John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy
by Samuel Flagg Bemis
Summary
Samuel Flagg Bemis, a Yale historian who would spend his career reshaping how Americans understood their own diplomatic history, wrote the first of two volumes on John Quincy Adams to argue that Adams, remembered popularly as an unsuccessful one term president, was in fact one of the most consequential diplomats the country ever produced. This volume follows Adams through his education in diplomacy under his own father, John Adams, and a string of ministerial postings before he ever became secretary of state, to the Netherlands in the 1790s, to Prussia, where he negotiated a trade agreement, and as the first American minister to Russia from 1809 to 1814.
Bemis gives real weight to Adams's role negotiating the Treaty of Ghent in December 1814, ending the War of 1812 on favorable terms despite resolving almost none of the war's original grievances, and then to his eight years as secretary of state under James Monroe, when Adams signed the Adams Onis Treaty in 1819, transferring Florida to the United States and fixing the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase once Spain ratified it in 1821. The book gives Adams direct credit for the substance of the Monroe Doctrine, arguing that the December 1823 declaration opposing further European colonization in the Americas reflected principles Adams himself had pressed on Monroe rather than ideas that originated with the president whose name the doctrine carries.
Bemis writes as a diplomatic historian working from treaties, dispatches, and Adams's own extensive diary, building a sustained case for reassessing a man historians already ranked among the greatest secretaries of state but whose presidency and later reputation had overshadowed the diplomatic achievements this volume restores to the center of the story. It suits a reader more interested in the machinery of early American foreign policy, treaty negotiation, boundary settlement, doctrine formation, than in a conventional life story, and it rewards patience with genuinely dense diplomatic history.
Historical Context & Significance
John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, Bemis's second Pulitzer after he had already won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for History for Pinckney's Treaty, an earlier study of American diplomacy with Spain.
Bemis followed this volume with a sequel, John Quincy Adams and the Union, covering Adams's presidency and his later career in Congress, published in 1956, but that second volume did not itself win a Pulitzer, leaving the diplomatic years covered here as the only part of Adams's life this particular prize ever recognized. Bemis spent his career at Yale and was later called by the historian Jerald Combs the greatest of all historians of early American diplomacy, and by Mark Gilderhus a founding father of the field in the United States, a reputation this book, alongside his Pinckney's Treaty, did the most to establish.