His nature is too noble for the world:

　　He would not flatter Neptune for his trident,

　　Or Jove fors power to thunder.

　　– Coriolanus, Act 3, scene 1

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

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

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

　　The Moral Constitution of a Natural Rights Republic

　　It is tempting to suggest that John Quincy Adams learned everything he knew about politics from his father. While the son certainly looked to the elder John Adams for guidance in both the theory and practice of politics, it is probably true that Adams père’s greatest influence on Adams fils came not through a rigorous indoctrination but by planning for him a truly liberal education. Brought up to revere the wisdom of Greek and Roman sages, classical antiquity was never far from John Quincy’s mind. The glories and horrors alike of the ancient world provided him with a framework for understanding the revolutionary times in which he lived.

　　From the beginning, Adams thought of America as a kind of classical republic in the modern world. In an address he gave at his commencement from Harvard University in 1787—the first document in this collection—he asserted that the republic had a high responsibility to reconcile the claims of patriotic duty with personal liberty. “Does not the very idea of a right imply that of a correspondent obligation?” Adams asked his classmates. Other societies, from the ancient republics to the British empire, had failed to properly reconcile self-interest and republican virtue. America, he thought, had a chance to provide a different example.

　　John Quincy Adams believed that the same enlightened ambition that motivated the Revolution itself could sustain the republic as she grew up.

　　Throughout his career, Adams looked to the Declaration of Independence as a lodestar for navigating this tension between freedom and virtue. Several of the speeches Waldstreicher chose are, fittingly, Independence Day orations. In these speeches, Adams often reflected on the idea of natural rights articulated by the document and argued that the Revolution was fought to achieve a kind of “social equality” that makes self-government possible. He even would claim that the struggle possessed world-historical significance in his first Fourth of July speech in 1793:

　　The origin of the American Revolution bears a character different from that of any other civil contest, that had ever arisen among men. It was not the convulsive struggle of slavery to throw off the burden of accumulated oppression, but the deliberate, tho energetic effort of freemen, to repel the insidious approaches of tyranny. It was a contest involving the elementary principles of government, a question of right between the sovereign and the subject which in its progress had a tendency to introduce among the civilized nations of Europe, the discussion of a topic the first in magnitude, which can attract the attention of mankind, but which for many centuries, the gloomy shades of despotism had overspread with impenetrable darkness.

　　In The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk wrote that this kind of statement from John Quincy Adams “out-Jeffersons Jefferson” insofar as it presents “an idealistic moralist’s view of society,” but other writings in this collection show that, in certain ways, Adams could also out-Burke Burke. For instance, he explicitly defended Edmund Burke’s counter-revolutionary opinions in pamphlets published under the pseudonym Publicola during the early 1790s, which eventually made him famous as a young writer in the young republic and won him the admiration of George Washington. Against Thomas Paine’s radical conception of the rights of man, “genuine liberty,” Adams contended, “consists in a mean equally distant from the despotism of an individual, as of a million.” His idea of natural rights was not the abstract, leveling force the Jacobins wielded to bring France to her knees, but rather a way to describe in theory the actual practice of the American republic.

　　In the Publicola papers especially, Adams attempted to reconcile his conservative instincts and commitment to natural rights by appealing to moral tradition. “The eternal and immutable laws of justice and morality,” he wrote in the first essay, “are paramount to all human legislation.” Adams did not believe that majorities could simply override that natural law. The French Revolution professed a devotion to many of the same principles at the heart of its American predecessor, but insofar as it used these as pretexts for the pursuit of absolute power, Adams held that it was no different from the monarchy it toppled. “The principles of liberty must still be the sport of arbitrary power” if the Jacobins succeeded, he thundered, “and the hideous form of despotism must lay aside the diadem and the sceptre, only to assume the party-coloured garments of democracy.” A theory of natural rights, he held, was totally useless if it undermined the moral core of the republic.

　　Before the Mast of the Ship of State

　　Adams entered politics to defend this conception of a free and independent republic rooted in natural law. Though initially a skeptic of the Constitution, he became a great defender of the document against its manifold critics because he felt that its system of checks and balances could effectively preserve the virtuous liberty the Founders put at the heart of American nationhood. For Adams as for Washington, the Union was the great “palladium” of political freedom. The new republic needed statesmen willing to defend not just the particular rights and interests of their constituents, but also take a more comprehensive view of the national interest as a whole, and her liberties as well. He believed that the same enlightened ambition that motivated the Revolution itself could sustain the republic as she grew up.

　　President Washington appointed the young Adams to a number of diplomatic posts in Europe, after which he established a legal practice in Boston. Then, in 1803, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts elected Adams to the US Senate. By that point, the Jeffersonian Republicans and Federalists were locked in a bitter partisan contest—and the Federalists were losing. Adams was nominally committed to the conservative party, but never felt at home among the reactionaries that controlled it. He strongly disagreed with Jefferson’s policies and even many of his principles, but he never considered him the fundamental danger to order that the Essex Junto ultras did.

　　This independent streak was both Adams’s greatest asset as a statesman and his abiding stumbling block. Somewhat like his father, he could never acclimate himself to party politics in part because of his high conception of republican virtue. None of the Adamses believed that public servants should participate in the self-interested scramble for power, instead holding that principle alone ought to guide their conduct. As a result, both Adamses came to be despised and eventually abandoned by Federalist partisans.

　　Unfortunately, Waldstreicher did not include some of Adams’s most important writings from this period in his collection. The 1809 pamphlet American Principles, for instance, was Adams’s attack on the most extreme of the High Federalist politicos, Fisher Ames. He denounced the way his and his followers’ partisanship “sharpens all the asperities of party spirit, and makes federalists and republicans consider one another, not as fellow citizens having a common interest; but as two rival nations marshalled in hostile array against each other.” This pamphlet, written just before he accepted another diplomatic position in James Madison’s administration, was Adams’s definitive break with the narrow politics of Massachusetts, a declaration of independence from provincial bigotry and a demonstration of his political maturity.

　　Adams and the Antagonist World

　　Constitutional questions preoccupied the first part of Adams’s career, but as he rose in the ranks of national politics he increasingly came to focus on foreign policy. After serving in a variety of ambassadorial roles in the Washington and Madison administrations, he returned home to the United States in 1817 and became James Monroe’s Secretary of State. In that capacity, he was the principal mind behind the Monroe Doctrine, a policy that sought to protect American interests from the imperial ambitions of Old Europe.

　　Without a doubt, Adams’s most famous statement on foreign policy is another Fourth of July oration, delivered in 1821. It is a long speech, not often anthologized in full. In fact, only one line is typically cited: Adams’s declaration that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy” because “she is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all” but “the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Enamored with the apparent isolationism of this sentiment, a number of contemporary DC think tanks in the so-called “restrainer” camp have adopted Adams as something of a mascot for their non-interventionist positions.

　　To his credit, however, Waldstreicher chose to include the entire oration in his collection—and the wider context shows Adams had a somewhat more expansive view of America’s global responsibilities than his latter-day admirers allow. Holding the original copy of the Declaration of Independence in his hands, Adams asserted that it was the first full articulation of “the only legitimate foundation of government” and, therefore, “the corner stone of a new fabric, destined to cover the surface of the globe.” European diplomats in the audience were incensed by Adams’s proclamation; they understood that he was giving vital diplomatic support to national independence movements around the world opposed by many royal courts, especially in Greece and Latin America.

　　Later as president, Adams would give a speech defending more material support he supplied to Latin American countries seeking independence from the Spanish Empire. Citing a line from Washington’s Farewell Address that is also sometimes given an isolationist gloss, his fifth successor noted that “counsel of Washington in that instance, like all the counsels of wisdom, was rounded upon the circumstances in which our country and the world around us were situated at the time when it was given.” It was necessary for the United States to pursue a doctrine of neutrality in the 1790s given the nature of the conflict roiling the world at the time; by 1826, when Adams delivered this speech, a new kind of policy was better suited to the interests of an expanding nation with more power to assert the Declaration’s principles on a global stage.

　　What made John Quincy Adams an effective statesman was his combination of an idealism about American principles with a realism about human nature.

　　All the same, Adams was no proto-neoliberal or neoconservative with pretensions about making the world anew. He saw the ruin France left behind after her revolutionary wars, and he understood the position of relative weakness facing the United States. What made Adams an effective strategist, though, was his combination of a certain kind of idealism about American principles with a realism about great power competition and human nature. Adams believed foreign policy should be guided by a humble sense of justice and interest, not an ideology of either aggression or isolation. This older tradition of statecraft may be out of fashion in Washington today, but it still offers great wisdom for moments of crisis.

　　A Retreat to Eloquence

　　After his decades of loyal service, one might think that Adams’s election to the presidency was the crowning achievement of his career. But the circumstances surrounding that election left a cloud hovering over his entire administration that would eventually cut it short. Adams was simply incapable of responding to the rising populist movement led by Andrew Jackson; both his centralizing policies for national economic development and his quasi-aristocratic approach to politicking made him an unpopular figure.

　　Waldstreicher collects four speeches from Adams’s time as president—three addresses to Congress and yet another Independence Day oration. In each, Adams leaned into his most progressive instincts. He saw the development of commerce and science as great boons for the republic; surely, he thought, economic prosperity would lead to political stability and even happiness. Although there may be something appealing in this vision at the distance of many years, it is easy to understand why Adams’s Jacksonian opponents found such success in the moment by portraying him as an out-of-touch elitist more concerned with enriching his section than with the needs of Americans on the frontier. He was soundly thrashed in the 1828 election.

　　Adams considered retiring from the field of politics like his father before him, but a horror at Jackson’s autocratic style and an abiding concern for the country’s future inspired him to run for a seat in the House of Representatives. It was from this lower office that Adams embraced the cause for which he is perhaps best-known today—antislavery. He considered the “Peculiar Institution” both a moral blot and a political time bomb. Its continuance was a threat to the Union he believed was essential to American liberty.

　　The antislavery writings Waldstreicher collects prove just how powerful Adams’s sense of morality was. Unlike more blinkered leaders in American politics, he understood the shocking barbarity of chattel slavery, and he deployed all his mighty rhetorical power to oppose it. Adams thundered against the “gag rule” forbidding representatives from discussing the slavery issue, and he was among the most strident critics of the proslavery expansionism that fueled the war with Mexico in the 1840s. Adams would be proud of the fact that it is for this advocacy that he is most remembered nearly two hundred years after his death.

　　An objective historical assessment of Adams’s career in the House, nevertheless, cannot conclude his eloquence led to great political success. In some ways, it could even be argued that his ceaseless Demosthenes-like orations contributed to the factionalism that set the stage for civil war. The crisis over slavery only grew into an all-consuming fire after Adams died, with radical elements in the North and South alike pushing secessionist positions the Massachusetts statesman would have despised. To save the Union and free the slaves, it would take even greater acts of statesmanship from a man who served as a pallbearer at Adams’s funeral: Abraham Lincoln.

　　In the end, though, anyone who spends time reading Adams’s writings must conclude that he is in the first rank of American statesmen. Whatever his shortcomings as a practical politician, he achieved great things on behalf of his country—and, perhaps more importantly, he gave voice to her most fundamental principles. As Lincoln said of Adams’s colleague Henry Clay, his eloquence came first and foremost from his ardent patriotism. It is altogether fitting and proper, then, that his memory should be honored with such a beautiful new volume in the Library of America series. One only hopes that this collection can inspire in a new generation of statesmen the same sense of public spirit that burned bright in John Quincy Adams.