No other American President, not even Thomas Jefferson, has equaled
John Quincy Adams in literary accomplishments. His orations and
public speeches will be found to stand for a tradition of
painstaking, scholastic finish hardly to be found elsewhere in
American orations, and certainly not among the speeches of any other
President. As a result of the pains he took with them, they belong
rather to literature than to politics, and it is possible that they
will not be generally appreciated at their real worth for several
generations still to come. If, as is sometimes alleged in such
cases, they gain in literary finish at the expense of force, it is
not to be forgotten that the forcible speech which, ignoring all
rules, carries its point by assault, may buy immediate effect at the
expense of permanent respectability. And if John Quincy Adams, who
labored as Cicero did to give his addresses the greatest possible
literary finish, does not rank with Cicero among orators, it is
certain that respectability will always be willingly conceded him by
every generation of his countrymen.
Some idea of the extent of his early studies may be gained from his
father's letter to Benjamin Waterhouse, written from Auteuil,
France, in 1785. John Quincy Adams being then only in his eighteenth
year, the elder Adams said of him:--
"If you were to examine him in English and French poetry, I know not
where you would find anybody his superior; in Roman and English
history few persons of his age. It is rare to find a youth possessed
of such knowledge. He has translated Virgil's 'Aeneid,' 'Suetonius,'
the whole of 'Sallust'; 'Tacitus,' 'Agricola'; his 'Germany' and
several other books of his 'Annals,' a great part of Horace, some
of Ovid, and some of Caesar's 'Commentaries,' in writing, besides a
number of Tully's orations. ... In Greek his progress has not been
equal, yet he has studied morsels in Aristotle's 'Poetics,' in
Plutarch's 'Lives,' and Lucian's 'Dialogues,' 'The Choice of
Hercules,' in Xenophon, and lately he has gone through several
books of Homer's 'Iliad.'"
The elder Adams concludes the list of his son's accomplishments with
a catalogue of his labors in mathematics hardly inferior in length
to that cited in the classics. Even if it were true, as has been
urged by the political opponents of the Adams family, that no one of
its members has ever shown more than respectable natural talent,
it would add overwhelming weight to the argument in favor of the
laborious habits of study which have characterized them to the third
and fourth generations, and, from the time of John Adams until our
own, have made them men of mark and far-reaching national influence.
In national politics, John Quincy Adams, the last of the line of
colonial gentlemen who achieved the presidency, stood for education,
for rigid ideas of moral duty, for dignity, for patriotism, for all
the virtues which are best cultivated through processes of
segregation. He ended an epoch in which it was possible for a man
who, as he did, wrote 'Poems on Religion and Society' and
paraphrased the Psalms into English verse to be elected President.
It has hardly been possible since his day.
Chosen as a Democrat in 1825, Mr. Adams was really the first Whig
President. His speeches are important, historically, because they
define political tendencies as a result of which the Whig party took
the place of the Federalist.