THE AGE OF ADAMS

JOHN AND ABIGAIL ADAMS did not just hope that their son would become President of the U.S. They raised him for the position. Watching the Battle of Bunker Hill from a distance as little John Quincy Adams held her hand, his mother could not have known that both her husband and her son would hold the highest office. But three years later, in 1778, Abigail told eleven-year-old Johnny that his embattled country might one day ask him for leadership.

In John Quincy Adams and the Union (Knopf; $8.75). the second volume of his big and authoritative biography of the sixth President, Historian Samuel Flagg Bemis shows how bitter the big prize was when in 1824 it came to the son of John and Abigail at the age of 57. Running against General Andy Jackson, high-principled John Adams refused to campaign. If his countrymen wanted him, they must say so without any courting from him. Jackson beat him, but the electoral vote was close enough to throw the election into the House of Representatives. There, with an assist from Kentucky's Henry Clay, who controlled the votes of three states, Adams was elected. (His Vice President: John C. Calhoun, who kept the job under Jackson until he resigned to become U.S. Senator from South Carolina.) For John Quincy Adams, Author Bemis says, the manner cff his election "was unsatisfactory to his pride."

The Bemis biography tells not only of Adams, but of a crucial era in the young republic's history--and of the other great leaders whom U.S. artists captured on their canvases (see color pages). On balance, John Quincy Adams held his own among them, although he did not make his greatest contributions in the White House. With the West and South both against him, a hostile Congress kept him pinned down. But Adams could no more keep out of political controversy than his father before him. In 1831 he was elected to the House of Representatives, the only U.S. President ever to take such a step. He was to remain there for the rest of his life, fighting against slavery and bringing to bear on every public question the Adams intelligence and high principle.

The massive Adams diary reveals a somewhat unhappy man. Of women he once wrote, "My attachment to them is not enthusiastic." Most people found him cold and personally unattractive. By his own account he liked a joke but was hopeless when he tried to make one, and in any case the matters that usually absorbed him were not to be joked about. He was never rich and often in debt. Tragedy came to him when his eldest son George ran into debt, got a young girl pregnant and finally committed suicide.

As he grew older, his mind seemed to become livelier (he came to be known as "Old Man Eloquent"), and no combination of the ailments that plagued him could keep him from his job. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "He is like one of those old cardinals, who, as quick as he is chosen Pope, throws away his crutches and his crookedness, and is as straight as a boy. He is an old roue who cannot live on slops, but must have sulphuric acid in his tea." Sulphuric he remained to the very end. In February 1848 a resolution was proposed in the House to honor the victorious generals of the Mexican War. Adams had opposed the war because he thought it an unjust one. He still thought so, and his vote now was a ringing no. It was his last word on the floor of Congress. A few minutes later he collapsed. He died next day, but he spoke like a son of John and Abigail Adams to the last: "This is the end of earth, but I am composed."

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