John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life.

John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life. By Paul C. Nagel. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Pp. xii, 432. $30.00, ISBN 0-679-40444-9.)

John Quincy Adams seldom fares well in the rankings of U.S. presidents frequently compiled by historians. The reason is not hard to discover: during his administration (1825-29), Adams ran afoul of a rapidly changing political climate, the machinations of politicians eager to undercut him, and his own political clumsiness. If the criteria for historical reputation were to be expanded to include entire public careers, however, Adams would surely rank close to the top. Adams's non-presidential accomplishments are legion: lawyer; U.S. senator; Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard; U.S. minister to the Netherlands, then Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain; poet and essayist; secretary of state and chief architect of the Monroe Doctrine; erudite author of a pathbreaking report on weights and measures; antislavery Congressman; and counsel for the Amistad mutineers before the Supreme Court. Few individuals in the entire history of American public life have amassed such a remarkable record of public service. Adams is seldom included in the American pantheon, in spite of his record, as a consequence not only of his failed administration but also of his irritable, often self-righteous manner and stubborn adherence to a fading, eighteenth-century political order in the raucously democratic, aggressively egalitarian world of nineteenth-century America.

The biographies under review--alike in making the case for Adams's historical importance (alike as well in their lamentable lack of footnotes and other scholarly apparatus)--are notably dissimilar in approach and significance. Lynn Parsons's John Quincy Adams successfully meets the criteria of Madison House's American Profiles series of which it is a part: "to add a human dimension to the study of history" by offering "relatively concise and swiftly-paced sketches" of significant Americans. The series operates on the reasonable premise that "complex and often dry subjects ... can be enlivened and given meaning through a focus on ... individual stories (p. ix)." The story Parsons tells, well informed and carried forward by an engaging narrative style, moves briskly and hits the standard highpoints of Adams' s career. While it may effectively serve the needs of the elusive "general reader," however, scholars will find little new concerning either Adams or his times in these pages. Parsons tells us Adams was deeply conservative and ardently nationalist. He was a man who, although affirming his own political independence (he wanted desperately to be "the man of my whole country"), suffered rejection by the American people in spite of decades of personal sacrifice and public service.

Far more ambitious and thus more engaging is Paul Nagel's magisterial John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life. Deeply informed by his years of work in the six-hundred-plus reels of Adams family papers, including the full text of Adams' s monumental diary, Nagel sets out to accomplish what no previous biographer has done, that is, "to illuminate the entire Adams, private as well as public" and to reveal the hitherto obscure "inner" Adams (pp. ix, x). The key to understanding the bitterness, austerity, and unfriendliness emphasized by scholars, Nagel asserts, is to be found in the "effects of a recurring major depression (p. xi)" that dogged Adams his entire life, a condition traceable primarily to the harsh, unrelenting criticism of his mother, Abigail. Here Nagel's close familiarity with the entire Adams family, women as well as men, immeasurably enriches his account.

In contrast to the "cold, aloof figure often pictured by historians," Nagel offers a more balanced and far more nuanced figure who could be cheerful and engaging, was widely regarded to be one of his era's most brilliant dinner companions, and, although an often insensitive husband, frequently penned "charmingly erotic" and warmly received poems to his wife Louisa (p. x). Moreover, in spite of Adams's recurring self-doubts and sense of public rejection, Nagel points out that upon his death in 1848 grateful citizens, moved by his heroic defense of the right of petition and adamant opposition to slavery and the Mexican War, lined the railroad tracks between Washington and Boston as his casket was carried home. Nagel asserts that in the nineteenth century "only the death of Abraham Lincoln would elicit a greater display of national sorrow" (p. xi).

Nagel's carefully crafted interpretation of Adams's inner nature--an interpretation centered in a secure understanding of the complicated web of relationships within the extended Adams family--is fully persuasive. Yet, perhaps because of his consuming preoccupation with the "inner Adams," Nagel has surprisingly little to say about external, public dimensions of Adams's career, dimensions that by Nagel's own assertion were inextricably connected to Adams's inner being. The reader learns little, for example, about the content or significance of Adams's intellectual work--as a professor of rhetoric or as the author of the report on weights and measures--although Nagel emphasizes the importance that Adams, and many of his contemporaries, accorded such work. Even more surprising is the cursory treatment given to central accomplishments of Adams's official career, his various ministries abroad, his extraordinary achievements as secretary of state, the nationalist program that lay at the heart of his presidency, or his remarkable service in the U.S. House of Representatives. Nagel's Adams is never fully realized. That said, Nagel has created an extraordinary book, one that opens to view as never before an extraordinary life.

JOHN R. HOWE University of Minnesota, Twin Cities