John Quincy Adams bio offers unromanticized portrait

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS: American Visionary, by Fred Kaplan. Harper, 652 pp., $29.99.

History, no less than life, is unfair. It does not favor the loyal, the persistent or the morally upright, preferring instead the bold, the obsessed, the scoundrel and the hero. Perhaps above all, it favors those complex men and women who are filled with contradictions that make them both familiar and yet never completely explained. Thus, for historians, even one as distinguished as Fred Kaplan, the task of writing a biography of John Quincy Adams is daunting.

Kaplan seems confident that his readers will, in the end and almost despite themselves, find our sixth president endearing. And he is correct. Adams was, after all, a president who not only read broadly and deeply but who also wrote poetry and elegant government reports. He was a devoted son and husband, a caring and supportive father, a staunch opponent of slavery and an equally staunch supporter of the Union. That he was erudite, intelligent, modest, responsible and hardworking there can be no doubt. And yet it is not until the last decades of his life that Adams becomes an interesting man.

The portrait that Kaplan draws is a sympathetic one, but it is effective in large part because the author does not romanticize his subject. As Kaplan shows, Adams refused to play politics, to campaign for office, to exploit patronage opportunities to build a loyal following. Like his father, John Quincy took the high road on almost every issue, and, also like his father, he suffered the political consequences. His vision of a national government that fostered an educated and informed citizenry and devoted resources to infrastructure and scientific advancements was decisively, if temporarily, buried under the crush of ambitious professional politicians such as Martin Van Buren and the anti-intellectual populism of Andrew Jackson.

In personal life as in his public one, Adams was a dutiful, overly devoted son, always measuring his performance as a husband and parent against an idealized version of his father's long and contented marriage to Abigail. Kaplan offers us much to admire in John Quincy's devotion and fidelity to his near-invalid wife, Louisa, and in his willing financial support of his children long into their adulthood. Yet he cannot point to much passion to balance the heavy sense of responsibility and concern.

John Quincy did not find his independent voice until he was in his 70s. Serving in Congress in the 1830s and '40s (after one term as president, 1825-29), he found an issue that fully ignited his own moral passion. That issue was slavery.

As Kaplan lays out the events that heightened Adams' commitment to abolition, the narrative's tempo increases and the story unfolds more powerfully. It culminates with the Amistad trials, which revolved around 53 Africans seized by Portuguese slave traders. Sold to Spanish planters, they were loaded onto the Amistad to be sent to Caribbean plantations. They rebelled, killed the captain and attempted to sail to Africa, but the ship was seized by an American brig off the U.S. coast. The Africans were imprisoned in New Haven, Connecticut. As the planters, the Spanish government and the brig captain argued over who owned this human property, abolitionists insisted the Amistad passengers were free individuals, kidnapped illegally.

When the case came to the Supreme Court, it was Adams who argued -- and won -- the defendants' case. This, at last, was Adams' moment -- not a tribute to his father's memory but a declaration of his own commitment to human equality and justice.

There is much to praise in this extensively researched book, certainly one of the finest biographies of a sadly underrated man. Ironically, Kaplan is often at his best when the focus is not on Adams but on the era. His accounts of a world before the transportation and communication revolutions of the mid-19th century, his rich descriptions of European culture seen through the eyes of a young American, his astute analysis and deft explication of complicated political and diplomatic issues before the Civil War -- these are the marks of a master historian and biographer. In the end, despite Kaplan's efforts, John Quincy Adams is unlikely to become one of the top 10 presidents in the annual poll. But if he could read this biography, Adams would be satisfied he had been fairly dealt with at last.