Although a great secretary of state and a man eminently qualified for executive office, John Quincy Adams was hopelessly weakened in his leadership potential as a result of the election of 1824. Most importantly, Adams is considered to have been a failure as a President principally because he was such a poor politician in a day and age when politics were beginning to really matter again. He spoke of trying to serve as a man above the "baneful weed of party strife" at the precise moment in history when America's "second party system" was emerging with nearly revolutionary force. Also, his idea of the federal government setting a national agenda, while a lofty and principled perspective, was the wrong message at the wrong time. As a great visionary, Adams was out of touch with political reality. And he seemed incapable or unwilling -- if one believes his wife -- of learning anything from defeat. He impressed people as a man more in step with the Federalist past than with the majoritarian attacks on elitism that were so powerfully expressed by Andrew Jackson. Adams's defeat in 1828 was one of the most devastating losses sustained by an incumbent in American history.

Fortunately for Adams, he had a public career both before and after his White House years. As a diplomat, most historians credit him with having set the essential marks of American foreign policy for the next century: freedom of the seas, a halt to further European colonization in the Western Hemisphere, a Manifest Destiny to expand across the continent, and isolationism from European affairs. They credit his formidable skills as an international diplomat with ushering in two generations of peace with Europe.

As the only President to serve in an elected office after his presidency (outside of Andrew Johnson's brief tenure), Adams is viewed as the embodiment of the partisan but highly principled politician who focused on antislavery as the means of challenging Jacksonian democracy. The same high-minded and rigidly uncompromising stance on moral issues that so weakened his effectiveness as a President served him well as a representative in Congress from 1830 to 1848. In taking up the battle against slavery, Adams greatly redeemed himself in the eyes of history for his failure as a President to shape or to reflect a national consensus.