Lindsay Chervinsky  00:00

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  00:09

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 in 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. Lindsey Stravinsky, 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 Shobha, 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, I 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  01:55

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  02:34

So, what did those early years abroad teach John Quincy Adams?

‍

Lindsay Chervinsky  02:39

Well, I think they taught him a couple of really important things. The first thing was that diplomacy fails, so 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, or even sort of virtuous reasons.

‍

Colleen Shogan  03:21

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?

‍

Lindsay Chervinsky  03:39

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, for example, to 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  04:22

John Quincy Adams eventually has a speech in which he makes a famous statement in which he says United States does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. What does that quote mean, and what significance does that have?

‍

Lindsay Chervinsky  04:39

Well, the context behind the speech is important, and it's actually a really fun sort of scene to set. He was invited to give the july 4 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 and. 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. So, 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. 

‍

Colleen Shogan  06:18

Now, who's president during when John Quincy Adams gives this speech? 

‍

Lindsay Chervinsky  06:21

So 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  06:32

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  06:42

Yes, absolutely. I really, easy to say

‍

Colleen Shogan  06:45

is Monroe Doctrine. I don't know.

‍

Lindsay Chervinsky  06:48

Yes, it really should have been, because it was. 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. So, 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 kind of 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, in the wake of 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  08:17

John Quincy Adams 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  08:38

That's 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 and sort of into now Louisiana, which had long been very desirable for four 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  09:06

Did they really campaign in 1820s Was that what they did?

‍

Lindsay Chervinsky  09:11

They pretended that they didn't, so 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 sort of 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.

‍

Colleen Shogan  10:20

And he wins the presidency, but it's not without controversy, correct?

‍

Lindsay Chervinsky  10:24

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 of Representatives, and there were basically four viable candidates. There was 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, then 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 through 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 you know, disregarding precedent in any way.

‍

Colleen Shogan  12:03

Is that the beginning of this early spoils system in 1824

‍

Lindsay Chervinsky  12:08

No, I don't. I would say that actually Jackson is really the beginning of the spoil 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, you know, the team of rivals cabinet concept, which, of course, Doris Kearns Goodwin made so famous with Lincoln, that was just what was done, you know. Any, 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  12:49

So, John Quincy Adams becomes President of the United States. What does he prioritize? What type of agenda does he espouse?

‍

Lindsay Chervinsky  12:59

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 the 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  14:09

But then Jackson does pass an infrastructure bill. Right?

‍

Lindsay Chervinsky  14:13

This is one of the things I think is so fascinating, is you know, Adams put all of these ideas forward and they were defeated, and then Jackson embraced a lot of them, and they were supported, so 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  14:33

And John Quincy Adams, I mean, 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  14:53

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 one. Sometimes you know, 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, 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  15:55

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  16:06

Yeah, I think you know, as early as 18, 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 sort of 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 they, 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  17:33

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  17:59

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, like, 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, so he had always been until 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 South. Slavery in there, and their interests, and 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  20:20

Do you think he was better suited as a member of Congress than as President of the United States?

‍

Lindsay Chervinsky  20:26

Certainly, at the end of his life, and I, you know, 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 a common, you know, a 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, you know, 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 sort of cantankerous nature served him well as a fly in the ointment, or as you know, a burr in the side of the Southerners.

‍

Colleen Shogan  21:19

Can you talk a little bit about, I mean, you know, his death, I mean, his death is extraordinary.

‍

Lindsay Chervinsky  21:23

So unbelievably dramatic. So he was giving a speech on the floor of the house, which today is the rotunda. So you can, 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 room or the women's leadership lounge. They still have the original couch, and you can sit on it, 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 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, and 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  22:27

Was Lincoln there when he died?

‍

Lindsay Chervinsky  22:30

I don't believe he was in the room, but I do think he was in Congress when John Quincy Adams collapsed.

‍

Colleen Shogan  22:34

So 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?

‍

Lindsay Chervinsky  22:45

Yeah, 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, you know, 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, he was, you know, 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 an intellectual and economic and, you know, 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  24:13

So, you've already written a book on John Adams, and you're writing a book right now on John Quincy Adams. You know why the obsession with the Adamses, the Adams family?

‍

Lindsay Chervinsky  24:23

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 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 and come. 19, 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 and 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  25:45

Well, that brings us full circle, really, from that early phase of the American presidency, from George Washington to John Quincy Adams. So, Lindsay Chervinksy, thank you for joining us for In Pursuit.

‍

Lindsay Chervinsky  25:58

Thank you so much for having me.

‍

Colleen Shogan  26:00

To read Lindsay Chervinsky's essay on John Quincy Adams, and to enjoy other great In Pursuit essays and podcasts, visit inpursuit.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 Claus by Charlie Ryan. Audio mixing by Curt Dahl of CD Squared. Please rate and review the show on your favorite podcast app, and tell us which Americans inspire you.

‍