I recently took John Quincy Adams to Alaska with me. He’d spent a good chunk of the first part of his life traveling through Europe and was more traveled than most people of his era. But he’d never been to Alaska and I felt bad about that. And as I happened to be heading that way, I thought I’d take him with me. It wasn’t much of an inconvenience. I tucked him inside my backpack. He didn’t seem to mind.

At some point this year, I decided that I should spend some of my reading time going through primary sources. I’d re-read some of Stephen Jay Gould’s essay collections and was impressed by how frequently he went to primary sources, even in preparing for his essays. I realized that as widely as I have read in science, history, and biography, I rarely tackled primary sources. The Library of America two volume set of John Quincy Adams Diaries sit near my desk and I decided that those would be the first primary source to tackle.

My first significant encounter with the sixth President of the United States was a quarter of a century ago, when I read John Adams by David McCullough. Prior to that, I knew that he was the sixth President and that he was the son of John Adams, the second President of the United States, but not much more. McCullough’s book began a lifelong fascination with the Adams family.¹

It’s fair to say that I thought I knew John Quincy Adams.

Reading his diaries, however, was an experience unlike any I’d had before. JQA is famous for the diaries he kept, more than 14,000 pages from about 1779–1848, a good span of his life. The Library of America editions don’t contain all 14,000 pages in order to avoid unnecessary repetition. But they provided enough of his diary writing to make me feel as if I knew JQA better than most people I’ve read about.

In reading history and biography, both the writer and the reader have some sense of what is to come and can cast the narrative with those future events in mind. In memoir and autobiography, the subject is writing about the past with full knowledge of how things turned out and that knowledge pollutes the timeline. JQA wrote his diaries contemporaneously with the times he lived in, with each entry, he had no idea of what the future would hold, even as we, the reader, does. It provided a tension that drew me into the book the way a good story draws the reader in by its plot.

The first entries in the diary were written when JQA was still a boy. The final entry in the second volume came three days before he died at age 80. Reading the volumes from start to finish gives such a complete picture of one man’s life that it is impossible not to know him. Through approximately 1,300 pages, I watched him grow, learn, form opinion, some rash, some mature for his young age. I watched those opinions morph and change as he grew in experience. Many of the attitudes and opinions he wrote about in the second half of his life were clearly formed from earlier experiences.

Adams was critical of himself, frequently berating himself for slacking off, or not doing as well at a task as he believed he was capable of. This critical eye followed him throughout his entire life. The introspection probably helped him achieve all that he managed to achieve in his lifetime.

He wrote in great detail about his negotiations with foreign ministers when he was himself a minister and his diary entries analyzing the negotiations, the situations, the people, are a masterclass in diplomacy.

As I read, I scribbled ferociously in the margins, capturing thoughts, notes, behaviors, observations, more than 130 of these in total. And that doesn’t count the ones that I lost.

Upon leaving Alaska, I continued to read the first volume of JQAs diaries on an Alaska Airlines flight from Fairbanks to Seattle. It was a late flight², dark out as we made our final approach into SeaTac airport. I was tired from the vacation. We deplaned, picked up our luggage, and got an Uber to our hotel. As we finally settled into bed for the evening I went to pull out my copy of JQA’s diaries only to find it missing. It took only a few moments to realize that I’d left the book in the seat back on the plane. I was abashed! The book itself was easily replaced. The marginal notes that I’d not yet captured in my archive were lost for good!³

I got lucky with my first foray into primary sources. Looking back on it, I can say without hesitation that JQAs diaries are the finest American literature that I have come across so far.

I am now well into the second volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. While this is not exactly a primary source, it is turning out to be far more engaging than I initially imagined it would be.

1. In addition to McCullough’s book, I’ve read *Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson* by Gordon S. Wood, *John Adams Under Fire* by Dan Abrams and David Fisher, *John Quincy Adams* by Fred Kaplan, *John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit* by James Traub, *John Quincy Adams* by Randall B. Woods, and *A Perfect Coincidence* by Jim Rasenberger. ↩︎
2. In his lifetime, JQA traveled across the Atlantic by ship many times, each time taking at minimum five to six weeks. He traveled from Boston to New York or Philadelphia or Washington, D.C. by coach, which would take up to two weeks. Later in his life, however, he traveled by steamship, which cut down travel time significantly, and later still, by train. The increase in the speed of travel in his lifetime was much more noticeable than in my own. ↩︎
3. I did submit a lost item report to Alaska Airlines, but after a month, the report was closed. The book was never located. My guess is that it was tossed out. Meanwhile, I acquired another volume, without, of course, my original marginal notes. ↩︎