For more than fifty years, in writings of remarkable breadth and insight, John Quincy Adams shaped the politics of a young America, becoming its greatest champion and most penetrating critic. Despite a persistent interest in Adams’s extraordinary life and career, there has never been a volume of his essential political writings. Here, for the first time in an anno­tated edition, are the complete texts of twenty-one works by this farsighted American statesman and consummate literary stylist.

The volume opens in the critical year 1787, with a twenty-year-old Adams, in his Harvard commence­ment oration, urging Americans to turn toward “the radiant sun of our union,” the lodestar of his politi­cal philosophy. Taking to the newspapers as “Publi­cola” and “Marcellus,” and then offering the first of his consequential Fourth of July addresses, Adams contributes to the rise of the first national political parties in the 1790s. Later, as a U.S. senator, in polemical works of fierce intensity, he embraces the policies of the Jefferson administration, losing the support of his Federalist base but confirming his determination to be a man of the whole nation.

That determination is tested when, as secretary of state, Adams stands alone in his defense of Andrew Jackson’s controversial invasion of Spanish Florida in a scorching diplomatic communiqué. Likewise, as president, in high-minded addresses to Congress and the people, Adams outlines a bold vision of national integration and benevolent international­ism at odds with the prevailing political winds. Throughout, roiling beneath the issues he con­fronts, lies the specter of slavery, threatening to pull the union apart.

Only after achieving and losing the presidency and returning to public life as a congressman from Massachusetts is Adams able to summon the voice to fully match his nationalist vision. The major works from this culminating stage of his career—when he becomes, in the words of one of his adversaries, “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed”—form the core of the volume and remain among the most dramatic and inspiring political writings in the nation’s history.

Noteworthy features of this Library of America edition include an introduction, headnotes, facsimile title pages, and a chronology of Adams’s life and political career, as well as a textual essay describing the composition and reception of the works gathered here and detailed notes illuminating their many historical and literary allusions. Two companion Library of America volumes present selections from Adams’s extensive personal diaries.

David Waldstreicher, editor, is Distinguished Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of numerous acclaimed works, including The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journey Through American Slavery and Independence, winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, and Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification. He is the editor of A Companion to John Adams and John Quincy Adams and, for Library of America, of The Diaries of John Quincy Adams in two volumes.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by The Achelis and Bodman Foundation.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.