![]() ![]() In truth few contemporaries ever questioned his talents. As he wrote to his mother upon becoming secretary of state, he feared the president and public had “overestimated, not the goodness of my intentions, but the extent of my talents.” Adams emerges from these pages as a man driven to prove his worth to the world and history, never quite sure he could measure up to his own standards but utterly confident of his values and principles. With “John Quincy Adams: American Visionary,” Kaplan has produced a full-length narrative of this remarkable life, rendered in lucid and loving prose. And he kept a diary that Fred Kaplan, the biographer of Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, among others, calls “the most valuable firsthand account of an American life and events from the last decades of the 18th century to the threshold of the Civil War.” He had served as a United States senator, secretary of state, minister to Russia, Prussia and Britain, and member of the commission that negotiated the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812. I am composed.” It was a fitting death scene for someone who had served 17 years in the House and emerged as one of his era’s most magnetic men of conviction.īut he also had been his country’s sixth president. His only words upon that sofa were: “This is the end of earth. He was carried to a nearby sofa and eventually transported upon it to the speaker’s office, where he died the next day. 22, 1848, Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts collapsed over his desk on the House floor and slumped toward the carpet. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2023
Categories |