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John Quincy Adams at Prayer
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2013
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At seventy-three years old, John Quincy Adams embarked on a winter lecture tour to share his views “On Faith” and drew on his “intercourse with the world” to describe the “many liberal minded and intelligent persons—almost persuaded to become Christians” whom he had met. So powerful was Adams's religious message that when his youngest son came across the manuscript years later, he simply docketed it: “Two sermons/JQA.” The speech, delivered from Boston to Salem and Hartford to Brooklyn—but never printed—laid out his decades of seeking and the formulation of Adams's own theology. Overall, Adams came to believe that man's unity of faith, hope, and charity could defeat earthly ills and clarify choices in the early republic's burgeoning religious marketplace. “Faith must have its bounds, and perhaps the most difficult and delicate question in morals is to define them clearly,” Adams said, praising the American government's nonintervention in forming official articles of faith. “But allow me to say that this unbounded freedom of religious faith, far from absolving any individual from the obligation of believing, does but impose it upon them, with a tenfold force.” This insight was especially true of Adams's own religious history. Therefore this essay offers a reintroduction to America's sixth president based on the diverse circles of prayer that he moved through, and the religious poetics that he created to narrate that pilgrimage. It ends with a glimpse of the curious afterlife that American religious culture assigned to him.
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References
1 John Quincy Adams [JQA], On Faith, draft in JQA's hand, listing lecture dates from October 27, 1840 through November 20, 1840; reprised on March 24, 1841 and November 1 [2?], 1842, docketed by his son, Charles Francis Adams: “Two Sermons / J.Q.A. / 1825 / not printed,” The Adams Family Papers, Boston: The Massachusetts Historical Society. Hereafter cited as Adams Papers.
2 Many excellent works exist to outline the shifts in antebellum religion and culture that John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams experienced and reflected upon, including Lewis, R. W. B., The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)Google Scholar; Bush, Clive, The Dream of Reason: American Consciousness and Cultural Achievement from Independence to the Civil War (London: Edward Arnold, 1977)Google Scholar; Simonson, Harold P., Radical Discontinuities: American Romanticism and Christian Consciousness (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Morse, David, American Romanticism, Volume 1, From Cooper to Hawthorne (Totowa: Barnes & Noble Books, 1987)Google Scholar; Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Wright, Conrad Edick, ed., American Unitarianism, 1805–1865 (Boston: The Massachusetts Historical Society and Northeastern University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Perry, Lewis, Boats against the Current: American Culture between Revolution and Modernity, 1820–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Block, James E., A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gatta, John, Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2005)Google Scholar; Howe, Daniel Walker, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johnson, Paul E., The Early American Republic, 1789–1829 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and, Ratner, Lorman et al. , Paradoxes of Prosperity: Wealth-Seeking Versus Christian Values in Pre-Civil War America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
3 Adams, On Faith.
4 The classic biography is Samuel Flagg Bemis's two-volume work, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy and John Quincy Adams and the Union (New York: Knopf, 1949, 1956)Google Scholar. For surveys of Adams's career and intellectual development, see also: Shepherd, Jack, Cannibals of the Heart: A Personal Biography of Louisa Catherine and John Quincy Adams (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980)Google Scholar; Nagel, Paul C., John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life (New York: Knopf, 1998)Google Scholar; Parsons, Lynn Hudson, John Quincy Adams (Madison: Madison House, 1998)Google Scholar; and Remini, Robert V., John Quincy Adams (New York: Times Books, 2002)Google Scholar.
5 JQA to Reverend Alvan Lamson, September 25, 1846, letterbook copy, Adams Papers.
6 JQA, Diary, May 16, 1792, Adams Papers.
7 East, Robert A., John Quincy Adams: The Critical Years, 1785–1794 (New York: Bookman, 1962), 31–34Google Scholar.
8 For John Adams's drafting of the Massachusetts constitution and the role of religion in the document's Declaration of Rights, see Lint, Gregg L. et al. , eds., The Papers of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), 8:228–271Google Scholar.
9 For Louisa Catherine Adams's reflections on her childhood, education, and formative years, see “Record of a Life,” and “The Adventures of a Nobody,” in eds. Graham, Judith S. et al. , Diary and Autobiographical Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 1:1–356Google Scholar.
10 See Rose, Anne C., “Religious Individualism in Nineteenth-Century American Families,” in Perspectives on American Religion and Culture, ed. Williams, Peter W. (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1999)Google Scholar.
11 Diary and Autobiographical Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams, 1:185.
12 JQA made close lists of his book and pamphlet acquisitions throughout his life. The sermons mentioned here are cited at his Miscellany for the years 1803 to 1825 (Adams Papers), next to his New Testament chapter summaries. See also Adams, Henry, A Catalogue of the Books of John Quincy Adams, Deposited in the Boston Athenaeum (Boston: Printed for the Athenaeum, 1938)Google Scholar. The 1843 Hawaiian Bible, printed in Oahu and presented in late May of 1845, bears an inscription of gratitude to JQA from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, “for the kind interest he has taken in the Sandwich Islands.”
13 As she prepared her memoirs, Louisa often referred to JQA's more precise diary entries to sharpen her recollection of people or events. While we cannot know if JQA ever read his wife's diary, it is worth noting that most of her entries took the form of “journal letters” that were occasionally edited and sent to either JQA or his elderly father.
14 JQA, Diary, December 31, 1812, Adams Papers.
15 JQA's instructions were collected and published as Letters of John Quincy Adams to His Son: On the Bible and Its Teachings (Auburn: James M. Alden, 1850)Google Scholar. Hereafter cited as Letters.
16 Letters, 13.
17 JQA, Diary, January 2, 1812, Adams Papers.
18 For JQA's use of the pastoral mode to explain the historical progress of civilization and its impact on society, see Glick, Wendell, “The Best Possible World of John Quincy Adams,” The New England Quarterly 37 (March 1964): 3–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 JQA to Skelton Jones, April 17, 1809, Adams Papers.
20 “Mr. Adams's Illness, Daily Republican (Springfield, Mass.), February 24, 1848.
21 Lunt, William P., A Discourse Delivered in Quincy, March 11, 1848, at the Interment of John Quincy Adams, Sixth President of the United States (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, State Printers, 1848), 1–44Google Scholar.
22 “Josiah Brigham, Esq.” in Livingston, John, Biographical Sketches of Distinguished Americans, Now Living (New York and London, 1853), 66–69Google Scholar.
23 “Preface,” in Twelve Messages from the Spirit of John Quincy Adams, through Joseph D. Stiles, Medium, to Josiah Brigham (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1859)Google Scholar. Hereafter cited as Twelve Messages.
24 Twelve Messages, 180.
25 Twelve Messages, 191, 202.
26 JQA confided to his diary on June 4, 1819 that he often appeared to be “a man of reserved, cold austere and forbidding manners; my political adversaries say, a gloomy misanthropist, and my personal enemies, an unsocial savage. With a knowledge of the actual defect in my character, I have not the pliability to reform it” (Adams Papers).