Diaries

The existence of this diary was totally unsuspected until its somewhat accidental discovery among papers at the Vermont Historical Society during a search for Adams family letters of a later period. In part, the diary antedates by more than two years all other diaries of John Adams, and significantly supplements the Diary and Autobiography of John Adams. Among other matters, the newly found diary contains material on John Adams’s life as an undergraduate at Harvard, his choice of a career, his law studies and his first case as a practicing lawyer, his ambitions, and his observations on girls.

Covering the period from Adams’s marriage in September 1829 to the end of 1832, these volumes record the early years of his maturity during which he was seeking to find his vocation.

Twenty-five at the start of these volumes, Adams had yet to embark on the public career that would mark him a statesman, but by their conclusion he had been drawn into the maelstrom of politics. It was an unwilling plunge, dictated by what both he and his father, John Quincy Adams, regarded as betrayal of the elder Adams by Daniel Webster and his Whigs. Once in, however, he showed himself politically adept.

The period from Adams’s twenty-eighth to thirty-second year was characterized by his turn from the political activities that had occupied him for the preceding several years. The course of the Van Buren administration he had helped to elect dissatisfied him, the Massachusetts Whig leadership had earned his distrust, positions on political issues that would either echo or oppose those being vigorously espoused by his father, John Quincy Adams, he felt inhibited from avowing publicly. So confronted, Charles found occupation in preparing and expressing himself on economic matters of moment—banking and currency—and moral questions generated by the slavery issue.

Volume 1 and Volume 2 of the Diary of John Quincy Adams begin the publication of the greatest diary in American History. Recording a span of sixty-eight years, it has been known heretofore only in partial form. When Charles Francis Adams edited his grandfather’s diary, he chose to omit “the details of common life,” reduce “the moral and religious speculations,” and retain criticisms of others only if they applied to public figures “acting in the same sphere with the writer.” Now the diary is being published complete for the first time.

Volume 1 and Volume 2 of the Diary of John Quincy Adams begin the publication of the greatest diary in American History. Here is a remarkable record of the passage from adolescence to manhood of a precocious and sensitive boy torn by self-doubt and driving himself to fulfill his promise and his parents’ expectations.

Born in London in 1775 to a Maryland merchant and his English wife, Louisa recalls her childhood and education in England and France and her courtship with John Quincy. Her diaries reveal a reluctant but increasingly canny political wife. Her husband emerges in a fullness seldom seen—ambitious and exacting, yet passionate, generous, and gallant.

The present volume reveals Charles Francis Adams as a sensitive and self-critical young man during his college years, in the social whirl of Washington while his father was Secretary of State and President, during his training as a lawyer in Daniel Webster’s Boston law office, and throughout his prolonged courtship of Abigail B. Brooks, a New England heiress. A central theme of these volumes is the struggle which raged within young Adams’ mind and heart between the warm, poetic heritage of his Southern-born mother and the cold, political, New England legacy of his Adams forebears.

The present volume reveals Charles Francis Adams as a sensitive and self-critical young man: in the social whirl of Washington while his father was Secretary of State and President, during his training as a lawyer in Daniel Webster’s Boston law office, and throughout his prolonged courtship of Abigail B. Brooks, a New England heiress. The defeat of his father in the 1828 election, the tragic death of his older brother, and his marriage to Abigail in 1829, with which the volume ends, were way stations in his course toward making himself a “New England man.”

The Autobiography, intended for John Adams’s family but never finished, consists of three large sections. The first records his boyhood, his legal and political career, and the movement that culminated in American independence. The second and third parts deal with his diplomatic experiences, and serve among other things as a retrospective commentary on the Diary; they are studded with sketches of Adams’s associates which are as scintillating as they are prejudiced. Parts and in some cases all of these sketches were omitted from Charles Francis Adams’s nineteenth-century edition.

Adams’s Diary is a font of information on Revolutionary resistance in New England, debates in the early Continental Congresses, and diplomacy and financing of the American Revolution. Presented in full, we have a basis for comprehending him: an extraordinary human being; master of robust, idiomatic language; diarist in the great tradition.

John Adams’s Diary has proved a quarry of information on the rise of Revolutionary resistance in New England, the debates in the early Continental Congresses, and the diplomacy and financing of the American Revolution. The Autobiography, intended for Adams’s family but never finished, consists of three large sections. The first records his boyhood, his legal and political career, and the movement that culminated in American independence.

The Autobiography, intended for John Adams’s family but never finished, consists of three sections. The second and third parts deal with his diplomatic experiences, and serve among other things as a retrospective commentary on his Diary: they are studded with sketches of Adams’s associates which are as scintillating as they are prejudiced. Parts and in some cases all of these sketches were omitted from Charles Francis Adams’s nineteenth-century edition.