John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949. First Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing. Hardcover. xix, [1], 588 pages. Ex-library with some of the usual library markings. Boards weakened and restrengthened with glue. Part of DJ pasted on an end page. Maps (one folding). Footnotes. Index. Includes Preface, as well as chapters on Son of the American Revolution; The French Revolution and Jay's Treaty with Great Britain; At the Hague Listening-Post; London Interlude; The Mission to Prussia; The Young Senator and the Louisiana Purchase; Politics Stops at the Water's Edge; At the Court of the Czar; The War of 1812; The Peace of Ghent; Minister to Great Britain; The Department of State; The Foreign Service Abroad and the Diplomatic Corps at Washington; Issues with England: The Treaty of 1818; The Florida Question; The Transcontinental Treaty with Span; The Independence of Latin America; John Quincy Adams and the Background of the Monroe Doctrine; President Monroe's Message of December 2, 1823; The Slave Trade and Slavery; The Freedom of the Seas and the Abolition of Private Warfare on the Ocean; Equality of Commercial Opportunity; The Northeast Boundary Question; The North West Coast; The Oregon Question; President Adams, Henry Clay, and Latin America; The Foundations of American Foreign Policy. Also contains 4 appendixes (John Quincy Adams's Accounts of His Break with the Federalists; Text of John Quincy Adams's Supplementary Instructions to Richard Rush, December 8, 1823; John Quincy Adam's Project of a Convention for Regulating the Principles of Commercial and Maritime Neutrality; Lord Ashburton, Daniel Webster, and Jared Sparks, 1842. Illustrations are: Frontispiece of John Quincy Adams as Secretary of State and President; John Quincy Adams, Minister to the Netherlands, Portrait by John Singleton Copley, London, 1795. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, Miniature by J. T. Barber, London, 1797. Owned by Mrs. Robert Homans; John Adams as President. Portrait by Gilbert Stuart, Philadelphia, 1978. Owned by Mrs. Robert Homans; Abigail Adams, Portrait by John Stuart, Boston, 1804. Owned by Mrs. Robert Homans; The Signing of the Treaty of Ghent. From the painting by Sir Amedee Forestier, 1914, in possession of the National Art Gallery, Washington, D.C., now hanging on loan in the office of the Secretary of State. This biography of John Quincy Adams to the Presidency emphasizes his formative influence on American foreign policy. It is a work of commanding interest and basic importance on which Professor Bemis has been working for many years. He has shown with much enlightening and enlivening detail how John Quincy Adams more than any other man shaped the foundations of American foreign policy. In this book, Samuel Flagg Bemis has brought to life not only John Quincy Adams the diplomatist, but also John Quincy Adams, the man of many talents.
Samuel Flagg Bemis (October 20, 1891 – September 26, 1973) was an American historian and biographer. For many years he taught at Yale University. He was also President of the American Historical Association and a specialist in American diplomatic history. He was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes. Jerald A. Combs says he was "the greatest of all historians of early American diplomacy." Bemis joined the faculty at George Washington University in 1924, remaining there a decade, and accepted the history department's chairmanship in 1925. He left George Washington University in 1934, first serving as lecturer at Harvard University for the 1934–1935 academic year while James Phinney Baxter III was on research leave. Then, in 1935, he took up his position at Yale University, where he remained through the end of his career. He was first the Farnham Professor of Diplomatic History and then in 1945 became the Sterling Professor of Diplomatic History and Inter-American Relations. In 1958, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He retired in 1960, and served as president of the American Historical Association in 1961. His presidential address for the AHA engaged the topic of "American Foreign Policy and the Blessings of Liberty". His single greatest scholarly achievement was his two-volume life of John Quincy Adams. John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (1949) won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 1950; its sequel, John Quincy Adams and the Union (1956), covered Adams's life from his Presidency through his second political career as a member of the United States House of Representatives from Massachusetts. Condition: Good.
Keywords: John Quincy Adams, Foreign Policy, Henry Clay, George Canning, Castlereagh, Freedom of the Seas, James Monroe, Monroe Doctrine, Slavery, War of 1812
[Book #80923]
Price: $65.00