September 22, 2025

The Secretary: Great Expectations

1 hour 3 minutes

“[T]here would not be I believe, a happier being in the United States… [c]ould I have just enough business to support my expences, so as to relieve me from the mortification of being at my time of life, a burden to my Parents…” -John Quincy Adams (December 14, 1790)

These were the words of the 23 year old John Quincy Adams, tirelessly working in a profession he seemingly didn’t particularly enjoy, but making very little headway in it and dependent upon money from his parents to live.

Four years after this, he was now a 27 year old who had not made a ton of outward progress despite an extreme amount of effort in between.

As we teased in our last video: The Secretary: Training for Greatness, this period of one of the greatest men in U.S. history’s life was filled with bouts of depression, anxiety, countless sleepless nights, and a whole lot of hopelessness. Trained from birth to become that great man, and with it drilled into him he must become so, after he graduated college, he found achieving this seemingly an impossible task no matter how hard he worked.

His aunt Elizabeth Shaw, who John Quincy would live with for a little while during one of his deepest bouts of depression shortly after graduating college, would write of this period of her nephew’s life, “Perhaps, no one, knew better than myself, the strong emotions which tore, & agitated your Mind— I could have sat by your side & counted out Tear, for Tear…”

And this was more or less the state of his life from about 20 to 27.

Needless to say, his first true steps into one of the greatest men of his era were slightly stumbling. But rather than break under the pressure, John Quincy merely bent for a time, unlike others in his family.

On that, as John Quincy Adams' son, Charles Francis Adams, who himself led a rather distinguished life, among many other things including serving as the U.S. Minister to the UK during the American Civil War and being a key figure in keeping Europe mostly out of that war, would sum up,

“The history of my family is not a pleasant one to remember. It is one of great triumphs in the world but of deep groans within, one of extraordinary brilliancy and deep corroding mortification—The misery of children falling as much below the ordinary ....

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