John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams, by John. T.
Morse

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Title: John Quincy Adams American Statesmen Series
Author: John. T. Morse
Release Date: December 26, 2006 [EBook #20183]
Language: English
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[Illustration: John Quincy Adams]

American Statesmen
STANDARD LIBRARY EDITION
[Illustration: The Home of John Quincy Adams]
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.

American Statesmen
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
BY
JOHN T. MORSE, JR.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND
COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge

Copyright, 1882 and 1898, By JOHN T. MORSE, JR.
Copyright, 1898, By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
All rights reserved.

PREFACE (p. v)

Nearly sixteen years have elapsed since this book was written. In that
time sundry inaccuracies have been called to my attention, and have
been corrected, and it may be fairly hoped that after the lapse of so long
a period all errors in matters of fact have been eliminated. I am not
aware that any fresh material has been made public, or that any new
views have been presented which would properly lead to alterations in
the substance of what is herein said. If I were now writing the book for
the first time, I should do what so many of the later contributors to the
series have very wisely and advantageously done: I should demand
more space. But this was the first volume published, and at a time when
the enterprise was still an experiment insistence upon such a point,
especially on the part of the editor, would have been unreasonable.
Thus it happens that, though Mr. Adams was appointed minister
resident at the Hague in 1794, and thereafter continued in public life,
almost without interruption, until his death in (p. vi) February, 1848,
the narrative of his career is compressed within little more than three
hundred pages. The proper function of a work upon this scale is to draw
a picture of the man.
With the picture which I have drawn of Mr. Adams, I still remain
moderately contented--by which remark I mean nothing more
egotistical than that I believe it to be a correct picture, and done with
whatever measure of skill I may happen to possess in portraiture. I
should like to change it only in one particular, viz.: by infusing
throughout the volume somewhat more of admiration. Adams has never
received the praise which was his due, and probably he never will
receive it. In order that justice should be done him by the public, his
biographer ought to speak somewhat better of him than his real deserts
would require. He presents one of those cases where exaggeration is the
servant of truth; for this moderate excess of appreciation would only
offset that discount from an accurate estimate which his personal
unpopularity always has caused, and probably always will cause, to be
made. He was a good instance of the rule that the world will for the
most part treat the individual as the individual treats the world. Adams
was censorious, not to say uncharitable in the extreme, (p. vii) always
in an attitude of antagonism, always unsparing and denunciatory. The
measure which he meted has been by others in their turn meted to him.

This habit of ungracious criticism was his great fault; perhaps it was
almost his only very serious fault; it cost him dear in his life, and has
continued to cost his memory dear since his death. Sometimes we are
not sorry to see men get the punishments which they have brought on
themselves; yet we ought to be sorry for Mr. Adams. After all, his
fault-finding was in part the result of his respect for virtue and his
hatred of all that was ignoble and unworthy. If he despised a low
standard, at least he held his own standard high, and himself lived by
the rules by which he measured others. Men with vastly greater defects
have been much more kindly served both by contemporaries and by
posterity. There can be no question that Adams deserved all the