Lindsay Chervinsky: He's just constitutionally incapable of
sort of sitting home and writing books, or reading books, or, you
know, writing poetry, and being a farmer. He has to be in the
action.
Colleen Shogan: On June 17, 1775 John Quincy Adams and his
mother, Abigail, climbed up Penn's Hill near their Braintree
home to the sound of thunder, except it wasn't. It was the
sound of cannon and gunfire from the Battle of Bunker Hill. The
seven-year-old Adams had no way of knowing that he was
witnessing a rebellion becoming a revolution, the beginnings of
a nation that he would one day lead as its chief diplomat and
as its president, that revolution would sweep him
across the Atlantic to Paris just a few years later to serve
as his father's personal secretary. It was the first of
many diplomatic posts that would shape Adams's vision for the
United States and its place in the world, but as today's guest,
Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, finds convincing his fellow Americans
of that vision wasn't always easy. Adams imagined a future
that many Americans could not or refuse to see. So, what can we
learn from Adams's quest for a strong and virtuous nation in a
dangerous world. I'm Colleen Shogan, and this is In Pursuit,
a podcast that explores lessons from America's past to write the
history of America's future. Episode Six: John Quincy Adams
avoids the monsters abroad. Lindsay Chervinsky. Welcome to
In Pursuit. John Quincy Adams had an amazing career. He held
pretty much every diplomatic post imaginable. So, when did
his career in diplomacy begin?
Lindsay Chervinsky: He was so unbelievably young, so he really
comes onto the scene when he's eight, and his mother, Abigail
Adams, brings him up to a local hill to watch the battle of
Bunker Hill, and it is the first time that he starts to really
see the impact of failed diplomacy war, of course. Just a
couple of years later, when he was very young, he went with his
father to Europe for basically his first assignment, which was
to help his father as a secretary and to help his father
learn French, and so he started to have experiences in Paris, in
France, in London, when he was not even a teenager.
Colleen Shogan: So, what did those early years abroad teach
John Quincy Adams?
Lindsay Chervinsky: Well, I think that he taught him a
couple of really important things. The first thing was that
diplomacy fails. He saw his father fail at diplomacy, and
that is a very important lesson for any diplomat to learn. The
second was that the United States was incredibly weak,
especially early on, and it was really just a pawn to be used
between the various different European empires. And
critically, I think the second part of that was that he learned
that the European empires were not particularly interested in
the fate of the United States. They were interested in using
the nation if it was beneficial to them, but they didn't care
what happened for moral or even virtuous reasons. Later in his
career, he becomes the ambassador to Great Britain. He
becomes the Secretary of State. So, how did some of those early
experiences affect his future diplomacy, and had conditions
changed in the United States. They had a bit, of course. The
United States continued to grow in size, it continued to grow in
its economic power, it was acquiring more and more land. It
was a very valuable market for the European empires, and they
also bought a lot of goods from the United States to, for
example, feed their colonies in the Caribbean. So it was
starting to become an economic player in its own right, but I
think that those early experiences were formative for
John Quincy Adams, because it made him intensely pragmatic and
a little bit suspicious of whatever the Europeans were
doing, and that's really important when you're a
diplomat, because you have to understand where the other
person is coming from in order to find compromise.
Colleen Shogan: John Quincy Adams eventually has a speech in
which he makes a famous statement in which he says the
United States does not go abroad in search of monsters to
destroy. What does that quote mean, and what significance does
that have?
Well, the context behind the speech is important, and it's
actually a really fun scene to set. He was invited to give the
July 4th address at Congress. He was not a congressman at this
point, he was Secretary of State, and he wanted to
demonstrate that he was not speaking on behalf of the
administration, so he wore his Harvard robes to give this
speech. At the time, there were a number of wars in Europe, and
there were also a number of rebellions in Latin America and
South America. A number of republics were declaring their
independence and trying to throw off the shackles of Spain, in
particular, but European. Powers, there was a question of
would the United States recognize those new republics,
would they interfere in wars in Europe on behalf of other
nations who were declaring their independence, and this speech, I
think, is probably one of the most underappreciated or
misunderstood speeches in American history, because yes,
he does that famous line, we don't go abroad in search of
monsters to destroy, which is him saying we are not going to
insert ourselves in wars that have nothing to do with us. But
the next line is super important too. What he says is that we
want to be a friend to all nations, but we cannot enforce
those principles through military might, or it will
corrode our own character, so it is not an isolationist
sentiment. It is not saying that the United States won't engage
internationally or won't have friends or allies, but rather we
can't make other nations be like us, or that process will destroy
who we are.
Who's president during when John Quincy Adams gives this speech?
Lindsay Chervinsky: James Monroe was president. He had the very
good sense to appoint John Quincy Adams as Secretary of
State, and then he even had the better wisdom to actually let
him do the job.
Colleen Shogan: During Monroe's presidency, we know that there
is a famous international doctrine, the Monroe Doctrine.
Should it have been called the John Quincy Adams doctrine?
Lindsay Chervinsky: Yes, absolutely. I really think it
should have
Colleen Shogan: easy to say as Monroe Doctrine. Exactly,
Lindsay Chervinsky: Yes, it really should have been, because
it was Adams' brainchild, and it was something that he had been
talking about and thinking about for at this point at least a
decade, and it's actually three parts. The part most people know
about is President Monroe's address to Congress, which, of
course, is a written address at this point. President Monroe was
not going and speaking to Congress, and it basically laid
out the principle that the Western Hemisphere was closed to
further interference from European nations. The United
States wouldn't interfere in their existing relationships,
but they wouldn't tolerate any further colonization, but there
are two more parts. One is a letter to Russia that John
Quincy Adams wrote, basically telling them to back off, and
that their interference in South America, in particular, would
not be welcome. And the third piece is a letter to Great
Britain, and Great Britain had actually offered to partner with
the United States to keep Russia and Spain at bay, and John
Quincy Adams said no, because he said it would be more dignified
to come in as a cock boat in the wake of a British man of war
than to agree to be their lesser partner in this endeavor, so it
was asserting a sort of independence and a claim to
future dominance over the Western Hemisphere that was very
forward looking.
Colleen Shogan: John Quincy Adams, you know, has this very
successful career as a diplomat. He negotiates an end to the War
of 1812 He's the ambassador to Great Britain, and then a very
eventful role as Secretary of State, and very influential
role. What makes him want to run for President of the United
States?
Lindsay Chervinsky: Such a great question. He also, you know, as
Secretary of State, he had engineered the purchase of what
was called the Floridas, which is Florida into now Louisiana,
which had long been very desirable for Americans, I think
there were a couple of things that made him want to run for
president, and I should say he didn't actually want to run for
president, he wanted to be president, because he thought
campaigning was sort of beneath him and beneath the office of
the presidency.
Colleen Shogan: Did they really campaign in 1820s Was that what
they did?
Lindsay Chervinsky: They pretended that they didn't, they
pretended that they had nothing to do with it, but in reality
they had these massive campaign apparatuses that were run by
their allies. Their wives were incredibly important, so Louisa
Catherine Adams was essential. She threw these parties that
were basically a way to curry favor with potential supporters.
They had newspaper editors who were on staff or on side with
their campaign, but they were supposed to appear as though
they were disinterested, and they were being called to
service. I think Adams wanted to be president because he was kind
of what one did. Once you were Secretary of State, you know, we
had had, of course, Thomas Jefferson had become president,
Madison had become president, Monroe had become president, and
so it was the next viable step, he certainly believed that he
was more experienced and capable of anyone else that was running,
and therefore would be the better president. His father had
been president, so I think it was sort of living up to that
Adams legacy, and he believed deeply in the future of the
union and wanted to do everything in his power to
support it. He wins the presidency, but it's not without
controversy, correct. So, this is what is often called the
corrupt bargain. I think unfairly so, because it is how
the Constitution is intended to work. So, in the election of
1824 there were a number of different candidates, none of
them received enough to win outright, and so the election
was thrown to the House. Representatives, and there were
basically four viable candidates. There's Andrew
Jackson, there was John Quincy Adams, there was Henry Clay, and
William Crawford. Now, William Crawford had had a stroke during
the campaign and was in ill health and could not really
actually serve, so quickly he was out of the running, and
Henry Clay had a relatively small number of votes, so he was
not going to be a viable candidate, so it came down to
Adams and Jackson, and that meant that Henry Clay had
enormous influence on what would happen, because he could
encourage his supporters to go to one side or the other. Here's
where I think the story gets fuzzy. Henry Clay despised
Andrew Jackson with every fiber of his being; he would have
rather jumped off a bridge than voted for him or encouraged his
supporters to vote for him, so there is absolutely nothing that
Adams could have offered Clay or that Jackson could have offered
Clay to change the outcome. However, Adams did meet with
Clay, Clay threw his support to Adams, and then later Adams made
Clay his secretary of state, so it looked like there was this
backroom deal that had gone on. Now that allegation ignores both
the relationship between Clay and Jackson, but also this was
what had been done. All previous presidents had put their rivals
into the cabinet, so it wasn't like he was breaking practice or
disregarding precedent in any way.
Colleen Shogan: Is that the beginning of the early spoils
system in 1824?
Lindsay Chervinsky: No, I don't. I would say that actually
Jackson is really the beginning of the spoils system, because
Jackson, when he came into office in 1828 he fired pretty
much everyone that was in office and put in all of his cronies
and supporters. Up until that point, what we refer to as the
team of rivals cabinet concept, which, of course, Doris Kearns
Goodwin made so famous with Lincoln, that was just what was
done. You typically took the leading people in your party and
you brought them into the administration as a way to
strengthen your position, to make yourself seem stronger,
because you had the support of all these people, and to try and
smooth over any fissures in your party. It was a way to build a
coalition.
Colleen Shogan: So John Quincy Adams becomes President of the
United States. What does he prioritize? What type of agenda
does he espouse?
Lindsay Chervinsky: John Quincy Adams really had a vision for
how to strengthen the union, and that was particularly important
in the 1820s as the country was expanding rapidly, and you had
these different regions that culturally were quite different,
had very different economic bases, had very different
traditions and religions and education, but they needed each
other, or at least he believed that they did, and so he
embraced what he called the American system, which would
support infrastructure at a national level that would
increase roads, it would improve canals, it would improve the
quality of ports and harbors to make trade easier, but it also
had a scientific and educational component. He supported a
national university, which is actually something that both
Washington and John Adams had supported as well, and he
supported a national center for astronomy. He felt that
understanding the heavens and the skies were really important.
Now, this was sort of roundly mocked by his opponents as a
lighthouse of the skies, but it does show how forward-thinking
he was about what the nation could do to support learning and
education
Colleen Shogan: But then Jackson does pass an infrastructure
bill. Right?
Lindsay Chervinsky: This is one of the things that I think is so
fascinating. Is Adams put all of these ideas forward and they
were defeated, and then Jackson embraced a lot of them, and they
were supported. It wasn't that the ideas were flawed or
problematic, it was that sometimes you need the right
political culture, the right political moment and the right
person in office to actually make them happen.
Colleen Shogan: You talked a little bit about the astronomy.
He also is credited with the Smithsonian. So, John Quincy
Adams was some people say the smartest US president that we
ever had. How were those ideas received, or did they have to
have a different moment in time as well?
Lindsay Chervinsky: He was, I think, probably among the
smartest presidents we've had, and you know, there's an
interesting discussion to be had about whether the smartest
presidents are always the best ones. Sometimes John Quincy
Adams was so smart he couldn't really deal with other people,
and you kind of have to do that as president. He was very
supportive of the Smithsonian when he was later in Congress,
after his time as president, he was pretty instrumental in
getting the bill passed, and then actually donated a number
of items and goods for the early museum. I think that the
Smithsonian, and actually a number of his efforts in the
White House, get at this concept that it's not enough to have
shared borders, you have to also have a shared history and a
shared culture in order to sustain a union going forward,
in recognition that the country was going to hit some pretty
hard times, he could foresee some of the challenges coming
down the road, and he thought that if we had a shared cultural
base, a shared educational base, a shared history, that that
might help us survive those rocky moments,
Colleen Shogan: And in 1828 of course. He wants to run again
for a second term, and he does, but this time he's defeated by
his rival, Andrew Jackson.
Lindsay Chervinsky: Yeah, I think as early as the end of
1826 he knew he was going to lose, because the country was
really moving away from New England, it was moving away from
his version of what it meant to be a politician. In some ways,
he was really the last of the founders, because he did want to
remain above the people. He did not see himself as a party man.
He didn't want to be a party man. He wanted to be a president
for all of the people. He didn't like to campaign. He didn't like
to do those kinds of things. And the country had gone through
enormous changes in those four years. Many of the states had
introduced new suffrage laws that expanded the vote to most
white men. You didn't have to have property anymore. That
meant that there were a huge influx of voters, especially in
the West, and that was important because they were very resentful
of the hold on power that New Englanders had held for so long,
and sort of like the intellectual elite that Adams
embodied, I mean, he was the intellectual elite. He was
brilliant. He had incredible education and experiences, and a
lot of voters scorned that what they saw as elitism. And so the
cultural shift, the actual voter shift West, and Jackson's
persona, of which he was a very, very appealing - now we would
call him a demagogue, but he was a very appealing character,
meant that Adams didn't really have a chance.
Colleen Shogan: But John Quincy Adams doesn't just pack up his
bags and go home. This is what's really interesting about John
Quincy Adams: he recognizes his electoral defeat, but then he
becomes the only president in American history to run for and
have a seat in the House of Representatives after serving as
President of the United States. What does he do as a member of
Congress?
Lindsay Chervinsky: He does. I love this about him. He's just
constitutionally incapable of sort of sitting home and writing
books, or reading books, or, you know, writing poetry and being a
farmer, he has to be in the action, and so his neighbors
elect him to Congress. He serves for 18 years, which is amazing
at the end of his life. He also takes side gigs in that he
represents the Amistad case in front of the Supreme Court. So,
these are people who had been captured into slavery illegally,
and he represents them and gets them their freedom, but he sees
his time in Congress as an opportunity to speak on behalf
of his vision for what the country can be, and to warn
against the dangers he sees coming down the road. He had
always been intellectually an abolitionist, in that he opposed
the slave power and the unfair advantage it brought to the
South, in particular, he thought slavery degraded all that
participated in it, but he hadn't ever really taken a
public stand. Once he was in Congress, he became an ardent,
outspoken advocate against slavery, and, in particular,
against the gag rule, which prevented congressmen from
talking about slavery. I mean, talk about the ultimate
violation of the First Amendment, and he almost
single-handedly defeated it. It took a great deal of time and
parliamentary maneuvers, but he excelled at those things, and
Southerners recognized him as the most impressive and
difficult to defeat opponent of slavery, and that was a couple
of reasons: one, he was so smart, he was so eloquent, he
was so good at using the maneuvers of Congress to get
what he wanted, but his stature as the son of a president and a
former president meant that he was physically untouchable, and
this was very important in the 1840s because there was a
fighting and dueling culture in Congress where southerners
tended to elect people who would fight on behalf of slavery and
their interests, that meant caning, so we saw, you know, the
caning of Charles Sumner, duels, fisticuffs, all sorts of
violence, and they would threaten any northerner who
spoke against slavery. Well, they couldn't threaten John
Quincy Adams, and he knew it, so he was effectively untouchable.
Colleen Shogan: Do you think he was better suited as a member of
Congress than as President of the United States?
Certainly, at the end of his life, and I think early in his
life he would not have been. I think he got to the point where
he just had no F's left to give, to use more modern parlance. He
didn't have anything to lose, and he recognized the danger of
a potential civil war. He was warning against it. He opposed
the Mexican-American war because he thought it would hasten these
divisions, and so he just laid it out on the line. And so, I
don't think he would have done that as a young man, because he
would have had this whole career ahead of him. I think, as
president, he was still trying to lead on behalf of all of the
American people, and towards the end of his life, I think his
cantankerous nature served him well as a fly in the ointment,
or as you know, a burr in the side of the Southerners.
Can you talk a little bit about his death? I mean, his death is
extraordinary.
Lindsay Chervinsky: Oh, it's so unbelievably dramatic, so he was
giving a speech on the floor of the house, which today is the
rotunda. If you go into the rotunda, you can see the plaques
on the floor of where the various desks would have been.
He was giving a speech, and he had a stroke and collapsed. He
was moved into the speaker's office, which is now, I believe,
the Women's Leadership Lounge. They still have the original
couch, and you can sit on it. I'm like, no, no, no, don't sit
on the couch. We need to preserve the couch. So they
moved him to this couch, and he died, I think, the next day. So
he died in Congress. He served almost his entire life. What I
think is so amazing is when he died, his desk was a couple of
desks away from Abraham Lincoln, so his career spans from the
Battle of Bunker Hill to Abraham Lincoln in Congress. That is
such an incredible scope of American history, and the fact
that he was witness to it and a part of it is remarkable.
Colleen Shogan: Was Lincoln there when he died? I don't
believe he was in the room, but I do think he was in Congress
when John Quincy Adams collapsed,
Lindsay Chervinsky: So when we put John Quincy Adams in
perspective, he sounds like a futurist in a way. What can we
learn from John Quincy Adams as Americans today? I think there
are two things we can learn: one, that it is totally
acceptable to have a vision that is very forward-looking
futurist, as you said. It turns out to be quite prescient and
brilliant, and just because you can't achieve it in your life or
in your moment doesn't mean that it's not right or worth fighting
for, because as we talked about with infrastructure, the
importance of union, the importance of rational and
pragmatic international engagement, these are all
principles that we now celebrate as Americans, and he was just a
little bit ahead of his time. Doesn't mean he was wrong, it
just means that he was moving a little too fast. The second
piece is he offers a vision for our engagement in the world that
I think is actually maybe what we need today, which is that we
are not going to go seek out a ton of foreign wars that have
nothing to do with our political interests or our national
security, but it's also not isolationist. It's deeply
pragmatic. It's very supportive of a intellectual and economic
and emotional participation in the world. It's important to
have allies, especially allies that share our principles, but
that we can't force people to have our principles, or it will
destroy us. That is, I think, a foreign policy that most
Americans agree upon, and it's one that I think is quite
relevant for the 21st century.
Colleen Shogan: So, you've already written a book on John
Adams, and you're writing a book right now on John Quincy Adams.
Why the obsession with the Adamses, the Adams family?
Lindsay Chervinsky: Yes. Well, the John Adams book came about
because my first book was on George Washington, and sort of
all the things he did to create the presidency. And then I
started thinking about, okay, well, what happens when you're
not George Washington? How does the presidency work for anyone
else? And then I was, of course, very much shaped by january 6.
Then I wanted to have a better understanding of how the
peaceful transfer of power was created, and so that's where the
John Adams book came from. And I've actually long loved John
Quincy Adams. My dog's name is John Quincy Dog Adams. I wrote
in college on John Quincy Adams, so this book was, I think, a
long time in coming, and it felt like a story that I think maybe
needs to be shared in the next couple of years, and so it felt
like a relevant one. And then, as I was doing the research, I
was like, oh, I actually need to write this story now, while I'm
the executive director of the George Washington Presidential
Library, because John Quincy Adams explicitly claims the
mantle of being George Washington's ideological heir.
As president, he offers an address in which he basically
gives an updated farewell address, and he talks about
Washington and what Washington would think in the 1820s that
is, I think, an incredible legacy for Washington and for
John Quincy Adams, and was a story that I felt like worked
very well with my day job.
Colleen Shogan: Well, that brings us full circle, really,
from that early phase of the American presidency, from George
Washington to John Quincy Adams. So, Lindsay Chervinsky, thank
you for joining us for In Pursuit.
Lindsay Chervinsky: Thank you so much for having me
Colleen Shogan: To read Lindsay Chervinsky's essay on John
Quincy Adams, and to enjoy other great In Pursuit essays and
podcasts, visit In pursuit.org in Pursuit with Colleen Shogan
is a podcast by More Perfect. The series is written and
produced by Jim Ambuske. Our theme music is Kleos by Charlie
Ryan. Audio mixing by Curt Dahl of CD Squared. Please rate and
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