The Secretary- Training for Greatness

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“What are the Qualifications of a Secretary of State? He ought to be a Man of universal Reading in Laws, Governments, History. Our whole terrestrial Universe ought to be summarily comprehended in his Mind.” -John Adams July 5, 1811

The speed at which the United States’ rose from birth to prominence on the world stage has rarely been matched in history. From first casting off a king and parliament that no longer served them to unequivocally telling the rest of the world that the new nation would no longer allow any state from the Old World to continue directly interfering with budding nations on the American side of the pond took only 47 years.

In all this, some of the most significant advancements in modern international politics, and the United States’ role in it, came in part thanks to one man and the eight years he spent as the U.S. Secretary of State. Trained from birth to serve his nation, you’d be hard pressed to find any individual in U.S. History more well prepared for the role he was eventually chosen for.

And the results, well, they showed.

This future President of the United States and, as noted by one time governor of Virginia Henry Wise, “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed”, is still today generally considered the greatest Secretary of State in United States history. For instance, in one pole conducted by Dr. David L Porter of William Penn College asking 50 of the leading diplomatic historians in the United States who they felt the best Secretary of States were, a whopping 80% of them chose as number one our man of the hour- John Quincy Adams, with a distant second place going to William H. Seward, Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson.

So, without further ado, here now is the remarkable story of John Quincy Adam’s rise to one of the most powerful offices’ in the nation, and how he irrevocably changed world history in countless ways, leveraging all the training his life, and parents, had provided him to do it.

Author: Daven Hiskey
Host: Daven Hiskey
Producer: Samuel Avila