John Quincy Adams, politician, diplomat and statesman, due to its effect and importance for the creation, consolidation and development of the Young Republic at the beginning and during the 19th century, occupies one of the most prominent places in the pantheon of founding fathers and builders American nations. Although younger than them, he belongs to the first line of those who founded, designed and marked in the thorny expanses of history the astonishing path of this country from "colony to superpower". In that order, George Washington is certainly the first, followed by John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, then Thomas Jefferson, as well as the two Jameses - Madison and Monroe. Posterity did not immediately, as in the case of the above-mentioned monumental phenomena of American and world history, recognize and welcome the greatness of statesmanship and diplomatic skill and, especially, the strategic genius of this intellectual giant from Massachusetts. Only in the middle of the 20th century, the famous historian of diplomacy from Yale, Samuel Flagg Bemis, in his study "John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy", returned the attention of historical science and the professional public to the colossal contribution of his countryman to the strengthening and gigantic progress of the state and society that occupies the central part of North America between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. At the very least, he showed and proved that his scientific-research approach has strong foundations in reality and that it was not written in a fashionable, politically profitable way, in times of romantic enthusiasm for "inventing history" due to the daily-political needs of building fundamental mythologems. Without this study by Bemis, posterity was close to forgetting a very exceptional man, the secretary of state and the sixth president of the USA, as well as his work that crucially directed the course of America's development during the 19th century.
MAN
In the case of Quincy Adams, it can be said that in addition to many other external factors and influences, his own character may have determined his fate decisively, with "blind cruelty" (Heraclitus). By the way, few people, if any at all, have successfully escaped with the blessings and/or the curse of their own character. Quincy Adams had, as Bemis notes, two careers interrupted by one presidential term (1825–1829): first as a diplomat and "continentalist" (advocate of territorial expansion of the Young Republic to the entire continent of North America), and then after leaving the White House after only one, and unexpectedly unconvincing, presidential term. As a member of the House of Representatives, this dedicated anti-slavery fighter raised many unpopular issues until his death of a stroke on the floor of Congress in 1848. In the case of Quincy Adams, when analyzing such a fate, one should first start from hereditary traits, childhood and upbringing, in order to reach the influence of social circumstances that also shaped his character. For himself, at the time of perhaps the greatest appreciation and respect that his compatriots, almost equally political opponents and like-minded people, generously showed him as the Secretary of State in the administration of President Monroe, he said in his diary notes in 1819: "I am a reserved man, cold, strict, unwilling to forgive... with the awareness... that I did not have the flexibility to change the shortcomings of my character".
John Quincy Adams was born in 1767 in Braintree, Massachusetts, as the first son of a total of five children from the marriage of John and Abigail Adams. Like his father, the second president of the United States of America, John Adams, he was prone to hard, exhausting work until the end of his life, with almost no rest or rest. He was brought up from an early age not to spare himself in dedicated service to the public good of his country. There is a famous letter in which John Adams gives instructions to his wife Abigail on how to educate and direct their children: "To virtue, accustom them to diligence, activity and spirituality, so that they consider every vice shameful and unmanly." Abigail Adams posterity rightly counts among the "founders of the nation" because of her services during the American Revolution, as well as the invaluable advisory and every other help to her husband and son during their careers. As a mother, she went somewhat further in the Spartan-Puritan upbringing of her children. This was especially true of their oldest and most intelligent child, John Quincy Adams. By the way, the thousands of preserved letters between these three exceptional people, as well as with other actors of the creation and preservation of the USA, are a rarely valuable, deep and colorful source of knowledge about the protagonists of events and the times of the birth of the American nation and state. In one such letter, Abigail admonishes the then twelve-year-old Quincy Adams, who was in Europe with his father, that he is expected "that the improvements he makes should be proportionate to the advantages he enjoys"... and that "nature has not been stingy" with him. Constant nagging and excessive expectations from his parents made young Adams an introverted and excessively self-critical person. All this, however, did not prevent him from reaching the stellar heights of diplomatic skills and strategic thinking: he was educated at several universities, including the University of Leiden during his stay in the Netherlands, and then the prestigious Harvard, where he also taught oratory and rhetoric for a while. Often changing political, state and diplomatic tasks and missions in European capitals, he learned seven languages.
WEATHER
All of this was characteristic of a man who began his diplomatic career at the age of fourteen as an assistant to the American minister-ambassador in Russia, and ended with his death in the manner of a hero of ancient tragedies, at the age of eighty, on the floor of Congress. In the meantime, he represented his country as minister plenipotentiary-ambassador in the Netherlands, Prussia, Great Britain and Russia.... He was a member and then leader of the American delegation during the negotiations in Ghent, Belgium, which ended in a peace treaty with the British on Christmas Eve 1814, which ended the war with Britain that had begun two years earlier. That diplomatic and political success was at the same time a prologue to the most brilliant years of his public activity, until he entered the White House on March 4, 1825. Starting with the post of US ambassador to Great Britain, where he was sent by President James Madison, and then Secretary of State in the James Monroe administration. From then until today, it is difficult to find another state secretary who has achieved more for the interests of his country in this position. Territorial expansion of a continental scale, between the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, as well as south to the Rio Grande River, and north to the Great Lakes, which will happen just before his death in February 1848, was a strategic response that, after the traumatic war with the British and the burning of Washington, was designed, above all, by Quincy Adams. As John Lewis Geddis notes in his analysis of this phase of American history, the path to security and stability of the Young Republic led through America's territorial expansion, proactive action, in short, through a fundamental redefinition of the previous system and concept of security. The answer was not in retreat, tactical and/or strategic, but in strengthening security systems and institutions, arming while setting the highest goals to strive for. The defeat in the war with the British (1812–1814) particularly hurt the Americans. The burning of the White House and government buildings in Washington on August 24, 1814, contributed to the strengthening of awareness of the need for changes in the way of thinking and practicing the security of a still insufficiently stable state with internal problems, but with a strong external threat still present to the very survival of the former thirteen colonies. John Quincy Adams and James Monroe, as well as other leading American statesmen of that time, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Henry Clay, John Calhoun, William Wirth and others were aware that even the danger of the Young Republic breaking up into two or three entities was not yet completely eliminated.
With at least two cardinal tasks, territorial expansion at any cost, against the interests of the European powers present on American soil and, above all, against the vital survival needs of the indigenous peoples who inhabited North America for centuries, it was first necessary to stabilize relations with Great Britain. The importance of peaceful relations and cooperation with the former colonial metropolis was clear to Quincy Adams even during his diplomatic mission in London. The reached Begot-Rush agreement gave the United States of America a "free hand" in its expansion to the west and south in return for the continued British presence north of the Great Lakes.
DELO
This true liberal Democrat, following the best understood American national interests, along with President Monroe, adopted the robust manner of General Andrew Jackson after the victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, in the 1817/1818 Florida Seminole Indian War. forced Spain to retreat from this peninsula. The negotiations with the Spanish ambassador in Washington, Luis de Onís, were successfully led by Quincy Adams: when the Adams-Onís treaty was finally ratified in 1821 after many vicissitudes, Adams considered it his greatest diplomatic and political success (with this treaty, among other things, Florida belonged to the United States of America).
Posterity, however, better remembers and appreciates the role Quincy Adams played in formulating the three non-sequential paragraphs on foreign policy in President James Monroe's Seventh Annual Sixthousand-word Address on December 2, 1823. The President and Secretary of State, Monroe and Adams, quite unexpectedly for the beginning of the 19th century and for many decades the valid American geopolitical paradigm of the almost absolute stopping power of water (Mearsheimer), considered that the largest European powers, especially the Holy Alliance, could threaten not only the newly freed countries of South America from Spanish colonial rule, but also the United States itself. The actions that the Holy Alliance (Austria, Prussia, Russia and, from 1818, Bourbon France) took in Europe, with the announcement that according to the Tropav Doctrine from 1820, which gives itself the "right" to intervene wherever legitimate monarchies are threatened, the main political leaders of the Young Republic worried. At the same time, by decree of 1821, Russian Emperor Alexander I asserted that the empire he ruled had full jurisdiction north of the 51st parallel in North America.
This development of events in Europe alarmed the newly liberated states of South America, fearing a possible invasion of European powers, above all France, which had already intervened south of the Pyrenees, and which would restore Spanish colonial power... The Ottoman Empire cruelly suppressed the Greek uprising for independence... The champions of the independent states of South America persistently hovered around Monroe and Quincy Adams, seeking and hoping for concrete help from the country that was a social and political role model for many Latin American nations. And not only them! For many reasons, political as well as religious and cultural-civilizational, Quincy Adams was not willing to go beyond the principled support and recognition of new states. It was "El Libertador" Simon Bolivar and other Bolivarian leaders Quincy Adams had in mind when he said in his famous address on July 4, 1821, "that America does not go abroad with the intention of destroying every neman that appears..."
The return of the Western Hemisphere to the focus of the foreign and security policy of the United States of America and the existence of what is called the "Donroe Doctrine" (compound of Donald Trump and James Monroe) requires understanding the roots of this policy, when it was created. The intellectual, statesmanship and political legacy of the greatest American strategist in the 19th century and creator of the Monroe Doctrine, John Quincy Adams, is certainly the first and most important step in the entire process.
The author is a full professor, founder and director of the Center for United States Studies at FPN University in Belgrade
This text was created as a result of the project "Freedom 250 - Celebrating 250 years of independence of the United States of America", which is conducted by the Center for United States Studies of the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Belgrade, and is financed by the US Embassy in the Republic of Serbia.
