Portland Public Library

Diaries, John Quincy Adams ; David Waldstreicher, editor, II

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

portraits

index present

non fiction

Diaries

bibliography

956480095

John Quincy Adams ; David Waldstreicher, editor

Library of America, 294

The diary of John Quincy Adams is one of the most extraordinary works in American literature. Begun in 1779 at the age of twelve and kept more or less faithfully until his death almost 70 years later, it is both an unrivaled record of historical events and personalities from the nation's founding to the antebellum era and a masterpiece of American self-portraiture, tracing the spiritual, literary, and scientific interests of an exceptionally lively mindVolume 2 opens with Adams serving as Secretary of State, amid political maneuverings within and outside James Monroe's cabinet to become his successor, a process that culminates in Adams's election to the presidency by the House of Representatives after the deadlocked four-way contest of 1824. Even as Adams takes the oath of office, rivals Henry Clay, his Secretary of State, John C. Calhoun, his vice president, and an embittered Andrew Jackson, eye the election of 1828. The diary records in candid detail his frustration as his far-sighted agenda for national improvement founders on the rocks of internecine political factionalism, conflict that results in his becoming only the second president, with his father, to fail to secure reelection. After a short-lived retirement, Adams returns to public service as a Congressman from Massachusetts, and for the last seventeen years of his life he leads efforts to resist the extension of slavery and to end the notorious "gag rule" that stifles debate on the issue in Congress. In 1841 he further burnishes his reputation as a scourge of the Slave Power by successfully defending African mutineers of the slave ship Amistad before the Supreme Court. The diary achieves perhaps its greatest force in its prescient anticipation of the Civil War and Emancipation, an "object," as Adams described it during the Missouri Crisis, "vast in its compass, awful in its prospects, sublime and beautiful in its issue."

Chapter VIII, 1821-1925 : Secretary of State -- Chapter IX, 1925-1929 : President -- Chapter X, 1829-1831 : Retirement -- Chapter XI, 1831-1835 : Twenty-second and Twenty-third Congresses -- Chapter XII, 1835-1838 : Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Congresses -- Chapter XIII, 1839-1843 : Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh Congresses -- Chapter XIV, 1843-1848 : Twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth, and Thirtieth Congresses

Diaries, 1821-1848John Quincy Adams diaries 1821-1848