John Quincy Adams Said America Does Not Go Abroad Hunting for Monsters

Any quotation that has been printed on a thousand protest signs and a thousand op-ed headlines should be treated like a stranger who has been introduced at too many parties: pleasant enough, but you should find out what he actually does for a living. The sentence about America and monsters is one of those. It is quoted by people who want fewer wars and by people who want more of them, which is usually a sign that nobody has read the paragraph around it.

So let us read the paragraph. The man who wrote it was the son of a Founder, the Secretary of State of the United States, and one of the most formidable minds ever to hold American office. The occasion was Independence Day, 1821, in Washington, an address given at the request of a committee of citizens while the Declaration of Independence was read. And the passage is more careful, and more interesting, than the slogan.

The text

Here is the passage, as it is commonly printed:

"Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."

Read it slowly, because it has four parts, and each part cuts a different way.

1. "Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be." America sympathizes with every free people and every people striving to be free. This is not neutrality of feeling. It is a statement of allegiance in the moral sphere.
2. "But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." America does not turn that sympathy into a crusade. The word "search" matters. Adams is not saying that America never fights a monster. He is saying that it does not go looking for them.
3. "She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all." Again the sympathy, stated as a universal.
4. "She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." The deed is reserved for America's own cause.

That is a structure of heart on the one side and hands on the other. The sympathy is wide. The action is narrow. A restrainer quoting parts two and four is on solid ground. A hawk quoting parts one and three is also on solid ground. The honest reader has to hold all four.

Adams then continues with a warning that is less quoted and, I think, more important. America, he says, might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit. The point is not about the cost of foreign adventures in blood or in treasure, though that is implied. It is about the effect on the country that undertakes them. A republic that makes itself the policeman of the globe will, in time, have to rule in order to police, and a nation that rules abroad will find it very hard to stay a republic at home.

The context: two revolutions

An address is a response to a moment. In July 1821 there were two major struggles for freedom that Americans cared about.

The Latin American revolutions. Between roughly 1810 and 1825 the Spanish colonies of the New World rose against Madrid, one after another, and a number of them, from Argentina to Colombia to Mexico, had won effective independence by 1821. Americans of every party were enthusiastic. Henry Clay in the House was the leading champion of recognizing the new republics at once. The Monroe administration, with Adams at State, was more careful, because it was still negotiating with Spain over Florida. The Adams-Onis Treaty, signed in February 1819, transferred Florida to the United States, and ratifications were exchanged in February 1821. Adams did not want to jeopardize it by rushing to recognize Spain's rebels. In March 1822, with Florida secured, Monroe asked Congress to recognize the new governments, and the United States did.

The Greek revolt. In March 1821 the Greeks began their war of independence against the Ottoman Empire. It was an uprising of a Christian people against a Muslim empire, in the land of Athens, and the response in the United States was emotional and enormous. Classical education had made Americans fond of Greece. But the Greek cause was a war against a sovereign with whom the United States had commercial interests, and where an American intervention would have required a fleet and a theory. Adams was sympathetic and unwilling to commit. A few years later, in December 1823, Daniel Webster introduced a resolution in the House in support of sending a commissioner to Greece, and made a speech for the Greek cause in January 1824. The administration did not act on it.

Put those two struggles in view, and the structure of the passage makes sense. When Adams says that America's heart is with freedom wherever it is unfurled, he has the Greeks and the South Americans in mind. When he says that she goes not abroad in search of monsters, he is answering the enthusiasts who wanted a more adventurous policy.

The Monroe Doctrine: what Adams did afterward

Now the first complication for the restrainers. Within two and a half years, Adams was the principal architect of the policy that carries the name of his chief. In December 1823, in his annual message, Monroe declared that the American continents were no longer open to colonization by European powers, and that any attempt by them to extend their system to any portion of the Western Hemisphere would be considered dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States. In return, the United States would stay out of European wars and would not interfere with existing colonies.

Adams shaped that stance in cabinet debate. The British had proposed a joint declaration with the United States. Adams argued, at a cabinet meeting on November 7, 1823, that the United States should make its statement alone, rather than come in, as he put it in a phrase often quoted, as a cockboat in the wake of a British man-of-war. The meaning is that America should speak in its own voice and not as the junior partner of a European power.

The Monroe Doctrine is thus a policy of limited commitment. It draws a line around a hemisphere, it promises restraint beyond that line, and it threatens force inside it. A hawk can see in it the germ of an American security perimeter. A restrainer can see in it a promise not to intervene in Europe. Both are right, which is why the doctrine has had so long a life.

For the later history of the doctrine, and its later expansion under another president, see The Roosevelt Corollary Turned Monroe's Warning Into a Police Badge.

The restrainers' claim

The case for the restraint tradition on the right goes like this. The country's founding generation was wary of entanglement. Washington's Farewell Address warned against permanent alliances, and the thought is examined in What Washington's Farewell Address Really Said About Foreign Entanglements. Jefferson's inaugural spoke of honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none. Adams's address is the next link in that chain, and it adds a reason that goes beyond prudence: the effect of empire on the republic.

Restrainers have several practical points that deserve to be stated at full strength.

1. Limited resources. A government cannot do everything. Every commitment abroad is a claim on soldiers, on money, and on the attention of a Congress and a President who have a limited supply of each.
2. The tendency to mission creep. A war begun to destroy one monster often ends with the country governing the territory the monster ruled. The record of the last quarter century supplies examples, and the reader can compare them in Why Did We Lose in Afghanistan? Twelve Questions the Record Can Answer.
3. The constitutional point. A foreign policy of constant crusade is a foreign policy of constant executive action, because Congress cannot deliberate at the speed of events. The more the nation goes abroad, the more power flows to the President, which is a form of the concentration the Founders feared.
4. The moral point. A people that thinks of itself as the vindicator of the world's freedom may come to think of its own rulers as exempt from the ordinary limits. Adams's phrase about not being the ruler of her own spirit is the warning.

The hawks' claim

The hawks' reading deserves equal fairness.

First, they point to the first half of the passage. America's heart is with freedom everywhere, and Adams did not stop at sentiment. He spent his career as a diplomat and Secretary of State acquiring territory, securing the continent, and resisting European encroachment. He was not a man who thought America should be small. On the continent, he was among the most expansive thinkers in the early republic, and the treaty he negotiated in 1819 carried the nation's recognized boundary all the way to the Pacific.

Second, they point out that Adams's text is a statement about what America should not do in 1821, with the Navy it had and the allies it lacked. A man who writes that America goes not abroad in search of monsters in a year when the country has a few frigates and a large Atlantic Ocean is describing a strategic situation. The twentieth century changed the situation. A hawk argues that when the oceans no longer protect you and a hostile power can reach the continent in an hour, the logic of the passage changes. The monsters do not have to be searched for. They arrive.

Third, they point out the word "only." She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. That is true, but "her own" can be construed broadly. A country with global trade, global alliances and global financial obligations has a lot of "own" to defend, and an enemy who is destroying the freedom of the seas, or the stability of a region on which the American economy depends, is threatening something that is American.

Where I come down

I think the restrainers have the better of the reading of the sentence, and the hawks have the better of the history of the author. Both are worth saying.

The sentence is about the use of force for the sake of other people's freedom, and on that the text is clear: America is a well-wisher, not a crusader. If you want a war, you must be able to say what America's own interest in it is, and that interest should be defined by the people who will bear the cost, through their representatives, in the open. That is not pacifism. It is the Constitution. Article I, section 8, clause 11 gives Congress the power to declare war. It is a clause that exists because the Framers did not trust one person to decide when to spend the nation's blood, a theme running through Commander in Chief Means Less Than Presidents Claim and More Than Critics Say.

The author, meanwhile, was no isolationist. He believed in a strong country with a strong navy and a strong diplomatic service. He wanted America to be so well governed and so prosperous at home that the world would see freedom in action without having to be conquered by it. That is a position in which prudence and ambition go together, and it is closer to what a modern conservative would call a realist foreign policy than to either of the slogans.

The decisive point is the definition of interest. Adams's own record suggests that he would have treated the shipping lanes, the hemisphere and the balance of power in Europe as American interests, and would have been suspicious of efforts to remake foreign societies from the outside. I cannot tell you what he would have said about any specific modern war, and nobody else can either. Anyone who claims otherwise is quoting him as a ventriloquist quotes a dummy.

A short test for the quotation

If you find the line on a poster, ask four questions.

1. Does the speaker also quote the first sentence, about the heart and benedictions? If not, he is trimming the passage.
2. Does the speaker address the clause that follows, about becoming the dictatress of the world? If not, he is missing the argument.
3. Does the speaker acknowledge that Adams drafted the Monroe Doctrine? If not, he is leaving out the author's strategy.
4. Does the speaker say what the principle implies for the case at hand? If not, he is quoting for decoration.

Most posters fail all four. The text passes, which is why it is worth the trouble.

What the passage still asks of a free people

There is one more use of the text, and it is the one I think a citizen can apply without any knowledge of diplomatic history. Adams's sentence asks a question of every proposal for a foreign commitment: whose freedom is this, and who is going to pay for defending it?

If the answer is "ours," and the case can be made to Congress and to the voters with the evidence in hand, then the country can act, and act decisively. If the answer is "theirs," the country should help in the ways that cost least and risk least, with sympathy, with arms for those who will fight, with diplomacy and trade. It should reserve the commitment of its own sons and daughters for the defense of its own.

That is neither the passion of the crusader nor the shrug of the isolationist. It is the posture of a republic that knows its limits, which is among the rarest qualities in the history of great powers.

The case in brief

1. Adams's address of July 4, 1821 has four parts: sympathy for freedom everywhere, no search for monsters abroad, good wishes to all, and championship of America's own cause only.
2. The context was the Latin American revolutions and the Greek revolt, and the speech answers those who wanted a more adventurous policy than the Monroe administration judged prudent, though the address was a public Independence Day oration and not an official statement.
3. Adams was also the architect of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, so the restraint he urged was a restraint with a perimeter, not a withdrawal from the world.
4. Restrainers are right that a nation of constant crusades concentrates power in the executive; hawks are right that a nation with global interests has more "own" to defend than the America of 1821.
5. The usable lesson is a question to ask of every foreign commitment: whose freedom is at stake, who will pay, and has Congress been asked.

What you can do: read the text of the Constitution's war powers clauses at the Constitution page and then ask your representative's office, in writing, what limits Congress has placed on the use of force you are being asked to support.