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The Tao of John Quincy Adams

by Sean Patrick Adams

Any political consultant worth their salt would see that John Quincy Adams had many liabilities, but the vision thing was not one of them. As the candidate who finished second in both the popular and electoral vote, Adams enlisted the aid of Henry Clay and a host of other allies to win the presidency after the election of 1824 was thrown to the House of Representatives. When the smoke cleared in February of the following year, Adams was president. One would think that a president elected by only 31 percent of the popular vote might ease into his first term. But this was John Quincy Adams. In his (in)famous first message to Congress in December of 1825, Adams forcefully outlined the philosophy of a group of like-minded politicians known to historians as the National Republicans. “The great object of the institution of civil government is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact, and no government, in what ever form constituted, can accomplish the lawful ends of its institution but in proportion as it improves the condition of those over whom it is established.” For Adams and his followers this meant a dramatic new role for the national government. Federal funding for an ambitious program of roads, canals, and river improvements, a national observatory, a national university, a new naval academy, tighter patent laws, and even a new marble monument to George Washington all stood on Adams’s to-do list. After outlining these grandiose plans, Adams veered into a rhetorical ditch. As the president with perhaps the least electoral support of any in the young nation’s history, Adams stood before Congress and wondered if we were “to slumber in indolence or fold up our arms and proclaim to the world that we are palsied by the will of our constituents, would it not be to cast away the bounties of Providence and doom ourselves to perpetual inferiority?” With these ill-chosen words about the needs and wants of American voters, Adams offered his critics the choicest of political plums. Here was proof that the sixth president of the United States was out of touch with the nation’s increasingly expanded and fractious electorate.

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