The Richmond palladium and sun-telegram. [volume] (Richmond, Ind.) 1907-1939, 1920-04-26

| - ~uluCy Aud Ills uOluS lue I0COIu
Of having been the youngest
and oldest public servant. From boy
hood, when he was a secretary of le-
cation at the extraordinary age af Ia
until he fell at his post in the halls of
| Congress in his S1st year, he was in
| the service of his country SIS of those
| 81 years.
| A President and the son of Presi-
dent. all the other Is Presidents from
Washington to Johnson were his as
SoclateS. From the day he climbed
a height near his Ma ssachusetts birth
| place to see the battle of Bunker HILL
| 10 miles away, he was a witness to
nearly every great event in the his
tory of the Nation until the close of
the Mexican War
When John Quincy stood beside
| his mother watching the smoke of the
first pitched battle for American in
dependence, he was not yet 8. At
9, he heard the windows rattle from
the storming of Dorchester Heights.
Soon he stood again on the neighbor
ing HILL looking off to Boston HarbOr,
where he beheld the glad sight of the
| British ships sailing away from the
| rebel town, which had been the first
| to defy and the first to vanquish the
King
The boy was aglow with patriotism
| In the siege of Boston, a musket had
been placed in his little hands by an
officer of company passing the
Adams home to join Washington's
army and he went through the man
ual of arms With crude drawings of
soldiers and frigates, he covered the
pages of his diary, which he began
before he was 9 and which he kept
| until the end, when II printed vol
umeS were required to hold this most
remarkable personal document in all
America.
With John Adams in Congress the
child had to be the man of the fam
lily, and at he regularly rode his
| horse to Boston to fetch the mail.
At 10 his father took him with him
on his mission to France. By IL he
had crossed the Atlantic four times,
running the British blockade in leaky
tubs and passing through the perils
of shipwreck on the Spanish coast.
At IA, an American Minister ap-
pointed the mature youngster" his
secretary of legation. By II, the
youth had travelled over much of
Europe, and he came home to enter
Harvard. After graduation, he open
ed law office in Boston. But bust
ness was only beginning when the
young attorney was appointed by
Washington, Minister at The Hague,
where the Government to which he
was accredited fled before the armies
of France and left him in the midst
of the triumphant revolutionists
Meeting the daughter Of the American
Consul in London, Marylander, she
and the young diplomat were married
on the eve of his departure for Berlin
to which capital he had been promoted
AS the first American Minister to
knock at the Brandenburg Gate, he
was held up until a Prussian lieutenant
was assured by private soldiers that
there really was United States OF
America
| Among his last acts as President
John Adams removed his son from of
fee to deprive Jefferson of the mali
cious satisfaction of dismissing him
When the recalled diplomat was elect
ed to the Senate he displayed his fam
lily trait of independence by taking
sides with his fathers hated rival and
supporting the jefferson AdminiStra
ton.
The Infatuated Federalists of Massa
chusetts savagely turned upon him as
traitor to his party and a renegade
from his class. They drove him from
the Senate, and when he came home
he found himself in his Boston house
which stood where the Hotel Touraine
now stands, a social outcast on a lone
ly island entirely surrounded by ice
The bitter feud was carried beyond
the grave, and the old Brahmins OF
Beacon Hill bequeathed to children
and grandchildren an unrelenting hat,
| sc Il o ,ho hol do l.
caste.
With his name erased forever from
the Boston blue book. John Quincy
was no longer a gentleman, and the
Jeffersonians, who were not gentle
men, but only democrats, took him up.
BY their favor he became Minister to
Russia, negotiator of the peace OF
Client in 1914 and Minister to Eng
land.
AS if it had been the unpleasant duty
of John Adams to be the First Min
lister in London after the Revolution,
and as it was to be the even more I'M
plea SAINT duty of his grandson, Charles
Francis Adams, to be the Minister in
the trying time of the Civil War, it
fell to his son, John Quincy, to brave
the frowns of the Court of st. James
when he appeared there at the close
of the War of 1912. But no other
American was more ready and able to
stand up to the critics of his country
than this plain-spoken, single-minded,
unflinching champion of America
From London, John Quincy was
called home to be Secretary of State
in the Monroe Administra ton In that
post, he played the leading part in OBJ
| tanning Florida from Spain and in