayer helped Adams survive his trials and lift him from depression and despair.145 Whether it was historical or allegorical, Adams argued, the book of Job “was written to teach the lessons of patience under affliction, of resignation under the divine chastisement, of undoubting confidence in the justice and goodness of God under every possible calamity, and of inflexible adherence to integrity under every temptation to provocation to depart from it.”146 In 1834 the Adams’ second son, John Adams II, died, seemingly the victim of overwork, but possibly of the alcoholism that had contributed to the death of his two uncles and his older brother.147 Nevertheless, the ex-president

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professed that “my lot has been a happy one upon earth, and every feeling of my heart ought to be a sentiment of gratitude to Him who is the disposer of events.”148

Despite the alcoholism that plagued his family, Adams usually drank a glass of wine after dinner, sometimes served wine to guests, and was a connoisseur of good wine throughout his life.149 At a dinner party in Washington he correctly identified eleven of the fourteen wines his host gave guests to sample as part of a taste test, demonstrating that he was quite familiar with the beverage.150 Although Adams supported temperance, he never pledged to abstain from alcohol or joined an association to promote temperance. In an address at Quincy in 1842, Adams lauded the temperance movement, but argued that wine was a gift of God when consumed in moderation. Throughout the Old Testament wine was depicted “as one of the most precious blessings bestowed by the Creator upon Man.” Even the New Testament contained no specific injunctions to abstain totally from liquor. While temperate use of wine was beneficial, Adams argued, intoxication was “a heinous sin.”151 He called efforts to reduce drunkenness “a holy work” and praised people who voluntarily took a pledge of total abstinence.152

Like her husband, Louisa Catherine Adams had a strong faith that was shaped by her childhood experiences and the trials of life. Although her father, diplomat Joshua Johnson, was a Unitarian, she was raised first as a Catholic in France and then as an Episcopalian in England. Although she did not join the Episcopal Church until 1837, Louisa was devoted to the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, and her religious convictions were very significant to her. Like her husband, she diligently studied the Scripture and even wrote a sixty-page analysis of Old Testament history. Various crises in her life helped strengthen her faith. She derived consolation from her faith after her infant daughter died in 1812 while the Adams resided in St. Petersburg. The death of two of her sons also prompted periods of religious reflection. After her second son died, she prayed frequently, read the Bible extensively, and wrote a long religious poem. Throughout their long marriage, she urged John Quincy to concentrate on serving God and people rather than focusing on self-gratification or fame.153

Adams’ Philosophy of Government

Greg Russell argues that Adams’ “intellectual universe” was “a compound of Christian faith and classical virtue.” Building upon medieval thinkers, he insisted that nations were subject to transcendent moral standards, that there were moral restraints on power, that rulers were responsible to their constituents, that governments were subordinate to laws, and that moral principles governed international relations. Thus political actions must be judged by moral principles, especially the extent to which they promoted justice and liberty. Few American statesmen have written as extensively on the moral purposes of government. Despite his personal problems and the nation’s perplexing dilemmas, Adams continued to believe that God intended the human condition to progressively improve and that government had a major role to play in this process.154

Adams’ firm belief that government was an instrument the Creator designed to glorify himself and benefit humanity helped shape his understanding of its responsibilities. He declared that as a congressman he strove to serve faithfully his constituents, the state of Massachusetts, the whole country, mankind “in every quarter of the globe,” and especially God “who rules the world in justice and mercy” and to whom people must render a final account.155 Because God was the supreme sovereign, the authority of nations was delegated and derivative. Political officials, therefore, could not simply do what the majority (or even the vast majority) of people wanted; they must do what was morally right.156 Eternal standards of justice, Adams insisted, must guide governments in both their domestic and foreign policies. The principles of Christianity, he asserted, applied to “the government of states as much as the conduct of individuals.” 157

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The federal government was morally obligated by the preamble to the Constitution, Adams stressed, to “establish justice,” “provide for the common defense,” and “promote the general welfare.”158 To fulfill these responsibilities and to deal effectively with foreign nations, the United States needed a strong union and an active federal government. The government must therefore undertake projects that were beyond the scope of private initiative, including subsidizing education, developing a favorable business climate, planning cities, and building a better transportation system.159 The Massachusetts politician repudiated British economist Adam Smith’s argument that individuals’ pursuit of their own self-interest automatically advanced the good of society. Instead he urged individuals to deliberately promote the common good in order to further social cohesion and moral advancement.160 Rejecting the common conviction that government primarily had negative functions—preserving order, protecting property, and punishing evildoers—Adams maintained it also had positive duties—ensuring equality and liberty and increasing opportunities and material comforts.161 Since God had made man a “sociable being,” the happiness of humans was interdependent and government had a major role to play in promoting this end. Thus Adams wanted the federal government to undertake projects to better the entire country.162 He supported a stronger federal judiciary system, a national banking system, a national bankruptcy law, and a tariff he thought benefited all regions. Without these bonds, Adams feared the union, torn by dissension and discord, would unravel.

While he wanted to increase the power of the federal government to promote the common good, Adams did not want it to regulate personal morality. He asserted that Jesus “came to teach, and not compel. His law was a LAW of LIBERTY.” Thus Christianity demanded “freedom of thought against organized power.”163 He opposed passing laws to prohibit people from drinking because self government was “the foundation of all our political and social institutions” and it alone could insure that people practiced temperance. Adams urged temperance advocates to teach people “more by example than by precept.” Only the dictates of individuals’ consciences and the energy of their wills, not the force of law, could develop virtues. Laws designed to restrict alcohol consumption, he argued were “ill-advised” because they infringed on people’s “personal freedom and habits.”164

Throughout his long political career, Adams normally adhered to his principles no matter what political repercussions ensued. Like his father, Adams believed the “magistrate is the servant not of his own desires, not even of the people, but of his God.”165 Convinced that his ultimate responsibility was to the Creator and moral principle, not to a party or his constituents, if Adams thought an action was morally right, he usually did it even if it was politically unpopular.166 After being the only senator to vote against a bill in 1806, he declared, “Everything on earth but a sense of duty dictated silence to me on this subject; if not acquiescence. I have acted upon inflexible principle, and am to take the consequences.” After his son George Washington was elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1826, Adams praised him for his “intention to act and vote” according to his “own sense of right even at the hazard of losing” his popularity.167 “Adams never surrendered to any man or party,” Samuel Flagg Bemis concludes, “only to the will of God.”168 Yet Adams contended that loyalty to principle “is only wise so far as the principle is important” and adhering to it produced “practical good.”169

Like George Washington, whom he revered, Adams believed the government must serve the good of the whole nation, and he repudiated parties, sectionalism, and interest groups, which were becoming the essential elements in American politics.170 Although he vigorously strove to pursue the common good throughout his entire political career, only as a member of the House of Representatives in the 1830s did Adams acquire the label of the “Man of the Whole Nation.” He complained that parties often prevented political officials from making decisions based on principles. “The Prince of Darkness could not spur the most devoted of his instruments upon the earth,” Adams wrote, to “anything more pernicious than parties.171 Denouncing the spoils system as destructive, Adams while president appointed individuals on the basis of merit, not personal or party loyalty. He also refused to remove those appointed under previous administrations unless

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they were incompetent or immoral. Adams blamed his inability to accomplish many of his objectives as president on partisan politicians who stove to benefit their faction or region rather than the nation.

Adams considered the United States a Christian country that had a God-given mission to accomplish in the world. The Puritans came to New England, he maintained, “to advance the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to enjoy the liberties of the Gospel in purity, with peace.“ Because the United States exalted the “natural equality of mankind,” and “the two eternal principles” upon which it stood—“civil and religious liberty,” it “must be that kingdom of Christ against which the gates of hell shall not prevail.”172 His belief that God had selected America to redeem the world helped make Adams a passionate proponent of continental expansionism. The laws of nature decreed that the United States would occupy the entire North American continent, he argued, just as surely as “that the Mississippi should flow to the sea.”173 Adams praised God in 1811 for the United States’ spectacular growth in population during its first two decades and asked Him to continue to provide a “clear and permanent improvement” in its residents’ morality. Because God governed all affairs, his unchangeable moral standards must be followed in all aspects of life. Adams told his father that he had “an undoubted confidence in the protection and favor of providence to support the real cause of justice and virtue.” The United States, he added, could “be certain of the success of Providence in every rightful cause.”174

Adams maintained that God had chosen Americans to civilize and Christianize the North American continent, serve as exemplars of liberty, spread democracy to the world, and eradicate all forms of European colonialism. Since democracy was “the corner-stone of the Christian religion,” Americans could simultaneously promote republican government and the gospel. Because the United States was “blessed with the largest portion of liberty,” Adams argued, it would someday “be the most powerful nation upon earth.” The Creator expected people to exercise their liberty to improve themselves and others.175 To achieve these ends, the United States must become “coextensive with the North American continent.” It was “destined by God and nature to be the most populous and most powerful people ever combined under one social compact.” Thus the United States had a “religious duty . . . to settle, cultivate, and improve” its territory. God had ordained the whole North American continent “to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, [and] professing one general system of religious and political principles . . . .” 176

During congressional debates in 1845, a Georgia Whig asked Adams on what basis he believed the United States had a claim to the entire Oregon territory. The Massachusetts congressman responded by asking the clerk to read Genesis 1:28, which commanded people to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it.” That, he contended, was not only America’s basis for possessing the whole Oregon territory, “but the foundation of all human title to all human possessions.” The United States claimed Oregon, he added, “to make the wilderness bloom as the rose, to establish laws, to increase, multiply, and subdue the earth, which we are commanded to do by the behest of God Almighty.” The British, by contrast, wanted Oregon only for navigation and hunting and sought to stunt America’s “natural growth” and “prevent the conversion of . . . a wilderness of savage hunters to a cultivated land of civilized Christian men.”177 In Parliament Lord George Bentinck denounced Adams for “impiously and blasphemously” using “the word of God as a justification for lighting up the firebrand and unleashing the hell-dogs of war.”178 Happily, however, the United States and Britain amicably resolved their dispute over Oregon. Adams envisioned and worked persistently to create a model republic, an orderly, stable community, united by its citizens’ shared political, religious, and moral convictions, which would be a shining example of liberty and virtue for the whole world. Delivering the annual July fourth speech in Washington in 1821, Adams declared, “Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.” Adams warned that both internal and external threats could thwart this goal. Raucous

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political debates over the power of the federal government, national expansion, the rights of Indians, and slavery could diminish American strength. So could going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” The United States must only go to war, Adams insisted, if its own security or rights were directly endangered. Although the United States was “the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all,” it must not champion this cause around the world by supporting revolution either in Europe or South America.179 Throughout most of the nineteenth century American foreign policy followed the course Adams prescribed: while sympathizing with other nations’ quest for independence, the United States did not provide aid or intervene militarily.180

For both moral and economic reasons, Adams urged the United States to increase its trade with other nations. He strove to transform the prevailing mercantilist system into an international commercial order and to create a community of nations committed to democracy and liberty. Trade would help knit the world’s diverse societies into a new global community led by the United States. Shared economic interests could make war obsolete. Elevating trade to a moral duty, Adams protested policies that inhibited it. Maintaining freedom of the seas, preventing the impressment of sailors, and protecting the ships of neutral countries in wartime was central to his work as a diplomat, secretary of state, and president. When China refused to trade with Western powers, secretary of state Adams protested. “If the state of Nature between men is a state of Peace, and the pursuit of happiness is a natural right of man,” he contended, “it is the duty of men to contribute, as much as is in their power to one another’s happiness. This is most emphatically enjoined by the Christian precept to love your neighbor as yourself.” People could best “contribute to the comfort and well-being of one another” by commerce. He complained that the Chinese did not “consider themselves bound by the Christian precept to love their neighbour as themselves.” Instead they adopted the “execrable principle of [Thomas] Hobbes” “that the state of Nature is a state of War.” Rejecting a Christian understanding of trade, China considered itself the center of the universe, “equal to the Heavenly host.” Because commerce was “among the natural rights and duties of men,” China’s unwillingness to trade with the West on “terms of equal reciprocity” was a selfish, unchristian, and “unsocial” policy that inhibited international progress.181 While all nations should be guided by the laws of nature, Adams averred, Christian nations must also follow “the laws of humanity and mutual benevolence taught in the gospel of Christ.” If these nations adhered to the “fundamental maxim of nature” that individuals should do unto others as they wanted others to do unto them, “it would solve all political, as well as individual, problems.”182

Despite his nation’s divisions and struggles and the many trials and tribulations of his own life, Adams remained confident God would use the United States to further the world’s material and moral progress.183 In an 1830 letter to the America Bible Society, Adams proclaimed, “Never since the foundation of the world have the prospects of mankind been more encouraging” “that the religion of Jesus shall prevail throughout the earth” “than they appear to be at the present time.” “I live in the faith and hope of the progressive advancement of Christian liberty,” Adams wrote in 1838.184 The pinnacle of his optimism is his 1845 essay published in The American Review that insisted that God’s plan for His chosen nation was near fruition. Fusing biblical teaching with French philosopher Marie Jean Antoine Condorcet’s famous 1795 essay on progress, the former president argued that America “stood on the threshold of the best possible world.”185

Adams fervently believed that transcendent principles revealed in both Scripture and the laws of nature should govern the behavior of individuals and nations and be used to evaluate the results of their actions. In both private and public life, Adams doggedly sought to follow moral principles, and he repeatedly urged other statesmen to do the same.186 In 1820 members of James Monroe’s cabinet debated whether the United States, while claiming to be neutral, should clandestinely aid South Americans rebels in their struggles to gain independence from Spain. The discussion prompted Adams to complain in his diary that “moral considerations seldom

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appear to have much weight in the minds of our statesmen, unless connected with popular feelings.” Neither President Monroe nor other cabinet members thought that “the dishonorable” act “of giving secret aid to the revolutionists, while openly professing neutrality” should “stand in the way of measures otherwise expedient, especially if supported by popular prejudice.” Adams countered that “the more of pure moral principle is carried into the policy and conduct of a Government, the wiser and more profound that policy will be.” Although virtue was not always “crowned with success,” God expected people always to act virtuously. Adams recognized that “the path of virtue” was “not always clear” and argued that because human affairs were complicated, “artifice and simulation” must “occasionally be practised [sic].” Even the sternest moralists allowed such actions in war, and they might sometimes be justifiable when a nation was contemplating war. It was a universal maxim, however, that “fraud is never justifiable where force would not be equally justifiable to effect the same object.”187 Believing that reason was a divine gift, Adams contended that its light would enable people to discover and implement God’s truth in the world. In his view, “the human mind had a natural affinity for truth and justice.”188 Because reason did not govern international relations, he concluded, however, that the use of force might sometimes be necessary to protect freedom.189

Adams’ Faith and Political Policies

Adams’ religious convictions shaped his understanding of the United States’ calling as a nation, human rights, humanitarianism, peace, and liberty.190 The impact that his faith had on his policies as a senator, diplomat, secretary of state, president, and congressman can be seen by examining his views of internal improvements, Indian rights, slavery, and religious liberty.

As a senator, Adams introduced a bill in 1807 that called for a national plan to construct canals and roads. As secretary of state, he wrote to James Lloyd in 1822 that “the first duty of a nation” was to better “its own conditions by internal improvements.”191 Breaking with Jefferson and Madison who thought that Congress could only do what was “expressly delegated” by the Constitution, Adams advocated a substantial program of internal improvements.192 His proposals were motivated in part by his belief that God gave humans a “cultural mandate” in Scripture to improve the earth. Adams asked God to motivate political officials to “seek a clear and permanent improvement” in people as social creatures. They could best accomplish this by setting a positive moral example and by promoting policies that gave citizens opportunities to enrich themselves.193

As president, Adams continued to argue that the federal government should use its resources to improve not only the new republic’s transportation system but also its political, social, intellectual, and moral life. Convinced that government must be an agent of social progress, the president urged the nation in his inaugural address to construct an infrastructure that would rival ancient Rome’s and would evoke “the most fervent gratitude” of future generations. In his First Annual Message to Congress in December 1825, Adams insisted that “the Author of Our Existence” had assigned to “social no less than individual man” the duties of “moral, political, [and] intellectual improvement.” The progressive betterment of the lives of citizens was “a duty as sacred and indispensable as the usurpation of powers not granted” was “criminal and odious.”194 In this and subsequent reports to Congress, Adams called for establishing a naval academy, a national university, and federal programs to explore the continent and the heavens; the construction of roads and canals; a more effective patent law to encourage inventors; a uniform system of weights and measures; protection for American industry; and a better Indian policy. He lobbied Congress to create a Department of the Interior (which was not established until 1849) and urged its members to appropriate money to complete the Cumberland Road and a thoroughfare from Washington to New Orleans, and to build the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. All these projects could be funded through the sale of public lands.

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The Creator expected people to enhance the condition of themselves and their fellow citizens. If Americans failed to take “gigantic strides” in public improvement, they would “cast away the bounties of Providence” and doom their country “to perpetual inferiority.”195 These steps would help the nation better utilize its natural resources, expand its industry, and increase its power in the world. Moreover, shared roads and canals, a national university, and common moral values and political ideals would cement the interests of Americans more firmly together. His belief that America had a divine destiny to occupy the entire continent also led him to persistently advocate a better transportation system to encourage settlement in the West. Speaking at ground breaking ceremonies for the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, Adams, citing Genesis, declared that God had commanded people to “replenish the earth, and subdue it.” Labeling this the preeminent purpose of the project, the president beseeched God to bless it and “every other similar work” the nation undertook.196 Similarly, Adams proclaimed, “By the law of nature, independent of all revelation, and by the concurrent testimony of holy writ in the narrative of creation, the earth was given by the Creator to the family of man, for the purpose of improving the condition of its possessor . . . .”197

While proposing particular programs to enhance the nation’s material, intellectual, and political life, Adams offered no specific measures to improve moral conditions. Influenced by the Enlightenment, he was confident that creating a healthy educational, physical, and social environment that allowed reason to flourish was the key to producing more upright behavior. Schools, churches, and other voluntary organizations also had an important role to play in elevating morality.198

Members of his cabinet cautioned Adams against making such sweeping proposals, arguing that many would consider them unconstitutional and impractical. The president recognized that they would be unpopular and that he must prepare “for severe trials” and “remember that ‘it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.’”199 Deeply interested in scientific observation, Adams published a lengthy report on uniform standards for weights and measures in 1824 while he was secretary of state. Much to his dismay, his plan for a national astronomical observatory was not realized. Adams later played a role in the construction of the Cincinnati Astronomical Society’s observatory and, despite his poor health, journeyed there in 1843 to give a major address to celebrate its opening, but no federal funds were used to build the facility. The president argued that creation of a national university would significantly help elevate moral and social conditions in the United States. Although Washington had recommended a national university (and a national military academy) as had John Adams and Jefferson, Madison’s argument that it was unconstitutional helped stimulate substantial opposition, and no bills to establish a national university made it to the floor of Congress during Adams’ administration. During his tenure, Adams was able to pass only minor bills for particular projects such as the Delaware breakwater and to gain enough funds to build the national road westward from Wheeling to Zanesville, Ohio. The opposition press lampooned his other schemes, and Congress refused to act on them. Such piecemeal legislation was small consolation for his plans to use the treasure trove of federal lands to fund major educational, scientific, cultural, and material improvements.

Several other factors thwarted the realization of Adams’ grandiose schemes. Quickly increasing strength under the banner of Andrew Jackson, westerners demanded free or very cheap land, and southern politicians, led by John Calhoun, called for increased state rights. Their fears that a strong national government would reduce states rights thwarted the president’s plan to provide an extensive system of internal improvements. Adams’ political capital was undermined by his alleged crooked deal with Henry Clay that gave him the presidency, his strong stands on principle that alienated many professional politicians, his lack of personal warmth, and his appointment of people to political posts on the basis of ability rather than party affiliation and personal loyalty.200 Moreover, he failed to solicit the help of those who could have been his allies in Congress, and after 1826 both houses were dominated by his opponents. In 1834 Adams

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blamed Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, and Daniel Webster for the failure of his plan to make the “national domain the inexhaustible fund for progressive and unceasing internal improvement.” Because congressional actions clashed with his conviction that the United States was divinely destined to occupy all of North America, he felt especially devastated when most of his proposals were defeated. Sadly, the nation had failed to use “the bounties of Providence” to increase its territory or elevate its life.201 Discouraged but not defeated, Adams continued as a congressman to fight zealously for causes he thought would improve American intellectual, social, political, and moral conditions. As did his quest for internal improvements, Adams’ attitude toward Indians and their relationship to the federal government was based in part on his Christian convictions and it contributed to his problems as president. Racial prejudices combined with the economic self-interest of southerners and westerners to make Adams’ policies toward Native Americans unpopular and to increase Jackson’s strength in these regions. Soon after becoming president, Adams discovered that a treaty the federal government had negotiated with the Creek Indians in Georgia was fraudulent. Bribed by federal and state officials, Creek agents had ceded all of their land to the state. Unaware of this treachery, Adams had signed the treaty shortly after taking office. Although most Creeks refused to accept this treaty, the governor of Georgia planned to seize their rich farm land. Until this point, Adams had not been an advocate of Indian rights, arguing that their nomadic ways, belligerent actions, and pagan practices thwarted the progress of civilization and required them to accept a permanently inferior place in American society. However, the Creeks were one of five “civilized tribes” that had become farmers, spoke English, espoused Christianity, and accepted many Anglo customs. Although he had opposed a British proposal in 1814 to make Indians an independent nation in the Old Northwest and had defended Jackson’s efforts to remove the Seminoles from Florida in 1818, the Creeks now seemed no different to him than the whites who craved their territory.202 He no longer saw Indians as a major menace, threat, or obstacle to white advancement. Not only the Creeks, but the other members of the “Five Civilized tribes” of the South, the Iroquois Nation in the North, and most other tribes remaining in the East had become farmers.

As he diligently studied the old treaties and relevant legislation, Adams’ sympathy for the Creeks increased. He told Congress in 1826 that the United States had two alternatives: to forcibly evict the Creeks from their land or to negotiate a new treaty to obtain the same end peacefully. The “nature of our institutions” and “the sentiments of justice” required the government to adopt the second solution.203 In the midst of the controversy, Adams informed Congress that if Georgia continued to encroach on Indian lands that “a superadded obligation even higher than that of human authority” would compel him to enforce the laws. Adams was reluctant to use force, however, because he realized it might lead to violence.204 Neither removal nor assimilation seemed like a good option. In addition to being unjust, removal was only a stop-gap measure that was bound to produce more aggression in the future. Assimilation, even if it could be achieved, clashed with the greed of the frontiersmen.205 The determined resistance of Georgians and the opposition of Congress prevented Adams from devising a more equitable treaty, and the Creeks were compelled to cede all their land to Georgia and to choose between submitting to white rule in the state or moving beyond the Mississippi River.206

The president continued to advocate the long-standing American policy of assimilation at a time when many whites opposed it because it was likely to deprive them of hundreds of thousands of acres of land they coveted.207 In his Fourth Annual Message, he rejoiced that “we have had the rare good fortune of teaching them [Indians] the arts of civilization and the doctrines of Christianity.”208 As president, Adams met regularly with Indians and their white representatives to discuss their grievances and concerns.209 For Adams, this confrontation involved not only the rights of Indians, but the issue of the superiority of the federal government over the states. Although white Georgians gained their objectives, they and other southerners denounced Adams’ position and the delay it caused.210 His humanitarianism angered speculators

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and settlers who wanted Indian lands, and his nationalism alienated southerners who prized state rights.

Like almost all Anglos at the time, Adams never doubted the “superiority of white Christian civilization over that of pagan Indians” and never seriously questioned the right of Europeans to settle America. Adams recorded in his diary a conversation he had with Henry Clay in 1825. Clay argued that Indians could not be civilized and thus were an inferior race that was not worth preserving. “They were not an improvable breed,” Clay declared, “and their disappearance from the human family will be no great loss to the world.”211 Lynn Hudson Parsons concludes that Adams probably did not accept the “racial notions implicit in Clay’s analysis,” but he became “increasingly pessimistic about Indians’ chance for survival in the face of the land-hungry white man and the impotence of the federal government to do anything about it.” Nevertheless, in the course of his political career Adams moved from “an attitude of hostility, to one of curiosity,” to a sense of outrage by 1840.212 The Indian Removal Act of 1830, passed while Jackson was president, for the first time put the weight of the federal government on the side of complete separation rather than assimilation. Most whites who were sympathetic to Indian interests opposed removal on the grounds that that it was unjust and Indians rejected it. Not yet serving in Congress when the bill was passed, Adams insisted that all its opponents could do was to denounce the “perfidy and tyranny of which Indians are to be made the victims, and leave the punishment of it to Heaven.”213

As a congressman during the 1830s, Adams became both a leading defender of the principle that Indians had rights that whites must respect and one of the most formidable critics of removal.214 Upset that slaveholders and speculators were taking control of the Southeast, he condemned removal policies for violating Indian rights and America’s honor. The force, fraud, bribery, and murder used to compel unwilling Indians to move outraged Adams and many other Americans. The “Trail of Tears” that took the lives of almost one quarter of the nation’s 19,000 Cherokees in 1838 was to him a national disgrace. Through his speeches in Congress condemning the tragic results of this policy, Adams hoped to change the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty.”215 Adams’ widely reported tirades brought him public acclaim in the East and North and vituperation in the South and West and prompted leaders of the Cherokees, Senecas, and many other tribes to solicit his help.216 Along with other Whigs, Adams presented petitions to Congress on behalf of the Cherokees. By 1840 he had become so distraught about the Second Seminole War and its seemingly futile results (the war eventually lasted seven years, took the lives of 1,500 soldiers and many thousands of Indians, and cost $20 million) that he opposed additional funding for it.217 Adams lamented that “we have done more harm to the Indians since our Revolution than the British and French nations before.”218 In 1841 he wrote that America’s Indian policy was “among the heinous sins of this nation” God would someday bring to judgment.219 In 1843 Adams worshipped with a group of Indians at the Tuscarora reservation in western New York. An observer reported that when asked to speak, he discussed “the equal care and love with which God regards all his children . . . and . . . the common destiny that awaits them hereafter . . . .”220

Like his sympathy for Indians, Adams’ opposition to slavery came later in his life. While strongly condemning slavery in his personal dairy, as secretary of state, a presidential candidate, and president, Adams made no public statements on the subject, recognizing that a frank declaration of his opinions would end his hopes to lead the nation.221 Moreover, because he was convinced that American unity was vital to the spread of liberty around the world, Adams was reluctant to do anything to fracture it. As president, he frequently met with black leaders to discuss their grievances, but he took no major steps to help them. Caught between his conscience and political expediency, Adams chose to remain silent, until his election to Congress allowed him to play the role of the prophet rather than the statesman and express his moral outrage.222 During his years in the House, Adams deplored slavery as a violation of basic human rights, a

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threat to the Union, a cause of the war with Mexico, and a divisive issue that thwarted the work of Congress.

Adams’ opposition to slavery first developed during Congressional debates in 1820 over admitting Missouri into the Union as a slave state. Reflecting on the Missouri Compromise, Adams wrote in his diary that among the many evils of slavery was that it “pervert[ed] human reason,” “taint[ed] the very sources of moral principle,” and “polluted” national politics. What could be “more false and heartless,” Adams asked, than a doctrine that made “the first and holiest rights of humanity . . . depend upon the color of the skin?” He repudiated the claim of southerners that Christianity sanctioned slavery and that slaves “were happy and contented in their condition.” He complained that the Constitution had “sanctioned a dishonorable compromise with slavery.” It did not speak well for human nature “that the cement of common interest produced by slavery” was “stronger and more solid than that of unmingled freedom.”223 Despite such convictions, Adams supported the Missouri Compromise because he thought the Constitution did not allow Congress to abolish slavery in a territory where it already existed as a condition for a state’s admission to the Union.224 While concluding that this measure was the best that could be achieved under the present Constitution, he wondered if revising the Constitution to eliminate slavery would be a wiser and bolder course since it was the nation’s “great and foul stain.” This would reduce the union to thirteen or fourteen states, but it would be “unpolluted with slavery” and might stimulate other states to emancipate their slaves. If the union had to be dissolved, Adam wrote, slavery was the issue “upon which it ought to break.” He denounced the Constitution’s allowance of slavery as “morally and politically vicious,” inconsistent with the principles of the American Revolution, and “cruel and oppressive.”225 His presidential ambitions and practical politics, however, led Adams to keep these thoughts to himself and to urge New England congressmen to support the Missouri Compromise. Although the settlement that admitted Missouri as a slave state and prohibited slavery in the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36 30’ was immoral, Adams argued, the Constitution’s defects regarding slavery made it necessary.

Inspired in large part by the Second Great Awakening, during the 1830s a host of new organizations strove to remedy social ills and reform American society. In addition to working to abolish slavery, the “Benevolent Empire” the Awakening spawned, promoted temperance, world peace, women’s rights, and strict observance of the Sabbath, and strove to improve public education, devise more humane asylums and prisons, and close brothels. Because he disagreed with its aims, Adams never joined the American Colonization Society or attended its meetings. Despite Liberia’s fertile soil and a favorable climate, he maintained, the blacks the organization had helped migrate there were unproductive and impoverished.226 He protested moreover that many proponents of colonization were speculators who hoped to make money or southerners who wanted to export free blacks to Africa at the public expense.227

Although convinced that slavery was a moral evil, Adams long thought that preserving the union was more important than immediate eradication of the institution. He declined to support the abolitionist crusade to end slavery in the District of Columbia and to outlaw the interstate slave trade because he considered these acts politically divisive. While serving in Congress, Adams did frequently protest the unjust treatment of free blacks. He objected to a South Carolina law that prohibited them from entering the state, denounced a Virginia law that permitted their imprisonment on the presumption that they were slaves, protested their ill-treatment by Washington police, and supported their right to vote.228

As a congressman, Adams also increasingly asserted that slavery violated fundamental moral, religious, philosophical, and political principles. The Bible taught that all races descended from the same ancestors, first Adam and Eve and then Noah and his wife, and that because they shared the same immortal soul all human beings were brothers and sisters.229 God’s immutable principles of justice, Adams insisted, applied to slaves as much as any other group of Americans.230 By making human rights depend on skin color, slavery violated divine moral

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principles and perverted human reason. Adams protested that slave owners were “prevaricating with their own consciences, and taxing their learning and ingenuity to prove that the Bible sanctions slavery; that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were slave-holders; and that St. Paul is the apostle of man-stealers, because he sent Onesimus back to his master Philemon. These preachers of the Gospel might just as well call our extermination of the Indians an obedience to Divine commands because Jehovah commanded the children of Israel to exterminate” the Canaanites.231

In addition to violating biblical teaching, Adams argued that slavery contradicted American and growing international commitment to human equality and natural rights.232 Those who practiced slavery while professing belief in the Declaration of Independence, Adams lamented, provided one of the most “flagrant images of human inconsistency.” Slavery also contravened the law of brotherly love.233 Adams rejoiced that slavery was daily becoming “more and more odious,” that Washington and Jefferson, although slaveholders, testified against it, and that the pope denounced it. He claimed furthermore that a Muslim despot, the Russian czar, and the absolute monarch of Austria had all abolished it, all motivated by the “truth that, by the laws of nature and nature’s God, man cannot be the property of man.”234

In addition to being a moral evil and a political travesty, Adams maintained, slavery had a disastrous effect upon the United States. It threatened to make the Constitution “a menstruous rag” and the nation “a military monarchy.” It created deep cleavages between southerners who owned slaves and those who did not. Moreover, southerners’ hypersensitivity about slavery created governmental gridlock, preventing the nation from solving many of its major problems or improving its life.235

In 1838 Adams wrote that the fall of slavery was “predetermined in the counsels of Omnipotence.” Christian benevolence and the American commitment to human rights and fundamental liberties would eventually destroy it. America, he proclaimed in 1842 was “among the chosen instruments of Almighty power,” not only to promote “the virtue, welfare and happiness” of countless millions, but to improve “the conditions of man, by establishing the practical, self-evident truth of the natural equality and brotherhood of all mankind, as the foundation of all human government, and by banishing Slavery and War from the earth.” “Was all of this an Utopian daydream?” Adams asked. “Is one talent, entrusted by the Lord of the harvest, for the improvement of the condition of man, to be hidden under a bushel? Is the lamp destined to enlighten the world, to be extinguished by the blasting breath of Slavery?” Adams warned, however, that the conflict to eradicate slavery would be “terrible” and conditions might get worse before they got better.236 He eventually concluded that fracturing the Union was preferable to maintaining slavery.

Two issues helped transform Adams into arguably the nation’s single most effective anti-slavery advocate during the last decade of his life: his opposition to the “gag rule” and his defense of 53 Africans who seized the Spanish slave ship Amistad in 1839.237 To disrupt its work, abolitionists flooded Congress with petitions calling for the end of slavery in the District of Columbia. This prompted Congress to adopt a “gag rule” in 1836 that automatically tabled all abolitionist petitions. Upset by this denial of the constitutional right of free speech, Adams led a nine-year battle to repeal this rule. When Congress finally did so in 1845, the 78 year-old exulted in his diary, “Blessed . . . be the name of God.”238 Tricked by the Spanish crew they took prisoners, the captives who seized control of the Amistad sailed into Long Island Sound, rather than back to Africa, and were incarcerated and held for trial in New Haven, Connecticut. Realizing that their trial provided an excellent opportunity to dramatize the plight of millions of victims of the slave trade, abolitionists rallied public support for these Africans. They also convinced Adams to serve as their legal counsel when the Supreme Court heard their case in 1841. His notoriety attracted a large crowd and helped rivet public interest on the case. Adam’s stirring appeal for justice, which Justice Joseph Story called “extraordinary, for its power, for its bitter sarcasm,” and for its broad ranging analysis, helped the defendants win their freedom. Abolitionists exploited the “great symbolic significance” of this legal victory by publishing

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Adams’ oral argument. At the same time, the ex-president gave hundreds of copies of it to congressmen, diplomats, and friends.239 The Amistad case prompted Adams to ponder the nation’s internal slave trade, the capture and return of fugitive slaves to the South, and the mistreatment of slaves by masters. “The world, the flesh, and all the devils in hell,” he lamented in 1841, “are arrayed against any man who . . . shall dare to join the standard of Almighty God to put down the African slave trade.” “What can I,” the congressman asked, “with . . . all my faculties dropping from me one by one . . . do for the cause of God and man, for the progress of human emancipation? . . . Yet my conscience presses me on; let me but die upon the breach.”240

Although Adams was a racist by modern standards—he thought that whites were culturally and morally superior to other groups—he asserted, as did few of his contemporaries, that all people should have the same basic rights regardless of their skin color. Moreover, Leonard Richards argues, viewing “himself as the guardian of the rights of the oppressed” was central to Adams’ self-image.241 Besides its exploitation of blacks, what most upset him about slavery was that it undermined America’s “leadership of the cause of human freedom.”242 Undeterred by threats against his life (about a dozen a month at the peak) and a congressional trial for censure, Adams zealously labored to realize his dream that “not a slave on this earth be found.”243 While most abolitionists wished Adams would more fully support their agenda, many of them deeply admired him. Joshua Leavitt, for example, asserted in 1842 that this “extraordinary man” deserved the title of “champion of the rights of personal liberty in the 19th Century.”244

Adams’ religious commitments also played a significant role in his diplomatic outlook.245 Convinced that God had created the United States to control the entire North American continent and that colonization was immoral and unjust, Adams strongly influenced the writing of the Monroe Doctrine, especially its principles on non-colonization. His role was so great that some insist it should be called the “Adams Doctrine.” He argued further that since the population, wealth, territory, and power—physical and moral—of the United States had nearly tripled in the thirty years since Washington warned against entangling alliances in his Farewell Address, the United States, while still being circumspect, should cultivate closer relations with the seven new republics in Latin America. In the mid 1820s religion and American interests marched in tandem as Protestant desires to evangelize Catholic countries in Latin America joined with hopes of promoting freedom and democracy there. Many Protestants wanted the United States to bring both spiritual regeneration and republican government to its southern neighbors. In 1823 the American Bible Society made plans to publish a Spanish edition of the Bible and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sent a team to investigate opportunities for mission work in South America. Inspired by such religious and political goals, Adams wanted the United States to participate in the first Pan-American Congress in 1826.246 Urging the House to send representatives, the president declared that it might be centuries before Americans would have a similar opportunity “to dispense the promised blessings of the Redeemer of Mankind.”247 His Christian convictions also encouraged Adams to work to promote religious liberty in Latin America.248 To Adams, religious liberty was a prerequisite for civil liberty. Americans would be forever indebted to the Puritans for their emphasis on the “natural equality of mankind,” which they derived from “the sacred foundation of the scriptures,” and the two pillars of civil and religious liberty.249 In negotiating treaties of commerce and navigation as secretary of state, Adams tried to include provisions guaranteeing liberty of conscience and religious worship. Although few Catholic countries allowed their citizens to worship as they wanted, he rejoiced in 1823 that the new Colombian constitution guaranteed freedom of conscience.250 “The tendency of the spirit of the age is so strong towards religious liberty,” he declared, “that we cannot doubt it will soon banish from the constitution of the southern republics of the hemisphere all those intolerant religious establishments . . . .”251

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A Final Assessment

Plagued by inner tensions and anxiety, Adams engaged in constant introspection and often berated himself for not fulfilling all his religious and civic duties, accomplishing more, or attaining higher moral standards.252 Despite his immense talents and incredible work ethic, Adams was deeply bothered by his lack of certain qualities and his shortcomings. In 1803, he wrote, “Pride and self-conceit and presumption lie so deep in my natural character . . . . I often see and condemn my faults.” In assessing his conduct, he often concluded as he did in 1806, “I had no reason to be satisfied with my performance this day . . . .” On his forty-fifth birthday, Adams confessed that “passions, indolence, weakness, and infirmity have sometimes made me swerve from my better knowledge of right and paralyzed my efforts of good.” “My own career is closed,” Adams wrote two years into his presidency. “My duties are to prepare for the end with a grateful heart and unwavering mind.” “My whole life has been a succession of disappointment,” he complained in 1833. “I can scarcely recollect a single instance of success to anything that I ever undertook.”253 After his arguments helped convince the Supreme Court to free the defendants in the Amistad case in 1841, Adams told his son Charles Francis that for the “first time he felt he deserved the blood of the signer of the Magna Carta” that flowed through his veins.254 Rarely satisfied with his accomplishments, Adams regretted near the end of his life that he had not done more to eliminate humanity’s two great scourges: slavery and war. “I have not improved the scanty portion of His gifts as I might and ought to have done,” he lamented.255

Although not as harsh as he often was on himself, others noted some of Adams’ character flaws. Many noted that he had little sense of humor. Even his “most enthusiastic eulogists” mentioned his “general irascibility.”256 Despite his high standards, extensive self-criticism, and frequent prayer that God would grant him greater humility, Adams was inclined to be self-righteous.257 Lipsky accuses Adams of failing to recognize that “his moral system was largely his preferences dressed up in philosophical garb.”258 During his years as president, Adams was often moody, despondent, and at times, possibly clinically depressed. Despite his continual self-criticism, the New Englander was troubled by the barbs of others. Having gained the “respect of czars, prime ministers, and distinguished men of science and letters,” he was galled by the abuse heaped on him by “unschooled and self-centered partisans.”259 Even some of his admirers admitted that Adams frequently responded too harshly and intemperately to his critics.260

On the other hand, Adams had many positive personality traits. Friends and adversaries, at home and abroad, lauded his learning, self-discipline, industry, integrity, and vigilance.261 Adams was one of the nation’s most intelligent and erudite presidents. Throughout his life, he read “great books” to help him better understand history, human nature, and his own times. Like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Adams was a close observer of the physical world and was well educated in the sciences.262 Many admired his constant pursuit of virtue, justice, and the common good, extraordinary moral courage, faithful study of the Scripture and church attendance, fervent search for religious truth, and heart-felt gratitude to God. Dwight Eisenhower argued that Adams “possessed more of the qualities of greatness” than any other member of Congress.263 John F. Kennedy lauded Adams’ courage in supporting Jefferson’s Embargo Act when all other New England Federalists opposed it.264 Few statesmen had his broad knowledge of government, history, and public law; there was “scarcely a subject . . . he had not contemplated,” claimed one of Adams’ contemporaries.265 Louisa Catherine Adams’ boast that her husband had more intellectual power than the rest of the politicians in Washington combined, Paul Nagel maintains, “was less exaggerated than it sounds.”266 Numerous commentators praised his “incorruptible integrity” and impeccable character. “No strain of moral obliquity has attached to his name from his cradle to his grave,” argued A. J. Crane. The “character of that great man,” proclaimed another admirer, “shines forth” with “almost unrivaled” “brightness.”267 A man of varied interests, Adams enjoyed walking, swimming, fishing, playing billiards, drinking wine, writing poetry, raising seedling trees, studying astronomy, and reading the Bible and great

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literature. Because of his daily regimen, constitution, and temperament, he was one of the hardest working individuals to ever occupy the oval office or a seat in Congress.268

Many have accentuated the importance of Adams’ faith. Constantly guided by principle, he was “a diligent and daily student of the Bible,” an editor declared in 1848, who had “the highest reverence for sacred things.” “A humble disciple of Jesus Christ,” Adams had left a name that would “stand bright and pure” as long as the American republic endured. The chief source of Adams’ character and immense contribution to his country was not his intellect, his knowledge, or his eloquence, another contemporary argued, but his “sense of dependence upon God.” “Always devoted to righteousness,” Adams insisted that “people could only prosper as their laws conformed to the laws of God.”269 The statesman carried “his somber sense of responsibility toward his Creator,” Kennedy averred, “into every phase of his daily life.”270

William Weeks argues that like several other antebellum American statesmen Adams sought “to remake the world in America’s image” by devising policies based on reason and morality rather than power and expediency. Adams continually struggled to avoid “the slippery slope of ‘power and expediency,’” which once pursued, was rarely repudiated.271 Statesmen must promote morality, Adams maintained, by modeling upright conduct and passing prudent laws. He complained that the “intrigue and trickery” infecting the nation’s elections and legislative bodies was tarnishing America’s moral image.272 Adams entreated God, “above all, that ‘till I die, I may not suffer my integrity to depart from me . . . .”273 Like Jefferson (and Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson after him), he insisted that the same code of ethics governed nations and individuals. This conviction was consistent with Puritan principles and belief that the American Revolution initiated a novus ordo seclorum—a new world order. Responding to naval hero Stephen Decatur’s famous toast in 1816, “My country right or wrong,” Adams wrote his father, “I cannot ask of Heaven success even for my country in a cause where she should be in the wrong . . . . I declaim as unsound all patriotism incompatible with the principles of eternal justice.”274

Adams was not always able to abide by his high moral standards, however, especially while secretary of state and during his two presidential campaigns. As secretary of state, he became “embroiled in an ethical quagmire” that sometimes seemed to pit patriotism against the principles of eternal justice as he pursued policies designed to maximize American interests “in which the ends controlled, rather than justified, the means.” Using persuasion, obfuscation, and intimidation, he promoted what he deemed the national good, even defending the questionable use of military force against Indians in Florida. He deliberately “distorted, dissembled and lied about the goals and conduct of American foreign policy to both the Congress and the public,” William Weeks contends, “so that a slave labor–based society he loathed could expand into the Floridas.” In a letter to Spanish leaders designed to defend the American position in the courts of Europe, Adams justified Andrew Jackson’s actions in Florida, implicitly supporting “Indian removal, slavery, and the use of military force without congressional approval—all of which,” as a congressman, he later opposed.275

As a candidate for the presidency he displayed a “scrupulous above-the-fray” perspective that did not reflect his true feelings or deal effectively with the political realities of his era. Adams insisted that the presidency should go to those who were “the most able and most worthy,” “not to those with the most friends in the Congress and the press.”276 He denounced obtaining an office by making promises to political supporters as “essentially and vitally corrupt.”277 Adams did not actively campaign for the presidency in the general election of 1824. The New Englander expected to be chosen president on the basis of his abilities, achievements, and character; he believed the nation should reward virtue, sacrifice, and service. To graciously concede the presidency to Jackson, whom Jefferson labeled a “dangerous man,” was more than Adams, “symbolically the most principled individual in the history of American politics,” could handle. “In his mind, he faced an agonizing choice between preserving his personal integrity and preserving the nation to which he had dedicated his life.” Consequently, in the two months

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preceding the House of Representatives’ vote to determine the president in February 1825, he engaged in “shameless politicking” as he visited congressional boardinghouses and used the “classic art of political horsetrading.”278 Samuel Flagg Bemis argues that the “implicit but certainly not corrupt bargain” between Adams and Clay was “the least questionable of the several deals” Adams made to secure his election.279 His actions prompted a Jacksonian newspaper to sarcastically declare, “Expired at Washington on the ninth of February, of poison administered by the assassin hands of John Quincy Adams . . . the virtue, liberty, and independence of the United States.”280 Ironically, Adams, who during his entire public life had tried to prevent factionalism in American politics, contributed significantly to “the rise of the second American party system” by his unwavering determination to become president.281

Although Adams’ presidency was largely devoid of scandal, the election of 1828 featured vicious attacks against both Adams and Jackson by partisan newspapers. Some newspapers reported a story that when the Adams were living in St. Petersburg, they had proposed that Emperor Alexander use Louisa’s maid to satisfy his sexual desires. The president was lambasted as a “pimp, gambler, and spendthrift,” all of which were patently false. Adams countered that Jackson was “incompetent” because of “his ignorance and the fury of his passions.”282 Meanwhile, his supporters circulated a story that Jackson and his wife Rachel had committed adultery before she divorced her first husband, which the president did nothing to stop. Jackson blamed Adams personally for this defamation, which he believed contributed to Rachel’s premature death shortly after the election.283

Stricken immediately after casting a vote in the House of Representatives in February 1848, Adams died two days later. As he lay dying, the House and Senate adjourned and congressmen prayed and waited. The dramatic death of the nation’s senior statesman mesmerized Americans. Both the manner of his death and his composure impressed his contemporaries. Very appropriately, the venerable leader had died as a soldier at his post, a sentinel doing his duty, “with his harness on.” Some thought his last words were “It is the last of earth. I am content.” Others thought he said, “This is the end of earth, but I am composed.”284 To his countrymen, both reported statements expressed Adams’ readiness to meet his Maker.

Only Washington’s death had evoked so much effusive praise and widespread pathos. “One of the first ‘media events’ in American history” thanks to the invention of the telegraph in 1844, his death provided a platform for proclaiming “the purity and moral superiority of the American political and social system,” lamenting America’s alleged religious decline, and celebrating the religious and cultural superiority of Whig over Democratic Party values. Northern clergy and politicians used Adams’ death to reaffirm “both Puritan religion and Yankee culture,” which they judged “to be under attack.” His reputation as an aged warrior, as the remaining link with the founders, as “Old Man Eloquent” struck down while serving his country in the House he loved, fascinated many of his contemporaries. Although he was not a popular president, his long career as a diplomat and chief executive, coupled with his courageous stands as a congressman, made the New Englander a heroic figure in death. Adams had not dominated an era the way Washington, Jefferson, or Jackson had, but he had been in the limelight for four decades and was closely identified with much of the United States’ history as an independent nation. The telegraph enabled Americans to read about his exploits and mourn his passing together. Thousands viewed his glass-covered coffin in the House of Representatives, and hundreds of thousands saw it at the stops his train made in Baltimore, Philadelphia, several New Jersey towns, New York City, Springfield, and Boston on its way to Quincy.285

During the two and one-half weeks between Adams’ death and burial, hundreds of eulogies, tributes, and funeral sermons were delivered, most of which accentuated the same themes. Some concluded that Adams’ death had evoked more sermons than any other event since the demise of the nation’s first president. The many newspaper accounts and the public viewing of his body etched Adams’ death more deeply into American minds than even the simultaneous passing of Adams’ father and Thomas Jefferson on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of

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Independence. In an effort to rebut foreign criticisms of American materialism, immorality, and lack of culture, Adams was lauded as the “intellectual equal and moral superior of the Old World’s Chesterfields, Richelieus, Talleyrands, and Metternichs.”286 Many eulogists, most of whom were northern Congregationalist or Unitarian ministers, praised Adams as a “Christian Statesman” or a “Christian Patriot,” a man of wisdom, integrity, and Christian character.287 They commended his frequent profession of Christianity, his regular use of biblical metaphors and stories in his speeches, his habitual church attendance, and his service to religious groups such as the American Bible Society. Adams’ letters to his son on the study of the Bible were widely reprinted and quoted. While depicting Adams as “intelligently, habitually, [and] consistently religious” and “free from any sectarian bias,” eulogists not surprisingly disagreed about his doctrinal commitments.288 At the same time, many ministers used their eulogies to deplore the nation’s moral and spiritual declension and to call for renewal and reformation and insisted that the best way to combat the rising tide of religious indifference and secularism was to support the Whig Party to which Adams belonged as a congressman.289

Funeral sermons typically lauded Adams’ character, integrity, and sense of duty. “Like Washington, his personal character,” insisted a Unitarian minister from Philadelphia, “was stainless, above reproach and above suspicion.” A Boston Universalist clergyman praised Adams’ “inflexible adherence to principle,” “steadfast integrity,” and “independent boldness.”290 At the First Parish Church in Quincy where the Adams family had worshiped for more than 200 years, pastor William Lunt preached a funeral sermon based on Revelation 2:10: “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.” Adams, Lunn argued, epitomized the scriptural definition of a good magistrate: “‘a minister of God for good’ to his native land.” He sought to base public policies on “the standard of Christian right, of justice, of absolute truth, of God’s law.”291 Congregationalist pastor Stedman Hanks extolled Adams as “a great and good ruler” who was both intellectually and morally great. Another Boston area minister, Joseph Allen, emphasized his “devotion to the cause of liberty and right and “his spirit of a genuine Christian love.” In moral courage, New York Whig William Seward argued, he excelled his model Cicero and rivaled Cato.292

Despite his long and varied public career, Adams has not obtained the historical rank his admirers in 1848 expected he would.293 Yet some diplomatic historians rate Adams as America’s greatest secretary of state. His policies and treaties insured peace, reduced future tensions, and helped the United States expand across the continent and enlarge its international trade.294 Adams devised policies that “peacefully resolved” or at least “postponed potentially explosive conflicts with Great Britain, Spain, Russia, and France.”295 These diplomatic successes resulted from his personal qualities, extensive knowledge, and vast practical experience and from his ability to take advantage of the new republic’s favorable position in world geography and global politics. Bemis argues that Adams played the major role in “defining, defending, and sustaining American foreign policy” in the first half-century of independence. Moreover, Adams articulated principles that directed American foreign policy for the next century after his death. He emphasized freedom of commerce and navigation, non-involvement in European affairs, continental expansion, self-determination of peoples, and Pan-Americanism and called for ending European colonization of the New World, suppressing the African slave trade, and using international arbitration to settle boundary disputes.296 Although the United States should be an example to the world of morality and republicanism, Adams maintained, it had no obligation to directly assist nations in South America or Europe in their fight for independence. Unlike some of his successors, Adams refused to aid such countries because he believed it would jeopardize America’s national interests.297

Adams had less impact on the nation as president. Many scholars contend that he had one of the least successful presidencies in the nation’s history. Like James Truslow Adams, many describe his presidency as lackluster, see him as “a foil for the more charismatic Andrew Jackson,” and attribute his failures to personal and regional characteristics. His presidency was

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“a four years’ martyrdom.” Like his father, he was a one-term chief executive, whose hopes for impressive achievements were dashed by political opponents. He failed to persuade Congress or the American public to empower the federal government to improve the nation’s transportation network, public education system, or scientific endeavors. His belief in the importance of science was treated with “laughter and scorn”; he witnessed western lands, the heritage of the nation, “plundered and pillaged to satisfy the greed of individuals”; and he saw Americans choose a man “he considered utterly uneducated” over himself. The manner of his selection as president tarnished his claim to moral leadership and helped produce a Congress that stymied his “farsighted plans for national unity and development.”298 Several other factors thwarted Adams’ ability “to govern by balancing political necessity and moral principle”: he lacked a political base, his political philosophy conflicted with the democratic impulses of the era, and the widening franchise made reasoned arguments less persuasive in the political arena.299

Some historians, however, portray Adams’ presidency more positively. Repudiating the frequent contention that Adams’ “stiff-necked ethical sense” and political ineptitude made his presidency ineffective, Mary Hargreaves praises him for pursing the good of the whole nation rather than personal, local, and regional interests.300 Samuel Flagg Bemis maintains that Adams, not Henry Clay, was the true father of the American System. By advocating a protective tariff, a more extensive system of roads, canals, and railroads, scientific and educational advancement, wise distribution of public lands, and prudent financial policies, Adams sought to make the nation more united, stable, prosperous, and powerful.301 George Lipsky argues that Adams’ fervent nationalism, emphasis on a strong, positive role for government, belief that moral laws governed international relations, and commitment to natural law was unique among the American leaders of his era. His social and political ideas had only a limited impact on his age because he never presented them in a systematic way, because of his austere and sardonic personality, and because some of his ideas were outdated while others were ahead of his time.302

Brooks Adams argued that his grandfather repudiated Christianity and died an agnostic, “convinced that no God who had permitted Andrew Jackson to triumph, the public lands to be plundered, slavery to expand, and half of Mexico to be conquered by the United States, could be counted on to exist.”303 The evidence indicates just the opposite: while Adams’ faith in the union sometimes faltered, his faith in God grew stronger in his later years.304 As Marie Hecht contends, Brooks Adams’ much quoted remarks that his grandfather’s presidency was “the tragedy” of his life because it made him doubt “whether there were a God and whether this life had a purpose” is incorrect. On the contrary, “Adams seemed to rely more and more heavily on divine guidance” as the world seemed to turn against him.305 Bemis’ conclusion rings true: Adams went through life “doubting and believing: doubtful on points of doctrine that had mystified men for centuries, convinced of the existence of God and the blessings of Divine Providence, hopeful about an after-life, looking to the example of Jesus Christ and the simple Christian ethic . . . .”306 Although Adams never realized his ambition to contribute significantly to the worlds of literature, science, or philosophy, Paul Nagel argues, his “stubborn courage in denouncing slavery and censorship” elicited “the gratitude and admiration of his country.” It was not his poetry or support of science, but his battle against the gag rule and defense of Africans in the Amistad case that gave the aged Adams the applause he craved and thanks he merited.307 The titles widely applied to Adams during his congressional years—Old Man Eloquent and Man of the Whole Nation—are richly deserved. Arguably no American has been more devoted to serving his nation, has spent more time doing it, or did more to advance its welfare. Adams wrote in one of his poems:

Behold the lettered sage devote The labors of his mind,

His country’s welfare to promote, And benefit mankind.308

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If we add the labors of statecraft to those of the mind, this stanza provides a fitting epitaph for America’s sixth president. 1 John Quincy Adams, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams: Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848 (hereafter Memoirs), 12 vols., Charles Francis Adams, ed. (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969),7: 27-29, June 13, 1825; first and third quotations from 28; second from 29. See also Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 309-10. 2 Quotations from William Weeks, John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 9. 3 Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union (Norwalk, CT: The Easton Press, 1987), 3-4. 4 Weeks, John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire 1. On Adams’ life, see also Robert A. East, John Quincy Adams: The Critical Years, 1785-1794 (New York: Bookman Associates, 1962). 5 National Intelligencer 49, Feb. 24 and 26, 1848. 6 Adams, Memoirs 2:452, Mar. 17, 1813. Adams was specifically discussing motives for fasting, but given his religious convictions as explicated in this chapter, it is appropriate to apply this statement generally. 7 Adams, Memoirs 7: 20, May 31, 1825. Adams had in mind Hebrews 6: 19: “which hope we have as an anchor to the soul, sure and steadfast.” He disliked the proposed design, which incorporated “too much heathen mythology” for his taste. Only about half of Adams’ diary has been published. The rest is on microfilm in The Adams Papers: Diary of John Quincy Adams (hereafter Diary), part of Adams Family Papers, at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. 8 E. H. Chapin, The Truly Great: A Discourse, Appropriate to the Life and Character of John Quincy Adams (Boston: A. Thompkin, 1848), 11, 15-16. Cf. Richard S. Storrs, An Address . . . on the Occasion of the Inauguration of John Quincy Adams . . . March 4, 1825 (Boston: Monroe and Francis, 1825), 18-19; Joseph Henry Allen, The Statesman and the Man: A Discourse on the Occasion of the Death of the Hon. John Quincy Adams (Washington: J. and G. S. Gideon, 1848), 16-17; Joshua Bates, A Discourse on the Character, Public Services and Death of John Quincy Adams (Worcester, MA, 1848), 18-19; R. C. Waterston, Discourse on the Life and Character of John Quincy Adams . . . (Boston: William D. Ticknor and Co., 1848), 16-22; “Notice of Recent Publications,” 1848, 470-73. 9 Theodore Parker, A Discourse Occasioned by the Death of John Quincy Adams (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1848), 45. Parker declared that Adams “loved the praise of God more than the praise of men” (46). 10 E.g., A. A. Livermore, The Ancient and Honorable Man: A Discourse Preached on the Occasion of the Death of Hon. John Quincy Adams (Keane, NH: J. W. Prentice and Co., 1848), 16. 11 Richard S. Storrs, God Determines the Rise and Fall of Princes: A Discourse . . . on the Occasion of the Death of Hon. John Quincy Adams (Boston: Press of T. R. Martin, 1848), 16. 12 Token of a Nation’s Sorrow; Addresses in the Congress of the United States and Funeral Solemnities on the Death of John Quincy Adams. . . (Washington: J and G. S. Gideon, 1848), 12. Hudson added, “To that end he was publicly dedicated on the second day of his earthly existence, and throughout his long life he manifested a firm belief in Divine revelation and a calm trust in that Being who rules among the nations . . . .” 13 George A. Lipsky, John Quincy Adams: His Theory and Ideas (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1950), 75. 14 Weeks, John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire, 11, 16-17; first quotations from 11, second and third from 17. Weeks rejects the idea that “Adams’ pious conception of his ‘destiny’” was merely a cloak for his personal ambition. His financial records and diary clearly reveal that “he received little profit and even less joy from his long years of public service” (17). In addition to the books of Lipsky and Weeks, the studies of Samuel Flagg Bemis and Paul C. Nagel listed in other notes discuss Adams’ faith at some length. Also helpful is Boardman W. Kathan, “The Spiritual Growth, Religious Beliefs and Church Affiliation of John Quincy Adams,” Prism: A Theological Journal of the United Church of Christ 16 (Spring 2001), 22-33. 15 See David Lee Thibault, “The Religious-Political Mindset of John Quincy Adams,” M. A. Thesis, California State University, Fullerton, 1988, 34 and passim. Thibault called my attention to a number of selections in Adams’ Memoirs and his letters on religious topics.

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16 Adams, Memoirs 3: 501, Apr. 16, 1817; 5: 129, May 22, 1820; 6: 503, Feb. 9, 1825, quotations in that order. Upon hearing that his son had been chosen president, John Adams wrote, “May the blessing of God Almighty continue to protect you to the end of your life, as it has heretofore protected you in so remarkable a manner from your cradle!” See JA to JQA, Feb. 1825, in Adrienne Koch and William Peden, eds., The Selected Writings of John and John Quincy Adams (hereafter Selected Writings) (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981 [1946]), 218. 17 Paul C. Nagel, The Adams Women: Abigail and Louise Adams, Their Sisters and Daughters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Marie B. Hecht, John Quincy Adams: A Personal History of an Independent Man (New York: Macmillan Co., 1972); Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union. Chapter titles are in that order. 18 Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (Norwalk, CT: The Easton Press, 1987), ix. 19 Jack Shepherd, Cannibals of the Heart: A Personal Biography of Louisa Catherine Adams and John Quincy Adams (New York: McGraw Hill, 1980), 16-17. 20 AA to JQA, Nov. 1783, in Abigail Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, Wife of John Adams, 2 vols., Charles Francis Adams, ed. (Boston, 1840), 1:191. 21 Quoted in Paul C. Nagel, Descent from Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 53. 22 C. Bradley Thompson makes this case convincingly in John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 3-23, quotations from 5 and 10. For the Adams quotation, see JA to Samuel Quincy, Apr. 22, 1761, in Robert L. Taylor et al., eds., Papers of John Adams, 11 vols. (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 1977), 1: 48-50. Thompson argues compellingly that scholars who depict Adams as a Puritan or Calvinist because of his use of Puritan themes such as sin, self-examination, self-mastery, and the quest for salvation in his diary and his alleged Calvinist view of human nature and sin are mistaken. See Paul K. Conklin, Puritans and Pragmatists: Eight Eminent American Thinkers (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1968), 109; John P. Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 55; Edmund Morgan, “John Adams and the Puritan Tradition,” New England Quarterly 34 (Dec. 1961), 518-29: Bernard Bailyn, “Butterfield’s Adams: Notes for a Sketch,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 19 (Apr. 1962), 238-56; Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 23-24, 40, 65, 211-12; Joseph J. Ellis, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 48, 52-53; and Page Smith, John Adams, 2 vols. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), 1: 262, 4: 234. Thompson shows that Adams’ understanding of these issues was markedly different than that of the Puritans. Influenced by the works of Locke, Adams concluded that the Bible fortified, but was not the primary source, of moral truth and that people, despite their weaknesses, were rational beings who could derive “standards of moral obligation and virtuous behavior from observation of the external world and of the operations” of their own minds (18). Yet Adams did conclude that Christianity, above all other religions, ancient or modern, was “the religion of wisdom, virtue, equity, and humanity” (quoted in Smith, John Adams, 2: 896). Adams wrote Benjamin Rush in 1806 that the Bible contained “the most perfect philosophy, the most perfect morality, and the most refined policy”; following its commandments would preserve a republic (JA to Rush, Sept 23, 1806; Feb. 2, 1807, in Adams Papers Microfilm, Massachusetts Historical Society, quotation from first letter). 23 JA to Benjamin Rush, Aug. 28, 1811, in Selected Writings, 161. 24 Adams was much more concerned about virtue than piety. The true purpose of Christianity was not to make people “good Riddle Solvers” as Calvinists allegedly emphasized, but to make “good men, good magistrates and good Subjects, good Husbands and good Wives, good parents and good Children, good masters and good servants.” See L. H. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols.. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 1:8. In 1816 he told Thomas Jefferson that “Be just and do good” summarized his moral and religious creed. JA to Jefferson, Dec. 12, 1816, in Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 2: 499. While Adams saw little value in Christian creeds or theology, he believed Christianity encouraged sound morality and thus helped preserve the political order. John Quincy was influenced by his father’s emphasis on the importance of virtue to a republic and on loving one’s neighbor as oneself, but his personal views were much more orthodox than his father and he was much more interested in and moved by worship, prayer, and other aspects of Christian piety.

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25 JA to Benjamin Rush, Aug. 28, 1811, in Selected Writings, 161. 26 Nagel, Descent from Glory, 7. 27 See Charles W. Akers, Abigail Adams: An American Woman (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1980), 126-28; Phyllis Lee Levin, Abigail Adams (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 5-6, 119, 179-81, 390, 443, 450, 454-55, 474; Nagel, The Adams Women, 74-75; Nagel, Descent from Glory, 20, 28-31, 80-81; Edith B. Gelles, Portia: The World of Abigail Adams (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 14, 22, 71, 129, 137-39, 147, 153. 166, 168, 168-69, 173, 205; and Clare Hodgson Meeker, Partner in Revolution: Abigail Adams (New York: Benchmark Books, 1998). 28 See JA to AA, June 29 and Aug. 28, 1774 and July 17, 1775 in the L. H. Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Correspondence, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963-93), 1:113-14, 145, 252; Louis Albert Banks, The Religious Life of Famous Americans (New York: American Tract Society, 1904), 199-208. 29 AA to JQA, June 1778, in Abigail Adams Letters, 1:123. 30 AA to JQA, Mar. 20, 1780, in Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, 1: 113. “Every new mercy you receive,” she added, “is . . . a new obligation to a diligent discharge” of your duties, first to “your great Preserver,” then to society, your country, your parents, and yourself. 31 AA to JQA, Mar. 20, 1780, in Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, 1: 113. 32 Brooks Adams, “Introductory Note,” in Henry Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (New York: Macmillan Co., 1919), vi. 33 Quoted in Shepherd, Cannibals of the Heart, 32. 34 Weeks, John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire, 10, 14. 35 JQA to AA, Feb. 8, 1810, in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Writings of John Quincy Adams (hereafter Writings), 7 vols. (New York: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1968), 3: 393-94. 36 Parsons, John Quincy Adams, 105. Several of Parsons’ assertions about Adams’ religion are questionable. She claims that he seldom mentioned religious or theological issues in his diary before 1803, but it is filled with comments on religious matters, although he does not analyze religious issues nearly as substantively as he does after that date. See David Grayson Allen et al., eds., Diary of John Quincy Adams, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Her contention that Adams “approached the Scriptures, not as the Word of God, but as divinely inspired literature” is also dubious. Ample evidence indicates that Adams viewed the Bible as God’s unique revelation to humanity. Finally, she labels Adams “one of the leading Biblical scholars of early nineteenth-century America.” Although Adams read broadly in religious literature and commented extensively on theological issues, he remained an amateur theologian at best. He was not in the same league as biblical and theological scholars such as Charles Hodge, Archibald Alexander, Bennet Tyler, Nathaniel William Taylor, Nathanael Emmons, Henry B. Smith, James H. Thornwell, or numerous others. 37 Adams, Memoirs 11: 340, Mar. 19, 1843. 38 Since residing in Washington, Adams confessed in October 1819, he had not regularly attended any church. Thereafter, Adams attended very faithfully. See Adams, Memoirs 4: 425, Oct. 24, 1819. 39 Adams, Memoirs 11: 341, Mar. 19, 1843. He considered it one of his public duties to attend these Sunday services in the Hall of the House of Representatives (Memoirs 11: 169, June 5, 1842). Robert Little, an English Unitarian, organized the All Souls’ Church in 1821 and pastored it until his sudden death in 1827. Adams, along with twenty-six others, helped found the congregation. Other attendees in the years from 1821 until 1848 included Supreme Court justices John Marshall and Joseph Story, President Millard Fillmore, historian George Bancroft, and Senators Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Edward Everett, and Charles Sumner. See Laurence C. Staples, Washington Unitarianism: A Rich Heritage (Washington, D.C., n. p., 1970); and George Willis Cooke, Unitarianism in America: A History of Its Origin and Development (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1902), 119, 376, 380. On the origins of Unitarianism in the United States, also see David Robinson, The Unitarians and Universalists (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1885), 9-38. See also Wilhelmus Bogart Bryan, A History of the National Capital . . . , 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1914-16), 2: 181-85. 40 Parker, A Discourse, 45. Adams wrote that not one of the churches in Washington was “of the Independent Congregational class to which I belong, the church to which I was bred, and in which I shall die” (Memoirs 4: 425, Oct. 24, 1819). 41 Adams, Memoirs 11: 341.

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42 Adams, Memoirs 7: 147-49, Sept. 13, 1826. “It is right that I should make a public profession of my faith and hope as a Christian, and no time can be better than now, immediately after the death of my father, and before my retirement from the public service . . . ” (147-48). After joining the church that morning, Adams took communion for the first time in his life. The First Parish Church in Quincy, also called the First Congregationalist Church and Society, should probably be considered a Unitarian church by 1825 when Adams joined. Cooke lists it as one of the 125 congregations that had associated with the Unitarian faith by 1825 (Unitarianism in America). Moreover, in 1835 William Lunt became a co-pastor of this church. He had previously been the pastor of the Second Unitarian Church and Society in New York City, was listed as a clergy member of the American Unitarian Association, which was organized in 1825, and wrote several tracts defending Unitarian beliefs. See Kathan, “The Spiritual Growth, Religious Beliefs and Church Affiliation of John Quincy Adams,” 32 and Adams, Memoirs 9: 239, June 3, 1835. During the ensuing years, Adams developed a close relationship with Lunt and discussed many theological issues with him. 43 Quotation from Adams, Memoirs 7: 147. See also Dean Grodzins, American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 88. 44 John Quincy Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, 2 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962 [Cambridge: Hilliard and Metcalf, 1810]), 1: 326-27, quotations from 327. 45 First two quotations from Adams, Memoirs 7: 376, Dec. 9, 1827; third quotation from Adams, Memoirs 9: 543, May 27, 1838. Shortly after his son Charles Francis married, Adams wrote him in January 1830 that “attendance upon public worship is an obligation of deep morality to every husband and father” (JQA to CFA, Jan. 25, 1830, in Adams Family Papers). See also R.R. Gurley, “Discourse at the Funeral of John Quincy Adams,” in Token of a Nation’s Sorrow, 38. 46 Allen, The Statesman and the Man, 5-6. 47 Adams disliked sermons that focused more on style than substance. He complained that a minister’s “eloquence reminds me . . . of the froth of spruce beer, exceedingly pleasant to the taste, but. . . mere gas, without substance and without permanent effect” (Memoirs 11: 69, Jan. 23, 1842). 48 Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, 1: 323-24, 336-37, 338, first quotation from 323, second from 338. 49 Adams had the opportunity to listen to both black and female preachers. In February 1827 he heard a black preacher at St. John’s Episcopal Church. His sermon was “rambling in argument, not below mediocrity in composition, and quite upon a level with the average Sunday discourses from white preachers.” The following March the president heard Elizabeth Robson, a Quaker from England, preach in the Hall of the House of Representatives. In an earnest, affectionate manner, she spoke for an hour on Ephesians 5:1-2, mainly stringing together a succession of passages from Paul’s epistles she had memorized. See Adams, Memoirs 7: 471, Mar. 9, 1828. 50 W. H. Seward, “John Quincy Adams,” Boston Recorder, 1848 in Edward J. Giddings, comp., American Christian Rulers or Religion and Men of Government (New York: Bromfield and Co., 1889), 12. 51 See, for example, Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams, with An Appendix Containing the Letters Addressed by John Q. Adams to His Son on the Study of the Bible (Boston: Wilkins, Carter and Co., 1848), 428. 52 Edward Everett, A Eulogy on the Life and Character of John Quincy Adams (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1848), 66; G. F. Disoway, “John Quincy Adams,” The Ladies Repository 10 (Feb. 1850), 54; quotations in that order. 53 He observed that many passages that were “obscure and even unintelligible” to him in English “were clear in French and German,” but he thought “the eloquence of St. Paul” was “more elevated and sublime” in English than in the other languages (Memoirs 2: 351-52, Mar. 13, 1812). Livermore claimed that Adams read the common English Bible, Thomson’s translation of the Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, Calvin’s French translation, the Catholic translation in French, Luther’s German translation, and the Greek New Testament (Ancient and Honorable Man, 11). See also JQA to JA, Jan. 3, 1817, in Selected Writings, 292. “The more I read the Bible,” Adams wrote, “the more I feel it ought to be accompanied with critical and explanatory notes” (Memoirs 2: 352, Mar. 13, 1812). He used Scott’s Bible and Commentary and Hewlett’s Commentary to help him understand the Bible (Memoirs 6: 539, Apr. 30, 1825). 54 Adams, Memoirs 8: 89, Jan. 1, 1829. 55 John Quincy Adams, 1844 address to the American Bible Society, in Samuel H. Cox, Interviews: Memorable and Useful; From Diary and Memory Reproduced (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853),

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271. In a poem Adams wrote, “The book of sacred inspiration/ Yields to my bosom in distress/ Both fortitude and consolation” (Memoirs 1: 456, Feb. 15, 1807). 56 For example, Adams bemoaned that although he had read the fifth Isaiah chapter fifty times, he “had never perceived a fiftieth part of its beauty and sublimity” (Memoirs 7: 169, Nov. 5, 1826). 57 Adams was unable to attend the society’s annual meetings, but he always sent cordial messages praising its work and offering suggestions and advice. See John M. Gibson, Soldiers of the Word: The Story of the American Bible Society (New York: Philosophical Library, 1858), 69, 107. 58 Adams, Memoirs 2: 334, Jan. 12, 1812. 59 Christian Register 17, 190, as cited by Livermore, Ancient and Honorable Man, 13-14. 60 In appreciation of his defense of their cause before the Supreme Court in the Amistad case, some Mendi sent Adams a Bible and asked him when he read it to remember his “grateful clients” (Cinque, Kinna, and Ka-le to JQA, Nov. 6, 1841, in Seward, “John Quincy Adams,” 11). Adams replied that he would keep the Bible as a kind remembrance the rest of his life. “May the Almighty Power who has preserved and sustained you hitherto, still go with you . . .” (JQA to Mendi, Nov. 18, 1841 in ibid.). 61 Hecht, John Quincy Adams, 454. In 1844 Adams sent his daughter-in-law Abby and his granddaughter Mary Louisa rings with this same motto and his wife Louisa a signet ring displaying a lion carrying a cross (Nagel, Descent from Glory, 195). See also Adams, Memoirs 7: 243, Mar. 20, 1827: Jesus taught his disciples to “pray as well as watch, and he used the cock as a monitor to recall to duty the faithful disciple who denied him at the crisis of his fate.” The sonnet is on p. 244. 62 Quoted in Seward, “John Quincy Adams,” 9. 63 In addition to hearing two sermons most weeks, Adams also read collections of sermons such as those of Anglicans John Tillotson (1630-94), archbishop of Canterbury, Laurence Sterne (1713-68), and bishops Francis Atterbury (1663-1732) and Samuel Horsley (1733-1806); and French Catholic bishops Jacques Bossuet (1627-1704) and Jean Bapiste Massillon (1663-1742) (Josiah Quincy, Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams [Boston, Phillips, Sampson and Co., 1859], 52). He also read various sermons in the English Preacher, and was especially moved by Atterbury’s sermon on anxiety, noting that he was too prone to worry (Memoirs 2: 379, June 21, 1812; 2: 388, July 12, 1812). 64 Adams, Letters on the Study of the Bible, 428, 472, 440; first quotations from 428; last two from 440. 65 Ibid., 431, 440, 430, 432, 472; first quotation from 431, second from 430. 66 Ibid., 435, 465, 467. “The sum of Christian morality,” Adams added, “consisted of “piety to God, and benevolence to man” (462); first quotation from 435, next four quotations from 465, last three from 467. 67 Contemplating this tragedy and the beginning of a new century, Adams wrote, “I passed the period of transition between the two centuries in communion with my own soul and in prostration to this being who directs the universe, with thanksgiving for his numerous blessings in the past time and with prayers for a mind to bear whatsoever the future dispensations of his Providence may be, in such a manner as may be most conformable to his will.” See Adams, Diary (Microfilm reel #28), Dec. 31, 1800. 68 Nagel argues that until this point, Adams, although somewhat regularly attending church, reading the Bible and engaging in theological reflection, “had shown no special enthusiasm for spiritual faith and worship” (John Quincy Adams, 124). 69 JQA to AA, Apr. 23, 1817, in Ford, ed., Writings 7: 270. 70 Adams, Memoirs 6: 46, July 26, 1822; 6: 518-5, Mar. 4, 1825; 8: 149, Apr. 30, 1829, quotations in that order. 71 E.g., Memoirs 7: 149, Sept. 13, 1826; William P. Lunt, A Discourse Delivered in Quincy, March 11, 1848, at the Interment of John Quincy Adams (Boston: C.C. Little and J. Brown, 1848), 11. 72 The first quotation is from Nagel, John Quincy Adams, 306; the second is from Hecht, John Quincy Adams, 449. 73 Quoted in Nagel, John Quincy Adams, 405. Adams was reflecting on Ps. 71:18. 74 Lunt, A Discourse Delivered in Quincy, 37. 75 Adams, Memoirs 7: 53-54, Nov. 15-16, 1825, quotations from 54. 76 Lunt, A Discourse Delivered in Quincy, 11. 77 John Quincy Adams, Poems of Religion and Society (Buffalo, NY: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1854). Many of these poems are paraphrases of the Psalms. Most of them focus on the power, justice, goodness, mercy, and love of God. They express Adams’ deep sense of piety, reverence, and worship. Christ is rarely mentioned.

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78 Livermore, Ancient and Honorable Man, 11. In 1845 when the Unitarian Church in Quincy sang one of his hymns based on Psalm 65, Adams was profoundly moved. “No words can express the sensations with which I heard it sung. Were it possible to compress into one pulsation of the heart the pleasure which, in the whole period of my life, I have enjoyed in praise from the lips of mortal man, it would not weigh a straw to balance the ecstasy of delight” he felt as “the organ pealed and the choir of voices sung the praise of Almighty God from the soul of David,” he adapted to English (Adams, Memoirs 12: 201, June 29, 1845). 79 See Seward, “John Q. Adams,” 10; Stedman W. Hanks, Sermon on the Occasion of the Death of John Quincy Adams (Lowell, MA: W. H. Waldron, 1848), 20; Bates, A Discourse, 18. 80 Adams, 1844 address to American Bible Society, 272. 81 Adams, Memoirs 11: 341, Mar. 19, 1843. 82 John Quincy Adams, A Discourse on Education . . . (Boston: Perkins and Marvin, 1840), 17. 83 Adams, Letters on the Study of the Bible, 432. 84 Adams, “Lord of All Worlds,” Poems of Religion and Society, 92-93. 85 JQA to Thomas Boylston Adams, Aug. 7, 1809, in Ford, ed., Writings 2: 354-55. 86 Adams, Memoirs 3: 127, Dec. 24, 1814. 87 JQA to AA, Mar. 12, 1814, in Ford, ed., Writings 5: 42. 88 Adams, Memoirs 4: 275, Feb. 22, 1819. Calling it “perhaps, the most important day of my life,” Adams expressed his “fervent gratitude to the Giver of all good.” Only the “all-wise and all-beneficent Disposer of events” who had “brought it about in a manner utterly unexpected and by means the most extraordinary and unforeseen” knew what the consequences of the treaty would be, but its prospects were propitious (274). 89 John Quincy Adams, “Inaugural Address,” Mar. 4, 1825, in James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages of and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897, 10 vols. (New York: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1901-6 [1896-99]), 2: 865. 90 John Quincy Adams, “First Annual Message,” Dec. 6, 1825, in Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers, 3: 865. 91 Adams, Memoirs 7: 176, Nov. 12, 1826. 92 John Quincy Adams, “Society and Civilization,” The American Whig Review 2 (July 1845), 88. 93 Quoted in Nagel, John Quincy Adams, 261. Adams had earlier professed difficulty believing in the biblical account of creation “with any distinctiveness” (Memoirs 2: 463, Apr. 18, 1813). 94 Nagel, Descent from Glory, 184. 95 Adams, however, protested the practice in Catholic countries where a Christian could not be a reasoner, only a believer. He could not examine and scrutinize but only give “implicit and unhesitating assent.” The Bible was held to be a mystery “above his understanding” and his creed was never “submitted to the decision of his judgment.” Protestant denominations, by contrast, admitted “no infallible rule of faith other than the scriptures” (Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, 333). 96 Adams, Memoirs 2: 357, Apr. 12, 1812. 97 Adams, Letters on the Study of the Bible, 439. At Harvard, Adams roomed with Henry Ware, who was later a professor at their alma mater and a leader in the schism within Congregationalism that produced Unitarianism. When controversy raged between the two groups in 1815, Adams concluded that Calvinist Samuel Thacher had defeated William Ellery Channing in a debate over the doctrine of the Trinity. See William Ellery Channing, A Letter to Rev. Samuel C. Thacher. . . (Boston : Wells and Lilly, 1815); and Charles A. Howe, “John Quincy Adams,” http//www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/johnquincyadams.html 98 Yet Adams wrote to his mother in 1815, “If I must choose between . . . the belief that Christ was a mere man” or proclaim him the Son of God, “I have no hesitation in making my choice” (JQA to AA, Dec. 5, 1815, in Ford, ed., Writings 5: 432). Although he could not fully believe that the Bible taught the Athanasian Trinity, Adams added, the texts declaring Christ to be God were “too numerous,” from too diverse parts of Scripture, connected by too strong a chain of argument, and contained too “direct and irresistible inferences” to accept the explanations Unitarians offered of them or the evasions others used to escape them. Jesus allowed his disciples to call him God; two apostles “expressly and repeatedly” declared him to be the Creator of the world; and Isaiah called him “the mighty God” (432-33). 99 JQA to JA, Jan. 3, 1817, in Ford, ed., Writings 6: 135-36. His father had cautioned him against “commencing to be the champion of orthodoxy, without first reading” more than would consume all his leisure time. “If after sixty years of assiduous study and profound meditation,” his father had “only come to the result of trusting the Ruler with his skies, and adhering to the sermon on the mount, I may be

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permitted to adopt the same conclusion by a shorter and more compendious process.” He agreed with his father that people should not dogmatize, but he insisted it was proper to hold opinions about religious matters (134). The previous year Adams wrote to his father, “And the catholic faith is THIS: that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity,. . .—in short the creed of Saint Athanasius; which . . . the eighth article of the English Church says, may be proved by certain warrants of Holy Scripture. Now I have many doubts about the Athanasian Creed; but if I read much more controversy about it, I shall finish by faithfully believing it . . . . If the Bible is a moral tale, there is no believing in the Trinity. But it is the rule of faith—.” JQA to JA, Jan. 5, 1816, Ford, ed., Writings 5: 459. Although his father did not believe in the Athanasian creed or other “doctrines usually called Calvinistic,” John Quincy insisted in 1831, his father “was a firm believer in Christianity” (Memoirs 8: 414). 100 Cox, Interviews: Memorable and Useful, 250-61, quotation from 257. Cox at the time was the pastor of the Laight Street Presbyterian Church in New York City and later was a professor at Auburn Theological Seminary and pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn. 101 Adams, Memoirs 7: 229, Feb. 18, 1827. Adams did not specify how or from where this revelation might come. 102 Adams noted that the preacher had argued that the divinity of Christ was “indispensable to sustain the atonement, and without the atonement there was no way of salvation.” Even though he had heard this argument in other sermons and discussed it privately with Baker, he still did not understand this point (Adams, Memoirs 7: 273, May 13, 1827). 103 Adams added that Little’s “moral discourses were always good, and sometimes admirable” and he had “listened to them with pleasure and profit” (Adams, Memoirs 7: 324, Aug. 13, 1827). 104 Adams, Memoirs 7: 477, Mar. 17, 1828. 105 Quoted in Nagel, John Quincy Adams, 261; see also Adams, Memoirs 4: 130, Sept. 19, 1818. 106 Nagel, John Quincy Adams, 261. 107 Adams, Memoirs 9: 507, Mar. 11, 1838. 108 Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 395. 109 Adams, Memoirs Mar. 17, 1828. Adams added that Baker lent him a pamphlet by Lewis Tappan who had been “converted from Unitarianism to Orthodoxy. Mr. Baker was in ecstasies at this pamphlet . . . which I thought illiberal and libelous.” Baker returned four days later to exhort Adams to believe in the doctrine of the atonement (Memoirs 7: 481, Mar. 21, 1828). 110 Adams, Letters on the Study of the Bible, 439, 462; first quotation from 439, second and third from 462. 111 Adams, Memoirs 9: 117-18, Mar. 30, 1834. Cf. 12: 132, Dec. 25, 1844.. 112 Adams, A Discourse on Education, 13, 15, 18, quotation from 18. 113 Adams, “Society and Civilization,” 89. 114 JQA to JA, Aug. 31, 1815, in Ford, ed., Writings 4: 362. 115 Adams, Memoirs 7: 459, Mar. 2, 1828. 116 Adams, Letters on the Study of the Bible, 436-37; first two quotations from 436, third and fourth from 437; fifth quotation from Adams, A Discourse on Education, 12. 117 Quoted in Nagel, John Quincy Adams, 407. 118 JQA to George Sullivan, Jan. 20, 1821, in Ford, ed., Writings 7: 90-91. 119 Adams, Memoirs 7: 268, May 6, 1827; Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, 1: 344. 120 Adams, Memoirs 8:89, Jan. 1829; Adams, A Discourse on Education, 16, quotations in that order. 121 Adams, 1844 address to American Bible Society, 271. 122 See, for example, ibid. Adams refused to submit to a religious test to become a professor at Harvard. He argued that the precise nature of his faith was between God and him alone (JQA to Samuel Dexter, Oct. 6, 1805, Ford, ed., Writings 3: 125). Strikingly, as an eighteen year-old, Adams had argued theology with John Shaw, the pastor of the First Parish Church of Haverhill, Massachusetts and his uncle, in whose home he was boarding. Shaw labeled Adams “presumptuous” when he argued theological issues with those who had studied them for much of their lives. Adams especially disputed Calvinist ideas of election and reprobation (East, John Quincy Adams, 33). Adams declared that Calvinist pastors criticized “the palpable absurdities of the Romish church,” but they fell into “others equally ridiculous” (Journal, Mar. 5, 1786). Adams stated in 1813 that he would not entangle himself in the controversy over “whether the Bible, like all other systems of morals, lays the ultimate basis of all human duties in self-love; or whether it enjoins duties on the principle of perfect and disinterested benevolence” (Letters on the Study of the Bible, 448).

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123 Adams especially pointed to New England (Memoirs 10: 345, Aug. 2, 1840). 124 Adams refused to take communion at a Presbyterian service on April 3, 1831 after the pastor had hammered away at “the everlasting anvil of the atonement” because sharing in the Lord’s Supper “might seem to them either a profession of their faith or an intrusion into their solemnities” (Memoirs 8: 353). 125 Adams, Memoirs 9: 438-39, Dec. 3, 1837. On another occasion, Adams confided that it was “painful” to hear Calvinists preach “and to witness the solemn and fervent sincerity in which they pour out absurdity and nonsense . . .” (Memoirs 8: 139, Apr. 19, 1829). See also Memoirs 8: 353, Apr. 3, 1831: “a communion discourse upon the atonement . . . . Solemn nonsense and inconceivable absurdity.” 126 Adams, Memoirs 9: 435, Nov. 26, 1837. According to Greek legend, Codrus was the last king of the Athenians. Believing the prophesy of an oracle that only the death of their king at the hands of the enemy could save the Athenians from the Dorian invasion of Peloponnesus (c. 1068 B.C.), Codrus disguised himself as an ordinary soldier and was killed fighting in the front lines. Learning why he had done this and inspired by his courage, the Athenians fought so fiercely that they forced the Spartans to retreat. In that sense then Codrus died to save this people. 127 Adams, Memoirs 9: 439, Dec. 3, 1837. 128 Adams, Memoirs 8: 214, Apr. 4, 1830; 9: 340, Jan. 1, 1837; quotations in that order. He noted that some denominations held a different perspective and that some Christians insisted on “being doomed weekly by their pastors to the infernal regions” (8: 214). 129 Quoted in Nagel, John Quincy Adams, 407. 130 Adams, “The Wants of Man,” Poems of Religion and Society, 23. 131 The first quotation is from Adams, Diary, June 18, 1829, as quoted in Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 187; the second is quoted by Nagel, John Quincy Adams, 203. 132 E.g., Adams, Letters on the Study of the Bible, 432. Catholics, he noted, believed in human immortality and a future state of retribution because the church told them to do so. Protestants, by contrast, believed in these fundamental tenets because they were satisfactory to their reason and important to their happiness (Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, 1: 335). 133 Adams, Memoirs 7: 459, Mar. 1, 1828. See also Memoirs 7: 140, Aug. 3, 1826; Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 105; and Greg Russell, John Quincy Adams and the Public Virtues of Diplomacy (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 81-87. 134 JQA to JA, Dec. 24, 1804, in Ford, ed., Writings 3: 104. 135 Adams, Memoirs 9: 263, Nov. 23, 1835; 9: 439, Dec. 3, 1837; quotations in that order. 136 Quoted in Nagel, John Quincy Adams, 407. 137 Adams, Memoirs 7: 268-69; first quotation from 268, the rest from 269. 138 Although Adams complained much more about the sermons at Presbyterian churches, he sometimes criticized Episcopal ones as well. In January 1821, for example, after hearing a sermon at the Episcopal church in Georgetown, Adams complained that the rector, like many southern Episcopal priests, had “resumed the rigorous Calvinistic doctrines of election and atonement, regeneration and reprobation, which the Church of England had long discarded.” They took this position because they had been educated by “the most straitest sect” of Calvinists at Princeton College and to counter the desertion of their followers. Adams also noted that Episcopal preaching was “usual[ly] cool, didactic, and argumentative,” not “enthusiastic” like Methodists (Memoirs 5: 231, Jan. 7, 1821). See also Memoirs 12: 75, Sept. 19, 1844). Despite his many complaints about Calvinist doctrine, during the last twenty-five years of his life, Adams frequently worshipped at the Second Presbyterian Church and gave nearly two thousand dollars to aid its work (Hanks, Sermon, 22). Matthew Hale Smith, the supply pastor of Second Presbyterian Church in 1845-46, reported that Adams had faithfully attended this church for nearly a quarter of a century. While living in Washington, Adams also loaned several congregations, including Second Presbyterian, significant amounts of money to pay their bills. See Richard G. Hutcheson, Jr., God in the White House: How Religion Has Changed the Modern Presidency (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 56 and Frank E. Edgington, A History of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church: One Hundred Fifty-Seven Years, 1803 to 1961 (Washington: New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, 1961), 25, 28, 186-87. Near the end of his life, Adams allegedly told a minister, “As I advance in life . . . I throw myself . . . upon the simple Word of God. I receive what that teaches. I go where that leads. I should not, I suppose, be considered fully orthodox, according to the standard of the Presbyterian Church; but I am not so far from them as people generally imagine. I enjoy the worship of that church; I am edified by its ministry” (Hanks, Sermon, 21). 139 Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundation of American Foreign Policy, 154.

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140 Lynn Hudson Parsons, John Quincy Adams (Madison, WS: Madison House, 1998), 100-1, quotation from 101. 141 Adams, Memoirs 1: 56, Dec. 4, 1789; 2: 498, Aug. 3, 1813.; 1: 443, July 11, 1806; 1:394-5, Jan. 31, 1806; 4:8, Sept. 21, 1817; Adams, Diary, Mar. 10, 1825; quotations in that order. 142 See Adams, Diary, Apr. 26, 1829; June 18, 1829, as quoted by Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 186. 143 Adams, “Written in Sickness,” Poems of Religion and Society, 60. 144 Nagel, Descent from Glory, 150; quotations from Adams, Memoirs 8: 159-60, Dec. 30, 1829. 145 Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 200. 146 Adams, Letters on the Study of the Bible, 460. 147 Parsons, John Quincy Adams, 220. 148 Adams, Memoirs 12: 206, July 26, 1845. 149 He sometimes drank two and occasionally three glasses with dinner (Adams, Diary, Apr. 25, 1831). Also see Memoirs 7: 340, Oct. 18, 1827 and Keith Sprunger, “Cold Water Congressmen: The Congressional Temperance Society before the Civil War,” The Historian 38 (Aug. 1965), 498-515. 150 Shepherd, Cannibals of the Heart, 345-46. 151 John Quincy Adams, Address to the Norfolk County Temperance Society (Boston: Gould, Kendall, and Lincoln, 1842), 4, 12, 19, 20; first quotation from 12, second from 19. Adams did not feel compelled to enter a field where the laborers were already abundant. He added that the biblical precepts against drunkenness were “strong, clear and uncompromising” (19). 152 Shepherd, Cannibals of the Heart, 205. With regard to other issues of personal morality, Adams sometimes smoked cigars and chewed tobacco and occasionally bought lottery tickets in Washington, perhaps inspired by the fact that his expenses repeatedly exceeded his income. 153 Nagel, Descent from Glory, 199, 338, 341; Shepherd, Cannibals of the Heart, 26-27, 163-64, 359-60; Nagel, The Adams Women, 188-89, 194-95, 218, 224, 228, 240, 268-69, 281, 283-84, 290-91. 154 Russell, John Quincy Adams, 3-4, 8, 137, 173, quotation from 3. 155 Adams, Address of John Quincy Adams to his Constituents . . . September 17th, 1842 . . . (Boston: J. H. Eastburn, 1842), as quoted by Quincy, Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams, 376. 156 John Quincy Adams, An Oration Delivered before the Inhabitants of . . . Newburyport . . . (Newburyport, MA: Morss and Brewster, 1837), 31. 157 JQA to Joseph Hall, in Ford, ed., Writings 1:33n.; quotation from Adams, Memoirs 2: 581, Mar. 6, 1814. 158 Adams to Skelton Jones, Apr. 17, 1809, in Ford, ed., Writings 3: 300. 159 See Lipsky, John Quincy Adams: His Theory and Ideas, 139-62. 160 Weeks, John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire, 19. 161 John Quincy Adams, An Oration, Delivered Before the Cincinnati Astronomical Society . . . (Cincinnati: Shepard and Co., 1843), 13-14. 162 John Quincy Adams, Lives of James Madison and James Monroe, Fourth and Fifth Presidents of the United States (Buffalo, NY: G. H. Derby, 1850), 35 (quotation);.Adams, “Inaugural Address,” 2: 865; Adams, “First Annual Message,” 882. 163 Adams, A Discourse on Education, 18, 25. Cf. Adams, Address to the Norfolk County Temperance Society, 21-22. 164 Adams, Address to the Norfolk County Temperance Society, 23 (first two quotations); Adams, Memoirs 10: 126, June 27, 1839 (third quotation). 165 Quoted in John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955), 43. 166 Lipsky, John Quincy Adams: His Theory and Ideas, 67. 167Adams, Memoirs 1: 434, Apr. 12, 1806; JQA to GWA, July 5, 1826, Adams MSS, as quoted by Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy, 427, quotations in that order. 168 Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 544. 169 Adams, Memoirs 9: 58. 170 Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 71. 171 JQA to AA, July 25, 1810, in Ford, ed., Writings 3: 456. 172 John Quincy Adams, Discourse Delivered before the Massachusetts Historical Society . . . (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1843), 43, 47; first quotation from 43, the rest from 47. See also Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, 1: 330. 173 Weeks, John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire, 20.

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174 Adams, Memoirs 2: 283, July 30, 1811; JQA to JA, Sept. 21, 1797, in Ford, ed., Writings 1: 216; JQA to JA, Aug. 1, 1816, in ibid., 6: 61, quotations in that order. 175 Adams, Address of John Quincy Adams to his Constituents . . . September 17th, 1842, 382; Adams, “First Annual Message,” 2: 882; quotations in that order. 176 JQA to AA, June 30, 1811, in Ford, ed., Writings 4: 128 (first two quotations); Adams, Memoirs 3: 41, Sept. 25, 1814 (third quotation); JQA to JA, Aug. 31, 1811, in Ford, ed., Writings 4: 209 (fourth quotation). 177 Congressional Globe, 29th Cong., 1st Session (1845-46), 338-42 (Feb. 9, 1846) (first three quotations); JQA to Joseph Sturge, April 1846 (fourth quotation). See also Adams, Memoirs 12: 259, Apr. 27, 1846. 178 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates 84: 1321-22 (Mar. 20, 1846), as quoted in Richards, Life and Times, 185. 179 John Quincy Adams, An Address . . . on . . . the Declaration of Independence, on the Fourth of July, 1821 (Washington: Davis and Force, 1821), 32. 180 Parsons, John Quincy Adams, 149-50. 181 John Quincy Adams, “The Opium War and the Sanctity of Commercial Reciprocity,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 42 (Oct. 1909-June 1910), 295-325, in Walter LaFeber, ed., John Quincy Adams and the American Continental Empire: Letters, Speeches, and Papers (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), 48-51; first four quotations from 49; fifth and sixth from 50. 182 Adams, Newburyport Oration, 17; Adams, “Columbus,” III, in Ford, ed., Writings 1: 164; quotations in that order. 183 Lipsky, John Quincy Adams: His Theory and Ideas, 74. 184 The first quotation is cited in Banks, The Religious Life of Famous Americans, 44; the second is from Adams’ July 28, 1838 response to an invitation from the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society to attend a meeting, cited in Quincy, Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams, 282. 185 Wendell Glick, “The Best Possible World of John Quincy Adams,” New England Quarterly 37 (Mar. 1964), 3-17, quotation from 4. 186 Lipsky, John Quincy Adams: His Theory and Ideas, 71. 187 Adams, Memoirs 5: 47-48, Mar. 29, 1820. 188 Lipsky, John Quincy Adams: His Theory and Ideas, 69, 71, quotation from 71. See JQA to Edward Everett, in Ford, ed., Writings 7: 202. 189 JQA to William Vans Murray, July 22, 1798, in Ford, ed., Writings 2: 344. 190 Lipsky, John Quincy Adams: His Theory and Ideas, 75); Adams, A Discourse on Education, 13. 191 JQA to James Lloyd, Oct. 1, 1822, in Ford, ed., Writings 7: 311. 192 Adams argued that Jefferson had inconsistently bought Louisiana from France and Madison had supported the creation of a national bank, neither of which was directly authorized by the Constitution (Adams, Memoirs 5: 365, Oct. 20, 1821). See also Memoirs 5: 281, Feb. 16, 1821. 193 Adams, Discourse Delivered before the Massachusetts Historical Society, 12-13; Adams, Memoirs 2: 283, July 30, 1811; 11: 441, Nov. 24, 1843; Adams, Cincinnati Oration, 34, 38; Quincy, Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams, 265, 306. 194 Adams, “Inaugural Address,” 2: 864; Adams, “First Annual Message,” 2: 877. 195 Adams, “First Annual Message,” 2: 882. 196 Adams, Memoirs 7: 343, Oct. 23, 1827; quotation from Memoirs 8: 48-49. 197 John Quincy Adams, The New England Confederacy of MDCXLIII (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1843), 12. 198 Even the elements of natural religion—the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and future retribution—Adams argued, were best learned through education (A Discourse on Education, 9). 199 Adams, Memoirs 7: 59, Nov. 22, 1825. 200 Walter LaFeber, “John Quincy Adams: An Introduction,” in LaFeber, ed., John Quincy Adams and the American Continental Empire, 24-25; Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 76-78. See Mary W. H. Hargreaves, The Presidency of John Quincy Adams (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), 30-40, 257-78. Four candidates split the electoral vote in the presidential election of 1824, with none of them winning a majority. The House of Representatives selected Adams to be president even though he finished second to Andrew Jackson in both the popular and electoral count. Another candidate, Henry Clay of Kentucky, supported Adams and was later named secretary of state, prompting claims of a “corrupt bargain” that plagued Adams throughout his tenure in office. See William G. Morgan, “John Quincy Adams Versus Andrew Jackson: Their Biographers and the ‘Corrupt Bargain’ Charge,” Tennessee

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Historical Quarterly 26 (Spring 1967), 43-58; and Morgan, “The ‘Corrupt Bargain’ Charge against Clay and Adams,” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 42 (Apr. 1968), 132-49. Almost all biographers of Adams and Jackson repudiate this charge. 201 Adams, Memoirs 9: 162, July 30, 1834 (first quotation); 8: 100-1, Feb. 28, 1829; 8: 486, Mar. 3, 1832; JQA to Charles W. Upham, Feb. 2, 1837, Huntington Library Quarterly 4 (April 1941), 381-82 in LaFeber, ed., John Quincy Adams and the American Continental Empire, 147 (second quotation). 202 For the background of Adams’ positions in 1814 and 1818, see JQA to George William Erving, Nov. 28, 1818, in Ford, ed., Writings 6: 498-99; George Dangerfield, The Era of Good Feelings (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World), 137-38; and Bemis, Adams and American Foreign Policy, 200-8, 315-16. 203 Adams to the Senate, Jan. 31, 1826 and Apr. 25, 1826, in Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers, 2: 324-26, 345. 204 Adams to the Senate, Feb. 5, 1827, Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers, 2: 370-73. 205 Lynn Hudson Parsons, “‘A Perpetual Harrow Upon My Feelings’: John Quincy Adams and the American Indian,” New England Quarterly 46 (Sept. 1973), 358. 206 See Richard J. Hryniewicki, “The Creek Treaty of Nov. 25, 1827,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 52 (1968), 1-15; Adams, Memoirs 7: 370-71, Dec. 6, 1827. 207 Parsons, “‘A Perpetual Harrow Upon My Feelings,’” 356. 208 See John Quincy “Fourth Annual Message,” Dec. 2, 1828, in Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers, 2: 973. 209 Adams, Memoirs 7: 465, Mar. 7, 1828: after three years as president, Adams reported that he had never denied access “to any one, of any color.” 210 Parsons, John Quincy Adams, 181-83. Adams defended Jackson’s assault against the Seminoles on the grounds that the Spanish and possibly the British were using them to threaten American security. Presenting “a highly inaccurate picture of the events that led to Jackson’s invasion of Florida,” he concentrated on the ‘barbarous, unrelenting, and exterminating character of Indian hostilities’.” The first quotation is from Parsons, “‘A Perpetual Harrow Upon My Feelings,’” 347; the second is from Adams to Don Luis De Onis, July 23, 1818, in Ford, ed., Writings 6: 386-87. See also Adams to George W. Erving, Nov. 28, 1818, in Ford, ed., Writings 6: 498-99. 211 Adams, Memoirs 7: 89-90, Dec. 22, 1825. 212 Parsons, “‘A Perpetual Harrow Upon My Feelings,’” 357, 341, quotations in that order. See also Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 83-84. On his early attitude, see John Quincy Adams, An Oration, Delivered at Plymouth, December 22, 1802, at the Anniversary Commemoration of the First Landing of Our Ancestors (Boston: Russell and Cutler, 1802), 22-25. Adams defended the American policy of purchase and removal as superior to the “theft and extermination which he alleged that other nations had practiced” (Parsons, “‘A Perpetual Harrow Upon My Feelings,’” 345). Adams insisted that Americans had a “moral and religious duty . . . to cultivate their territory, through . . . the necessary extinction of all the rights of savage tribes, by fair and amicable means” (Memoirs 3: 39-42, Sept, 23, 25, 1814; quotation from p. 40). 213 Adams, Memoirs 8: 206, Mar. 22, 1830. 214 Parsons, “’A Perpetual Harrow Upon My Feelings,’” 364; Richards, Life and Times, 148. 215 JQA to George Parkman, June 22, 1836, quoted in C. F. Adams, Jr., Emancipation Under Martial Law, 90. 216 Richards, Life and Times, 150. 217 Parsons, “‘A Perpetual Harrow Upon My Feelings,’” 374. 218 Jack Shepherd, The Adams Chronicles: Four Generations of Greatness (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), 292. 219 Adams, Memoirs 10: 491-92, June 30, 1841, quotation from 492. 220 Quoted in William H. Seward, Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams (Auburn, NY: Derby, Miller and Company, 1849), 312-13; the observer is not identified. 221 Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 54; Weeks, John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire, 193. In June 1824 Adams met with three Quakers who urged the government to suppress the slave trade. Arguing that it was being carried on primarily by ships flying French flags, they exhorted Monroe’s administration to appeal to the French government to take measures to end this practice. Adams promised to aid them in accomplishing their purpose (Adams, Memoirs 6: 375, June 4, 1824). 222 Weeks, John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire, 193.

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223 Adams, Memoirs 5: 4, 11, Mar. 3, 1820; first three quotations from 11, fourth and fifth from 4. 224 Adams believed that Congress did not have the power to proscribe slavery in places where there were “already slaves in great numbers.” On the other hand, he urged Congress to exclude the introduction of slaves in new territories (Adams, Memoirs 4: 530, Feb. 23, 1820). 225 Adams, Memoirs 4: 531, Feb. 24, 1820 (first quotation); 5:11-12, Mar. 3, 1820 (second and third quotations). Cf. Memoirs 5: 205-11, Nov. 24, 25, 27, 29, 1820. 226 Adams, Memoirs 9: 438, Nov. 30, 1837. 227 Richards, Life and Times, 107. 228 Adams, Memoirs 6: 376, June 6, 1824; Congressional Globe, 28th Congress, Ist session, Dec. 29, 1843, 88-9; ibid., 27th Cong., 2nd session, 569-70; Richards, Life and Times, 99. 229 Richards, Life and Times, 98. Adams was not without racial and ethnic prejudices, which Richards details on pages 95-97. Moreover, as a diplomat, Adams frequently affirmed that slaves were property, helped southerners recover slaves from Canada, played a key role in negotiations whereby the British paid more than a million dollars in indemnities for slaves who fled to their forts and ships during the War of 1812, and dragged his feet in supporting the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade (100). 230 Adams, Memoirs 10: 431, Feb. 24, 1841; Adams, Argument in the United States v. Cinque [15 Peters 518], 6, 88; Lipsky, John Quincy Adams: His Theory and Ideas, 125. 231 Adams, Memoirs 5:11-12, Mar. 2, 1820; quotation from 9: 544, May 27, 1838. 232 Adams, Letter from the Hon. John Quincy Adams, Read at the Recent Celebration of the West India Emancipation in Bangor, Maine (Quincy, MA: privately printed, 1843) , 1-2; Adams, A Discourse on Education, 13. 233 Quotation from Adams, Memoirs 4: 492, Dec. 27, 1819; John Quincy Adams, “Introduction,” Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy . . . (New York, J.S. Taylor, 1838), 3-4. 234Adams, Address of John Quincy Adams to his Constituents . . . September 17th, 1842, quoted in Quincy, Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams, 384-85. 235 Adams, Memoirs 12: 171, Feb. 19, 1845; 11: 180, June 20, 1842; quotation from the former. 236 Adams, Memoirs 10: 63, Dec. 13, 1838 (first quotation); Adams, Address of John Quincy Adams to his Constituents . . . September 17th, 1842, 51-52 (second, third, and fourth quotations). 237 Lipsky, John Quincy Adams: His Theory and Ideas, 127. Adams voted against abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia because he thought that Congress did not have the right to set policies for the residents of the district, because he did not want to create more friction between the North and the South, and because he thought he was voting as the great majority of his constituents wanted (Adams to Moses Brown, Dec. 9, 1833, Adam MSS, as cited by Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 331). 238 Adams, Memoirs 12: 116, Dec. 3, 1844. 239 Story as cited by Richards, Life and Times, 137; see also 135-39, quotation from 138. 240 Adams, Memoirs 10: 453-4, Mar. 29, 1841. 241 Richards, Life and Times, 99, 104-5. 242 Weeks, John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire, 194. 243 Adams, 1827 poem. Most were from southerners. Some were very specific: “On the first day of May next I promise to cut your throat from ear to Ear.” A Georgian threatened to slash his “damned guts out in the dark.” Although Adams refused to tone down his attack against slavery, the letters troubled him and terrified his wife (Richards, Life and Time, 131). 244 Emancipator, Mar. 10, 1842 as quoted in Hugh Davis, Joshua Leavitt, Evangelical Abolitionist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 192. Another abolitionist, Lydia Maria Child, wrote him, “True and honest hearts love you, bold and strong hearts venerate you, pious hearts pray for you, and breaking hearts murmur a blessing on your name” (Childs to JQA, Aug. 15, 1838, Adam MSS). For Adams’ views on slavery, see also William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 153-78. 245 Adams came to the White House with more foreign policy experience than almost any other president. He had served successively as the American minister to Holland, Portugal, and Prussia from 1794 to 1801. From 1809 to 1814 he had been the American minister to Russia. The last year in this post, Adams had chaired the American peace commissioners who met in Ghent, Belgium to negotiate an end to the War of 1812. Named in 1815 to the nation’s premier foreign diplomatic post, minister to Great Britain, Adams had helped construct two important treaties and develop better relationships between the two countries. As James Monroe’s secretary of state, he had negotiated the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819, by which Spain

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for five million dollars ceded all its land east of the Mississippi, most notably Florida, to the United States. See Weeks, John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire, 1ff. 246 Hargreaves, The Presidency of John Quincy Adams, 114. See also J. Orin Oliphant, “The Parvin-Brigham Mission to Spanish America, 1823-26,” Church History 14 (June 1945), 85-103. 247 Adams, “Message to the House of Representatives of the United States,” Mar. 15, 1826, in Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 2: 898. 248 See Wilkins B. Winn, “The Efforts of the United States to Secure Religious Liberty in a Commercial Treaty with Mexico, 1825-1831,” The Americas 28 (Jan. 1972), 311-32. 249 JQA to Richard C. Anderson, May 27, 1823, in Ford, ed., Writings 7: 465-67; quotation from Adams, Discourse Delivered before the Massachusetts Historical Society, 46-47. 250 JQA to Richard C. Anderson, May 27, 1823, Ford, ed., Writings 7: 442-43. 251 Ibid., 465-66, quotation from 466. 252 Nagel, Descent from Glory, 100. 253 Adams, Memoirs 1: 276, Dec. 4, 1803; 1: 417, Mar. 3, 1806; 2: 387, July 11, 1812; 7: 273, May 13, 1827; 9: 14, Sept. 9, 1833; quotations in that order. 254 Quoted in Nagel, Descent from Glory, 194. 255 Adams, Memoirs 12: 276-7, Oct. 31, 1846. 256 Lynn Hudson Parsons, “The ‘Splendid Pageant’: Observations on the Death of John Quincy Adams,” New England Quarterly 53 (Dec. 1980), 473. 257 Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 8. Adams called humility “a lesson which I sorely want and which I pray God to give me the grace to learn.” 258 Lipsky, John Quincy Adams: His Theory and Ideas, 190. 259 Nagel, John Quincy Adams, 304-5. 260 E.g., Parker, A Discourse, 42. 261 Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundation of American Foreign Policy, 571. 262 As a youth Adams mastered calculus, read Greek and Roman classics in their original languages, spoke four modern languages, and discussed contemporary events and political theory with some of the most prominent men in Europe and the United States. He made two trips to Europe with his father as an adolescent, and at the age of fourteen served as an interpreter for Francis Dana’s mission to gain Russian support for America. Additional travels in Germany and Scandinavia, discussions with diplomats, and the tutelage of his father gave him a unique perspective on the world and politics. Adams was educated at preparatory schools in Paris and Amsterdam, at the University of Leyden, and at Harvard and read widely in European and American literature, philosophy, religion, scientific theory, and international law (Weeks, John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire, 16). See also David, Musto, “The Youth of John Quincy Adams,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 113 (1969), 269-82. While serving as secretary of state, Adams was elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1820. As both president and a congressman, he pushed his nation to establish a national astronomical observatory and played a pivotal role in creating the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. See LaFeber, “John Quincy Adams: An Introduction,” 15; and Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 9. Adams’ reading about science and astronomical observation helped satisfy his curiosity and gave him greater appreciation and “reverence for the Creator and mover of these unnumbered worlds” (Memoirs 10: 39). Bemis argues that only Franklin did as much to further the cause of science in America as did Adams in the years before the Civil War (Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 523). 263 Dwight Eisenhower to Edward Everett Hazlett, Jr., Dec. 8, 1954, in The Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Louis Galambos et al., eds., 21 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) 16: 1436. 264 Kennedy, Profiles in Courage, 31ff. Adams was the only Federalist in either house who voted for the Louisiana Purchase, and he also strongly supported Jefferson’s embargo of trade with Great Britain and France, a policy despised by most New Englanders because of the importance of commerce to their region. Upset by his stance, the Massachusetts legislature called a special session in 1807 to remove him from office, prompting Adams to resign his seat. 265 Disoway, “John Quincy Adams,” 54. 266 Nagel, The Adams Women, 211.

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267 Allen, The Statesman and the Man, 7; A. J. Crane, “Address in Commemoration of John Quincy Adams,” Southern Literary Messenger 14 (May 1848), 301; Disoway, “John Quincy Adams,” 28, quotations in that order. 268 Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 326; Richards, Life and Times, 3. 269 “Notice of Recent Publications,” 473 (first quotation); Disoway, “John Quincy Adams,” 54, 28 (second and third quotations). 270 Kennedy, Profiles in Courage, 32. 271 Weeks, John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire, 126. 272 Adams to Lloyd, Oct. 1, 1822, in Ford, ed., Writings 7: 313. 273 Adams, Memoirs 4: 107, July 11, 1818. 274 JQA to JA, Aug. 1, 1816, in Adams Family Papers. 275 Weeks, John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire, 125, 187, 139; first and third quotations from 125; second from 187, fourth from 139. 276 “The Macbeth Policy,” in Ford, ed., Writings 7: 357; Weeks, John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire, 187, quotations in that order. 277 “The Macbeth Policy,” 7: 358. 278 Weeks, John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire, 187-88. 279 Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 58. For a discussion of these deals, see 36-47. 280 Quoted in Dangerfield, Era of Good Feelings, 345. 281 Weeks, John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire, 189. 282 Gail Collins, Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics (New York: Morrow, 1998), 31 (first quotation); Nagel, John Quincy Adams, 317, 319 (second quotation). 283 For analysis of the elections of 1824 and 1828, see Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822-1832 (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 74-100, 143-55; and Hargreaves, The Presidency of John Quincy Adams, 19-40. 284 Allen, The Statesman and the Man, 6, 8; Chapin, The Truly Great, 12, 16. 285 Parsons, “The ‘Splendid Pageant,’” 464-78, first quotation from 465, second from 469, third from 478. 286 “Notice of Recent Publications,” 468-69. 287 E.g. Hanks, Sermon, 22; Allen, The Statesman and the Man,, 16; Lunt, A Discourse Delivered in Quincy, 35; Timothy Walker, An Oration on the Life and Character of John Quincy Adams (Cincinnati: J.F. Desilver, 1848), 5, 17; Bates, A Discourse, 18; Livermore, Ancient and Honorable Man, 6, 10; Disoway, “John Quincy Adams,” 28. 288 “Notice of Recent Publications,” 471. 289 Historians point out that the Whigs had a more positive attitude toward religion, enjoyed greater support from the “established” clergy, and had the greatest political strength in areas were evangelical religion prevailed. Democrats, by contrast, tended to be more secularly minded, more committed to separating religious values from politics, and disinclined to use laws to regulate private behavior. See Lee Benson, Concept of Jacksonian Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 198-207; and Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 137-64. 290 William H. Furness, The Memory of the Just: A Discourse (Philadelphia: Crissy and Markley, 1848), 10; Chapin, The Truly Great, 9; quotations in that order. 291 Lunt, A Discourse Delivered in Quincy, 32, 35, quotations in that order. Other texts include Psalm 37: 37 “Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright; for the end of that man is peace (Allen, The Statesman and the Man); II Chronicles 32: 3 “And Hezekiah slept with his fathers. . . . And all Judah, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem did honor him at his death (Hanks, Sermon); II Samuel 3: 38: “Know ye not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel” (Bates, A Discourse). 292 Hanks, Sermon, 3, 7, quotation from 3; Allen, The Statesman and the Man, 14-15, quotations in that order; William H. Seward, Oration on the Death of John Quincy Adams . . . (Albany, NY: Charles Van Benthuysen, 1848), 32. Cf. Bates, A Discourse, 12. 293 Parsons, “The ‘Splendid Pageant,’” 481. 294 For this assessment of Adams, see Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundation of American Foreign Policy, 571; Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750 (New York: Norton, 1989), 72; Norman A. Graebner, “John Quincy Adams and the Federalist Tradition,” in Foundations of American Foreign Policy: A Realist Appraisal from Franklin to McKinley

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(Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1985), 145-79; Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire, 1; H. William Brands, The United States in the World: A History of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 102-3; and Russell, John Quincy Adams, 3-4. For a dissenting view, see James E. Lewis, Jr., John Quincy Adams: Policy Maker for the Union (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2001), xiii-xvii, 141-45. Lewis insists that Adams ultimately failed as a policy-maker because he was unable to protect and strengthen the union and keep it from falling apart (xvi). Moreover, although the United States recognized new states in Latin America, enunciated the Monroe Doctrine, and accepted an invitation to the Panama Congress, it did not succeed in “establishing the American model of national independence, republican government, and liberal commerce in the New World” (143). Lewis does conclude that “few individuals left as great a mark on American foreign politics” as Adams during a long career in politics (145). 295 Lewis, John Quincy Adams: Policy Maker for the Union, 141-42. 296 Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy, 567-71, quotation from 570. 297 Weeks, John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire, 21. 298 James Truslow Adams, The Adams Family (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1930), 188, 212, 481; first quotation from 481, second and fourth from 188, third from 212. Samuel Flagg Bemis argues that Adams could have only been elected president at this unique period of one-party government in the Era of Good Feelings. He belonged to no political party, controlled no political machinery, and lacked the charisma to build one. His credentials were his distinguished political lineage, sterling character, vast political experience, and undoubted competence for the office. During the campaign he had not elaborated a political program, and he was not the popular choice for president (Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 11, 71). 299 Russell, John Quincy Adams, 53-54. 300 Hargreaves, The Presidency of John Quincy Adams, xiii. 301 Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundation of American Foreign Policy, 127. 302 Lipsky, John Quincy Adams: His Theory and Ideas, 328. 303 The quotation is from Parsons, John Quincy Adams, 271. Brooks Adams argued that John Quincy’s defeat in the election of 1828, despite all his sacrifice and suffering for the nation, coupled with the death of his son, produced a personal crisis. Adams entertained doubts about the existence of God, his control of the universe, and the meaning of life. How could God allow him to lose the presidency to one who represented to him “the materialization of the principle of evil”? (Brooks Adams, as quoted in Adams, Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, 77). Near the end of his life, Adams did profess that he had “involuntary and agonizing doubts,” which he could “neither silence nor expel” about the “existence of an Omnipotent Spirit.” Adams, Memoirs 11: 341, but that statement is at odds with hundreds of others Adams made throughout his life. 304 Parsons, John Quincy Adams, 271 305 Hecht, John Quincy Adams, 488. 306 Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 106. 307 Nagel, John Quincy Adams, 418-19, quotation from 419. 308 Adams, “Justice,” Poems of Religion and Society, 98.