Old man eloquent

John Quincy Adams was the most existentialist of US presidents, and one of the worst.  He viewed his life as the consequence of a choice -- to politick in the public interest.  For more than a half century, he chronicled his choice in a journal that exceeded 10,000 pages.  “Any day in which he did not create an entry in his diary seemed like a day lost to the passage of time,” writes his best biographer, Fred Kaplan.  “Like ‘that irresistible current which hurries and dashes over the cataract of Niagara…so am I hurried down the stream of time, and day after day turns over the precipice and is lost.’”

If anything, Adams took the consequences of choice a bit seriously.  “I believe,” he wrote, “that moral principle should be the alpha and omega of all literary composition, poetry or prose, scientific or literary, written or spoken, and emphatically of every discourse….Pen should never be put to paper but for the discharge of some duty to God or man.”  Mickey Spillane might have demurred.      

Like any existentialist, Adams sought to expand his own freedom by decoupling the shackles on others.  In 1844, after a decade of struggle, including two attempts to censure him in the House of Representatives, Adams destroyed the gag rule that enabled Southern congressmen to avoid all debate over slavery and indeed to avoid the sight of an abolitionist petition.  And before the Supreme Court in 1841, he successfully defended the Africans aboard the Amistad who had been kidnapped for slavery and who killed one of their captors. 

Adams was principled and therefore a poor president.  He refused to compromise, so he rarely collaborated with Congress on legislation.  He was a lame duck well before his first (and last) term ended in 1829.  In contrast, his nemesis James Polk accomplished all four goals that he had set for himself in his single presidential term 15 years later, including the acquisition of Texas, which Adams had feared would enable the slave states to dominate the federal government.

Polk gave us Texas; Adams, the Smithsonian.  When an Englishman, James Smithson, bestowed half a million dollars on the US for the pursuit of knowledge, Democratic Congressmen proposed to invest the money in Arkansas bonds in order to win the state’s favor in the 1840 presidential elections.  Adams saw to it that impartial trustees would instead manage the money for a public museum.  Existentialist politicians are not myopic, not even the Whigs.  -- Plautus            

References

Walter R. Borneman.  Polk: The man who transformed the presidency and America.  Random House.  2008.

Fred Kaplan.  John Quincy Adams:  American visionary.  Harper.  2014.

John F. Kennedy.  Profiles in courage.  Harper.  1956.  Perhaps the worst history ever to win the Pulitzer.

Robert V. Remini.  John Quincy Adams.  Times Books. 2002.  Concise.

Harlow Giles Unger.  John Quincy Adams.  De Capo Press.  2012.  A lively narrative.