John Quincy Adams

420 Pages·2012·5.01 MB·English

by  Harlow Giles Unger

Table of Contents

BOOKS BY HARLOW GILES UNGER
Title Page
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction

CHAPTER 1 - A First Son for a Founding Father
CHAPTER 2 - The Seeds of Statesmanship
CHAPTER 3 - The Land of Lovely Dames
CHAPTER 4 - “He Grows . . . Very Fat ”
CHAPTER 5 - Never Was a Father More Satisfied
CHAPTER 6 - A Free, Independent, and Powerful Nation
CHAPTER 7 - A Profile in Courage
CHAPTER 8 - Diplomatic Exile
CHAPTER 9 - Restoring Peace to the World
CHAPTER 10 - Stepladder to the Presidency
CHAPTER 11 - The Great and Foul Stain
CHAPTER 12 - The End of the Beginning
CHAPTER 13 - A New Beginning
CHAPTER 14 - Freedom Is the Prize

Notes
Bibliography and Research Resources
Index
Copyright Page
BOOKS BY HARLOW GILES UNGER
American Tempest
Improbable Patriot
Lion of Liberty
Last Founding Father
The Unexpected George Washington
Lafayette
John Hancock
Noah Webster
America’s Second Revolution
The French War Against America
Who but shall learn that freedom is the prize
That nature’s God commands the slave to rise,
Roll, years of promise, rapidly roll round,
Till not a slave shall on this earth be found.
1
—JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, 1827.
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks to Sara Georgini, an assistant editor of The
Adams Papers, at the Massachusetts Historical Society in
Boston, for vetting the finished manuscript of this book. Her
encyclopedic knowledge of the life and times of the Adams
family saved me weeks, probably months, of research and
checking. My thanks, too, to Kelly Cobble, curator, and Patty
Smith, museum technician, at the Adams National Historical
Park, Quincy, Massachusetts, for their gracious and most
generous help in providing illustrations for this book. Also very
helpful in obtaining illustrations were Richard Sorenson of the
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, DC; Jessica Blesso, of the Library of Congress
duplication services; and Anna J. Cook, assistant reference
librarian at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
I know of no words that can express my gratitude to all the
great folks at Da Capo Press and the Perseus Books Group,
which published this book—the fourth they’ve published with
my byline. If this were a newspaper or magazine, all their
names would appear on a masthead. I have no idea why book
publishers don’t print mastheads in books, but, to try to thank
those responsible for the publication and sale of this volume, I
am breaking with tradition and not only displaying a masthead
but dedicating this book to all the people listed.
Da Capo Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
John Radziewicz, Publisher, Da Capo Press
Robert Pigeon, Executive Editor
Lissa Warren, Vice President, Director of Publicity
Kevin Hanover, Vice President, Director of Marketing
Sean Maher, Marketing Manager
Jonathan Crowe, Editor
Cisca Schreefel, Project Editor
Trish Wilkinson, Designer
Jennifer Kelland, Copy Editor
Cathy Armer, Proofreader
Marie Maes, Indexer
My most sincere thanks to you all and to the entire sales
team of the Perseus Books Group.
NOTE: Spellings, punctuation, and grammar in the eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century letters, manuscripts, and publications
cited in this book have, where appropriate, been modernized
without my knowingly altering the intent of the original author.
Readers may find the original spellings in the works cited in
the notes.