Excerpt from The Life of John Adams
Viewed in this light, the century commencing in this country in 1761, with the opposition to writs of assistance, and extending to the outbreak of the great civil war, may, as it recedes, be likely to stand out more and more as his torically constituting one epoch, marked by characteristics exclusively its own. It will be held to embrace the youth of a great people, establishing proofs of its capacity to proceed alone, under a specific form of government con structed and set in motion by its deliberate act, and per severed in throughout with the general assent. This epoch may, therefore, be justly designated as that of the sover eignty of a written organic law, steadily upheld by the voluntary co-operation of the governed, who, at the same time, continued all the while free masters of its terms. N 0 experiment of the kind can be said to have had anything like success before.
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John Quincy Adams was the sixth President of the United States from March 4, 1825 to March 4, 1829. He was also an American diplomat and served in both the Senate and House of Representatives. He was a member of the Federalist, Democratic-Republican, National Republican, and later Anti-Masonic and Whig parties.
During his term as president, however, Adams achieved little of consequence in foreign affairs. A reason for this was the opposition he faced in Congress, where his rivals prevented him from succeeding.
Among the few diplomatic achievements of his administration were treaties of reciprocity with a number of nations, including Denmark, Mexico, the Hanseatic League, the Scandinavian countries, Prussia and Austria. However, thanks to the successes of Adams' diplomacy during his previous eight years as Secretary of State, most of the foreign policy issues he would have faced had been resolved by the time he became President.
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