The irrepressible presidents Adams were products of a culture that led wandering minds in a search for useful knowledge. As avid readers, letter writers, and diarists, they took the past as their province. A preoccupation with history spawned two inexhaustible critics who documented the excesses they saw in unchecked democratic posturing and democratic pretense. Which makes them memorably combative.
What they learned could not be contained, even in the ever-expanding personal journals they kept. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts,” wrote Mark Twain near the end of The Innocents Abroad. “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” Twain’s lines seem entirely apropos here. It is not merely reading matter that informed the two Adamses’ thinking, though reading while abroad made a better America more imaginable for them. Wandering had long-term effects: it conditioned their trust in institutional solutions; and it fed their repugnance for unthinking types whose prejudices caused them to dismissively label entire groups of people instead of sifting through, and reasoning through, differences.
Europe produced judgments, positive and negative, about men and women of inherited wealth and power to whom they were daily exposed. A sustained immersion in distant capitals did not suck either of them in; we must underscore that they did not venerate any old-world political form. Their contemporaries were wrong who charged that any displeasure they voiced with regard to Thomas Jefferson’s or Andrew Jackson’s brand of democracy should be regarded as an illegitimate embrace of aristocracy. That bugaboo attaches to both father and son, for no good reason. It was the easy route for anti-Adams partisans in campaign literature and one-sided histories. It should be seen, with one backward glance, for what it was. Europe added to their inner lives but did not alter their essential personalities. In fact, foreign postings were extended opportunities to exhibit an unwavering nationalist passion.
There is another way to put this.
John and John Quincy Adams struggled surprisingly little in striking a balance between their New England provincialism and the age-old protocols that prevailed in European diplomatic circles. They never curried favor to gain acceptance. Adams bluffness, or Yankee hardheadedness, defined their relationships abroad no less than it was manifest in national congresses in which they both played important roles. In short, they studied the world without abandoning the moral geography of America.