Free John Quincy Adams by Harlow Unger Page A

ardent aspirations of improvement. Yet . . . passion,
prejudice, envy, and jealousy will pass. The cause of Union and of improvement will remain, and I have duties to it and to my country yet to discharge. 36
    Although the vast majority of American voters had rejected John Quincy and his vision for America, he refused to accept their judgment and vowed to continue his struggle to lead them and the nation to greatness. His only uncertainty was how to do it.

CHAPTER 13
    A New Beginning
    After his 1828 defeat, President John Quincy Adams prepared to return to his father’s house in Quincy, Massachusetts, resigned to a life of semiretirement, puttering about the farm a bit, but focused on writing a biography of his father and practicing law part time. John Quincy and Louisa were waiting for George Washington Adams to arrive from Boston to help them move back to Quincy, when a messenger delivered a thunderbolt:
    Their firstborn son was dead at twenty-eight.
    George Washington Adams had been en route to Washington on a steamboat from Providence to New York. On April 30, at 3 a.m., after a night of heavy drinking, he turned irrational, demanding that the captain stop the ship to let him off. When the captain refused, he went topside by himself and either jumped or fell overboard, leaving only his cloak and hat on board—and no note. In the weeks before his death, his drinking and gambling had not abated, and his work had suffered. Still worse, a maid working for the family where he was living had given birth to his child and was blackmailing him. w

    After learning of her son’s death, Louisa decided to remain in Washington apart from her husband. She was too despondent to cope with her husband’s moodiness and his brother’s drunkenness. John Quincy bought a home two miles from the Capitol and left her there.
    â€œThe parting from my wife was distressing to her and to me,” he confided to his diary. “The afflictions with which we have been visited—especially the last—has so weakened us in body and mind that our dejection of spirit seems irrecoverable. We parted with anguish that I cannot describe.” 1
    Early in September, John Quincy’s youngest son, Charles Francis—by then his and Louisa’s brightest hope—married Abigail Brooks, whose sister had married Massachusetts congressman Edward Everett. x Everett’s brother Alexander had trained in the law with John Quincy and served in his St. Petersburg legation for a year. Although John Quincy attended his son’s wedding, Louisa was still too distraught from the death of her oldest son to travel to Boston.
    Later that fall, John Quincy rejoined Louisa in Washington, spending his time on walks, swimming in the Potomac, and writing articles on international affairs that found their way into scholarly journals. In the spring of 1830, he returned to Quincy, this time with Louisa, leaving John II in Washington to try to extract profits from the Columbian Mills flour business.
    As the summer progressed, however, John Quincy fell deeper into depression, finding his only pleasures in walking and swimming, reading the Bible and Cicero’s Orations , planting fruit trees, and tending a garden of
peas, beans, corn, and other vegetables. He made halfhearted attempts at organizing his father’s papers, rummaging through boxes and finding some mementos of his youth—largely books, such as a fondly remembered edition of Arabian Nights . “The more there was in them of invention, the more pleasing they were,” he recalled. “My imagination pictured them all as realities, and I dreamed of enchantments as if there was a world in which they existed.” 2 Charles Francis and his wife visited regularly for family clambakes, John II came up from Washington for two short visits, and the summer slipped away.
    As ill disposed as he was to public functions, he agreed to attend the bicentennial celebration of the