John Quincy Adams and the Sacred Fire of Liberty

Virtue to discharge all the duties of life; and Fortitude, to bear whatever destiny awaits me. —John Quincy Adams

The long, eventful life of John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), which began on the eve of the American Revolution and ended on the eve of the Civil War, is a testament to ambition, fortitude, integrity, moral courage, and patriotism. Although he is naturally overshadowed by his father, John Adams, who was both a founding father and the second president of the United States, John Quincy was a crucially important figure in the country’s formative years and left an enduring political legacy that is still relevant to issues we face today.

In his book Profiles in Courage, President John F. Kennedy ranked John Quincy first of the nine figures he profiled, writing that Adams “held more important offices and participated in more events than anyone in the history of our nation.”¹ The only son of a founding father to become president, John Quincy served under George Washington and with Abraham Lincoln. He served as America’s diplomat to six countries; was a senator, a congressman, and a secretary of state; negotiated the treaty that ended the War of 1812; convinced Spain to cede Florida to the United States; and won a dramatic Supreme Court case that freed the African captives of the slave ship Amistad. John Quincy was the first congressman to issue a call to end slavery in the House of Representatives in an address that Abraham Lincoln would later echo in the Emancipation Proclamation. Slaveholding senator Henry Wise of Virginia called Adams “the acutest, the astutist, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed.”²

He was also a husband, father of four, lawyer, Harvard professor, and writer, and he was passionate about astronomy, horticulture, and poetry. A brilliant polymath, Adams mastered a wide range of subjects. In 1821, New York City Mayor Philip Hone wrote that Adams “has probed deeply into the arcana of all the sciences, understands and can explain all subjects, from the solar system down to the construction of a toothpick. He has the Holy Scriptures at his fingertips, knows every line of Shakespeare, can recite Homer in the original Greek.”³

During the American Revolution, John Quincy, accompanying his father who was then serving as an American diplomat, traveled throughout Europe, where he absorbed the ideas and culture of the European Enlightenment that had profoundly influenced the founding fathers. Those ideas included an authentic respect for reason as man’s only means of knowledge. Adams was an essential link between the visionaries who founded the United States and later generations. His education and early experiences sharply contrasted with those of many of his contemporaries, such as Andrew Jackson, who was raised on the American frontier with little formal schooling. While in Europe, he became intimately acquainted with such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, John Paul Jones, and Charles Dickens. When John Quincy was fourteen, the American ambassador to Russia asked him to be his translator at the court of Catherine the Great. While in his teens, John Quincy taught English to French diplomats and would eventually become fluent in seven languages. All these experiences profoundly influenced the future statesman.

Despite his enormous accomplishments, John Quincy’s tenure as the sixth president of the United States was a disappointment, and his major achievements came before and after his presidency.

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John Quincy Adams was born to John and Abigail Adams on July 11, 1767, in Braintree, Massachusetts. With revolution already in the air, the elder Adams quickly became a major figure in the independence movement, gaining local and international fame after his principled legal defense of British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trial of 1770. As a prominent patriot leader and a cousin of the “Father of the American Revolution,” Samuel Adams, John Adams increasingly stoked the ire of the British monarch, King George III. Adams attended the first Continental Congress in the fall of 1774. Soon after, British troops were ordered to put down the rebellion and “arrest the principal actors and abettors in the Congress.”⁴ John Quincy remembered the terror his family felt at the threat of his father’s arrest: “My mother with her infant children dwelt every hour of the day liable to be butchered in cold blood, or taken and carried into Boston as hostages by any foraging or marauding detachment of men.”⁵ The British attempt to crush the rebellion by seizing weapons from the colonists, and arresting Samuel Adams and John Hancock led to skirmishes at Lexington and Concord in April of 1775. The war began in earnest on June 17, 1775, at Breed’s Hill (named the Battle of Bunker Hill, after the highest hill in the area, though that’s not where the fighting took place).

On that day, seven-year-old John Quincy Adams held his mother’s hand as they watched the battle from a hillside on their family farm. The horror of the battle, which included heavy losses on both sides, was compounded when they learned that a patriot leader and close family friend, Dr. Joseph Warren, had died. In 1848, two years before John Quincy died, he still vividly remembered what his mother had called the “decisive Day,” because it sparked a war on which “the fate of America depends”:

I saw with my eyes those fires, and heard Britannia’s thunders in the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, and witnessed the tears of my mother and mingled them with my own, at the fall of Warren a dear friend of my father. . . . He had been our family physician and surgeon, and had saved my fore finger from amputation under a very bad fracture. . . . Yet in the spring of 1775 my mother taught me to repeat daily after the Lord’s prayer, before rising from bed, the Ode of Collins—“How sleep the brave who sink to rest / By all their country’s wishes blest!”⁶

So began the sweeping eight-decade saga of John Quincy Adams. It was an astonishing journey that left an indelible mark on American history. It began with that small seven-year-old boy standing on Penn’s Hill with his mother and ended with him, eighty years old and a former president, collapsing in the House of Representatives after serving in Congress for sixteen years.

Great Expectations

John Quincy Adams was immersed in a world of ideas and politics from his earliest years. . . .

About Tom Malone

Tom Malone is an entrepreneur and technology consultant in the greater Boston area, and the author of A Defense of American Ideals.

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