back. But of all men John Quincy Adams was the least fitted for such a task. We can learn from him how to act upon lofty principles, and also how to make their enforcement thoroughly disagreeable. He possessed in the highest degree that uprightness which leans backward. He had a horror of demagogy, and, lest he should render himself guilty of anything akin to it, he would but rarely condescend to those innocent amenities by which the good-will of others may be conciliated. His virtue was freezing cold of touch, and forbidding in its looks. Not only he did not court, but he repelled popularity. When convinced of being right in an opinion, he would make its expression as uncompromising and aggressive as if he desired rather to irritate than to persuade. His friends esteemed, and many of them admired him, but their devotion and zeal were measured by a cold sense of duty. To the eye of the people he seemed so distant that they were all the more willing to believe ill of him. With such a standard-bearer such a contest was lost as soon as it was begun.
Clay tried to bear the defeat with composure. “The inauspicious issue of the election,” he wrote to Niles, “has shocked me less than I feared it would. My health and my spirits, too, have been better since the event was known than they were many weeks before.” The hardest blow was that even his beloved Kentucky had refused to follow his leadership, and had joined the triumphal procession of the military chieftain.
