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Home – Historical Monuments & Statues News – Liberty or Force? John Quincy Adams on American Foreign Policy

Liberty or Force? John Quincy Adams on American Foreign Policy

John Quincy Adams’ 1821 Fourth of July address has had a long legacy. It has become a touchstone in debates about foreign policy to this day, thanks to Adams’ ringing assertion that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”  

Adams was the U.S. secretary of state at the time, and he would soon help President James Monroe draft what we now call the Monroe Doctrine. Adams was expected to be a presidential contender in 1824—and he not only was a candidate, he won, following his father’s footsteps to the highest office in the land. 

When a committee of citizens in Washington, D.C., invited Adams to give an Independence Day speech in 1821, they knew his remarks would be significant for the whole country. Like the Declaration of Independence itself, however, Adams’ comments were directed to the world as well as his fellow Americans.  

The Napoleonic Wars had ended only a few years earlier, and they had been, in effect, a world war. Even America had become involved—the War of 1812 was part of the wider conflict. And as happened after World War II, in the early 19th century, the Napoleonic Wars were followed by a kind of Cold War. The French Revolution and Napoleon had tried to plunge all of Europe into revolution for liberté, égalité, and fraternité.  

France was defeated, but the revolution’s ideals were not, and the victorious traditional powers of Europe now struggled to prevent revolution from erupting anew. Prussia, Russia, and Austria formed the Holy Alliance against revolutionary movements, and many of Europe’s Christian powers even feared the rebellion of Greeks against the rule of the Ottoman Empire would inflame radical causes elsewhere. 

Wasn’t America also a revolutionary republic that had fought to win its independence from the British Empire? In Britain itself, there was divided opinion about revolutionary movements, with liberal Whigs tending to sympathize with independence efforts everywhere. They saw the Holy Alliance as an ideological, geopolitical, and indeed spiritual enemy to be defeated in a cold war to advance liberalism, democracy, human rights, and enlightenment. The Catholic Church and hereditary monarchy were evils that held back human progress, they firmly believed. 

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