John Quincy Adams

Starred review from February 1, 2016
Foreign policy specialist Traub (The Freedom Agenda) synthesizes the extensive writings of John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) alongside a broad spectrum of primary and published sources in this essential biography of a complex man. “Guarded and taciturn,” Adams walked his own path, and despite his long and productive career as a statesman, he remains relatively obscure. Traub sees him as a “coherent and consistent thinker” who regarded America as the “greatest experiment in government the world had ever known.” Traub’s Adams is also “astringently realistic..., never confusing what he wished to be true with what he believed to be true.” As a problem solver, he had few equals. As a diplomat, he played a central role in negotiating the treaty that ended the War of 1812. As secretary of state, he gave the Monroe Doctrine its insistence that “American policy serve American interests.” Traub quotes British historian George Dangerfield, who noted that as president, Adams’s belief in a firm, active government made him a “great man in the wrong place, at the wrong time.” But in his 17 subsequent years in the House of Representatives, Adams became the foremost—and cleverest—Congressional opponent of the “slavocracy.” Traub shows that without imperiling national unity, Adams’s persistent, perspicacious opposition to slavery “shattered the overweening confidence of the South” and confirmed his place in America’s history. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency.

January 1, 2016
The life of an early American statesman and president who served as the young nation's strenuous conscience. Traub (Foreign Policy/New York Univ.; The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy (Just Not the Way George Bush Did), 2008, etc.) thoroughly explores the life of John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), a "hard man" of deep erudition and conviction who descended from the American aristocracy and learned at the knees of an exacting father and mother what the great American governing principles meant for world leadership and peace. The author emphasizes his subject's long, somewhat reluctant middle career as a diplomat, from his first posting in 1794 to the Hague to St. Petersburg and then to the Court of St. James during a turbulent time in European history. Breaking with his father's Federalist Party over its Anglophilism at a time of trade and shipping tensions with Britain, Adams pursued an admirable, if tendentious, course of nonpartisanship over the course of his political career, from senator to secretary of state (under James Monroe) to one-term president to Massachusetts congressman (he was the first and only ex-president to serve in Congress). Traub examines how much Adams contributed to what became known as the Monroe Doctrine. "What Adams may have contributed most...was its astringency," writes the author. Although Adams was a proponent of American expansion, he became intensely concerned at the question of admission of slave versus free states in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. During the latter part of his life as a congressman, he "seized the role of chief tormentor of the slavocracy" and represented in front of the Supreme Court the mutinous African captives aboard the Amistad. Most of all, Traub depicts a fully fleshed character, an extraordinary man driven by his birthright principles, a voluminous diarist, scholar, poet, polymath, eccentric, and iconoclast. The author also offers a masterly portrait of Adams' wife, Louisa. An impassioned biography of "a coherent and consistent thinker who adhered to his core political convictions across his decades of public service."

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February 15, 2016

Traub, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of The Devil's Playground, offers a lengthy and comprehensive account of the political and diplomatic contributions as well as the personal plight of John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), the sixth U.S. president and a major figure in early 19th-century history. Drawing primarily from Adams's diaries, letters, and political writings along with contemporaneous newspaper articles and previously published research and analysis, Traub provides a meticulous study of the statesman's public service and private life. Adams surfaces as an ambitious intellectual with deeply held convictions striving to hold his family together through illness, tragedy, and financial woes while relentlessly promoting a strong, active federal government as the young but rapidly expanding and diversifying nation grappled with geographic sectionalism and political partisanship. This rich and occasionally slow account emphasizes Adams's distinguished early career tenure as diplomat and secretary of state, the heated 1824 presidential election resulting in Adams defeating longtime personal and political foe Andrew Jackson, and his tireless effort to force the issue of slavery onto the Congressional floor as a postpresidential member of the House of Representatives. VERDICT As with Fred Kaplan's recent and similarly exhaustive John Quincy Adams: American Visionary, this scholarly book will interest serious readers of U.S. politics and history.--Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia

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Starred review from March 1, 2016
It is an axiom of U.S. history that the sixth president, the son of the second president, ranks in the low tier of chief executives. Recent estimations of his presidency, however, have taken less critical approaches to his performance in the highest office in the land, finding his administrationwhen viewed through the lens of his consciousness of what the American republic stood fora great experiment in freedom and democracy, and the chronicling of the man and his term as president therefore has assumed a less harsh tone. Of course, it is universally acknowledged that Adams, secretary of state under President Monroe, came to the presidency supremely qualified; at that time in U.S. history, that cabinet position was considered the stepping-stone to the White House. Traub thoroughly, even quite engagingly, follows Adams through the years during which he served in the diplomatic corps, building up the reputation as the new republic's best representative abroad. As secretary of state, his obvious next step was the presidency; but his election turned out to be so rancorous it had to be decided by the U.S. House of Representatives. And his intransigent personality made reelection impossible. But his postpresidency tenure in the House gave him a final stage to defend his passion for freedom.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)