In 1817, the United States under President Monroe was locked in an argument with Spain about who should own Florida. While Monroe’s secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, endeavored to cut the Gordian knot in diplomacy with his Spanish counterpart, an unexpected event and, as it turned out, opportunity presented itself: Seminole Indians on the border of the young United States attacked a convoy and massacred a group of Americans. The president responded by requesting that Andrew Jackson, hero of the Creek Wars of 1812-13, drive the Seminoles south of the border. Jackson did so and more, driving the Spanish out of Florida and bringing the territory under American control.
Adams thus found himself in a rather unfavorable position. Florida was a key asset for the United States but Jackson had gained it by force, causing gigantic diplomatic offense to the Spanish. Both "the Spanish and the French ambassador had written to Adams demanding that the United States repudiate Jackson and restore Spanish territory." John Quincy, however, responded with contemptuous calm. In transmitting their message to Monroe, Adams remarked, "there was something tragical in the manner of both these gentlemen."
America got Florida. Adams’ cool manner prevailed and his work convincing the president to think of Spanish occupation of Florida as an act of aggression resulted in the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819. This was but the preview to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, actually written by Adams, which declared that future colonization by European nations in the Americas would be viewed as an act of aggression and would be greeted with intervention by the now stable and growing United States.
The Transcontinental Treaty and Monroe Doctrine were two great accomplishments in the remarkable life of John Quincy Adams. As James Traub notes in his excellent biography, John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit, by the time he became secretary of state at age 50, Adams had already completed a career as America’s first leading diplomat and served one term in the Senate. He would go on to serve one term as president and many more terms in the House of Representatives before the apex of his career as a statesman when he predicted the American Civil War while fighting the battle against slavery.
In Adams’ day, men faced a choice between acting as heroes or seeing their country perish. Adams was raised, however, not to see this as a choice but rather to devote himself wholeheartedly to the cause of American republicanism. His father, John Adams, had already made the decision, and John and his wife Abigail raised their sons in a house built on pillars of (Unitarian) Christian revelation, on the one hand, and Roman-American republicanism, on the other.
These were not simply ideals for the Adams clan. Abigail would wake at dawn to milk the cows, then guide her husband in his political career through advice and caring, teach her sons classical history (with a healthy dose of Cicero, the republican hero of the Adams tribe), perform myriad activities around the house, and finally shut down the country house at the end of the day. Such seemingly disparate threads were together woven into a tapestry of American self-determination and independence. In those days, heroes really did walk the earth, and they knew why God had put them there. It wasn’t for themselves.
John Quincy’s youth was split between rural Massachusetts in his mother and father’s country home and Europe, where he traveled with his father on diplomatic missions from the time he was 11 years old. His education therefore mixed the rural American independence embodied by Abigail with the refinement of European Enlightenment. While he always guarded himself against the decadence of Europe (owing much to his mother’s letters), he also rather enjoyed his visits to Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Berlin—all by the age of eighteen.
The radical devotion to American republicanism John Quincy observed in his parents could never have led him to pursue a normal life. Indeed, the "militant spirit" of Traub’s title is linked to a founding principle of Adams’ life: the necessity of fighting and sacrificing for the cause of American republicanism. In 1792, Adams inserted himself into a debate about French attempts to use the U.S. Constitution against President Washington. Publishing a series of letters anonymously, Adams defended the president and his constitutional powers against the French, simultaneously taking up a quarrel with Tom Paine about the French Revolution.
When Washington learned who was behind the letters, he appointed Adams, age 26, minister to the Netherlands. Thus was born Adams’ public career, which would end in the Speaker’s Room in the United States Capitol, where he died, in 1848. His life is worth meditating on, and Traub’s biography is an indispensable resource for doing so.