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See this volume's table of contents

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The Adams Papers

ROBERT J. TAYLOR, EDITOR IN CHIEF
SERIES I
DIARIES
Diary of John Quincy Adams
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Diary of John Quincy Adams

DAVID GRAYSON ALLEN, ASSOCIATE EDITOR
ROBERT J. TAYLOR, EDITOR
MARC FRIEDLAENDER, EDITOR
CELESTE WALKER, ASSISTANT EDITOR
Volume 1 • November 1779–March 1786
THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS AND LONDON, ENGLAND
1981
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Copyright © 1981 by the Massachusetts Historical Society • All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability.
Funds for editing The Adams Papers were originally furnished by Time, Inc., on behalf of Life, to the Massachusetts Historical Society, under whose supervision the editorial work is being done. Further funds were provided by a grant from the Ford Foundation to the National Archives Trust Fund Board in support of this and four other major documentary publications. In common with these and many other enterprises like them, The Adams Papers has continued to benefit from the guidance and cooperation of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, chaired by the Archivist of the United States, which now also provides this enterprise with its major financial support.
For the first two volumes of the Diary of John Quincy Adams additional funds were supplied by the National Endowment for the Humanities, in its continuing effort to promote humanistic studies, and by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Adams, John Quincy, 1767–1848.
Diary of John Quincy Adams.
(The Adams papers. Series I, Diaries; v. 1– )
Includes bibliographies and indexes.
Contents: v. 1. November 1779–March 1786—v. 2. March 1786–December 1788.
1. Adams, John Quincy, 1767–1848. 2. United States—History—1783–1865. 3. United States—Politics and government—1783–1865. 4. United States—Foreign relations—1783–1865. 5. Presidents—United States—Biography. I. Title. II. Series: Adams papers. Series I, Diaries; v. 1–2.
E377.A185 1981 973.5′5′0924 81-6197
ISBN 0-674-20420-4 AACR2
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This edition of The Adams Papers
is sponsored by the massachusetts historical society
to which the adams manuscript trust
by a deed of gift dated 4 April 1956
gave ultimate custody of the personal and public papers
written, accumulated, and preserved over a span of three centuries
by the Adams family of Massachusetts
illustration
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The Adams Papers

ADMINISTRATIVE BOARD

  • Thomas Boylston Adams
  • James Barr Ames
  • Theodore Chase
  • F. Douglas Cochrane
  • Marc Friedlaender
  • Edward C. Johnson 3d
  • Paul C. Reardon
  • Stephen T. Riley
  • Arthur J. Rosenthal

EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

  • Bernard Bailyn
  • L. H. Butterfield
  • David Herbert Donald
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes
  • Robert Earle Moody
  • Ernest Samuels
  • Vernon Dale Tate
  • Gordon S. Wood
The acorn and oakleaf device on the preceding page is redrawn from a seal cut for John Quincy Adams after 1830. The motto is from Cæcilius Statius as quoted by Cicero in the First Tusculan Disputation: Serit arbores quae alteri seculo prosint (“He plants trees for the benefit of later generations”).
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Contents

  • Descriptive List of Illustrations ix
  • Introduction xvii
    • 1. The Manuscript xvii
    • 2. Earlier Use and Publication xxii
    • 3. The Young Diarist xxxv
    • 4. The Editorial Method xlviii
  • Acknowledgments li
  • Guide to Editorial Apparatus liii
    • 1. Textual Devices liii
    • 2. Adams Family Code Names liii
    • 3. Descriptive Symbols liv
    • 4. Location Symbols lv
    • 5. Other Abbreviations and Conventional Terms lvi
    • 6. Short Titles of Works Frequently Cited lvii
  • Diary of John Quincy Adams, November 1779–March 1786 1
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Descriptive List of Illustrations

 

John Quincy Adams Begins His Diary, 1779 4

The titlepage and the first page of entries are from John Quincy Adams' earliest extant Diary, cited as D/JQA/1 in the code used by Adams editors to indicate individual Diary booklets. The title was revised from that on the front cover. The meaning of the large capital letters (WORL) and the smaller letters in the margin and in the upper left-hand corner has not been determined; they do not appear in the text of the Diary. The design scrawled by Adams along the bottom of the titlepage is repeated throughout the early Diaries.
From the original in the Adams Papers.
 

John Quincy Adams' Cover Designs for His Second Diary Booklet, 1780 24

For the paper cover of D/JQA/2 Adams drew this winged figure, probably male, standing on a pedestal; beside it he scrawled an abstract design of almost equal height. He included no titlepage. The back cover, showing soldiers and sailors, guns, cannons, a fort, and a ship, may have been drawn from scenes Adams witnessed in northern Spain or southern France on his journey from Bilbao to Bordeaux. Imaginative sketches of this sort are not found in his Diaries after this date.
From the original in the Adams Papers.
 

“Saw the Shipping Which Made a Grand Appearance” 33

These sketches of ships, characteristically named the Frightful and the Horrid, and the two rows of stick figures engaged in combat suggest a young mind fired by imagined military and naval exploits, perhaps conjured up as Adams viewed the scene at the Bordeaux waterfront. The drawings appear in D/JQA/2 on the last page and on the inside of the back cover. This Diary booklet concludes with a description of the harbor.
From the original in the Adams Papers.
 

Francis Dana, by Sharples, Post 1794 90

Francis Dana, a Boston lawyer, served John Adams as secretary to the peace commission and as chargé d'affaires. John Quincy Adams {p. R10} accompanied him to St. Petersburg as a companion and private secretary in 1781, when Dana was appointed minister to Russia by the Continental Congress. Adams remained with him for over a year, while Dana tried repeatedly and without success to gain recognition from the court of Catherine the Great. In 1787, when Adams was a student at Harvard and heard that Dana had suffered a stroke, he wrote revealingly: “To me, he has been a second father, and his instructions, though too much neglected at the Time when he gave them, have since been more attended to; and have at least check'd some of my failings, and were calculated to reform them entirely.” After a slow recovery Dana resumed his distinguished career as judge and later Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Years later John Quincy Adams christened his third son Charles Francis in remembrance of his deceased brother Charles and “as a token of honor to my old friend and patron judge Dana.” The pastel portrait of Dana reproduced here is by either James or Ellen Sharples, or both of them, and was painted sometime after 1794 (Sibley-Shipton, Harvard Graduates , 15:204–217; JA, Diary and Autobiography , 4:191; JQA, Diary, 10 March 1787, below; 13 Sept. 1807; Katharine McCook Knox, The Sharples: Their Portraits of George Washington and His Contemporaries ..., N.Y., repr. 1972, p. 94–95).
Courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Victor Notarangelo.
 

“I Was Always ... Addicted To Books Beyond ... Bounds Of Moderation.” 109

John Quincy Adams' voracious appetite for and preoccupation with books, which he obtained on his frequent travels, led him from an early age to devise methods of identifying his acquisitions. Before he began to use bookplates, he often embellished his books with his signature and the date of purchase and occasionally forewarned any would-be thief. An example of this is found in his copy of John Clarke's Introduction à la syntaxe Latine pour apprendre aisément a composer en Latin ..., Paris, 1773, translated into French by Noel François de Wailly, in which the business label of L. C. R. Baudoin of Lorient has been mounted on the page facing Adams' statement of ownership. The book was purchased during his first trip to Europe in 1778–1779.
John Quincy Adams' first bookplate appears in books purchased after he returned to Europe in late 1779. Designed and executed by hand, it is designated “Book-Plate A” in Henry Adams 2d's note on “The Seals and Book-Plates of the Adams Family” ( Catalogue of JQA's Books , p. 135–136). The copy illustrated here, from his set of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres, 5 vols., London, 1753, vol. 1, shows the elaborate book numbering system Adams devised. The number 17 in the upper right corner distinguishes each set of volumes purchased, while the number in the lower left corner (56–60, in this set) was placed to record each separate volume in his library. This ambitious and cumbersome scheme was soon discarded.
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Adams' second bookplate (“Book-Plate B”), which he probably began to use in 1783, was based on the coat of arms of the family of John Adams' mother, the Boylstons. See the descriptive note, Adams Family Correspondence, 4:xv–xvi, and illustration facing p. 381. To the coat of arms, John Quincy Adams added the boughs framing the shield and the ribbon at the bottom, meant for a motto, though none was used. “Two Copper plates for the Arms and Name, J.Q.A.” were recorded among the inventory of his belongings in 1784 ( Catalogue of JQA's Books , p. 138; [Christian Lotter], Inventory of JQA's books, 6 Nov. 1784, Adams Papers).
When Adams abandoned his second bookplate for a third, designated “Book-Plate C” by Henry Adams 2d, he patterned it after one designed by his father. Like Bookplate B, it is based on the Boylston coat of arms; the shield is slightly modified, and the roundels are filled in with two lions and a fleur-de-lis. Above the shield, the lion holds the cross in a different position. The shield is encircled with a garter bearing a motto taken from lines in Tacitus' History ( Catalogue of JQA's Books , p. 138–140).
Although it is impossible to tell exactly when John Quincy Adams began to use each of his bookplates, they are occasionally useful in helping to date the purchase of books. Internal evidence shows that he used Bookplate A on books bought between 1780 and 1783; many books with the little-used Bookplate B were added to his collection in 1786 or before. Bookplate C appears in many volumes bought in Russia in 1781 and 1782 and those purchased when he returned to Europe in 1794. Presumably Bookplate C was affixed at a later time to books obtained in Russia.
The quotation about John Quincy Adams' addiction to books comes from the long autobiographical sketch he sent to Skelton Jones in April 1809 (JQA, Writings , 3:298).
Courtesy of the U.S. Department of the Interior—National Park Service, Adams National Historic Site, Quincy, Massachusetts.
 

Views of St. Petersburg 120–121

Founded by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, St. Petersburg was built along the Neva River and its tributaries and on islands near its mouth, where it empties into the Gulf of Finland in the eastern Baltic. The bottom engraving shows a view of the Neva, with the Admiralty on the left bank and, directly opposite, the Academy of Science. The Academy, which John Quincy Adams occasionally visited during his first sojourn in the Russian capital, was located in Vassilyostrof quarter, an island in the Neva, and near much of St. Petersburg's commercial district. Well endowed with a large faculty and an extensive natural history, geological, and art museum, the Academy derived considerable income from the publication and sale of books, almanacs, court calendars, and gazettes.
The Admiralty, seen from a different perspective in the illustration on the upper left, was a rectangular structure with a gilt spire. {p. R12} Surrounded by earthen ramparts, it was “remarkable,” one foreign visitor thought, “for nothing but its ugly appearance.” Nevertheless, in close proximity to most of the principal royal and governmental buildings, its immediate environs were “the centre of amusement and business, the brilliant resort of pleasure and fashion.” It was not far from here that Dana and young Adams first took lodgings when they came to the Russian capital. The Admiralty was also the geographical center of the city, most of which was on the left or southern bank, and it was from this point that three long, straight streets called Prospects ran out in various directions, like radii, to the outskirts of the capital.
The most important of these was the Nevski Prospect, which headed southeast about five miles to the monastery of St. Alexander Nevski. The view on the upper right shows this broad avenue at about midpoint, looking back toward the heart of the city. In the foreground is the Annitskoi (or Anitschkov) Palace and the Fontanka River, one of several older rivulets at this time being made into canals, which formed irregular concentric semicircles radiating out from the Admiralty and dividing the city into distinct quarters. The Nevski Prospect was lined with the grand houses of “the great and the opulent” and contained many hotels and shops filled with “a constant bustle” unknown in other quarters of the city.
The views were drawn by Louis Nicolas de Lespinasse and engraved by François Denis Née and Claude Niquet. All of these illustrations come from an untitled volume containing views, maps, tables, charts, and pictures of Russians in native costumes which was owned by John Quincy Adams and is now in the Stone Library at the Old House in Quincy. It is undoubtedly a companion “Atlas” to Nicholas G. C. Le Clerc's Histoire physique, morale, civile et politique de la Russie ancienne, 3 vols., Paris and Versailles, 1783–1784, and Histoire physique, morale, civile et politique de la Russie moderne, 3 vols., Paris and Versailles, 1783–1785. Both sets are among Adams' books at Quincy, and the first volume contains, as does the Atlas, the business label of the St. Petersburg bookseller Etter, from whom Adams purchased them while he was minister there. A number of references throughout Le Clerc's volumes indicate that these plates were to be reproduced as a separate volume. Harvard has another edition (Histoire ... moderne, 1783–[1794]) of these volumes, given by John Quincy Adams to the college on 29 September 1797, when he was minister plenipotentiary to the court at Berlin (Storch, Picture of Petersburg, p. 53, 297–301, 324–344, 38–39, 29, 20–22, 43–44; Bénézit, Dict. ... des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs ).
Courtesy of the U.S. Department of the Interior—National Park Service, Adams National Historic Site, Quincy, Massachusetts.
 

The Variétés Amusantes, Paris, 1786 213

Founded in 1778 or 1779, the Variétés Amusantes moved in 1785 from the Boulevards to the Palais Royal, where its new home was built on a site known today as the Parterre d'Enée. Although the actors included such renowned performers as Volange, the come• {p. R13} dies and other productions were, in the words of John Quincy Adams, “calculated to please the mob,” like those of many small Paris theaters of the time. “I wonder how people of any delicacy, and especially Ladies can frequent” this theater, he wrote in his Diary. “The plays acted have seldom much wit, and almost universally are very indecent.” While other, more established theaters were virtually deserted of patrons, these were “always crowded, though they present nothing but low buffoonery, and scurrility. O tempora, O mores!” Despite his moralizing, Adams attended performances here and at similar theaters throughout the remaining months of his stay in Paris. This illustration is from a group of engravings called “Les Délices du Palais-Royal,” in the Hennin Collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale (Max Aghion, Le théâtre à Paris au XVIII siècle, Paris, [1926], p. 279–282; Howard C. Rice Jr., Thomas Jefferson's Paris, Princeton, 1976, p. 16; JQA, Diary, 4, 10, 17 Jan. 1785, below).
Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
 

Thomas Jefferson, by John Trumbull, 1787 223

In early 1785, during the few months that John Quincy Adams remained in Paris after Jefferson's arrival, the young man came to borrow books and spend evenings with the new minister, “whom I love to be with,” he recorded in his Diary, “because he is a man of very extensive learning, and pleasing manners.” Even forty years later, John Adams recalled the influence that Jefferson had over John Quincy Adams at a time when the elder Adams referred to him as “our John” because, he told the Virginian, “he appeared to me to be almost as much your boy as mine.”
Trumbull, who had returned to London in 1783 to resume his studies with Benjamin West, had gradually turned his interest from classical subjects to events and personalities of American national history, and Jefferson, whom he met in 1785, “encouraged me to persevere in this pursuit.” The following year and again in the fall of 1787 Trumbull spent some time in Paris with Jefferson, and it was on the second trip that he painted the minister's portrait. Regarded by one authority as Trumbull's “most successful portrait of the statesman” and the model for numerous copies, it became part of the detail in the original small Declaration of Independence. The portrait shows the Virginian's own fine natural reddish hair instead of a powdered wig (JQA, Diary, 16 Feb., 11 March 1785, below; JA, Works , 10:414; The Autobiography of Colonel John Trumbull, Patriot-Artist, 1756–1843, ed. Theodore Sizer, New Haven, 1953, p. 92–93, 152; Fiske Kimball, “The Life Portraits of Jefferson and their Replicas,” Amer. Philos. Soc., Procs., 88:501, 503, 505 [Dec. 1944]).
Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery.
 

The Comédie Italienne, Paris, Circa 1780S 229

Established in 1716 and a royal troupe from 1723, the Comédie Italienne, or Théâtre Italien, as it was also known, had originally begun with an Italian repertory but gradually worked in French {p. R14} comedies and plays until, by the late 1770s, it was Italian in name only. The merger of the Comédie with the Opéra Comique in 1762 allowed it to present, in addition, light and comic operas, interspersed with musical plays and parodies, all of which had become fashionable in Paris during the final decades of the ancien régime. It was here, as well as at several other Paris theaters, that John Quincy Adams attended numerous performances with his family, Jefferson, and other Americans from 1783 until his departure for America. Some plays, such as Sedaine and Grétry's Richard Coeur de Lion, which he saw on 2 March 1785 at the Comédie Italienne, made such “an indelible impression” that Adams was able to recall lines and sentiments from the production 45 years later. In 1783 the Comédie moved from the Hôtel de Bourgogne to a new home, shown here, designed by royal architect Jean François Heurtier. The rear of the building was on the Boulevard; two new streets, the rue Favart and rue Marivaux, were cut along its sides; and the front of the theater faced a small square. After removal to its new quarters, the company experienced several profitable seasons, then struggled throughout most of the rest of the century. It disbanded in 1801 (Clarence D. Brenner, The Théâtre Italien: Its Repertory, 1716–1793, With a Historical Introduction, University of California Publications in Modern Philology, 63 [1961]: 1–35; JQA, Diary, 7 Nov. 1830, Memoirs , 8:247).
This engraving by Née, after the work of Jean Baptiste Lallemand, is from Jean Benjamin de Laborde and others, Description général et particulière de la France ..., 12 vols. [called Voyage pittoresque de la France ..., after vol. 4], Paris, 1781–[1796], vol. 10, Monuments de Paris et des environs, plate no. 75.
Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum.
 

The Marquis De Lafayette, by Joseph Boze, 1790 246

After the Marquis' return to France from America in January 1785, John Quincy Adams dined regularly at the home of Lafayette, who “entertained all the Americans every Monday.” Adams recorded with unusual detail one of his conversations with the Marquis in which the Frenchman severely criticized his peers. Adams concluded that he spoke “somewhat openly and freely for a french nobleman,” adding “perhaps he thought that among Americans, he could freely speak his mind without any danger.” On Adams' return trip to America several months later, he carried with him important letters and documents for various Americans from the Marquis, especially the whale oil proposals to aid New England merchants who were now without a market because of the war with Great Britain.
This portrait of Lafayette was commissioned by Thomas Jefferson after his return to the United States. In a letter to his close associate William Short on 6 April 1790, Jefferson wrote that “my pictures of American worthies will be absolutely incomplete till I get the M. de la fayette's.” Short selected as painter Joseph Boze, who {p. R15} had done many portraits and miniatures of the royal family and other leading Paris personalities, and who Short later said had “taken by far the best likenesses of the Marquis.” When completed, it cost Jefferson 16 guineas, 3 1/2 more for the gilt frame, and 12 livres for packing for shipment to America. After Jefferson's death most of his paintings were sold at public sales in New York and Boston to help clear up his debt-laden estate. Two years later this painting was given to the Massachusetts Historical Society by the widow of John W. Davis, a federal district court clerk and son of John Davis, president of the Society, 1818–1835 (JQA, Diary, 4, 9 April, 9 May 1785, below; Jefferson, Papers , 16:318; 18:32, 356; Bénézit, Dict.... des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs ; Mabel M. Swan, The Athenaeum Gallery, 1827–1873, Boston, 1940, p. 34, 85–89; Boston Daily Evening Transcript, 18 July 1833; MHS, Procs. , 2:16).
Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
 

John Quincy Adams' Return to America, July 1785 291

Beginning with the entries of 1785, the John Quincy Adams Diary went beyond the random and occasionally embellished jottings of the earlier period. Although the Diary booklets previous to 1785 show some gradual transition to more disciplined summaries of daily activities and begin to reveal Adams' thoughts and views, major changes in appearance and style occurred when he began D/JQA/10 on 1 January 1785, as is shown by the entry illustrated here, written with a consistent hand in well-thought-out prose. In August 1783 Adams purchased three blank, leather-bound books, which eventually became Diaries 10, 11, and 12; but it was another year and a half before he resolved to keep a consistent, day-by-day record. Then he began to write in his first permanent book for diary-keeping purposes, rather than rely upon the small booklets or folded sheets he had hitherto used.
From the original in the Adams Papers.
 

City Hall, New York, the Residence of Congress from 1785 to 1790 302

In December 1784, when the Confederation Congress resolved to hold its meetings in New York, the New York Common Council offered, and Congress accepted, use of City Hall, located at Broad and Wall streets. Congress convened in January 1785 and continued to meet there until 1790, when, as the United States Congress, it moved to Philadelphia. Congress gathered on the second floor of the east wing. In 1787 a visitor described the chamber as filled with richly carved mahogany tables and chairs and adorned with portraits of Washington, some slain general officers of the Revolution, and the King and Queen of France. Only days after arriving in New York in July 1785, John Quincy Adams found it impossible to refuse the offer of President Richard Henry Lee to live at his house during {p. R16} his New York stay. For a month Adams was a center of attention among congressmen, foreign consuls, and families of New York society. Barely eighteen years old, he dined or walked nearly every day with men from the North or South, sharing his views on politics and Europe.
This view of City Hall, New York's second, which was completed in 1704, was adapted from a sketch by David Grim. It depicted the structure as it appeared ca. 1745–1747 and was drawn from memory in 1818 after its demolition. The adapted sketch is in David T. Valentine's Manual of the Corporation of the City of New-York for 1856, N.Y., 1856, facing page 32. Except for a small, crude drawing by Du Simitière, ca. 1769, it is the only complete sketch showing the building before it was altered by L'Enfant in 1788, to become known thereafter as Federal Hall. A third story was added in 1763 (I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909, 6 vols., N.Y., 1915–1928, 1:272; 3:538, 863; 5:1219).
Courtesy of The New-York Historical Society.
 

The Parsonage of the First Parish Church of Haverhill 402

This late-nineteenth-century photograph, the only known extant view, shows the house in which John Quincy Adams' uncle and aunt, the Reverend John and Elizabeth (Smith) Shaw, lived while Shaw served as minister of the First Church from 1778 to 1794. It was here that Adams spent the fall and winter of 1785–1786 preparing himself, under the tutelage of Shaw, in Greek and Latin, for admission to Harvard. Built in 1773, the house remained the parsonage until it was sold in 1831. It was demolished in 1908. The portico, pillars, and door were probably added in the middle nineteenth century. In a view of Haverhill drawn ca. 1815 by a Mrs. Green, published in The Saltonstall Papers, 1607–1815, ed. Robert E. Moody, MHS, Colls. , 81: facing 326, the house without these additions is seen near the top of the hill on Main Street and opposite Shaw's Church, the third building of the First Parish Church (1766–1837). The size and elegance of the parsonage reflected the wealth that the town had garnered from inland and coastal trading before its postwar decline (Letter from Howard W. Curtis, Curator of Special Collections, Haverhill Public Library, 8 Nov. 1978, Adams Papers Editorial Files).
From the Haverhill Collection, Special Collections Department, and Courtesy of the Trustees of the Haverhill Public Library.
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Introduction

Docno: DQA01d001

The Manuscript

John Quincy Adams began his Diary when he was twelve, “upon embarking on board the French Frigate la Sensible, at Boston” on 12 November 1779.1 The last journal entry in his own hand was made on 24 December 1847, a little more than 68 years later. The actual Diary, which remains on the shelves of the Adams Papers, consists of fifty manuscript pieces, of which ten are gatherings of stitched, pinned, or loose sheets, some with covers; ten are printed almanacs or annual registers in which journal entries were written on blank pages; and thirty are volumes of varying size bound in calf or vellum.2
Stupendous as the Diary is in its scope and mass, full journal entries were not made with regularity throughout the period the diary was kept. In fact, the Diary consists of entries of differing kinds: full and complete entries, notes for entries, and line-a-day or abbreviated entries. From 1 January 1795 to 6 May 1821 there is a full entry for each day without interruption, an extraordinary diaristic achievement. For briefer periods, each of more than a year's duration, full entries were also made: 1 January 1785 – 23 August 1788, 1 February 1827 – 24 June 1828, 1 January 1829 – 24 March 1832, 5 July 1832 – 26 December 1834, 17 March 1839 – 30 September 1845. The periods of unbroken full entries add up to 43 years and 6 months. In addition, over 2,900 complete entries, the equal of eight years, are found in periods for which sequence was less rigorously maintained.
Of the days and months lacking full entries, by far the largest portion are represented by abbreviated entries; a much smaller number, by notes clearly intended for expansion into full entries. In the closing years of the Diary a few periods have no entries of any kind.3 Adams resorted to the short or line-a-day {p. R18} entries as substitutes for complete ones primarily in the earlier years, before he had settled into persistent and habitual journal-keeping.4 Later he used them to piece out gaps during 1821, 1823–1825, and 1835. The notes for entries occur mainly during times of heavy public responsibilities. When he was secretary of state and woefully in arrears with his journal, he wrote:
My physical powers sink under it.... I had hoped to keep this as a minute and circumstantial record of my share in the affairs of my country while I continue a member of its Administration. I must renounce this hope, and content myself with a mere abridgement of memoranda in future. In summer I can barely keep pace with the current of events. In winter, during the sessions of Congress, one indispensable occupation succeeds another, which absorb the morning hours, and leave me none for the daily narrative of yesterdays.5
The “memoranda,” or notes for entries, begun shortly afterward, continue for parts of each year following to the end of his term as president in 1829. They resume in 1832, at the start of his service in the Congress, and at intervals from 1834 to 1838.
Beyond utilizing shortened entries as expedients when he found it impossible to complete the full record, Adams also, during numerous and extended periods, wrote such entries along with and in addition to full journal entries. The purpose seems to have been to perfect the technique of the abbreviated and condensed entry in the expectation that shortly he would be physically unable to write at length. We learn from a passage written late in his life, just after Adams had dislocated his right shoulder in a fall in the House of Representatives, that he had experienced since childhood continuing difficulties with his writing hand:
I... could scarcely refrain from repining at the peculiar untowardness of the disability ... of my right arm. One of the first questions asked me by Dr. May was whether the shoulder had ever been dislocated before. I had no recollection of any such event; but remembered having been told by my mother that when a child two or three years old, I was straying out into the street, when the Nursery maid ran out after me, and seizing me by the right hand, gave it an involuntary sudden jerk and dislocated the shoulder. My right hand has consequently I suppose upon this early disability been weaker than the left all my days. {p. R19} Always unable to write fast, and for the last twenty-five years unable to write at all as other men do with the forefinger and the thumb. My right hand has been many times further disabled by casualties of various and different kinds against all which I have struggled to the utmost of my ability, considering it as the business and duty of my life to write.6
The fear that he might have to curtail the daily stint is apparent intermittently from his early years. In 1788, after more than three years of unbroken entries, Adams writes of “an indisposition which for two months has prevented me from writing....I will not however immediately drop all memorials of my transactions; but the remainder of this volume will probably contain a space of time as long as that recorded already in more than two volumes and an half.”7 In 1816, five years before the twenty-six-year sequence of full entries is broken, he muses on adopting a “practice which I now expect will be my last resort”:
The increasing difficulty that I experience in writing with my own hand, has sufficiently convinced me that it cannot be long before I shall be compelled either to cease keeping this Diary altogether, or of reducing within the smallest compass the record of every day. The idea occurred to me, of beginning to keep a separate minute; allotting one line to every day, and by an arrangement which would give one page to every Month.8
Despite his recurrent complaint that, burdened as he was with the discomfort of writing, he would soon face the need to curtail or cease diary-keeping in his own hand, Adams continued the Diary without resort to amanuensis until 30 September 1845. One day earlier, in an unusually cramped hand, he had made note of a “paralytic affection which disables me from writing,” and on the 30th he recognized that “the total disability to write with my own hand compels me to discontinue the daily journal of my life.” Thereafter, the entries in the manuscript are in the hands of amanuenses to 31 August 1846.9 Then, once more, {p. R20} by strength of will, he kept his journal in his own hand to 17 November. For each of the two days following, he began the entry but had to abandon it. The next day he suffered his first cerebral hemorrhage. The dictated entries do not resume until 1 April 1847 (continuing to 4 January 1848). In the interim, however, he did persist in daily “minutes” or brief entries in his own hand that he had begun on 1 May 1846 and would continue, with the omission of some days, until 24 December 1847.10
The variations in the physical character of the manuscript volumes and in the kinds of entries that constitute the Diary of John Quincy Adams differ markedly from his retrospective view of how his journal should have been maintained:
A page a day and rarely two pages have been my continual task but the keeping of a diary that I would recommend would be Quarto volumes of one size of 500 pages each—every page divided by two red lines into 3 equal parts. The entries to be made in abridged style and form of memoranda, never to exceed or fall short of one third of a page. Each volume to contain the record of 4 years. In 60 years this would make 15 volumes of 500 pages each—quite enough for the autobiography of one man.11
The variations perhaps seem to confirm what has been said of the Diary, that it was kept in a disorderly fashion. That description is justified only for particular periods and does not reflect habit. For the periods during which Adams was able to complete full journal entries on successive days, all the entries are made in due sequence within an ordered series of volumes, the integrity of each being observed without exception. Adams' employment of more than one volume at a time for entries during a span of any length, thus introducing “disorder,” marks three periods of the Diary: the years before he settled into a strict routine, 1788–1794, when he kept entries in one set of volumes and abbreviated entries in almanacs; the later years of his secretaryship and the years of his presidency (1821–1829); and his first years as congressman (1832–1839). In these last two spans, when the {p. R21} stresses of office were greatest, Adams had to select for a given entry one of three volumes he had in current use—one for full entries, one for abbreviated ones, and one for notes that were to be expanded and transferred when time permitted. From time to time during these periods he wrote the Diary notes in volumes which he also used for various memoranda: lists of visitors, dinner guests, members of the Congress, artists to whom he had sat, lands to be surveyed, newspaper titles, his published and unpublished writings; commentaries on Bible passages; notes on his reading; population statistics, election returns, meteorological observations, metrical versions of Psalms, poems; inventories of clothing, of the content of trunks; indexes to his letter-books; and the like. There are five such volumes among the fifty that constitute the Diary, four of which bear the word “Rubbish” on their spines.12
Given the variety of entries and the several ways in which they were kept, it is not surprising that Adams himself wrote that the Diary entries for the years preceding 1795, written on “loose sheets, Sybil leaves, interleaved Almanacks, and motley volumes of all sizes, are many of them lost.”13 Probably a number of these that Adams was unable to locate at any given time and that were “lost” to him during his lifetime were packed away in one or another trunk kept in Washington or Quincy. Much was submerged among the mass of his papers that were not brought into order until after his death, or left, while Adams was abroad for long periods, in the custody of his brother Thomas Boylston Adams or another.14 Yet despite almost limitless opportunities for losses, the evidence suggests that when Charles Francis Adams had completed the analysis and arrangement of his father's papers in preparation for their publication, no manuscript volume in which John Quincy Adams had made diary entries had failed to survive.15 The only clearly identifiable losses are of some entries made in a single loosely bound volume. There, leaves containing parts of the entries for 8, 11, 12, 27 July and 17 August 1781 and all the entries between these last two dates are {p. R22} missing. When the leaves disappeared is not clear, but in April 1911 Worthington C. Ford noted in the manuscript that they were missing.16

Earlier Use and Publication of the Diary

John Quincy Adams began keeping a diary or journal because of his father's repeated urging. The ends to be served were the perpetuation of “many observations that I may make,” the recollection of “both persons, and things, that would other ways escape my memory,” and the cultivation of “patience and perseverance.” These were the objectives with which John Adams had begun his journalizing. In consequence, L. H. Butterfield believes that the father regarded his Diary as a private and impermanent record: “The text of the Diary is almost wholly free of indications that the writer supposed anyone, including himself, would read it later.” To the young John Quincy Adams, however, a diary's usefulness was not alone as a “means of improvement to myself,” but as a source of interest and entertainment to others, though he admitted that the journal of a “Lad of Eleven years old, Cannot be expected to Contain much of Science, Litterature, arts, wisdom, or wit.” What may have been the earliest use of the Diary for the edification of others came less than a year after he made his first journal entry. His older friend John Thaxter Jr. recorded that “He sends me now and then small portions of his Journal,” and in acknowledging to the diarist one such “Continuation,” wrote that by it, “You have refreshed my Memory encore.”17
At first the Diary was essentially a travel journal in which John Quincy Adams recorded what he had observed, a number of persons perhaps being allowed to see extracts. Only when the entries began to include reflections and opinions on persons or events did he enforce a stricter privacy. Gradually, as he matured and entered upon a lifetime of public service, the Diary assumed its fundamental character, that of a daily record of occurrences so full and faithful that it would be accepted as a valid reference. As the controversies that marked his career mounted, {p. R23} Adams repeatedly had recourse to the Diary for substantiation. This is manifest from the several lengthy extracts made by amanuenses during his life that relate to disputed matters and survive in the Adams Papers. Yet those that remain are but specimens of more frequent usage. In the course of one disagreement, he wrote: “I thought it advisable to have extracts from [my diary] made....As a copy must be made by an entirely confidential hand, my wife undertook the task. She has often assisted me in the same manner before.”18 Adams' custom of resorting to the Diary to buttress his testimony is particularly well-documented in the papers bearing upon the suit of Levett Harris v. William D. Lewis for libel filed in 1821.19 In the course of the action Adams several times had to respond to interrogatories before appointed commissioners and to submit affidavits. Believing it “indispensable to the ends of justice that I should answer fully and explicitly,... I am re-examining all my papers having reference to these transactions, to bring all the facts as fresh as possible to my recollection.” At the conclusion of his search, he had extracts from the Diary made and introduced them as “vouchers” for the facts asserted in his testimony.20 In the Adams Papers are 24 pages of these extracts, of which those for the years 1810–1812 are docketed by the commissioners as received in evidence.21 When the commissioners permitted Calhoun to read parts, he reported to Adams that he “saw the benefit of keeping a diary.”22
Ten years later Calhoun, then vice-president, perhaps remembering that earlier impression, provided the occasion for another {p. R24} recourse to the Diary. The issue, important to President Jackson, was whether Calhoun or William H. Crawford or both had supported, in meetings of President Monroe's cabinet in 1818, the effort to discipline the then General Jackson for having exceeded his authority in invading the Spanish province of Florida. The position Adams had taken in the meetings was also in dispute. Confronted by requests from Calhoun and Crawford for confirmation, Adams had extracts made for them of those Diary entries that related to the Seminole War and to the cabinet discussions about it. Reflecting that both men had earlier cooperated to effect his ruin, Adams nevertheless thought it his duty “to discard all consideration of their treatment of me;... to conceal nothing which it may be lawful to divulge, and which may promote truth and justice between the parties.”23
Even as his life neared its end, John Quincy Adams continued under the necessity of defending his public acts, relying heavily upon his Diary. Once more he was pitted against Jackson, on this occasion over the annexation of Texas to the Union. The necessity for Adams' making a detailed defense arose from a communication from Jackson to Aaron Vail Brown, U.S. representative from Tennessee, 12 February 1843, and from Vail's letter to the Washington Globe, 21 March 1844. The charge had to do with Secretary Adams' conduct of the negotiations with Spain in 1819 that culminated in the Florida treaty, in which the Sabine River was accepted as the western boundary of Louisiana, and hence of the nation as it then was. Jackson claimed that Adams had deliberately neglected to consult him, a consultation to which his position and knowledge entitled him and one which President Monroe had requested. Adams saw the claim as “a fable [fabricated] to justify the robbery of Texas from Mexico, by the pretense that Texas had been by me treacherously surrendered to Spain.” In his view, “The Florida Treaty was the most important incident of my life and the most successful negotiation ever consummated by the Government of this Union. And this is precisely selected, above all others, as an engine for the total destruction of my good name.”
{p. R25}
Adams determined to reply at length. He chose as his vehicle an address to the Boston Young Men's Whig Club on 7 October 1844. In it he undertook to vindicate himself and “to expose to the world and to after-times the infamous means used to accomplish the annexation of Texas.'' In preparation he combed the Diary and had his nephew Walter Hellen copy extracts from entries of 1818–1820. These copies, now in the Adams Papers, come to 78 manuscript pages.24 From them Adams was able to demonstrate conclusively that he, contrary to Jackson's assertions, did consult with Jackson to obtain his opinion on the proposed boundary, that Jackson had expressed no objection to the proposed boundary at the Sabine, and that Jackson's interest at the time was centered upon Florida, not Texas. In the Address, which was printed and reprinted within the next few weeks, Adams quoted to great effect the diary entries of 1–3 February 1819.25
After John Quincy Adams' death, Charles Francis Adams initially responded freely to requests for extracts from his father's Diary with a view to their public use. The first such request of which there is a record came in only a few months from John Adams Dix, U.S. senator from New York. Dix wished to quote, in a speech on the Wilmot Proviso, the adverse opinion Adams had expressed on the slavery compromise in the ordinance of 1787. Charles Francis, enclosing transcripts of the entries for 3–6 March 1820, wrote:
I know of no reason why the information should be suppressed. If there be anything in these Extracts which may serve the public at this time, it will give me great pleasure to have you make use of it.
My father's position that Slavery cannot be established by Congress in a country where it does not exist, though it can be prohibited seems to me to be the true ground upon which to battle with all the schemes of compromise afloat that surrender that principle.26
Dix used the extracts on 26 July in a speech in the Senate on the {p. R26} bill to establish territorial governments in Oregon, California, and New Mexico.27
Publication had unexpected consequences. A year and a half later, 22 January 1850, Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, speaking on the same issues but to a different end, quoted at length from the passages Dix had used. His denunciation of John Quincy Adams' sentiments made it clear that Adams' death had not lessened the intensity of partisanship. Averring that public access to portions of the Diary would add nothing to Adams' “claims (and they are many)” on the good opinion of the citizenry, Cass lashed out at Adams' view that the compromise on slavery by which the Constitution was adopted was “morally and politically vicious” as an opinion “no right-minded American” could hold. This led him to a savage characterization of Adams, and a censuring of that “member of his family” who by permitting the quotation had exposed the statesman's weaknesses.28
The incident gave clear warning to C. F. Adams that by allowing others to quote from the Diary he exposed his father's name to the same accusations that had marked his life and rendered himself, as the protector of his father's reputation, chargeable. That he long felt the full force of the unpleasantness is evident in his response to Thomas Hart Benton's request in 1857 for permission to use and quote in the Abridgement of Debates of Congress passages from the Diary in 1821 bearing on cabinet discussions of the actions of Andrew Jackson as governor in West Florida. Identifying the Dix-Cass episode as decisive, Adams wrote Benton that thereafter he had refused repeated requests to permit any publication and that he presently allowed reading {p. R27} of the passages needed, but with the stipulation that there be no quotation nor citation of source. In offering Benton a transcript, he insisted upon its return without a copy's being made.29
Other applicants for the use of the Diary included William H. Seward, Josiah Quincy, Charles Sumner, and Bancroft Davis. Adams granted each request, it appears, with stipulations similar to those made to Benton. The biographies of John Quincy Adams written by Seward and by Harvard's President Quincy bear evidence that the authors had consulted the Diary—but neither contains lengthy or significant quotation from it.30 Sumner's interest was satisfied with a reading of extracts relating to the origin of the Monroe Doctrine; Bancroft Davis' request was for “information of the mode of opening the commission at Ghent in 1814.”31
The Dix-Cass misadventure was not the only cause of the more restrictive conditions C. F. Adams came to impose upon use of the Diary. As early as 1853, he was himself considering publishing somewhat extensive extracts from the Diary. The difficulties faced were in deciding what parts could be published and whether any should be during his lifetime.32 Both his reluctance to permit others to publish extracts and his own hesitancy arose partly from fear that their appearance in print would raise demands “for explanations, and further elucidations, that might end in a premature publication of the most delicate portions of that record.”33 Charles Francis Adams was inhibited also by his commitment to completing the editing of his ten-volume Works of John Adams, 1850–1856. Then, after little more than a year, he assumed an active role in public life—in the Congress and as minister to Great Britain—that would not {p. R28} end until 1868. In that interval, however, he did return to the study of the Diary and employed an amanuensis, Dr. Steele, to copy those selections he had made for publication. Adams had not decided at this juncture whether to publish the Diary alone or with materials from his father's correspondence.34 It appears, too, that by 1860 he had faced up to the likelihood that he could not look forward to an early return to editing.35
Throughout his tenure as minister in London, Adams retained a sense of obligation unfulfilled, and when he returned to America he resumed editorial labors. He devoted the early months of 1870 to reading the Diary and to formulating plans for an edition. With the decision made to focus upon his father's public life, he entered into correspondence in April with J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia publishers. He was then, with the copying not yet half finished, unable to predict the length of the projected work. After a year it seemed measurable, but of “fearful” size, even allowing for “extensive reduction.” Lippincott remained cordial, suggesting that terms and decisions await clarification of procedures. As a way to avoid the limited sales to be expected in a publication of this magnitude and to stimulate interest in the larger work, the publisher suggested beginning with a two-volume abridgment. Adams' conception, however, was that his edition should offer “permanent materials for the history of half a century,” convinced, as he was, that the Diary was unique in the record it established. The issue was settled when the “leading statesmen” sounded out by Lippincott agreed with Adams' position. Bowing to this opinion, the publisher announced in the firm's “Monthly Bulletin of New Publications” the impending publication of the Diary covering the years 1795–1848, and in “Our Monthly Gossip” offered a seductive sample —the entry for 11 December 1814 recording conversation at Ghent among the Peace Commissioners. An introductory statement promised that the editor's selection from the “mass” {p. R29} would include “whatever must have a permanent value” and would, when published, run to five or six volumes.36
Here a new cause for delay arose—Adams' appointment in August to the tribunal on the Alabama Claims to convene at Geneva. Despite Lippincott's offer of a contract, along with a proposal to put the first volume in print before his departure, Adams ultimately concluded to postpone any publication until his return. His official responsibilities and other commitments kept him away from scholarship longer than he had anticipated. Not until the summer of 1873 did he feel free to sign the deferred contract and to resume steady work on the Diary.37
Meanwhile, during C. F. Adams' absence abroad, Henry Adams, relying upon the announcement that the Diary would commence at 1795, and with apparent knowledge of his father's editorial plans, published in the North American Review some excerpts from the Diary written during his grandfather's years as a student at Harvard College, 15 March 1786 – 24 May 1787. The passages, interspersed with commentary, were not presented chronologically. An essay-review of two small volumes on Cambridge and Harvard in earlier days by T. C. Amory and Edward Everett provided the occasion and excuse for including the Diary excerpts. Henry Adams nowhere in the article mentioned that the student who kept the diary was John Quincy Adams.38
Charles Francis Adams' far larger editorial enterprise, when resumed, progressed rapidly. Before the end of September 1873, Lippincott had in hand copy for the first volume, with publication scheduled for January. By the end of 1874 three volumes had appeared, and Lippincott dispatched a fourth to Adams early in January 1875. However, the four volumes had brought the diarist only to February 1820. With the length of the work still estimated at five or six volumes, the publisher was led to {p. R30} inquire whether the editor had “any idea how many more volumes the work is likely to make.” But Lippincott's persistent requests to Adams for more copy indicated no loss of appetite for the enterprise.39 There were no undue delays, although Adams was discovering that providing the necessary annotation required more time and effort than he had anticipated.40 Three additional volumes appeared in 1875, Volumes 8–11 in 1876, and the final volume with index in 1877. Relations between editor and publisher remained cordial throughout. Adams, on receiving the balance ($1,051.50) due him, wrote Lippincott: “I trust that I need not express to you how pleasant has been the relation I have had with you ... and how faithfully the work has been carried through on your part, considering its magnitude. With such assistance I should be led to regret that instead of finishing my last labor, I was not recommencing upon my first.”41
Charles Francis Adams' mood, as he came to the end of his long editorial labors on the works of his father and grandfather was exultant: “Justice will at last be done by posterity to the men who had hard measure when alive.” Evident also was a profound sense of release: “Eighteen years have passed away since the will of my father laid this heavy responsibility upon me. I am at last my own Master again.”42 His conviction that he was so obligated is made no less real by our awareness that the facts were otherwise. The will of John Quincy Adams makes no allusion to publication of the Diary, nor indeed to the Diary itself (Adams Papers, Microfilms, Reel No. 607). In what was apparently the last conversation between father and son on the subject of the Diary, Charles Francis recorded that John Quincy Adams “said that his Diary was closed, he should never write any more of it. He should place it in my hands to do with it what I might think proper, at the same time, distinctly stating that it had never {p. R31} been written for extended publication and it was not his wish that such publication be made.”43
This position is consistent with what John Quincy Adams had maintained over the years. Upon examining John Adams' Diary, he had written: “The journal is ... deeply interesting to me ... but altogether unfit for public inspection, and such as ought to be reserved from all eyes but those of affectionate descendants. My own Journal will be of the same character.” Of that Journal and its disposition, he was later more explicit but to the same purpose: “I have already more volumes, and multitudes of fragments—Trash inexpressible, which I pray to God may never be exposed, but which I leave to my Son to be used according to his good judgment for a memoir of my life; and if, by the Mercy of God, the manuscripts should be preserved, to be left, with those of my father, to one of my grandsons who may be worthy of possessing and passing them down to further generations.”44
C. F. Adams came to believe that he had a mandate to publish the Diary, but also that he was committed by his father's wishes and his own to reserve from public scrutiny matter that he judged to be private. The methods by which he proposed to resolve these aims that were not altogether consonant are made manifest in his Preface to the Memoirs :
The chief objects to be attained by publishing the papers of eminent men seem to be the elucidation of the history of the times in which they acted, and of the extent to which they exercised a personal influence upon opinion as well as upon events.... [I]n the present instance there remains a record of life carefully kept by John Quincy Adams for nearly the whole of his active days, and in condition so good as but to need careful abridgment to serve the purposes above pointed out.... Assuming this to be certain, it became necessary to fix upon a rule of selection which should be fair and honest. To attain that object I came to the following conclusions: 1st. To eliminate the details of common life and events of no interest to the public. 2d. To reduce the moral and religious speculations, in which the work abounds, so far as to escape repetition of sentiments once declared. 3d. Not to suppress strictures upon contemporaries, but to give them only when they are upon public men acting in the same sphere with the writer.... 4th. To suppress nothing of his own habits of self-examination, even when they might be thought most to tell against himself. 5th. To abstain altogether from {p. R32} modification of the sentiments or the very words, and substitution of what might seem better ones, in every case but that of obvious error in writing.... I have confined myself strictly to the duty of explanation and illustration of what time may have rendered obscure in the text. Whatever does appear there remains just as the author wrote it.45
Comparison of widely separated sections of the text of the Memoirs with that of the manuscript Diary justifies the conclusion that C. F. Adams conformed unexceptionably to the rules he had set.46 This is also the judgment of the late Samuel F. Bemis, who reported that “constant searching behind the Memoirs into the Diary,... has yielded little new historical matter.” One concluded on the evidence that Adams had applied his announced principles of selection with such conscientiousness that the Memoirs became a virtually complete chronicle of the public aspect of John Quincy Adams' life. “Wherever there was any doubt ... [C. F. Adams] printed, so copiously that some of the descendants have felt that he went too far.”47
A different, more subjective, judgment on the Memoirs and on C. F. Adams as editor was voiced by C. F. Adams 2d.48 That same son in 1901 brought to public notice a further selection from John {p. R33} Quincy Adams' Diary, the first since the Memoirs . He read to a Newburyport audience entries from the period of young Adams' residence in that town.49 In November 1902, Adams read more extensively from entries of the same period at a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society, noting that “Though I found in this record much which greatly interested me, no use whatever was made of it by my father in his publication entitled ‘Memoirs of J. Q. Adams'; for it contains little of, so-called, historical value.” He placed the two appropriate Diary booklets in the hands of Charles C. Smith, the Society's editor, “with permission to make such use of their contents as he saw fit.” From the Newburyport entries, 9 August 1787 – 18 September 1789, Smith “incorporated in the Proceedings such extracts as to him seemed of interest or value.” He chose to print the record almost in entirety, Adams commenting that “some insignificant portions of the diary have been omitted either because the events recorded were too trivial or commonplace to merit publication or because they related to matters of student life and intercourse now of interest to no one.” The entries were accompanied by lengthy and impressive annotations prepared by Miss J. C. Watts, a Radcliffe alumna, “thoroughly trained and indefatigable in research.”50
Another, and seemingly the last, of C. F. Adams 2d's addenda to what his father had printed in the Memoirs concerned public matters that fell well within the senior Adams' guidelines for inclusion. Mistakenly he had omitted all entries from the period 24 March–30 November 1832, because “the minutes remaining ... {p. R34} are not deemed sufficiently perfect for publication.”51 In December 1905 the younger Adams read a communication to the Massachusetts Historical Society on the debates in the House of Representatives on the constitutional issues raised by the protective tariff and internal improvements. He included lengthy extracts from John Quincy Adams' published and unpublished correspondence as well as extracts from the Diary for 30, 31 May; 4, 6, 14, 18, 24, 25, 28, 29 June; and 5, 6, 8–13, 17–26 July 1832.52
Plans for publishing additional sections from the Diary manuscript were made unlikely by the decision in 1905 of the first Charles Francis Adams' heirs who were then of full age to create the Adams Manuscript Trust, in which the ownership, care, and supervision of the whole corpus of papers would vest. The archive had three years before been transferred from Quincy to the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. There the papers remained unused until 1908, when Worthington C. Ford came to the Society as Editor. Ford set himself to study and arrange the manuscripts with a view to publishing some of them, but not including in his plans any Diary excerpts.53
Although publication of selections from the Diary came to a stop, some consultation and use of the Diary manuscript by members of the Adams family persisted. Brooks Adams, for example, made considerable use of it, including the unpublished portions, in preparing his “Life of John Quincy Adams,” 1903–1909.54 In his later years, however, he was opposed to permitting the use of any of the papers, and after his death in 1927 no direct access to the papers by scholars was allowed.55 Only when Samuel F. Bemis had begun the research that would eventuate in his {p. R35} two-volume biography of J. Q. Adams was the rule relaxed, and apparently for him alone.56
Soon more fundamental developments governing the availability of the Diary and of the rest of the family's papers were at hand. In 1952 the then trustees of the Adams Manuscript Trust determined to publish on microfilm an edition of the whole archive. The story ends with the action of the trustees' transferring ownership of the papers to the Massachusetts Historical Society, and with the formulation of plans for a letterpress edition of the papers that would include in their entirety the diaries of the Adams statesmen.57

The Young Diarist

These two volumes, comprising thirteen manuscript booklets and books, record John Quincy Adams' activities and thoughts from the age of twelve to twenty-one. The earliest Diaries start with Adams' second visit to Europe, a sojourn of six years, during which time he lived in or visited more than a half-dozen countries. The Diary continues with his return to the United States, residence in Haverhill, where he prepared for entrance to Harvard, year and a quarter at college, leisurely summer after graduation, and the first fifteen months of his legal training in Newburyport. It affords a remarkable picture of the maturation of a serious, precocious, and thoroughly disciplined young man.58
Before starting his Diary in November 1779, John Quincy Adams had read more widely and had experienced more of life than most boys. By the age of ten he had read two volumes of Smollett's Complete History of England, some Shakespeare and Pope, and Thomson's The Seasons and had attempted Milton's {p. R36} Paradise Lost. Already he was asking his father for advice on how to proportion his play and study time, writing, “I am more Satisfied ... when I have applied part of my time to Some useful employment than when I have Idled it away about Trifles and play.” The elder Adams encouraged him to write and advised him on his reading, suggesting that, despite his “tender Age,” he should study the histories of revolutions to help “throw Some Light upon [his] Father's character” and to contrast the present war with other European revolutions. In the summer of 1777 Adams recommended to his son Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, for future times might require new wars, councils, and negotiations. Such works, John Adams told him, would afford “the most solid Instruction and Improvement for the Part which may be alloted you to act on the Stage of Life.”59 From these ambitious beginnings sprang John Quincy Adams' lifelong interest in books, which continued unabated and is amply documented in the earliest Diaries.
In early 1778 John Quincy Adams and his father sailed for Europe from Massachusetts on the frigate Boston. John Adams had been appointed a third United States commissioner, with Arthur Lee and Benjamin Franklin, at the Court of France. In France, John Quincy immediately entered the private boarding school of M. Le Coeur at Passy, where his schoolmates included Americans Jesse Deane, Benjamin Franklin Bache, and William Temple Franklin. During this first trip away from puritan New England, Adams acquired an interest in and devotion to the theater. He attended the principal theaters of Paris, including the French and Italian comedies and the Théâtre des Petits Comediens du Bois de Boulogne, “where a company of Children performed two or three times a week.” Just as John Quincy had begun to master French, John Adams started making plans for a return to America, for he learned that the congress had appointed a single minister, Franklin.60
Almost immediately after their return in August 1779, John Adams was appointed a minister plenipotentiary at Paris for the negotiation of a peace treaty with Great Britain. Although John Quincy had been eager to accompany his father on the first trip, {p. R37} he was reluctant to return to Europe, preferring to prepare for Harvard at Andover. Abigail Adams, however, took her son aside and, with “resolution and ... Roman matronlike affection,” Adams recalled years later, urged him to return to Europe. Eventually her “persuasive reasoning and tenderness” convinced him to go. Two months after the father and sons John Quincy and Charles had left, Abigail wrote reassuring John Quincy that his decision had been correct:
These are times in which a Genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed.... All History will convince you of this, and that wisdom and penetration are the fruits of experience, not the Lessons of retirement and leisure.
Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the Heart, then those qualities which would otherways lay dormant, wake into Life, and form the Character of the Hero and Statesman.61
John Quincy's second trip to Europe marks the start of his Diary, but he had given some thought to personal record-keeping before then. In June 1777 he asked for a blank book in which to write notes from his wide-ranging reading. A year later, while Adams was attending school at Passy, his father admonished him to keep a journal or a diary; but the eleven-year-old thought that the task, though important and useful, required too much “patience and perseverance.” Yet, less than a year later, he began to journalize, no doubt out of a sense of filial duty and perhaps to conform with others in their company who kept records of their journey.
The first entries describe, at times vividly, the stormy ocean crossing in the leaky La Sensible, which was forced to land at the closest Spanish port on 8 December. Later John Quincy Adams recorded such routine matters as seating arrangements in the carriages, miles covered on the day's journey, meals consumed, and occasionally impressions of the countryside. His comments often paralleled those in the diaries of adults on the trip. Numerous entries were devoted to drafts of letters later sent to family and friends back home.
Adams abandoned his Diary shortly before the completion of {p. R38} the journey from Spain to Paris, but he took it up again when his surroundings changed. After nearly half a year in school at Passy, the boys left with their father for Holland, where John Adams was to negotiate a loan for the United States. In a new country and the unfamiliar city of Amsterdam, John Quincy diligently copied into his Diary from guidebooks long passages about points of interest in the Dutch towns he visited, thereby heeding his father's injunction to write down something useful to reflect upon.62 After a short time in Amsterdam, however, and after minister Adams' energies turned to his diplomatic mission, John Quincy was reduced to recording the times of arrival at and departure from his lodgings and of going to bed, until, at last, he stopped writing.
Although Adams catalogued his activities and those of people around him, almost nothing in the earliest Diary booklets expresses his own feelings. Perhaps such sentiments in writing were too much to expect from a boy in his early adolescence or were beyond the scope of his father's guidelines for diary-keeping. John Adams' diplomatic labors in the Dutch city apparently left him little time to devote to his sons, but the diarist never permitted himself to express disappointment or complain of neglect, although the meticulous notation of his father's arrivals and departures may suggest loneliness. On one occasion when Adams asked his sons whether they wanted to return to Amsterdam from Leyden, John Quincy burst out in reply “With all my heart”! Such flashes of sentiment are rare in the earliest Diaries.
Life as the young son of an American commissioner had disadvantages. John Quincy and Charles were sent to school in Amsterdam; the meager diary entries give no hint of what the older boy thought of being enrolled in a Dutch-speaking school or whether John Adams had discussed the prospect with his sons. They were expected to remain in the cold, inhospitable environ• {p. R39} ment of the school for some time: “How long we shall stay here,” John Quincy wrote, “I can not tell.” Even during vacations the boys remained at school; but with few amusements to describe, the Diary entries become perfunctory, then subside altogether. The school was an unhappy experience, and John Adams angrily withdrew his sons when the master complained about the behavior of John Quincy, who resented being kept at a level below his abilities because of his deficiency in Dutch. On the recommendation of Benjamin Waterhouse, the boys thereafter pursued their studies with private tutors in Leyden, where they were also permitted to attend lectures at the university.63
John Quincy resumed his Diary a half-year later, on the very day his father came to take him and his brother from Leyden. As before, John Adams must have inspired and persuaded his oldest son to return to his Diary. The elder Adams had for some time been concerned that the boys' education lacked adequate exposure to English literature. John Quincy's earlier practice of copying passages from English essays had soon waned. Stimulated anew, he copied from Shakespeare, Pope, Garth, Addison, and Waller and long passages from William Guthrie's Geographical Grammar , to which he appended corrections drawn from his own experience.
About this time Adams, now almost fourteen, left for St. Petersburg with Francis Dana. On the two-thousand-mile journey to the Russian capital Adams added interesting detail to his Diary, but once settled in St. Petersburg, he mentioned only the routine features of daily life, without assessment or elaboration of his experiences. With monotonous repetition he recorded comings and goings, walks along the quay, and daily temperatures in St. Petersburg (until the thermometer was stolen). Extenuating circumstances make this part of the Diary less revealing. It was Adams' first attempt to keep a Diary for any extended period without the stimulus of constantly changing people and places that a journey affords. The Russian capital proved dreary and confining, hardly the environment for producing long, interesting journal entries.
The nature of Dana's mission, the disappointed expectations of the Adamses, father and son, and the dearth of tutors and schools in Russia also may have contributed to this passivity. {p. R40} Dana had been sent as United States minister in the hope that he could persuade Catherine the Great to receive his country into the League of Armed Neutrality by a treaty that would include formal recognition of the independence of the newly created republic. But the American minister never received acknowledgment as the representative of an independent power. Without it, Dana was treated as an outsider by the other foreign ministers until Dutch recognition of American independence. Thus, during his fifteen-month stay, Adams' role as an aide was a minor one. Dana, who had little familiarity with French, probably found his help with the diplomatic language of some use, even though French Minister Verac thought the young man's command of French only middling. Adams also served as copyist, but few documents and little important correspondence appear in his hand among Dana's papers. Adams was more of a friend and companion than an assistant to Dana, for whom Russia was an unfriendly, faraway place.64 For all practical purposes the youth was reduced to continuing his studies; but without schools and proper books, he could do little more than make elementary Latin translations and read English history and poetry. Dana, admitting that there was little he could do to help, deplored John Quincy's loss of time for regular study.65 It is not surprising, then, that Adams' Diary throughout much of 1782 is barren of description and details, even in his account of noteworthy events, such as his trips to Oranienbaum and Peterhoff.
During the next two years Adams kept his Diary irregularly. Occasionally he added a touch of whimsy with pencil sketches of the dance assembly and the church congregation he observed while visiting Sweden on his return from St. Petersburg. But there was no sustained interest in recording more systematically his daily activities; he even avoided significant comment on the negotiations and signing of the Definitive Treaty, because it forced him to discuss politics.
Later, Adams conceded that he lacked during these early years the one quality essential for diary-keeping—perseverance. He was constantly encouraged by his father to continue his efforts, but now the elder Adams asked him to do more than make {p. R41} a mere record of events. “Have you kept a regular Journal?” he asked upon John Quincy's return from Russia:
If you have not, you will be likely to forget most of the Observations you have made. If you have omitted this Useful Exercise, let me advise you to recommence it, immediately. Let it be your Amusement, to minute every day, whatever you may have seen or heard worth Notice. One contracts a Fondness of Writing by Use. We learn to write readily, and what is of more importance, We think, and improve our Judgments, by committing our Thoughts to Paper.66
Young Adams purchased three blank books in August 1783, undoubtedly for this purpose, but he did not gain firm resolve until January 1785, when he began to make use of the first of them.
His renewed efforts transformed the Diary. Visually the difference is apparent in the disappearance of his exaggerated writing style, with its special flourishes, and the far fewer crossouts and rephrasings, so common in his early efforts. (See Illustrations Nos. John Quincy Adams Begins His Diary, 1779 41 and 12 John Quincy Adams' Return to America, July 1785 29111 .) For the first time he began to question the quality of his entries, and this self-searching helped give the Diary added significance and an enduring character. It became a more personal document—so much so that he occasionally refrained from recording the substance of conversations because of the prying curiosity of others.
The metamorphosis may have come about for several reasons. Aware by late 1784 that he must return shortly to the United States to enter Harvard and eventually to pursue a career, Adams savored his final months in Paris. The company of a reunited family (his mother and sister had joined John and John Quincy in the summer of 1784) and the sights and opportunities in the French capital offered added stimulation for writing. Accounts of evenings with Jefferson, dinners at the home of Lafayette, and other glimpses of life in Paris show John Quincy's maturation and ability to enter into the world of his father and the men of the Revolutionary generation. Such events were worth recording. Arriving in New York in midsummer 1785, he won ready acceptance despite his mere eighteen years. He was entertained almost constantly by members of the congress and {p. R42} became a house guest of its president, Richard Henry Lee. On long walks Adams discussed politics and diplomacy with government leaders, and he enjoyed the hospitality of many of New York's leading families. The fulfillment of his promise to maintain a steady correspondence with his sister was made easier by a well maintained and detailed diary.
Once settled for six months in Haverhill and away from the attractions of Paris and New York, John Quincy Adams recognized that it would be a problem to maintain the same interest in his Diary that he had had during the past months. He adopted a new strategy: “My Plan will now be very different,” he wrote, “Little narrative, and the most part of what I write will be observations.”67 In the months that followed, the Diary's candor and openness illuminate our understanding of Adams, his generation, and his times. Buoyed with personal confidence from his experience on the Continent, he was more at ease in evaluating persons and experiences, surrounded as he was by people his own age and adults less distinguished than those he had known abroad.
His sketches, some brief, some extended and formal, offer penetrating accounts of those he met. The Diary also carries the reader through his critical encounter with Nancy Hazen, who charmed and finally irritated him. Here and there Adams assesses his own performance and conduct, revealing concern about self-confidence, ambition, and the proper use of time. The Diary now devotes more space to social commentary, ranging from opinions on religion to education and politics. Increasingly it portrays a young man more involved with people, institutions, and ideas in a world in which he was playing a larger role.
Adams brought to his character sketches a precociously analytical mind as well as impetuous and tenacious judgments. These contrasting qualities were readily apparent to his admiring, though not uncritical, family. His sister, Abigail (Nabby), warned him about the “warmpth of temper which [led him] to judge rather prematurely and to condemn without sufficiently considering the for and against.” His mother was well aware of the impulsiveness which occasionally carried him to excess. She hoped Cousin Eliza Cranch, temporarily living in Haverhill, might cure him of his tendency to be a “little too possitive.”68
{p. R43}
Adams had begun to write penetrating analyses of people in his Diary in 1785. In deciding to maintain an almost continuous correspondence, John Quincy and Nabby agreed to write opinions on various people they met. The passengers, officers, and some crew members on Le Courier l'Amérique, on which Adams returned to America, were his first subjects. From Harvard, he sent his sister sketches of members of the college government. After the start of his senior year he began to make in the Diary long appraisals of his classmates, finding nearly every gradation of disposition and intelligence. Adams predictably approved as “respectable Characters” studious classmates like himself, remaining convinced of an exact ratio between the hours at study and good scholarship. Although not always proved correct in his analysis of his classmates, he offered some perceptive insights. How seriously he took his evaluations is suggested by his modifications of some portraits on closer acquaintance and his consultation of his evaluations long after leaving Harvard.69
The prose sketch was not the only form Adams employed. Impressed by “The Receipt for a Wife,” a satirical poem written by and about several young women whom he met in New York, he sought to compose better ones himself. Several young women in Haverhill and Cambridge became subjects for poems, acrostics, and occasional lines, many preliminary efforts for longer pieces he published later. These sharpened his skill at satire, clarified his views about feminine personality, and apparently satisfied his “passion for rhyming.”70
Adams' Diary judgments went beyond descriptions of attractive women and character sketches. He interpreted his social environment in Haverhill and at Harvard in critical, often scathing, fashion. In Haverhill, he complained about the constricted life of a minister's family and looked forward to the changes Harvard would bring. Disdainful of household rules which interfered with late-night studying, he found just as disagreeable his uncle's unbending Calvinism. The six months at the Shaws', besides preparing him for college studies, underscored the contrast between the stimulating activities in Europe and the life of rural America, staid and conservative despite its happy and serene moments.
Admitted to advanced standing as a junior at Harvard in {p. R44} March 1786, John Quincy Adams spent the next sixteen months, as he acknowledged at the time and throughout his life, in a pleasant and exhilarating environment. What sets his Harvard Diary apart from those of other eighteenth-century students is his almost total absorption with the institution and the educational process. It tells us more about students and their daily routine and activities, college officials, tutors, educational policy and practice, and curriculum than does any other personal record of this period.
Leading an almost cloistered existence, John Quincy Adams never missed a lecture until near the end of his senior year. Eliza Cranch once complained of his chamber's “learned dirt.” He was thinner, and she thought he looked unkempt, so she busied herself in setting things straight.71 The Diary provides information on the subjects studied, the texts used, and the methods and quality of instruction and administration. Particularly important to Adams were the disputations and orations that were part of the academic routine. The preparations he made, his feelings about the subject, and the speeches themselves were usually faithfully recorded. Topics varied from the immortality of the soul to social inequality as essential to liberty.
Despite Adams' fondness for Harvard, he found that the daily routine made it impossible for independent minds like his own to concentrate effectively on study. He lamented that “as soon as I get in a way of thinking and writing upon any Subject, the College Bell infallibly sounds in my Ears, and calls me, to a lecture, or to recitation or to Prayers.” Only by remaining at the college during the summer vacation could a student enjoy uninterrupted study.72
Adams found President Joseph Willard dull and aloof, and with the exception of the affable Professor Samuel Williams, the faculty almost too haughty to bear. The tutors had the double fault of inadequate knowledge of their subjects and of imposing between themselves and the students artificially created and rigid social barriers, which caused hostility and an occasional student rampage. Classroom recitations, instead of providing enlightenment, simply repeated an author's words; no independent thought was engendered. Tutors returning to college several years after their own graduation were out of touch with {p. R45} their subjects, and few remained long enough to achieve an understanding of their discipline or their students.73
Harvard meant not only a return to formal study and instruction, recently all too infrequent, but also a retreat from the society of adults to the company of peers. Time spent away from prescribed studies was devoted to a variety of extracurricular clubs, including the Handel Sodality, and the Musical, Junior Tea, Breakfast, Dancing, and Tuesday clubs, in addition to “A.B.” and Phi Beta Kappa. The last two, which afforded further opportunities for composition and oratory, reflected the interest that began among some students in the early 1770s in perfecting their writing and elocution. There were dinners at nearby taverns, trips to Boston, refreshment and good talk in the rooms.
Looking back upon his months at Harvard, Adams thought they had produced “very good effects; particularly, in reducing my opinion of myself, of my acquirements, and of my future prospects, nearer to the level of truth and reality.” More than ever before, the Diary reveals an intense inner life—his reflections upon his ambition, self-worth, and use of time. He worried most about his suitability for the law, hoping he “had just Ambition enough to serve as a Stimulus ... and just Vanity enough to be gratified with small Distinctions.” But he realized that his headstrong behavior required a curb and that his vanity was often obvious to others. Warned years before by his mother of his need to check his passions, Adams now began to recognize that he impetuously aired sentiments that a more rational behavior would conceal. Yet, accepting his vanity, he preferred to live a purposeful life, in which he might receive “the applause of his Country, and the Esteem of mankind” rather than settle for an unambitious, ordinary existence.74
Still, he was often troubled by a lack of self-confidence and of a sense of self-worth. He agonized over comparisons between himself and others for college honors. He viewed himself as “plod[ding] along, mechanically” After graduation he declared that he was a “mere cypher in creation; without any employment and without any character,” who was waiting to begin studying {p. R46} law so that he might have something to say in his Diary.75 As with other Adamses, his paramount concern was the use of time. Opportunities for leisure made him uneasy. At home in Braintree he belittled exercise as a dull though perhaps necessary routine that took him away from the improvement of his mind. He found that he had “even discarded thought, and live[d] more like any of the domestic animals, than like man.” At year's end Adams often added moral reflections to his last entry, disheartened by the amount of time he had “lost” which could not be retrieved, but reassured that he had done nothing seriously reproachful.76
Despite Adams' doubts about his accomplishments, the Diary bears evidence of significant growth. He developed well-considered opinions on religion and politics. Tolerant of the religious beliefs of others, he eschewed a strong denominational commitment, maintaining a reasoned conviction about God and revealed religion. He was scornful of Biblical literalism, from his own study and translation of ancient authors, and impatient with the impracticality of “abstruse points of religion.” Calvinistic election, he held, was incompatible with a god who was good and wise as well as powerful.77
Adams' accumulated experience in Europe, as the journal of his last months there occasionally reveals, made him an ardent republican even before his return; his speeches in college confirmed and refined his thoughts on the subject. On the grounds that limited size was necessary to maintain a republic, he opposed enlarging the powers of the Continental Congress. He recognized and applauded the social revolution that republicanism was accomplishing in America. He noted that in Boston few wealthy or politically important families possessed a genteel ancestry of several generations. Families in high repute, he thought, would fall to their lowest ebb within three decades. “And there is a great chance,” he reflected soberly, “that I myself shall at some future period serve as an additional example of this truth.” Adams' sense of republicanism led him to view the United States Constitution as designed to give more power, influence, and wealth to those who already possessed them. After {p. R47} Massachusetts ratified, however, he became “converted, though not convinced”78
In one of his Harvard forensics, Adams argued that even civil disobedience was not altogether deplorable, provided that it was kept within bounds. Well managed, such civil discontent might encourage the growth of republican government. In a favorite metaphor, he saw such convulsions as like certain drugs, “which of themselves are deadly Poison but if properly tempered may be made, highly medicinal.” Thus, he was not wholly opposed to Shays' Rebellion. When the Shaysites arose in armed military companies, they threatened the fabric of republicanism and deserved public condemnation; Adams recognized, however, that threats to social order might arise outside the lower orders. The Society of the Cincinnati, dangerous, if not fatal, to a republic, equally merited public censure.79
Adams spent the three years after graduation studying law in the office of Theophilus Parsons of Newburyport. Fifteen months of that period are covered in the second of these two volumes. Adams' record of the reading chosen by his mentor and of other activities gives some idea of the course of instruction thought appropriate by one of the leading trainers of lawyers of that day. Besides overcoming ponderous legal tomes, some requiring several readings, he spent his first months on the drudgery of completing a copybook of legal forms for later use in his practice and assisted Parsons to get ready for court days—all this amid the noise and chaos occasioned by law office visitors and fellow apprentices. Meaningful study was fitful, to say the least.80
Adams' attention to the law did not isolate him from friends, relatives, and social activities, especially after he had made some progress in his studies. He found it necessary to engage in some diversions in order not to appear “too singular.” A club of apprentices, several being old classmates, met weekly in Newburyport and filled some of his most pleasant evening hours. Occasionally club members or town acquaintances gathered in tav• {p. R48} erns; the Diary dutifully recorded bouts of intoxication and Adams' reprimands to himself in the days that followed. He joined in dancing, card playing, singing, kissing games, and other entertainments in Newburyport homes. The young ladies he met inspired sketches and satirical pieces for poems.81
Distraction from his legal studies induced guilt, despite his recognition of the need for relaxation, and with it anxiety and depression. In reflective moods, Adams questioned the value of ambition and fame. His Phi Beta Kappa address, delivered in September 1788, admonished his audience to avoid the distresses and bitterness of aspiration by keeping desires “within rational bounds.” He insisted that if everyone filled the station in life allotted to him, he would win respect and escape envy. The final months of that year were for Adams ones of ill health and frequent despair.

The Editorial Method

Materials Included and Their Arrangement
Sequential entries in a number of instances have been derived from more than one Diary book or booklet. Whenever two booklets carry an entry for the same day, both entries are included only if additional information is provided. In most cases, the minor entry is mentioned with citation in a note to the main Diary entry. Monthly summaries in one of the early Diaries have been retained. Extended passages copied from Adams' literary readings, guidebooks, or newspapers have usually been deleted, but a description of the passages and the sources used has been supplied. Adams' own compositions included in the Diary, such as his college essays and speeches, are of course retained.
Textual policy
In general, the text follows the rules set forth in the Introduction to the Diary and Autobiography of John Adams , 1:lv–lix, to which readers are referred to find a complete statement of policy of the Adams Papers. The nature of the Diary of John Quincy {p. R49} Adams, particularly for the early years published here, does require, however, certain minor variations and emphases.
Spelling. Adams' many French passages are printed unchanged, with numerous spelling and accent errors, unless intelligibility is impaired. The same is true for his inaccurate rendering of Greek accents and breathings. Many of the towns and villages visited by Adams on journeys through Spain, Russia, Finland, Sweden, and elsewhere have their names incorrectly spelled, no longer have the same name, or are occasionally misidentified by the diarist. When possible, corroborative sources, such as John Adams' Diary and Autobiography , Francis Dana's Journals, or contemporary guides and maps, are used to correct place names or doubtful spellings.
Translations. Latin and Greek quotations have been translated; French passages, with only a few exceptions, have not been.
Paragraphing. Adams usually broke long Diary entries with a period and dash to indicate a change in subject matter. In the present edition these breaks have been interpreted as marking the beginnings of paragraphs. As his Diary progressed, Adams, writing with a smaller hand, made more economical use of space, virtually filling the page. In some of his college essays, for example, the Diary runs for pages without any break indicated. Where appropriate, the editors have supplied paragraphing with an accompanying explanatory note.
Punctuation. Adams' original punctuation has been generally preserved, with the exception of his comma practice. Throughout the Diaries, Adams consistently used periods for commas, a habit he also followed when copying passages from printed sources. These have been changed to commas where terminal punctuation was not intended. When Adams' purposes are not clear, a note is provided. Occasionally it has been necessary to supply minimum punctuation for intelligibility in dialogue and quoted material.
Annotation. General principles are laid down in the Diary and Autobiography of John Adams , 1:lx–lxii. If for published works referred to in the Diary there is a personal copy now among Adams' books at the Stone Library, Quincy, and several other locations, that fact is noted, provided it is reasonable to assume that he owned and used them at the time. In most other cases, annotations give the earliest known place and date of publica• {p. R50} tion. Occasionally reference is made to Henry Adams 2d's Catalogue of the Books of John Quincy Adams Deposited in the Boston Athenaeum ..., although all of this part of Adams' library, with the exception of his voluminous bound pamphlet tracts, was returned to the Stone Library, Adams National Historic Site, during the 1970s. Many books now in John Adams' library at the Boston Public Library were borrowed by John Quincy during the early years, and some of the younger Adams' books made their way into that library, even though bookplates and other evidence clearly show that their owner was the son, not the father.
No thorough and systematic attempt has been made to identify every line of poetry John Quincy Adams copied into his Diary. Since quotations, however, are clues to his early education and reading habits and served as models for his attempts at satirical rhyming, an effort has been made to trace such passages to books Adams owned or used at the time.
The double-dated letters written from St. Petersburg by John Quincy Adams and Francis Dana to various Adamses are referred to in the notes with a single date for the convenience of readers wishing to find them in the Adams Papers Microfilm; but several letters written by Dana to other than Adamses retain Old and New Style dates to aid in locating them in Dana's letterbooks.
 
1. JQA, Diary, 26 July 1816 ( Memoirs , 3:407).
 
2. Adams Papers, Microfilms, Reel Nos. 4–52.
 
3. 28–31 Jan., 22 Feb., 6 March 1836; 1–29 March 1837; 12 Jan.–16 March 1839; 20 Nov. 1846–31 March, 26–31 May, 12 June–6 Aug. 1847.
 
4. In 1783 and from 1788 to 1794.
 
5. Diary, 20 March 1821 ( Memoirs , 5:334).
 
6. Same, 20 May 1840.
 
8. Same, 26 July 1816. This project, of undertaking for the future an “Index” to his Diary, he began on 1 July 1816 and continued without break until 3 Dec. 1835. In the same month he commenced a “retrospective Index,” or line-a-day epitomes of earlier journal entries, which he completed for the periods 1 Jan. 1795–12 May 1801 and 5 Aug. 1809–July 1816. He devoted a separate volume (numbered 23 among the volumes of the Diary of JQA in the Adams Papers) to these line-a-day epitomes.
 
9. Except for one sentence in his hand in the entry for 20 Oct.
 
10. In addition, there are fuller entries in JQA's hand for 14 and 20 March 1847, which he designated “Posthumous Memoir,” and retrospective entries for 8–12 Feb. 1847, apparently written on 7 April 1847. The last entry in his hand, that of 24 Dec. 1847, is followed in the Diary volume by three poems in his hand, two of them dated 20 Feb. 1848, one day before his seizure on the floor of the House and three days before his death.
 
11. Diary, 7 Nov. 1842 ( Memoirs , 11:266–267).
 
12. They bear the Adams Papers designations: D/JQA/33, 47, 48, 49, 50. The numbering system employed by Charles Francis Adams for the Diary volumes is somewhat different.
 
13. Diary, 26 July 1816.
 
14. Same.
 
15. The Adams editors are understandably reluctant to be more positive on the point. See JA, Diary and Autobiography , 1:xlii and JA, Earliest Diary , p. 1–2.
 
16. D/JQA/4, p. 113–114, 127–128, 149–156. See note to entry for 8 July 1781.
 
18. Diary, 15 Jan. 1831 ( Memoirs , 8:277).
 
19. Harris, American consul at St. Petersburg during Adams' ministry there, later chargé d'affaires, and in 1817 a candidate himself for the ministry, was publicly charged by Lewis with malfeasance in the performance of his duties. In rebutting the charges, Harris cited letters from Minister Adams approving his work. Adams, having afterward become aware of Harris' venality, found himself chargeable also: “I was very slow and dull of sight, even before admitting in my mind a suspicion against Harris's integrity.... And even after becoming convinced... I was still unwilling to expose him.” Only when Harris' appointment as minister was being weighed did Adams reveal his knowledge to the President and secretaries Calhoun and Crawford. And when Adams' views became known as at least an indirect source for Lewis' public accusations, Harris averred that Adams' earlier views destroyed the validity of the later ones (Diary, 11 March 1821; Memoirs , 5:328–329). For a full account, see James B. Rhoads, “Harris, Lewis, and the Hollow Tree,” American Archivist, 25 (1962): 295–314.
 
20. Diary, 11, 18 March, 3, 4 Nov. 1821 ( Memoirs , 5:328–329, 330, 382–383).
 
21. Extracts from entries for 19 Sept., 11, 27 Oct. 1810; 12 Aug. 1811; 2, 18, 23 May, 3, 4, 6, 7, 17, 19, 22 June, 9, 11, 20, 29 July 1812; 3, 12, 14, 16, 28 Nov., 3, 6, 7, 12, 13, 19 Dec. 1817. The extracts are in Adams Papers, Microfilms, Reel Nos. 410, 440 (under the dates 19 Sept. 1810 and 3 Nov. 1817).
 
22. Diary, 6 Nov. 1821 ( Memoirs , 5:387).
 
23. Same, 14, 15 Jan. 1831 ( Memoirs , 8:274–277); see also Memoirs , 1:ix. The controversy is summarized in CFA, Diary, 3:406–407, 428. Public airing came with the publication of parts of the correspondence, including extracts from the Diary (but without identification as such) in Niles' Register, 40:11–45 (5–19 March 1831).
 
24. Diary, 27 Sept., 2, 3, 7 Oct. 1844 ( Memoirs, , 12:78, 81, 84). The extracts are drawn from entries of 23 Oct. 1818–2 March 1819 and 31 Jan.–28 Feb. 1820 (Adams Papers, Microfilms, Reel No. 530).
 
25. Boston Daily Atlas, 9 Oct., p. 2, col. 3–8; Niles' Register, 67:105–111 (19 Oct.); Quincy Aurora, 31 Oct., p. 1, col. 1, p. 2, col. 2. The printer's copy in JQA's hand (36 p.) is in the Adams Papers, Microfilms, Reel No. 530.
 
26. To John A. Dix, 14 July 1848, LbC (Adams Papers).
 
27. Congressional Globe, Containing the Debates and Proceedings, 1833–1873, Washington, 1834–1893, 30th Cong., 1st sess., App., p. 1177–1183; the Diary extracts are at p. 1179. The speech appeared subsequently in John A. Dix, Speeches and Occasional Addresses, 2 vols., N.Y., 1864, 1:346–382.
 
28. “Strong prejudices, not to say bitter ones, and a temperament often ill-regulated and always excitable, too frequently interfered . . . with that calm investigation, so essential to the exercise of a correct judgment. This contemporaneous record of his feelings and opinions exhibits these traits ... in bold relief, ... a melancholy proof that a vigorous intellect may be overshadowed by strange aberrations, and rendered useless and sometimes dangerous by wayward views . . . and maintained with characteristic tenacity and with little respect for the opinions of others.”
“How often has the memory of distinguished men been injured by the zeal of indiscreet friends, who, instead of going backward with a garment to cover them, reveal their infirmities to the curiosity of the world? . . . Better that it had been entombed, like the ancient Egyptian records, till its language was lost, than have been thus exposed” (Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., App., p. 69). See also JQA, Memoirs, 5:12, note.
 
29. Benton to CFA, 13 Oct. 1857; CFA to Benton, 20 Oct. 1857, LbC (both in Adams Papers). The transcript of excerpts from entries of 23 Oct.–3 Dec. 1821 was sent on 3 Nov., was subsequently returned, and is now in the Adams Papers.
 
30. William H. Seward, Life and Public Service of John Quincy Adams, Auburn, N.Y., 1849; CFA, Diary, 5 April 1854; Josiah Quincy, Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams, Boston, 1858. Quincy was able to say in a prefatory note (p. v), “derived . .. from authentic unpublished materials.” In his Journal (3 Nov. 1855), Quincy records that on his own handling of the student rebellion of 1834 at Harvard: “Until I had the reading of [JQA's] diary, I never understood the malignity with which I was assailed, nor the laborious zeal with which I was defended by Mr. Adams” (CFA, Diary, 5:371–372).
 
31. CFA, Diary, 15 Nov. 1855; 21 Feb. 1871.
 
32. “The early portion ... is harsh upon others in a manner which his own later judgment would have disapproved” (CFA, Diary, 15 Jan. 1853; 5 April 1854).
 
33. CFA to Thomas Hart Benton, 20 Oct. 1857, LbC (Adams Papers).
 
34. CFA, Diary, 18 Feb.–18 May 1858 passim. At a much later time, he dated the initiation of his work on the Diary as in 1856 (CFA to J. B. Lippincott & Co., 12 July 1877, LbC, Adams Papers).
 
35. The conclusion derives from a conversation reported by CFA2 (Autobiography, N.Y., 1916, p. 68) with two of his father's friends: “General Nye asked me about my grandfather's diary, when would it be published, etc? Seward seemed to think it a dangerous experiment; and expressed a hearty concurrence in my remark that the great thing concerning that diary was ‘Who was to edit it?' For on the editor must depend the great question of extracts, and the light in which the diarist would be shown. ‘Nothing,' said he, ‘is so dangerous to the reputation of a public man as a diary.'”
 
36. CFA to Lippincott, 20 April 1870, 4, 19 April, 12 May 1871, all LbC's; Lippincott to CFA, 10, 24 April, 15 May 1871; both issues of Lippincott's announcements are enclosures in Lippincott to CFA, 3 July 1871 (all in Adams Papers).
 
37. Martin B. Duberman, Charles Francis Adams, 1807–1886, Boston, 1961, p. 384–388. CFA to Lippincott, 12 Aug., 16, 25 Sept., 18 Oct. 1871; 7, 28 July 1873, all LbC's; Lippincott to CFA, 18 Aug., 21 Sept., 4 Oct. 1871; 9, 31 July 1873; “Monthly Bulletin,” Nov. 1873 (all in Adams Papers). Publishing arrangements as detailed in this correspondence provided, among other things, that manufacturing costs and profits would be shared equally between publisher and author, that 750 copies would be printed, that the price per volume would be five dollars to subscribers, six to others.
 
38. North American Review, 114:110–147 (Jan. 1872). The excerpts, with somewhat reduced commentary, were later published in Henry Adams, Historical Essays, N.Y., 1891, p. 80–121.
 
39. CFA, Diary, 6 July–23 Sept. 1873 passim; 19 May 1874; CFA to Lippincott, 22 Sept. 1873, LbC; Lippincott to CFA, 26 Sept., 4 Nov. 1873; 13 Jan., 13 Feb., 9 March, 2 April, 8, 25 May, 18 June, 6 July, 13 Aug., 3 Sept. 1875 (all in Adams Papers).
 
40. “Almost at every step there appears something to explain. The investigations which follow are precisely what I like best of all literary occupations” (Diary, 19 July 1873); “Diary . . . needs more annotation than I can make without a greater consumption of time and space than would be prudent. . . . Yet the labour is a pleasure” (same, 28 Aug. 1873).
 
41. 7 Aug. 1878; see also same to same, 12 July 1877, both LbC's (Adams Papers).
 
42. CFA, Diary, 30 Aug. 1876; see also, same, 12 July, 10 Aug. 1877.
 
43. Same, 19 Jan. 1847.
 
44. JQA, Diary, 30 July 1826; 7 Nov. 1842 ( Memoirs , 11:266–267).
 
45. Memoirs , 1:vii–ix.
 
46. CFA was not so absolute in the exclusion of family matters as might be inferred. For example, he provides a few glimpses of JQA in the role of father; he includes adverse comments by JQA on CFA (5:219), and a passage on the death of GWA (8:159–160).
 
47. Bemis, JQA, 1:x–xi. See also the opinion of L. H. Butterfield as quoted in Duberman, Charles Francis Adams, p. 510. His judgment on CFA's procedures in editing the Diary and Autobiography of JA ( Diary and Autobiography , 1:xxvi–xxx, xlvii–lii) includes much that is appropriate to CFA's procedures in editing the Memoirs .
 
48. “The Memoirs as edited by [CFA] are most unsatisfactory to me. He was then old and tired; and ... his theory of editing such papers seems to me to have been radically wrong. Had I edited that diary, it would have been a very different publication. About half as bulky, with much more editorial work; and above all, with a copious index and many cross references. It is now, to me, a very exasperating work”(CFA2 to W. F. Reddaway, 30 Nov. 1898). “As the [volumes of the Memoirs ] one by one came out, they unmistakably revealed in their editorial work the hand of a tired man,—one who, in his own language, most of all wanted ‘to be left alone.' Containing much that was superfluous, there was in them more which it would have been better to have suppressed. Missing links, also, essential to a correct understanding of the narrative, had not been supplied, manifestly because investigation had become irksome and writing difficult” (CFA2, Life of CFA, MS draft, p. 1803). Both documents in Adams Papers, Fourth Generation. These views are reflected in Duberman's account (Charles Francis Adams, p. 388–389). Another charge was leveled by Edward Everett Hale, who, apparently without much familiarity with the Memoirs , wrote: “Some day . . . some one will print in twenty volumes more the rest of John Quincy Adams's diary, which the prudence of his son . . . suppressed” (Memoirs of a Hundred Years, 2 vols., N.Y., 1902, 2:139).
 
49. Celebration of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Meeting House of the First Religious Society in Newburyport, October 31, 1901, Newburyport, 1902, p. 43–46. The extracts published were from the entries of 3, 15, 18 Nov., 9 Dec. 1787; 6, 20 Jan., 10 Feb., 27 April, 4, 11 May, 3, 10, 14 Aug. 1788.
 
50. MHS, Procs. , 2d ser., 16 (1902): 292–462. The text and notes as they had appeared in the Proceedings were published in Boston in 1903, with some changes in C. F. Adams' introduction and the addition of an index, as Life in a New England Town: 1787, 1788: Diary of John Quincy Adams, While a Student in the Office of Theophilus Parsons at Newburyport. The first and third quotations are from the Proceedings, p. 292–294; the rest, from p. 8 and 9 of Life in a New England Town.
In 1904 CFA2 furnished to William W. Crapo, with permission to publish, entries of 14–21 Sept. 1835 relating to a visit to Nantucket and New Bedford (Old Dartmouth Historical Society, Historical Sketches, No. 47 [1918–1919]: 13–22). See also CFA, Diary, 6:226. It is likely that Adams also furnished a similar unpublished passage, this one of 26 Sept. 1826 recounting a dinner and evening party in Cambridge, for publication in Hannah Winthrop Chapter, D.A.R., An Historic Guide to Cambridge, Cambridge, 1907, p. 170.
 
51. Memoirs , 8:502. It would appear that the decision was made after insufficient study of the Diary manuscript for that time span. The entries occur in vol. 47 of the MS, one of the “Rubbish” volumes; those for 25 March–4 July do conform to CFA's statement, being memoranda or notes for later expansion. However, for 5 July–30 Nov. the entries are complete or “perfect” ones, publishable according to CFA's standards.
 
52. CFA2, “J. Q. Adams in Twenty-Second Congress,” MHS, Procs. , 2d ser., 19 (1905): 504–553. The Diary extracts are at p. 520–534. Allan Nevin's one-volume condensation of the Memoirs (The Diary of John Quincy Adams, 1794–1845, N.Y., 1928) has not been brought into this account because it includes no material from the Diary not earlier published.
 
53. JQA, Writings , 1: vi. For a more detailed account of the history of the Papers during this period, see JA, Diary and Autobiography , 1:xxx–xxxi.
 
54. Adams Papers, Fourth Generation; Henry Adams, on the other hand, appears to have used only the Memoirs in writing his History of the United States, 1801–1817.
 
56. Bemis' prefatory statement to John Quincy Adams and the Union in 1956 that the papers had been placed “unreservedly at my disposal” seems to apply to conditions after the death of Henry Adams 2d in 1951. The Bemis-HA2 correspondence, 1938–1951, preserved in the Adams Papers, Fourth Generation, makes it clear that although Professor Bemis did enjoy direct access to the papers he needed during those years, that access was always with Mr. Adams' aid and in his presence. The earlier situation is properly mirrored also in Bemis' preface to the first volume (1949) of the biography where he acknowledges that his “searching” was “with the uninhibited and indefatigable assistance of Mr. Henry Adams, 2d” (Bemis, JQA, 1:x–xi; 2:xi).
 
57. For a full account, see JA, Diary and Autobiography , 1:xxxii–xxxiv.
 
58. A physical description of each of the thirteen Diary booklets and books is given in the notes with the text.
 
59. Adams Family Correspondence, 2:254–255, 261, 290–291, 307–308; JQA, Diary, 24 Sept. 1829 ( Memoirs , 8:156–157); JQA to Elizabeth Smith Shaw Peabody, 29 July 1812, LbC (Adams Papers).
 
60. Adams Family Correspondence, 3:93–94, 99–100; JQA, Loquitur, [14–21 Oct. 1824], LbC (Adams Papers).
 
61. JQA to Henry Coleman, 25 Aug. 1826, LbC (Adams Papers); Adams Family Correspondence, 3:268; see also p. 293.
 
62. A generation later, when GWA and JA2 were departing from Boston to join their parents, JQA and LCA, in Europe, JA admonished his two grandsons, doubtless as he had his own son three decades earlier, always to keep with them a pencil book, pocket inkhorn, and some paper so that they could “minute on the spot any remarkable thing [they might] see or hear.” Without a diary, JA warned, “your Travels, will be no better than the flight of Birds; through the air. They will leave no trace behind them. Whatever you write preserve. I have burned, Bushells of my Silly notes, in fitts of Impatience and humiliation, which I would now give anything to recover. ‘These fair Creatures are thyself.' And would be more useful and influential in Self Examination than all the Sermons of the Clergy” (JA to GWA and JA2, 3 May 1815, Adams Papers).
 
64. JQA, Loquitur, [14–21 Oct. 1824], LbC (Adams Papers); Francis Dana letterbooks and other papers, Dana Family Papers (MHi); Francis Dana to JA, 28 March 1782 (Adams Papers).
 
65. Francis Dana to JA, 16 Sept. 1782 (Adams Papers).
 
66. JQA, Diary, 26 July 1816 ( Memoirs , 3:407); JA to JQA, 14 May 1783 (Adams Papers). In 1834 JQA noted that this perseverance “requires a character given to very few of the sons of men ... to which toil is a pleasure, and of which untiring patience is an essential element” (JQA, Diary, 1834; Memoirs , 9:159).
 
67. JQA, Diary, 1 Oct. 1785.
 
68. AA2 to JQA, 26 Aug.–13 Sept. 1785 (Adams Papers); AA to Elizabeth Cranch, 2 Sept. 1785, AA, Letters, ed. CFA, 1848, p. 267.
 
69. JQA to JA, 30 Aug. 1786 (Adams Papers); JQA, Diary, 5 April 1788.
 
71. Elizabeth Cranch to AA, 1 July 1786 (Adams Papers).
 
72. JQA, Diary, 21 Sept., 20 June, 23 March 1786.
 
73. JQA to AA2, 18 May–17 June 1786, AA2, Jour. and Corr., [3]: 118; JQA, Diary, 1, 8 May, 13 June, 4 Sept. 1786; 11 March 1787.
 
75. JQA, Diary, 21 May, 11, 28 July 1787.
 
76. Same, 31 Dec. 1785; 14 April, 12 July 1787.
 
77. Same, 25 Sept., 27 Nov., 18 Dec. 1785; 20 Jan., 17, 22 Feb., 5 March 1786. For Adams' views on Calvinistic, evangelical preachers, compare his Diary analyses of sermons with the biographical notes, beginning with entry for 11 Feb. 1786, note 1, during Adams' stay in Haverhill, as well as later remarks in such entries as 2 March, 8 Aug. 1788.
 
78. JQA to AA, 30 Dec. 1786 (Adams Papers); JQA, Diary, 19 July 1786; 6 Jan., 2 Aug. 1787; 7 Feb. 1788; Douglass Adair, "‘That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science': David Hume, James Madison, and the Tenth Federalist,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 20:348–349 (Aug. 1957).
 
79. JQA to JA, 30 June 1787 (Adams Papers); (“Whether civil discord is advantageous to Society”), JQA, Diary, 6 July, 7 Sept. 1786.
 
80. JQA, Diary, 17, 24 Sept., 2 Oct., 22 Dec. 1787; 21 March 1788.
 
81. JQA, Diary, 30 Sept., 1, 20 Oct., 6 Dec. 1787.
{p. R51}

Acknowledgments

Docno: DQA01d002
For the Adams Papers editors these two volumes begin the presentation of yet another generation of Adamses. Yet even beginnings are dependent upon a past. The contribution of former editors, earlier Adams volumes, and over twenty-five years of research on the family and their activities are evident in these pages.
In addition to these valuable cumulative efforts for the editing of the Diary, we have benefited from the help of various specialists. Mason Hammond, Pope Professor of the Latin Language and Literature Emeritus at Harvard University, translated Adams' occasional Greek passages with their archaic symbols; Birgitta Knuttgen of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature at the same institution helped with Swedish translations. Professors Ralph E. Weber of Marquette University and Brian J. Winkel of Albion College unraveled John Quincy's misciphered message in one of the earliest Diaries. Mona Dearborn, Keeper of the Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, offered important assistance in locating portraits and their current owners for illustrations in these volumes. Scott Schaefer of the Department of Paintings, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, identified a painting from John Quincy Adams' less-than-precise description of it.
The Massachusetts Historical Society, which holds the Adams Family manuscripts and houses the Adams Papers editorial offices, continues to provide incalculable aid to our enterprise. Specific acknowledgment must go to Librarian John D. Cushing and members of his staff, Winifred V. Collins and Aimée Bligh, in particular, who responded without fail to our every request for manuscripts and books from the Society's extraordinary holdings. Malcolm Freiberg, the Society's Editor of Publications, has graciously joined us in reading galley proofs.
One of the indirect effects of John Quincy Adams' early life and travels in Europe, as well as his insatiable interest in books, {p. R52} has been our increasing dependence upon the resources of several other institutions in the Boston area. Wilhelmina S. Harris, Superintendent of the Adams National Historic Site in Quincy, and her staff have graciously permitted us long hours in the Stone Library to consult Adams' extensive collection of books. Harley P. Holden, Curator of the Harvard Archives, and his staff have provided important materials that have helped to illuminate Adams' student life at Harvard. The Boston Athenæum is an important repository on which we have called often for books and other materials pertaining to Adams' European stay.
Research efforts in the Boston area were ably assisted by Jane Knowles, now Radcliffe College Archivist, who brought her excellent research skills and broad knowledge to bear upon Adams' unexplored early life. After Mrs. Knowles' departure from our staff, Jill Schindler helped us with some outside research and verification. Editorial Assistants Katherine Oppermann, Maureen Kaplan, and her successor, Eileen Garred, skillfully readied the copy for the press and assisted with the proofreading and indexing. Michael Crawford, NHPRC intern for 1980–1981, also assisted with prepublication chores. Our editor at Harvard University Press, Ann Louise C. McLaughlin, bestowed upon the manuscript, to its great benefit, the same expertise and concern she has given to all the Adams volumes that have preceded these.
{p. R53}

Guide to Editorial Apparatus

Textual Devices

The following devices will be used throughout The Adams Papers to clarify the presentation of the text.
[...], [....]   One or two words missing and not conjecturable.  
[...], [....]   More than two words missing and not conjecturable; subjoined footnote estimates amount of missing matter.  
[ ]   Number or part of a number missing or illegible. Amount of blank space inside brackets approximates the number of missing or illegible digits.  
[roman]   Editorial insertion or conjectural reading for missing or illegible matter. A question mark is inserted before the closing bracket if the conjectural reading is seriously doubtful.  
<italic>   Matter canceled in the manuscript but restored in our text.  

Adams Family Code Names

In dealing with an assemblage of papers extending over several generations and written by so many members of a family who often bore the same or similar names, the editors have been obliged to devise short but unmistakable forms for the names of the persons principally concerned. They could not be forever adding dates and epithets to distinguish between the two or more Abigails, Charles Francises, Johns, John Quincys, and Louisa Catherines in the family. The following table lists the short forms that will be used in the annotation throughout The Adams Papers , together with their full equivalents and identifying dates. It includes the principal writing members of the “Presidential line” of the Adamses and certain others in that line (and their husbands and wives) who either appear frequently in the family story or have been important in the history of the family papers. Users should bear in mind that this table is highly selective, and in no sense is a complete genealogical table for each generation.
  First Generation  
JA   John Adams (1735–1826)  
AA   Abigail Smith (1744–1818), m. JA 1764  
  Second Generation  
AA2   Abigail Adams (1765–1813), daughter of JA and AA, m. WSS 1786  
WSS   William Stephens Smith (1755–1816), brother of Mrs. CA  
{p. R54}
JQA   John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), son of JA and AA  
LCA   Louisa Catherine Johnson (1775–1852), m. JQA 1797  
CA   Charles Adams (1770–1800), son of JA and AA  
Mrs. CA   Sarah Smith (1769–1828), sister of WSS, m. CA 1795  
TBA   Thomas Boylston Adams (1772–1832), son of JA and AA  
Mrs. TBA   Ann Harrod (1774–1846), m. TBA 1805  
  Third Generation  
GWA   George Washington Adams (1801–1829), son of JQA and LCA  
JA2   John Adams (1803–1834), son of JQA and LCA  
Mrs. JA2   Mary Catherine Hellen (1807–1870), m. JA2 1828  
CFA   Charles Francis Adams (1807–1886), son of JQA and LCA  
ABA   Abigail Brown Brooks (1808–1889), m. CFA 1829  
ECA   Elizabeth Coombs Adams (1808–1903), daughter of TBA and Mrs. TBA  
  Fourth Generation  
LCA2   Louisa Catherine Adams (1831–1870), daughter of CFA and ABA, m. Charles Kuhn 1854  
JQA2   John Quincy Adams (1833–1894), son of CFA and ABA  
CFA2   Charles Francis Adams (1835–1915), son of CFA and ABA  
HA   Henry Adams (1838–1918), son of CFA and ABA  
MHA   Marian Hooper (1842–1885), m. HA 1872  
MA   Mary Adams (1845–1928), daughter of CFA and ABA, m. Henry Parker Quincy 1877  
BA   Brooks Adams (1848–1927), son of CFA and ABA  
  Fifth Generation  
CFA3   Charles Francis Adams (1866–1954), son of JQA2  
HA2   Henry Adams (1875–1951), son of CFA2  
JA3   John Adams (1875–1964), son of CFA2  

Descriptive Symbols

The following symbols will be employed throughout The Adams Papers to describe or identify in brief form the various kinds of manuscript originals.
D   Diary (Used only to designate a diary written by a member of the Adams family and always in combination with the short form of the writer's name and a serial number, as follows: D/JA/23, i.e. the twenty-third fascicle or volume of John Adams' manuscript Diary.)  
Dft   draft  
Dupl   duplicate  
FC   file copy (Ordinarily a copy of a letter retained by a correspondent other than an Adams, for example Jefferson's press copies and polygraph copies, since all three of the Adams statesmen systematically entered copies of their outgoing letters in letterbooks.)  
Lb   Letterbook (Used only to designate Adams letterbooks and al• {p. R55} ways in combination with the short form of the writer's name and a serial number, as follows: Lb/JQA/29, i.e. the twenty-ninth volume of John Quincy Adams' Letterbooks.)  
LbC   letterbook copy (Letterbook copies are normally unsigned, but any such copy is assumed to be in the hand of the person responsible for the text unless it is otherwise described.)  
M   Miscellany (Used only to designate materials in the section of the Adams Papers known as the “Miscellany” and always in combination with the short form of the writer's name and a serial number, as follows: M/CFA/32, i.e. the thirty-second volume of the Charles Francis Adams Miscellany—a ledger volume mainly containing transcripts made by CFA in 1833 of selections from the family papers.)  
MS, MSS   manuscript, manuscripts  
RC   recipient's copy (A recipient's copy is assumed to be in the hand of the signer unless it is otherwise described.)  
Tr   transcript (A copy, handwritten or typewritten, made substantially later than the original or than other copies—such as duplicates, file copies, letterbook copies—that were made contemporaneously.)  
Tripl   triplicate  

Location Symbols

The originals of most of the letters and other manuscript documents printed, quoted, and cited in this edition are in the Adams Papers in the Massachusetts Historical Society. But the originals of the Adamses' outgoing letters and dispatches, and of many other papers by them, are preserved in numerous public and private archives and collections in this country and elsewhere. Locations of privately owned documents are given in expanded or at least completely recognizable form. Locations of documents held by public institutions abroad are indicated by abbreviations generally familiar to scholars; in the United States by the short, logical, and unmistakable institutional symbols used in the National Union Catalog in the Library of Congress, of which a published listing is available and which do not vary significantly from the library location symbols in the familiar Union List of Serials.
The following list gives the symbols and their expanded equivalents for institutions owning originals drawn upon in the present volumes. A similar listing, appropriate to the volumes concerned, will appear in the Guide to Editorial Apparatus prefixed to succeeding volumes of the Diary of John Quincy Adams.
DLC   Library of Congress  
MB   Boston Public Library  
MBAt   Boston Athenæum  
MH-Ar   Harvard University Archives  
MHi   Massachusetts Historical Society  
{p. R56}
MQA   Adams National Historic Site, Quincy, Massachusetts  
MWA   American Antiquarian Society  
NN   New York Public Library  
NNMus   Museum of the City of New York  

Other Abbreviations and Conventional Terms


  • Adams Papers
  • Manuscripts and other materials, 1639–1889, in the Adams Manuscript Trust collection given to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1956 and enlarged by a few additions of family papers since then. Citations in the present edition are simply by date of the original document if the original is in the main chronological series of the Papers and therefore readily found in the microfilm edition of the Adams Papers (see below). The location of materials in the Letterbooks and the Miscellany is given more fully, and often, if the original would be hard to locate, by the microfilm reel number.

  • Adams Papers, Adams Office Files
  • The portion of the Adams manuscripts given to the Massachusetts Historical Society by Thomas Boylston Adams in 1973 and retained in the editorial office of the Adams Papers.

  • Adams Papers Editorial Files
  • Other materials in the Adams Papers editorial office, Massachusetts Historical Society. These include photoduplicated documents (normally cited by the location of the originals), photographs, correspondence, and bibliographical and other aids compiled and accumulated by the editorial staff.

  • Adams Papers, Fourth Generation
  • Adams manuscripts dating 1890 or later originally part of the Trust collection together with Adams manuscripts acquired from other sources, administered by the Massachusetts Historical Society on the same footing with its other manuscript collections.

  • Adams Papers, Microfilms
  • The corpus of the Adams Papers, 1639–1889, as published on microfilm by the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1954–1959, in 608 reels. Cited in the present work, when necessary, by reel number. Available in research libraries throughout the United States and in a few libraries in Europe and Canada.

  • The Adams Papers
  • The present edition in letterpress, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. References between volumes of any given unit will take this form: vol. 3:171. Since there will be no overall volume numbering for the edition, references from one series, or unit of a series, to another will be by title, volume, and page; for example, JQA, Papers, 4:205. (For the same reason, references by scholars citing this edition should not be to The Adams Papers as a whole but to the particular series {p. R57} or subseries concerned; for example, John Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 3:145; Adams Family Correspondence, 6:167.)

  • Dana, Journal
  • Francis Dana, Journal, 1779–1780, 1781, in Dana Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

  • Thwing Catalogue, MHi
  • Annie Haven Thwing, comp., Inhabitants and Estates of the Town of Boston, 1630–1800; typed card catalogue, with supplementary bound typescripts, in the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Short Titles of Works Frequently Cited


  • AA, Letters, ed. CFA, 1848
  • Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams. With an Introductory Memoir by Her Grandson, Charles Francis Adams, 4th edn., Boston, 1848.

  • AA2, Jour, and Corr.
  • Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, Daughter of John Adams,... edited by Her Daughter [Caroline Amelia (Smith) de Windt], New York and London, 1841–[1849]; 3 vols.
    Note: Vol. [1], unnumbered, has title and date: Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, 1841; vol. 2 has title, volume number, and date: Correspondence of Miss Adams ... Vol. II, 1842; vol. [3] has title, volume number, and date: Correspondence of Miss Adams ..., Vol. II, 1842[!], i.e. same as vol. 2, but preface is signed “April 3d, 1849”[!], and the volume contains as “Part II” a complete reprinting from same type, and with same pagination, of vol. 2 (i.e. “Vol. II”), above, originally issued in 1842.

  • Adams Family Correspondence
  • Adams Family Correspondence, ed. L. H. Butterfield and others, Cambridge, 1963– .

  • Almanach royal, 1778 [and later years]
  • Almanach royal, année M.DCC.LXXVIII [&c.]. Présenté à sa majesté pour la première fois en 1699, Paris, no date.

  • Amer. Philos. Soc., Procs.
  • American Philosophical Society, Proceedings.

  • Annales dramatiques
  • Annales dramatiques; ou, dictionnaire général des théâtres, Paris, 1808–1812; 9 vols.

  • Bell, Bench and Bar of N.H.
  • Charles H. Bell, Bench and Bar of New Hampshire, Boston, 1894.

  • Bemis, JQA
  • Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams, New York, 1949–1956; 2 vols. [vol. 1:] John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy; [vol. 2:] John Quincy Adams and the Union.

  • Bénézit, Dict.... des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs
  • E[mmanuel] Bénézit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs de tous les temps et de tous les pays par un groupe d'écrivains spécialistes français et étrangers, new edn., [Paris], 1960; 8 vols.

  • Bentley, Diary
  • The Diary of William Bentley, D.D., Pastor of the East Church, Salem, Massachusetts, Salem, 1905–1914; 4 vols.

  • Biog. Dir. Cong.
  • Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1774–1949, Washington, 1950.

  • Biographia Dramatica
  • David Erskine Baker and others, eds., Biographia Dramatica; Or, A Companion to the Play House ..., London, 1764–1812; 3 vols, in 4.

  • Book of Abigail and John
  • The Book of Abigail and John Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762–1784, ed. L. H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlaender, and Mary-Jo Kline, Cambridge, 1975.

  • Boston Directory, [year]
  • Boston Directory, issued annually with varying imprints.

  • Boston Record Commissioners, Reports
  • City of Boston, Record Commissioners, Reports, Boston, 1876–1909; 39 vols.

  • Brenner, Bibliographical List
  • Clarence Dietz Brenner, A Bibliographical List of Plays in the French Language, 1700–1789, Berkeley, 1947.

  • Cal. Franklin Papers, A.P.S.
  • I. Minis Hays, comp., Calendar of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin in the Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1908; 5 vols.

  • Catalogue of JA's Library
  • Catalogue of the John Adams Library in the Public Library of the City of Boston, Boston, 1917.

  • Catalogue of JQA's Books
  • Worthington C. Ford, ed., A Catalogue of the Books of John Quincy Adams Deposited in the Boston Athenæum. With Notes on Books, Adams Seals and Book-Plates, by Henry Adams, Boston, 1938.

  • CFA, Diary
  • Diary of Charles Francis Adams, Cambridge, 1964– . Vols. 1–2, ed. Aïda DiPace Donald and David Donald; vols. 3–6, ed. Marc Friedlaender and L. H. Butterfield.

  • Chase, Hist. of Haverhill
  • George Wingate Chase, The History of Haverhill, Massachusetts, from Its First Settlement, in 1640, to the Year 1860, Haverhill, 1861.

  • Cioranescu, Bibliographie du dix-huitième siècle
  • Alexandre Cioranescu, Bibliographie de la littérature française du dix-huitième siècle, Paris, 1969.

  • Cioranescu, Bibliographie du dix-septième siècle
  • Alexandre Cioranescu, Bibliographie de la littérature française du dix-septième siècle, Paris, 1965.

  • Col. Soc. Mass., Pubns.
  • Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications.

  • Currier, Newburyport
  • John J. Currier, History of Newburyport, Massachusetts, 1764–1905, Newburyport, 1906–1909; 2 vols.

  • DAB
  • Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, New York, 1928–1936; 20 vols. plus index and supplements.

  • Descendants of Edmund Quincy, comp. Holly
  • Descendants of Edmund Quincy, 1602–1637, Who Settled in What is Now Quincy, Massachusetts in 1635, comp. H. Hobart Holly, Quincy, 1977.

  • Dexter, Yale Graduates
  • Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, with Annals of the College History, New York, 1885–1912; 6 vols.

  • Dict. de la noblesse
  • François Alexandre Aubert de La Chesnaye-Desbois and——Badier, Dictionnaire de la noblesse, 3d edn., Paris, 1863–1876; 19 vols.

  • DNB
  • Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, eds., The Dictionary of National Biography, New York and London, 1885–1900; 63 vols. plus supplements.

  • Essex Inst., Hist. Colls.
  • Essex Institute Historical Collections.

  • Fleet's Pocket Almanack and Massachusetts Register [year]
  • A Pocket Almanack ... Calculated Chiefly for the Use of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ... To Which is Annexed, The Massachusetts Register [title varies], Boston: T. and J. Fleet, 1779–1800; 22 vols.

  • Franklin, Papers
  • The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, William B. Willcox (from vol. 15), and others, New Haven, 1959– .

  • Franklin, Writings, ed. Smyth
  • The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert Henry Smyth, New York and London, 1905–1907; 10 vols.

  • Freeman, Hist. of Cape Cod
  • Frederick Freeman, The History of Cape Cod: The Annals of Barnstable County, Including The District of Mashpee [second vol. subtitled: The Annals of the Thirteen Towns of Barnstable County,] Boston, 1860–1862; 2 vols.

  • Gottschalk, Lafayette
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volume 1

Diary 1779–1786

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Cite web page as: Founding Families: Digital Editions of the Papers of the Winthrops and the Adamses, ed.C. James Taylor. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2007.
http://www.masshist.org/ff/