John Quincy Adams
From Philosopedia
Adams, John Quincy [President] (11 Jul 1767—23 Feb 1848)
John Quincy Adams was the sixth U. S. President, the first to be photographed. A conservative, he disliked Andrew Jackson, calling him “a hero, a murderer, an adulterer . . . who in his last days of his life belied and slandered me before the world and died.”
By post, Adams’s mother had once lectured her son that death was preferable to vice. He is said to have risen often at 4 a.m. to read the Bible and to have advised his son, George Washington Adams, to “Spurn the deadly draught of pleasure.” He is also known to have swum naked in the Potomac River, to have written a book on weights and measures, to have been an exponent of the sciences, to have been an ambassador, Secretary of State, and U. S. Senator, and to have been outspoken not only against slavery but also against the Southern politicians who defended slavery.
Adams’s best-known achievement, as President James Monroe’s Secretary of State, was the Monroe Doctrine (1823). Although his presidency was a disappointment to many, Adams was instrumental in the setting up of the Smithsonian Institution.
Gore Vidal has called Adams the hero of the Armistad affair, a reference to his part in an incident involving the kidnapping of several hundred West Africans by Portuguese slavers for shipment to the slave markets of Cuba. Adams aided Joseph Cinqué, a twenty-five-year-old from Sierra Leone who had led a mutiny and refused to become a slave. Vidal has suggested that Congress should, in light of Adams’s accomplishments, hire sculptors with sandblasters “and let them loose on Mt. Rushmore so that they can turn the likeness of the war lover Theodore Roosevelt into that of a true hero, John Quincy Adams.”
A conservative Unitarian, Adams deplored his father’s and Jefferson’s deistic views. He was a member of the United First Parish (Unitarian) in Quincy, Massachusetts, as were his son Charles Francis and his father, John. Paul C. Nagel’s John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life (1997), points out that Adams’s mother was a carrier of an alcoholic gene; Adams’s two brothers and, later, his two sons were all to die of acute alcoholism.
Adams, however, remained a political activist, “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery,” according to one Virginia congressman. Although he suffered a stroke and weakened, he continued to go to the House. In fact, he was a key figure in the Amistad case, in which he argued before the House and the Supreme Court concerning the rights of mutinous slaves.
On 21 February 1848 he cast his last vote, a “no” in regard to the war upon Mexico. Then, motioning to the chair that he wanted to speak, he rose but staggered, being caught by another member before he hit the floor. Two days later, he drifted in and out of consciousness. “This is the last of earth,” he was then heard to murmur. “I am composed.” Vidal’s evaluation: “Final words. Articulate to the end.”
{CE; Gore Vidal, The New Yorker, 10 November 1997; Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams (1997); TYD; U; UU}
