Militant Spirit
0465028276
James Traub
Notes
“Education has made a greater difference between man and man, than nature has made between man and brute,” John wrote Abigail in 1775. “It should be your care, therefor, and mine to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite them a habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty and virtue.” Abigail and John would have recoiled at the idea that intellect could be taught in the absence of morality, for they believed that the goal of education was to produce both goodness and usefulness.
…no man knows what he can bear until he tries… ”Whenever a great able and upright man appears, there will be ever a swarm of little, corrupt, weak or wicked ones, who will find among the people such numbers like themselves, as to form a body capable of obstructing, diverting and interrupting him.” -John Adams
...a popular tyranny never fails to be followed by the arbitrary government of a single person…But “ten years of peace, at home and abroad, have assuaged the animosities of political contention, and blended into harmony the most discordant elements of public opinion.
A self-made man, John Adams had been an agent of his own success and the author of his own ambition. The situation with his son was almost the opposite. John Quincy had known since the earliest childhood that he had a destiny to fulfill. It was not for him to choose a path through life. And since he had been given everything he needed to succeed, failure would be unforgivable. Worse still, should he fall short, he would be failing not himself, but his parents, his nation, his Christian obligations… John Adams had discovered his calling in politics; John Quincy had inherited that calling. He was a man born to and for controversy. In the years to come, Adams would discover that the solution to his life lay in politics. He had a gift not for avoiding storms of partisanship, but for weathering them.
The young man who spotted vanity everywhere had so fortified himself against this (3-year post at Hague) folly that he responded to praise with a paroxysm of self-abasement. But this was no mere show; Adams’ fear of failure was more vivid than his hopes of success.
Coming from someone else, such pettifogging would have amounted to egotism. In Adams’ case, it is probably best to take his objections at face value. He would not bend on anything he considered a matter of principle, no matter what the possible cost to his own happiness. And with Adams, practically everything was a matter of principle… Adams had a gift for adapting to his circumstances without ever sacrificing an ounce of his essential nature.
He was, it’s true, an alarmist temperamentally disposed to see calamity encroaching from all sides. There may have been as well a part of him that sought war, as a test of whether he had the inner steel of his father and his father’s generation.
He had intended to be a man of no party; now his wish had been granted him in the worst possible way. He didn’t – couldn’t – regret his choice, but it had brought him a terrible isolation.
“This Nation will not cease to irritate or torment you, both with Flattery and Reproach till they force you out, that they may have the pleasure of insulting and abusing you.” This, too, was the shared Adams ethos.
Clay shared Adams’ convictions about the central role of state in refashioning America, but he knew better than Adams how to make himself understood. He not only knew but cared about what the political market would bear. And he knew men: he knew who to befriend and who to fight. In short, Clay accepted politics for the fallen endeavor that it is…So remote is Henry Adams from his forebears that he described politics, the profession of all of them, as “systematic organization of hatreds.”