JOHN QUINCY ADAMS: Speeches & Writings
Edited by David Waldstreicher
Library of America; hardcover, 832 pages; $45
The Library of America, now in its fourth decade, is a nonprofit organization that champions the nation's heritage by publishing America's greatest writing in authoritative new editions, and providing resources for readers to explore this deep legacy.
The Editor of the voluminous JOHN QUINCY ADAMS: Speeches & Writings is David Waldstreicher, who is Distinguished Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of numerous acclaimed works, including The Odysssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journey Through American Slavery and Independence, a winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, and Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification. Waldstreicher is also the editor of these prior collections on Adams, A Companion to John Adams and John Quincy Adams and the Library of America's two-volume The Diaries of John Quincy Adams.
For over fifty years, John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, produced writings of remarkable breadth and insight that shaped the politics of America in its infancy. In the process, Adams became its greatest champion and most penetrating critic, from his prophetic college commencement address in 1787 to his denunciation of slavery in 1843.
In JOHN QUINCY ADAMS: Speeches & Writings, the first volume of his essential political writing, there are 21 essential works that trace the great statesman's lifelong engagement with the promise of America and the legacy of the Founding Fathers.
In these writings, Adams' eloquence, scholarship, and fierce energy were brought to bear on the politics of the nation as it evolved into a democratic republic. Adams' remarkable career began in the founding era in the late 18th century to the sectional crisis that preceded the Civil War.
Waldstreicher writes in the Introduction, John Quincy Adams in a paradox, which may account for our renewed fascination with him. The sixth president of the United States, he was better prepared and almost certainly more eager to take on the job than any of his predecessors. And yet by the usual measures he was not a great president, becoming just the second to fail to secure reelection. The first, of course, was John Adams. This unhappy distinction wasn't all that Adams had in common with his father. Both were deeply committed to the principles of the American Revolution, but skeptics of democracy. Both rejected the idea of partisanship while being temperamentally unable to resist hard-fought political battles. Both were ardent nationalists, despite a cosmopolitanism born of many years spent abroad in the service of their country. They leaned conservative, except when they were radical. They were against racial slavery - but for a long time had little to say about it.
The Adamses shared one other crucial quality: they led intense inner lives that they committed to paper, leaving prolific records, in the form of diaries and letters, that have informed shifting understandings of their politics, their times, and their legacies. Their often harsh self-criticisms and judgments of others have been visited upon them too - resulting in a focus on personality that sometimes obscures the significance of their more formal principles, their position statements, their eloquence, and literary skill.
In the case of the younger Adams, his public writings assume particular value for us as a riveting, ultimately inspiring case study in the long and sustained effort to square the values of the American Revolution with changing political realities in the young nation. For more than fifty years, in one high-stakes political contest after another, John Quincy Adams wrote to and for the American public with insight, passion, and an often lacerating with. Sometimes he wrote anonymously, for the press; sometimes he wrote for an international audience, as part of his official diplomacy; sometimes he wrote erudite orations for civic celebrations; sometimes he wrote public letters to his constituents in Massachusetts, filled with dramatic transcripts from floor debates to explain what he had done in the Capitol. All were informed attempts to persuade and to make history out of history. By the 1830s he was "Old Man Eloeuent": patriot, partisan, and prophet.
Some of Adams' works featured in this compact volume are: Letters of Marcellus, April 24-May 11, 1793; An Oration, Pronounced July 4th, 1793, at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, in Commemoration of the Anniversary of American Independence (Boston, 1793); An Oration, Delivered at Plymouth, December 22, 1802, At the Anniversary Commemoration of the First Landing of our Ancestors, at that Place (Boston, 1802); Letters of Publius Valerius, October 26-November 16, 1804; and The Defense of General Jackson's Conduct in the Seminole War, December 31, 1818.
Biographer Fred Kaplan sees a fresh urgency in Adams' writing in the United States' current moment. "His values, his definition of leadership, and his vision for the nation's future - particularly the difficulty of transforming vision into reality in a country that often appears ungovernable - are as much about twenty-first century America as about Adams' life and times," observes Kaplan.
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