FOR MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS Abigail had been urging her husband to retire from public life and join her beside the hearth at Quincy. Now, at last, he was finally doing so, albeit at the insistence of the American electorate rather than by any choice of his own. John Quincy, writing from Berlin, observed that his father should not be surprised at being hurled from office, since such was the fate that, by his own analysis, awaited all public servants determined to lead rather than listen to popular opinion. “I knew he was aware that in contributing to found a great republic,” John Quincy noted to his mother, “that he was not preparing a school for public gratitude … and that he himself in all probability would be one of the most signal instances of patriotism sacrificed to intrigue and envy.” Indeed, as John Quincy himself was destined to discover, a conspicuous flair for alienating voters while acting in their long-term interest, much like premature baldness, was bred into the genes of all prominent male members of the Adams line.1 At least publicly, John claimed to realize that his political defeat had been inevitable: “I am not about to write lamentations or jeremiads over my fate nor panegyrics upon my life and conduct,”
