Diaries 1821-1848: The Monroe Doctrine / Henry Clay and the Election of 1824 / Presidency / Father’s Death and Son’s Suicide / The Age of Jackson / House of Representatives / Amistad Case / Triumph over the Gag Rule

For the 250th anniversary of Adams’s birth, Library of AmericaLibrary of America and historian David Waldstreicher have prepared a two-volume reader’s edition of his monumental diary, presenting selections based for the first time on the original manuscripts and restoring personal and revealing passages suppressed in earlier editions.

As this second volume opens Adams, as secretary of state, is the leading figure in James Monroe’s cabinet, a fractious group whose members jockey to be the next president. This political intrigue, described with gripping immediacy in the diary, culminates in Adams’s election to the presidency by the House of Representatives after a deadlocked four-way contest. Even as Adams takes the oath of office, rivals Henry Clay, his secretary of state, John C. Calhoun, his vice president, and an embittered Andrew Jackson eye the next election in 1828. The diary records Adams’s frustration as his far-sighted agenda for national unification and internal improvement is threatened by this internecine political factionalism, as well as his revulsion at the advent of the “unprincipled absurdities” of Jacksonian democracy: “My hopes of the long continuance of this Union are extinct — The people must go the way of all the world.”

After a short-lived post-presidential retirement, during which he and his wife Louisa Catherine endure the apparent suicide of their eldest son, Adams returns to public service as a congressman from Massachusetts, without question the most extraordinary second act in American political history. In his final seventeen years, Adams leads efforts to resist the extension of slavery and to end the notorious “gag rule” that stifles debate on the issue in Congress, earning the sobriquet Old Man Eloquent. In 1841, he further burnishes his antislavery reputation by successfully defending the African mutineers of the slave ship AmistadAmistad before the Supreme Court, a dramatic manifestation of his life-long commitment to liberty and the rule of law. The edition concludes with Adams’s final entry, recorded on February 20, 1848, the day before he suffered a fatal stroke at his congressional desk.

Throughout, the diary brims with brilliant, sometimes acerbic portraits of an astonishing range of American statesmen, from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to Stephen A. Douglas and Andrew Johnson.