![]() In 1823 he drafted the Monroe Doctrine that has guided American policy toward the Western Hemisphere ever since.Įspecially appealing to modern eyes was his political activity after he lost reelection to the presidency in 1828. In 1819 he negotiated the Transcontinental Treaty with Spain that acquired the Floridas and defined the southwest border with New Spain all the way to the Pacific. He was one of the delegates who signed the peace with Britain that ended the War of 1812. More than any other political leader he formulated the fundamentals of foreign policy that governed American thinking through much of the nation’s history. ![]() He is certainly one of the greatest statesmen in American history and probably the most extraordinary secretary of state the nation has ever had. In some respects John Quincy had a more distinguished political career than his father. She did claim, however, to have a good memory and the ability “to discover the difference between a man of sense and a Fool, and to know that the latter often do the least mischief of the two.” She claimed no pretentions to being a writer and wrote her journals merely for the education and amusement of her children. “Record of a Life,” begun in 1825, dealt with her education, courtship, and marriage, and a continuation of that memoir, “The Adventures of a Nobody,” written in 1840, covered the years from 1797 to 1812. Unlike Abigail, Louisa kept diaries and wrote several memoirs. Most important, as Thomas makes clear, she had an acute capacity for honest self-scrutiny, expressed in her several autobiographical writings. Yet she was as perceptive about people as Abigail and possessed a greater sense of irony than her famous mother-in-law. She lacked Abigail’s self-confidence and was full of self-doubt and often of self-pity. Louisa was raised in England amid comfortable circumstances, and was unprepared for the puritanical and egalitarian climate of her husband’s New England, never mind the challenge of milking cows. In some respects the couple was ill-matched, something John Quincy actually acknowledged in his diary in 1811 on the fourteenth anniversary of their marriage. It was not surprising that Louisa at one point toyed with the idea of divorce. He almost never consulted his wife on matters involving her and their children. As a lover, husband, and father he was always dutiful, but even by the patriarchal standards of his era often very difficult. John Quincy had great difficulty expressing his feelings even offering simple words of consolation to a friend who had lost a child was a struggle. ![]() John Quincy was harder and more stern than his father and lacked much of his father’s redeeming warmth and humor. Whatever problems the senior Adamses had with their relationship, they paled next to those experienced by John Quincy and Louisa. This Adams marriage was very different from that of John and Abigail. Although we have as yet no studies of John Quincy and Louisa as a couple, juxtaposing these two books gives us an excellent picture of what an intriguing and complicated marriage they had. For that reason Louisa Thomas’s smoothly written life of Louisa is bound to seem newer and more remarkable than Traub’s life of John Quincy, no matter how ably written, complete, and fair-minded it is. Adams, in 2014, we still know much less about Louisa Adams than we know about her husband, John Quincy Adams, who has been blessed with a recent spate of biographies, this one by James Traub being one of the best. Heffron’s abbreviated biography, Louisa Catherine: The Other Mrs. What were the odds that their brilliant son John Quincy would marry a woman who was as bright, as interesting, and as able a writer as Abigail? John Quincy and Louisa haven’t acquired much of the acclaim that John and Abigail have, but they are an equally fascinating couple.Īlthough Louisa Adams has begun to attract attention, especially with the publication in 2013 of the two-volume edition of her Diary and Autobiographical Writings and the appearance of the late Margery M. ![]() We have always considered John and Abigail Adams as the most famous couple of the Revolutionary generation-each of them smart, observant, and a superb letter-writer. Louisa Adams miniature painting by John Thomas Barber Beaumont, 1797 ![]()
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