Об этой статье мне рассказал мой приятель, который сказал, что сегодня вы http://xbox360-live.ru/kupit-xbox360.php по сравнительно низкой цене, а кроме того, качество данной игрушки будет просто замечательным. In 1777, when John Quincy Adams was only 10, his father, John Adams— then a leader in the American Revolution—made it clear he expected the youngster to commit his life to public service. Just four years later JQA—the moniker he used in his letters to distinguish himself from his father—was in St. Petersburg, Russia, as secretary to the American minister. His public service 50 John Quincy Adams under way, it would continue to his deathbed, wrapped in his parent’s expectations, a constant din in his mind to avoid idleness, reject vice, and strive without being aggressive. The pressure placed on him, mixed with a personality noted for stubbornness, sensitivity to criticism, and self-righteousness, resulted in both notable accomplishments and what most historians consider a great failure: his presidency. An Adams biographer, Paul Nagel, says of him: "The poor fellow really was impotent as a President.” k John Quincy Adams was born in Braintree, Massachusetts, on July 11, 1767, the second child and first son of John and Abigail Adams. He grew up in a household imbued with revolutionary spirit as his father joined the fight to end British control of the American colonies. In 1775, with the elder Adams serving in the Continental Congress at Philadelphia, John Quincy and his mother climbed Penn Hill, near their farm, from where they watched the Battle of Bunker Hill. The distant cannon and smoke impressed JQA, and the sacrifices made for independence forever remained fixed in his mind. Young Adams made his first trip to Europe in February 1778 when he sailed with his father to France, where the elder Adams joined Benjamin Franklin in representing the United States. After a brief return to Massachusetts, they sailed to France a second time when John Adams was appointed minister plenipotentiary to seek a peace with Britain. In July 1780 they traveled to the Low Countries (present-day Holland and Belgium), and JQA kept a diary in which he described Brussels, Rotterdam, Leyden, and The Hague. As a result of his trips, he saw more of the world than almost any American boy his age could ever expect to see, and his outlook became less provincial and more cosmopolitan. (In his lifetime, he spent a total of 21 years overseas.) In January 1781 JQA enrolled at Leyden University to pursue his higher education. His stay was brief. That July he made his trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, accompanying Francis Dana, a former delegate to the Continental Congress, on a diplomatic mission. In addition to serving as Dana’s secretary, JQA acted as an interpreter at the Russian court, which conducted its state business in French. After he returned to The Hague early in 1784, he translated Latin and French classics into English. By that time, however, the elder Adams had decided his son had been much too long in Europe and sent JQA home in 1785 to enroll at Harvard. Accustomed to keeping company with adults, the young man despaired at the sight of a group of sophomore students who went on a drunken spree and broke windows in rooms occupied by the college’s tutors. "Such are the great achievements of many of the sons of Harvard,” he said sarcastically. He avoided such drunken bouts, but he joined in the social scene and complained more about the faculty, whom he thought inferior in mind, than about his fellow students. John Quincy Adams graduated from Harvard in 1787, having earned praise from its president. He then began studying law under Theophilus Parsons. Although Parsons was renowned as a teacher, JQA hated the study of law, which meant three years of supervised reading. This bored him, but he pursued it because his parents insisted and because he could think of nothing better to do. With constant commands from his mother and father to work hard, he attributed his reluctance to study to his own laziness: "Indolence, indolence, I fear, will be my ruin.” He soon plunged into depression, which forced him to suspend his studies for six months. In 1790 however, he passed the bar and set up practice in Boston, though he had no desire for a long legal career. With America’s constitutional government just beginning in 1791, JQA entered a debate over how populist it should be with the publication of his Letters of Publicola in the Columbian Centinel of Boston. The young man displayed a conservative outlook in such agreeJohn Quincy Adams 51 ment with his father that many people thought the elder Adams was the author. JQA criticized Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, a prodemocratic treatise that defended the French Revolution, and warned about passion ruling reason. His writing reflected his love for literature and his intensifying attraction to politics. Although he at times combined the two in his long career, for the most part he professed his greater liking for books while committing most of his time to public office, a predicament that tormented him. When President George Washington appointed JQA American minister to the Netherlands in 1794, Adams expressed reservations that his father, then vice president, may have arranged the assignment. There was some truth in this, since the elder Adams had discussed the post with the secretary of state. But upon speaking with his father JQA found "that my nomination had been as unexpected to him as to myself, and that he had never uttered a word . . . which . . . could be presumed that a public office should be conferred upon me.” By going to the Netherlands, JQA could get away from his dreary law practice and reenter public service in the European society he found attractive for its brilliance and gaiety. Soon after he arrived, he renewed his diary, so remarkable in detail about contemporary events that historians still use it as an important resource. In November 1795 Washington sent John Quincy to London to exchange with Britain the ratification documents relating to the Jay Treaty. Delayed in his journey, he arrived too late for his assignment, but while in the city he often visited with Joshua Johnson, a wealthy Briton who entertained lavishly. JQA fell in love with Johnson’s daughter, Louisa, and married her in July 1797, a few months after his father was inaugurated as the second president of the United States. They eventually had three sons and a daughter. Before long, John Quincy and his new wife were heading for Berlin, President Adams having appointed him minister to Prussia. There he concluded a treaty of commerce and friendship. In addition to his diplomatic work, he translated several books from German to English. In 1801 John Adams lost his bid for reelection to Thomas Jefferson and recalled his son to preclude any possibility the incoming president might do so. After once again sailing across the Atlantic, JQA reopened his law practice in Boston and descended back into the profession he loathed. For the first time, the domestic political scene beckoned, and in 1802 Adams won election to the Massachusetts senate, where he served into the following year. Until this time, he had long said he would avoid political office because it represented a clawing aggressiveness he found repulsive. He later said he changed his mind so he could get away from his tedious law routine and serve the public as an independent leader standing above party rancor and favoritism. Over the years, Adams hid his ambition beneath his insistence that political office had caused him to sacrifice himself for the public good. He always believed he should stand for election, not run for office, and portrayed his victories as the people calling him, rather than as an Adams debasing himself by seeking their vote. His sanctimoniousness served him well at times by making him appear to be more honorable than his opponents; at other times, when his political ambitions were obvious, it made him appear hypocritical. And sometimes he could not decide how to play the political game, an indecisiveness that made him appear weak and vacillating. In 1803, having lost a race for Congress, Adams hoped the Massachusetts legislature would elect him to a seat in the U.S. Senate. The legislature obliged, and although Adams went to Washington as a member of the Federalist Party, he immediately took an independent course. He arrived after the initial vote on Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase but supported several bills needed to complete the Republican president’s deal. This put him at odds with many other New England Federalists 52 John Quincy Adams who believed that acquiring and quickly settling the land would drain the northeastern states of people and resources. Adams thought differently; a strong nationalist, he insisted that programs to help the West would in time benefit the entire nation. Just as many Federalists began suspecting JQA had abandoned them for the Republican Party, he took a strong stand against Jefferson’s orchestrated impeachment of Samuel Chase, a Federalist Supreme Court justice. To remove Chase from office based on the flimsy charges that faced him, Adams said, would make a mockery of the constitutional separation of powers. As it turned out, the House impeached Chase, but the Senate acquitted him. Those puzzled by JQA’s peculiar politics could find some answers in statements he made about political parties, which showed his dislike for them. At one point he lamented, "The country is so totally given up to the spirit of party, that not to follow blindfold the one or the other is an inexpiable offense.” In a move that tempered Adams’s political ambition, Harvard chose him in 1805 for its new chair of rhetoric and oratory. Though Adams continued serving in the Senate—"I could neither bind myself to residence at Cambridge, nor to attendance more than a part of the year,” he said—he accepted his professorial duties with enthusiasm and presented several lectures well-received by students. His academic experience may have provided some compensation for his much rockier ordeal in politics. After the British frigate Leopard fired on the American ship Chesapeake in 1807, killing several on board, Adams joined the general outrage against the attack. Once again he broke with numerous New England Federalists, who in this instance feared that any retaliation directed at Britain would lead to war and damage overseas trade. Adams fumed that these New Englanders would rather submit to British indignities for the sake of the dollar than defend American rights. On several occasions he engaged in angry shouting matches with his Federalist colleagues. His position in the Senate had clearly become untenable, and it was made all the more so when he joined Republicans in supporting an embargo of all overseas trade to keep Britain and France from raiding American ships. In June 1808 Federalists in the Massachusetts House voted to name a successor to Adams’s Senate seat well ahead of schedule— making it clear that he would not be returned to office. He could have stayed in the Senate until 1809, but when the legislature instructed him to vote for a measure to repeal the embargo, he refused and quit. He then resumed his law practice. Before long Adams was again packing his bags for Europe. He had let it be known to President James Madison, a Republican, that he desired a government appointment, and in July 1809 he gave his final lecture at Harvard before assuming his duties as minister to Russia. There Adams developed a close friendship with Czar Alexander I. They often took lengthy walks together and talked about everything from international developments to personal matters. President Madison nominated John Quincy Adams for justice of the Supreme Court in 1810, and the Senate confirmed his appointment, but he declined the post. In a letter to his brother he revealed an important reason for his decision: He preferred his role as a political partisan. It was one of the few times when he admitted ambition as a ruling passion over selfless service. In the spring of 1814 Adams joined the American diplomatic team at Ghent to negotiate a peace with Britain to end the War of 1812. His colleagues considered him ill-tempered and rude, but he was instrumental in getting an acceptable treaty when he advised them against trying to obtain British concessions on issues such as neutral rights. Instead, he insisted, they should settle for conditions as they existed before the war. He accurately understood that by this time Americans and Britons alike were anxious for peace. Soon after the treaty talks, President Madison appointed Adams minister to Britain. He accomplished little, but in 1817 another John Quincy Adams 53 Republican president, James Monroe, appointed him secretary of state. Monroe chose Adams partly because of his diplomatic background and partly because he wanted to balance his cabinet geographically and needed a New Englander. The time had come for John Quincy Adams to make his last transatlantic voyage. Once in Washington, Adams found himself attacked early and hard by his political opponents, in part because of his personality. Many fellow politicians considered him cold, snobbish, and aloof. The last characteristic he readily admitted, saying it came from an aversion to idle conversation. But the opposition was more intensely stirred by politics. Adams had assumed an office many saw as a stepping stone to the presidency—a route previously followed by Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. As a result, others who desired the executive office battled him from the start. Among them was Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House, who had hoped to be secretary of state himself and was now determined to run foreign affairs. Despite all the in-fighting, Adams possessed Monroe’s confidence and was given wide latitude in pursuing policy. The president, however, always made the final decisions, closely reviewed his secretary’s official papers, and made numerous changes to them. JQA’s accomplishments set a high standard that future secretaries of state would find difficult to match. In 1818 he arranged a treaty with Britain that set the northwest boundary between Canada and the United States at the 49th parallel out to the Rocky Mountains and reaffirmed the right of Americans to fish off the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador. The following year he settled the boundary between the Louisiana Purchase territory and Spanish Texas, and he signed the Adams-Onis Treaty with Spain, by which the United States acquired Florida for $5 million. In 1821, with Spain’s colonies in the Americas seeking independence and other European countries threatening to intervene, JQA stated publicly that the Western Hemisphere should never again "be encroached upon by foreign powers.” That view was refined and formalized as the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, after Adams advised the president that the United States should defend North and South America on its own, without British help. He wrote in his diary: "It would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our principles explicitly to Russia and France, than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war.” Monroe declared the Western Hemisphere closed to further colonization by European powers. He said the United States would keep out of European affairs and that any attempt by European nations to expand into the Americas would be considered a threat to U.S. security. The fears of JQA’s opponents that he would move from the state department to the White House proved well-founded. In 1824 Adams worked as hard as anyone else in seeking the presidency, even holding a grand ball to honor General Andrew Jackson in an unsuccessful attempt to rally him behind the Adams campaign. A bitter and divisive four-way race—what one historian has called "America’s most fractured Presidential election ever”—involved Adams, Jackson, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and treasury secretary William H. Crawford of Georgia. When none of the candidates obtained a majority of the electoral vote, the election went to the House of Representatives. On February 9, 1825, the House surprised almost everyone by settling the matter on the first ballot: it elected Adams, making him the first son of a president to obtain the nation’s highest office. Legend has it that JQA obtained his victory after Congressman Stephen Van Rensselaer prayed for divine guidance in casting his vote and, upon opening his eyes, saw a ballot for Adams at his feet, which he took as a sign to select him. Van Rensselaer’s decision then threw New York to Adams and helped give him the victory. In reality, Adams’s lobbying of congressmen, including Van Rensselaer, proved more important, as did Clay’s decision to have his congressional supporters vote for the secretary of state. 54 John Quincy Adams No divine intervention quelled the enormous outcry over Adams’s election. Andrew Jackson had received the highest popular vote, and he and his supporters claimed that in electing Adams as a minority president, Congress had cheated them and thwarted the popular will. Adding to JQA’s woes, his election as a National Republican came with the party in disarray, a problem made worse by his never having strongly identified with it. Adams pushed the outcry to higher decibels when he chose Henry Clay as secretary of state. The appointment shocked Congressman Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina, who said the two men had entered into a "monstrous union.” Jacksonians charged Adams with a "corrupt bargain,” saying he and Clay had reached a deal where Clay would support Adams for president and Adams would appoint Clay to the politically powerful secretary’s job. Andrew Jackson believed Clay would use the position to grab the presidency. In truth, Henry Clay never had to ask John Quincy Adams specifically to make him secretary of state, for in the closeted political world of Washington, where politicians knew exactly where to scratch to get a desired reaction, nothing needed to be said directly. Clay disliked Adams, but he disliked Jackson even more, so in December he sent an emissary to speak to the New Englander. For his part, Adams despised Clay and expressed his feelings in his diary. Yet according to historian Robert V. Remini in Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union, Adams decided he would place his personal dislike aside, thinking "if that was the price of the presidency, so be it. He would pay it. [He] was just as ambitious as Henry Clay.” In early January, Adams met with Clay at the Kentuckian’s request. JQA’s diary leaves much unsaid about the meeting, but the New Englander notes about Clay: "He wished me . . . to satisfy him with regard to some principles of great public importance, but without any personal considerations for himself. In the question to come before the House between General Jackson, Mr. Crawford, and myself, he had no hesitation in saying that his preference would be for me.” Whatever transpired between the two men, Clay’s appointment smelled so suspect that it ruined his chances of reaching the White House. Because the Clay deal was one of several Adams made to collect votes in the House for his election to the presidency, he began his term sullied and distrusted and never recovered from his inauspicious start. In late 1825, on the heels of the Clay controversy, he backed John W. Taylor of New York for Speaker of the House because Taylor had supported him in the congressional vote for president. Taylor won by a narrow majority, but Adams antagonized the South with his support, for Taylor strongly opposed slavery. The president stumbled again when he chose Tobias Watkins to be his contact person with politicians, newspapermen, and office-seekers. Watkins had few political connections and only limited talent. Throughout his public life, Adams had been a strong nationalist, whether it was in supporting Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana or in arranging for the acquisition of Florida. He combined this nationalism with his passion for books and learning and his faith in reason to introduce a nationalist program. It was so strong in its call for an activist federal government that his opponents condemned him for trying to be "another Caesar.” He wanted the government to take responsibility for the nation’s cultural, scientific, and general welfare, a radical concept back then. He called for roads and canals to be built, geographic exploration expanded, and a national university founded, all through congressional legislation. He even called for a national astronomical observatory, a project critics thought as starryeyed as its advocate. Adams’s own cabinet considered his proposals excessive. At that point he could have compromised, but instead he held stubbornly to his agenda. "He made himself ludicrous,” says biographer Paul Nagel. As it turned out, Congress passed little of the program, choosing to fund only piecemeal internal improvements, such as money to repair the John Quincy Adams 55 Cumberland Road, which stretched from Maryland into the Midwest. Another fight developed when Congress resisted naming delegates to the Pan-American Conference meeting in Panama. Southerners feared slavery would be discussed there, or even worse, the meeting might lead to relations with the black republic of Haiti. By the time Congress relented, the conference was nearly over, and it was too late to send the delegates. All the fighting and back-stabbing caused JQA to suffer insomnia and indigestion and to lose weight. To relieve the pressure he took daily four-mile walks, swam in the Potomac River—in a fitting metaphor for his presidency, he once almost drowned in the currents—and began gardening, occasionally greeting callers at the White House in dirt-covered clothes. Another issue for Adams involved Indianoccupied land. Early in his presidency he signed a treaty with the Creek in Georgia requiring them to cede their lands. Congress ratified it, but the treaty had been negotiated with a small minority of Creek; when Adams discovered this, he reconsidered the deal. During a cabinet debate on the issue Henry Clay said, "It is impossible to civilize Indians. . . . I do not think them, as a race, worth preserving. . . . Their disappearance from the human family will be no great loss to the world.” Under a second treaty, the Creek retained land west of the Chattahoochee River. But when Congress balked, yet a third treaty again confiscated all the Creek land. Years later, in a general observation, Adams claimed: "We have done more harm to the Indians since our Revolution than had ever been done to them by the French and English nations before. . . .” If Adams found Congress uncooperative early in his presidency, he found it more so after 1826, the year his political opponents captured control of the House under the banner of the new Democratic Party. General Jackson and his supporters organized the Democrats with the express purpose of winning the presidency in 1828. When the House met in March 1827, it ousted John Taylor as Speaker, causing Adams’s influence to hit rock bottom. The president lost all support in the South in 1828 when he signed the so-called Tariff of Abominations, passed by Congress to raise taxes to their highest level yet on imports. Southerners applied this name to the tariff because they considered it to be oppressive in its potential to stifle their economy. In the 1828 presidential contest Andrew Jackson used innovative campaign tactics, such as avoiding issues, telling voters what they wanted to hear, and staging huge rallies. Jackson’s supporters attacked Adams for having bought a billiard table for the White House and for having bargained with Henry Clay in the previous election to win the presidency. Adams’s supporters gave as good as they got. They smeared Jackson by charging him with adultery for having married his wife before she had finalized her divorce with her first husband. Jackson considered it a vicious attack and blamed Adams for it, to which the president said, "I have not been privy to any publication in any newspaper against either himself or his wife.” Modern campaigning had arrived. Jackson easily defeated Adams with 56 percent of the popular vote and a tally of 178 to 83 in the electoral college. As Adams’s term ended he said, "The greatest change in my condition occurred . . . which has ever befallen me—dismission from the public service and retirement to private life.” Depression overwhelmed him. He took his defeat hard and believed his life worthless. To make matters worse, his son George, for years an alcoholic, committed suicide. "I have no plausible motive for wishing to live,” Adams said. His spirits lifted when political leaders in Massachusetts asked him to run for the House of Representatives. He agreed, for here was a way for him to salvage some dignity from his defeat and maybe get back at those who had opposed him. In November 1830 he became the first, and as of 2000 still only, former president to serve in Congress. Adams cheerily proclaimed: "No election or appointment conferred upon me ever gave me so much pleasure.” 56 John Quincy Adams Adams combined political activity with writing poetry but suffered more depression in 1834 after his work in the House grew tedious and his son John, like George an alcoholic, died. His spirits again revived in 1835 when he found, as he put it, a cause. Adams strenuously opposed the gag rule, adopted by Congress in 1836, that forbade the House from considering any petitions dealing with slavery. He had long hated slavery; in 1820 he said that it "polluted” the nation. He therefore saw the gag rule as another example of slavery’s corrupt influence, in this case blinding Americans to a republican principle—namely, the right to petition. Early in 1837 Adams moved to present 21 antislave petitions to the House, some purportedly from the slaves themselves. Congress tried, but failed, to censure him, while southern congressmen shouted "Expel him! Expel him!” Adams angered Southerners even more with his prominent role in the Amistad case. Slaves aboard the Cuban schooner Amistad mutinied in 1839 and tried to sail back to Africa, but their white navigators misled them, causing them to land near Long Island. A federal court ruled the slaves had been seized illegally from Africa and must be released. To avoid angering Southerners, however, President Van Buren appealed the case to the Supreme Court. In 1841 Adams made a closing statement before the Court on behalf of the slaves. In an impassioned eight-hour speech he called human liberty more important than maritime laws and property rights. The Supreme Court agreed with him and ruled that the slaves had been illegally smuggled from Africa and must be freed. The decision made Adams a hero in the North. In 1846 Adams suffered a paralytic stroke that kept him from his duties in the House for four months and impaired his speech. Good news soon came with the repeal of the gag rule. Meanwhile, Adams continued his long-held opposition to the U.S.-Mexican War, which he considered a fight to gain more territory for slavery. On February 21, 1848, he voted against a measure to commend the war’s veterans. He then rose on the floor of Congress to address the Speaker, but upon getting up his face grew flushed and he started to fall. A colleague caught him, and he was carried to a sofa in the Speaker’s private chamber. At one point Henry Clay came to visit him and wept at his side. Adams died in the chamber two days later, on February 23, 1848, at 7:15 P.M. Some fellow congressmen claimed that as JQA collapsed in the House he said, "This is the last of earth—I am composed.” His equanimity may have come from the realization he had achieved the goal of service to society instilled in him by his parents and adopted by him as his guiding light. In the case of the presidency, however, such service damaged his reputation. His ineptness in appointing Henry Clay to his cabinet and his failure to achieve any effective working relationship with Congress has relegated his
tenure to the list of failed chief executives.