I must acknowledge, after all, that nothing in life has mortified or grieved me more than the necessity which compelled me to oppose him so often as I have.  He was a man with whom I always wished to live in friendship, and for that purpose omitted no demonstration of respect, esteem, and veneration in my power, until I had unequivocal proofs of his hatred, for no other reason under the sun but because I gave my judgment in opposition to his in many points which materially affected the interests of our country, and in many more which essentially concerned our happiness, safety, and well-being.  I could not and would not sacrifice the clearest dictates of my understanding and the purest principles of morals and policy in compliance to Dr. Franklin.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

(1767-1848)

The chief distinction in character between John Adams and his son is the strangest one imaginable, when one remembers that to the fiery, combative, bristling Adams blood was added an equal strain from the gay, genial, affectionate Abigail Smith.  The son, though of deep inner affections, and even hungering for good-will if it would come without his help, was on the surface incomparably colder, harsher, and thornier than his father, with all the socially repellent traits of the race and none of the softer ones.  The father could never control his tongue or his temper, and not always his head; the son never lost the bridle of either, and much of his terrible power in debate came from his ability to make others lose theirs while perfectly keeping his own.  The father had plenty of warm friends and allies,—­at the worst he worked with half a party; the son in the most superb part of his career had no friends, no allies, no party except the group of constituents who kept him in Congress.  The father’s self-confidence deepened in the son to a solitary and even contemptuous gladiatorship against the entire government of the country, for long years of hate and peril.  The father’s irritable though generous vanity changed in the son to an icy contempt or white-hot scorn of nearly all around him.  The father’s spasms of acrimonious judgment steadied in the son to a constant rancor always finding new objects.  But only John Quincy Adams could have done the work awaiting John Quincy Adams, and each of his unamiable qualities strengthened his fibre to do it.  And if a man is to be judged by his fruits, Mr. Morse is justified in saying that he was “not only pre-eminent in ability and acquirements, but even more to be honored for profound, immutable honesty of purpose, and broad, noble humanity of aims.”

[Illustration:  John Q. Adams.]