He had the
Puritan's restraint, self-scrutiny, and self-condemnation. "I am,"
he writes, "a man of reserved, cold, austere, and forbidding
manners." Nor can this estimate be pronounced unjust. He was a
lonely man, communing with his soul in his diary more than with a
circle of admiring friends. It was not easy for men to love John
Quincy Adams. The world may respect the man who regulates his course
by a daily dead-reckoning, but it finds it easier to make friends
with him who stumbles towards rectitude by the momentum of his own
nature. Popularity, in any deep sense, was denied him. This
deprivation he repaid by harsh, vindictive, and censorious judgments
upon his contemporaries, and by indifference to popular prejudices.
With the less lovely qualities of the Puritan aggravated by his own
critical nature, Adams found himself in a struggle for the
presidency against some of the most engaging personalities in
American history. He must win over his enemies in New England and
attach that section to his fortunes; he must find friends in the
middle states, conciliate the south, and procure a following in the
west, where Clay, the Hotspur of debate, with all the power of the
speakership behind him, and Jackson, "Old Hickory," the hero of New
Orleans, contested the field.
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