John Quincy Adams (July 11, 1767 – February 23,
1848) was the
sixth President of the United
States from March 4, 1825 to March 4, 1829. He was also an
American
diplomat and served in both the Senate and House of
Representatives. He was a member of the
Federalist,
Democratic-Republican,
National Republican, and later
Anti-Masonic and
Whig parties.
Adams was
the son of the second President John
Adams and his wife Abigail Adams,
the name "Quincy" having come from Abigail's maternal grandfather,
Colonel John Quincy, after whom Quincy,
Massachusetts
is also named. As a diplomat, he was
involved in many international negotiations, and helped formulate
the
Monroe Doctrine as
Secretary of State. As
president he proposed a program of modernization and educational
advancement, but was stymied by
Congress. Adams lost his
1828 bid for
re-election to
Andrew
Jackson.
Adams was elected a
U.S. Representative from
Massachusetts
after leaving office, the only president ever to do
so, serving for the last 17 years of his life. In the House
he became a leading opponent of the
Slave
Power and argued that if a
civil war
ever broke out the president could
abolish
slavery by using his
war
powers, which
Abraham Lincoln
partially did during the
American
Civil War in the 1863
Emancipation Proclamation.
Early life
Adams was
born on July 11, 1767, to John Adams and
his wife and third cousin Abigail
Adams in what is now Quincy, Massachusetts
. Quincy in 1767 was the "north precinct" of
Braintree,
Massachusetts
; Quincy became incorporated as an independent town
in 1792 and was named for John Quincy,
just as John Quincy Adams had been. The John Quincy Adams birthplace
is now part of Adams National
Historical Park
and open to the public. It is near Abigail Adams Cairn, marking the site
from which Adams witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill
at age seven.
In 1779 Adams began a diary that he kept until just before his
death in 1848.
Adams
first learned of the Declaration of
Independence from the letters his father wrote his mother from
the Second Continental
Congress in Philadelphia
.
Much of Adams' youth was spent accompanying his father overseas.
John Adams
served as an American
envoy to France from 1778 until 1779 and to the Netherlands
from 1780 until 1782, and the younger Adams
accompanied his father on these journeys.
Adams acquired an education at institutions such as
Leiden University.
For nearly three
years, at the age of 14, he accompanied Francis Dana as a secretary on a mission to St. Petersburg
, Russia
, to obtain
recognition of the new
United
States
. He spent time in Finland
, Sweden
, and
Denmark
and, in 1804, published a travel report of Silesia.
During these years overseas, Adams gained a mastery of
French and
Dutch and a familiarity with
German and other European languages.
He
entered Harvard
College
and graduated in 1788, Phi Beta Kappa.
(Adams
House
at Harvard College is named in honor of Adams and
his father.)
He
apprenticed as a lawyer with Theophilus Parsons in Newburyport,
Massachusetts
, from 1787 to 1789. He was admitted to the bar in 1791 and began
practicing law in Boston
.
Early political career
George Washington appointed Adams
minister to the
Netherlands (at the age of 26) in 1794 and
to Portugal in 1796. He
then was promoted to the Berlin Legation.
When the elder Adams became president, he appointed his son in 1797
as
Minister to
Prussia at Washington's urging. There Adams signed the renewal
of the very liberal Prussian-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce
after negotiations with Prussian Foreign Minister
Count Karl-Wilhelm
Finck von Finckenstein. He served at that post until
1801.
While
serving abroad, Adams married Louisa Catherine Johnson, the
daughter of an American merchant, in a ceremony at the church of
All
Hallows-by-the-Tower
, London
.
Adams remains the only president to have a foreign-born
First Lady.
On his return to the United States Adams was appointed a
commissioner of bankruptcy in Boston by a Federal District Judge.
However, Thomas Jefferson rescinded this appointment. He again
tried his hand as a lawyer, but shortly entered politics. John
Quincy Adams was elected a member of the Massachusetts State Senate
in April 1802. In November 1802 he lost in a congressional election
where he was the Federalist candidate for a seat in the United
States House of Representatives.
The
Massachusetts General
Court elected Adams as a Federalist to the U.S. Senate soon
after, and he served from March 4, 1803, until 1808, when he broke
with the Federalist Party. Adams, as a Senator, had supported the
Louisiana Purchase and Jefferson's Embargo Act, actions which made
him very unpopular with Massachusetts Federalists. The
Federalist-controlled Massachusetts Legislature chose a replacement
for Adams on June 3, 1808, several months early. On June 8, Adams
broke with the Federalists, resigned his Senate seat, and became a
Democrat-Republican.
While a member of the senate Adams also
served as a professor of rhetoric at Harvard University
.
New President
James Madison appointed
Adams as the first ever
United States Minister to
Russia in 1809. Three years later Adams, still in Russia,
reported back to the United States the news of
Napoleon's invasion of Russia in
1812 and his disastrous retreat. In 1814, Adams was recalled from
Russia to serve as chief negotiator of the U.S. commission for the
Treaty of Ghent, which ended the
War of 1812 between the United States
and Great Britain.
Finally, he was sent to be minister to the
Court of St. James's (Britain
) from 1815 until 1817.
Secretary of State
Adams
served as Secretary of
State in the Cabinet of
President James Monroe from 1817 until
1825, a tenure during which he was instrumental in the acquisition
of Florida
. Typically, his views concurred with those
espoused by Monroe.
As Secretary of State, he negotiated the
Adams-Onís Treaty and wrote
the Monroe Doctrine, which warned
European nations against meddling in the affairs of the Western
Hemisphere
. Adams' interpretation of neutrality was so
strict that he refused to cooperate with Great Britain in
suppressing the slave trade. On Independence Day 1821, in response
to those who advocated American support for
Latin America's independence movement
from Spain, Adams gave a speech in which he said that American
policy was moral support for but not armed intervention on behalf
of independence movements, stating that America "goes not abroad in
search of monsters to destroy."
1824–25 presidential election
Adams ran
against four other candidates in the presidential election
of 1824: Speaker of
the House Henry Clay of Kentucky
, Secretary of the
Treasury William H.
Crawford of Georgia
, U.S. Senator Andrew
Jackson of Tennessee
, and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun of South Carolina
. After Crawford suffered an incapacitating
stroke, there was no clear favorite.
In the election, no candidate had a majority of the
electoral votes (or of the
popular votes), although Jackson had been the winner of a plurality
of both. Under the terms of the
Twelfth
Amendment, the presidential election was thrown to the House of
Representatives to vote on the top three candidates: Jackson,
Adams, and Crawford. Clay had come in fourth place and thus was
ineligible, but he retained considerable power and influence as
Speaker of the House. Crawford was unviable due to the
stroke.
Clay's personal dislike for Jackson and the similarity of his
American System to
Adams' position on
tariffs and
internal improvements caused him to throw his
support to Adams, who was elected by the House on February 9, 1825,
on the first ballot. Adams' victory shocked Jackson, who had gained
the plurality of the electoral and popular votes and fully expected
to be elected president. When Adams appointed Clay as Secretary of
State—the position that Adams and his three predecessors had held
before becoming President—
Jacksonian Democrats were outraged, and
claimed that Adams and Clay had struck a "
corrupt bargain." This contention
overshadowed Adams' term and greatly contributed to Adams' loss to
Jackson four years later, in the
1828
election.
Presidency 1825–1829
Adams served as the sixth
President of the United
States from March 4, 1825, to March 3, 1829. He took the oath
of office on a book of laws, instead of the more traditional Bible,
to preserve the separation of church and state.
Domestic policies
During his term, he worked on developing the
American System, consisting
of a high tariff to support internal improvements such as
road-building, and a national bank to encourage productive
enterprise and form a national currency. In his first annual
message to Congress, Adams presented an ambitious program for
modernization that included roads, canals, a national university,
an astronomical observatory, and other initiatives. The support for
his proposals was limited, even from his own party. His critics
accused him of unseemly arrogance because of his narrow victory.
Most of his initiatives were opposed in Congress by
Jackson's supporters, who remained outraged
over the 1824 election.
Nonetheless, some of his proposals were
adopted, specifically the extension of the Cumberland Road into Ohio
with surveys
for its continuation west to St. Louis
; the beginning of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the
construction of the Delaware and Chesapeake Canal
and the Portland to Louisville Canal
around the falls of
the Ohio; the connection of the Great Lakes
to the Ohio River system
in Ohio
and Indiana
; and the enlargement and rebuilding of the Dismal Swamp Canal in North
Carolina
.
One of the issues which divided the administration was protective
tariffs.
Henry Clay was a supporter, but
Adams´ Vice President
John C.
Calhoun was an opponent. The
position of Adams was unknown, because his constituency was
divided. After Adams lost control of Congress in 1827, the
situation became more complicated. By signing into law the
Tariff of 1828 (also known as the Tariff of
Abominations), extremely unpopular in the South, he limited his
chances to achieve more during his presidency.
Adams and Clay set up a new party, the
National Republican Party, but it
never took root in the states. In the elections of 1826, Adams and
his supporters lost control of Congress.
New York
Senator Martin Van
Buren, a future president and follower of Jackson, became one
of the leaders of the senate.
Much of Adams' political difficulties were due to his refusal, on
principle, to replace members of his administration who supported
Jackson (contending that no one should be removed from office
except for incompetence). For example, his
Postmaster General,
John McLean, continued in office through
the Adams administration, although he was using his powers of
patronage to curry favor with Jacksonites.Another blow to Adams'
presidency was his generous policy toward Native Americans.
Settlers on the frontier, who were constantly seeking to move
westward, cried for a more expansionist policy. When the federal
government tried to assert authority on behalf of the Cherokees,
the governor of Georgia took up arms. It was a sign of
nullification that foreshadowed the secession of the Southern
states during the Civil War. Adams defended his domestic agenda as
continuing Monroe's policies. In contrast, Andrew Jackson and
Martin Van Buren instigated the policy of Indian removal to the
west (i.e. the
Trail of Tears).
Honors presidents deaths
On July 4, 1826 former presidents
Thomas Jefferson and
John Adams died. John Quincy Adams gave an
Executive Order on July 11, 1826
that was a
commemoration to both
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The order included a day of rest
at each military station and flags were set at half mast.
Foreign policies
Adams is regarded as one of the greatest diplomats in American
history, and during his tenure as
Secretary of State he was
one of the designers of the
Monroe
Doctrine.On July 4, 1821, he gave an address to Congress:
...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.
During his term as president, however, Adams achieved little of
consequence in foreign affairs. A reason for this was the
opposition he faced in Congress, where his rivals prevented him
from succeeding.
Among the
few diplomatic achievements of his administration were treaties of
reciprocity
with a number of nations, including Denmark
, Mexico
, the
Hanseatic League, the Scandinavian countries, Prussia and Austria
. However, thanks to the successes of Adams'
diplomacy during his previous eight years as Secretary of State,
most of the foreign policy issues he would have faced had been
resolved by the time he became President.
Administration and Cabinet

Presidential Dollar of John Quincy
Adams
Judicial appointments
Supreme Court
Other courts
Adams was able to make eleven other appointments, all to
United States district
courts.
States admitted to the Union
None
Departure from office
John Quincy Adams left office on March 4, 1829, after losing the
election of 1828 to
Andrew Jackson.
Adams did not attend the inauguration of his successor, Andrew
Jackson, who had openly snubbed him by
refusing to pay the traditional "courtesy call" to the
outgoing President during the weeks before his own inauguration. He
was one of only three Presidents who chose not to attend their
respective successor's inauguration, the others were his
father and
Andrew
Johnson.
Election of 1828
After the inauguration of Adams in 1825, Jackson resigned from his
senate seat. For four years he worked hard, with help from his
supporters in Congress, to defeat Adams in the
Presidential election of
1828. The campaign was very much a personal one. As was the
tradition of the day and age in American presidential politics,
neither candidate personally campaigned, but their political
followers organized many campaign events. Both candidates were
rhetorically attacked in the press. This reached a low point when
the press accused Jackson's wife
Rachel of bigamy. She died a few weeks after
the elections. Jackson said he would forgive those who insulted
him, but he would never forgive the ones who attacked his
wife.
Adams lost the election by a decisive margin, 178-83 in the
Electoral College. He won exactly the same states that his father
had won in the
election
of 1800: the New England states, New Jersey, and Delaware.
Jackson won everything else except for New York, which gave 16 of
its electoral votes to Adams, and Maryland, which cast 6 of its
votes for Adams.
Member of Congress
Adams did not retire after leaving office. Instead he ran for and
was elected to the House of Representatives in the
1830
elections as a National Republican. He was the first president
to serve in
Congress after
his term of office, and one of only two former presidents to do so;
Andrew Johnson later served in the
Senate. He was elected to eight
terms, serving as a Representative for 17 years, from 1831 until
his death. Through
redistricting Adams
represented three districts in succession:
Massachusetts's 11th
congressional district (1831-1833),
12th congressional
district (1833-1837), and
8th congressional
district (1837-1843), serving from the
22nd to the
30th Congresses. He became a
Whig in 1834.
In Congress, he was chair of the
Committee
on Commerce and Manufactures (
23rd,
24th,
25th,
26th,
28th and
29th), the
Committee on
Indian Affairs (for the
27th Congress) and the
Committee on
Foreign Affairs (also for the 27th Congress). He became an
important antislavery voice in the Congress. During the years
1836-37 Adams presented many petitions for the abolition of slavery
and the slave trade in the District of Columbia and elsewhere to
Congress. The
Gag rule prevented discussion
of slavery from 1836 to 1844, but he frequently managed to evade it
by parliamentary skill.

United First Parish Church
In 1834 he unsuccessfully ran as the
Anti-Masonic candidate for
Governor of Massachusetts, losing
to
John Davis.
Adams then continued his legal career.
In 1841, he had the case of a lifetime, representing the defendants
in
United States v.
The Amistad
Africans in the Supreme
Court of the United States
. He successfully argued that the Africans,
who had seized control of a Spanish ship on which they were being
transported illegally as slaves, should not be extradited or
deported to Cuba
(still
under Spanish control) but should be considered free.
Under
Andrew Jackson's successor Martin Van
Buren, the United States Department of
Justice
argued the Africans should be deported for having
mutinied and killed officers on the ship. Adams won their
freedom, with the chance to stay in the United States or return to
Africa. Adams made the argument because the U.S. had prohibited the
international slave trade, although it allowed internal slavery. He
never billed for his services in the
Amistad case.
Adams sat for the earliest confirmed photograph still in existence
of a U.S. president in 1843.
The original daguerreotype is in the collection of the
National Portrait Gallery
of the Smithsonian Institution
.
Although there is no indication that the two were close, Adams met
Abraham Lincoln during the latter's
sole term as a member of the House of Representatives, from 1847
until Adams' death. Thus, it has been suggested that Adams is the
only major figure in American history who knew both the
Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln.
Death and burial
John Quincy Adams during his final hours of life after his collapse
in the capitol.
Drawing in pencil by Arthur Joseph Stansbury, digitally
restored.
On February 21, 1848, the
House of
Representatives was discussing the matter of honoring US Army
officers who served in the
Mexican-American War. Adams firmly
opposed this idea, so when the rest of the house erupted into
'ayes', he cried out, 'No!' Immediately thereafter, Adams
collapsed, having suffered a massive
cerebral hemorrhage.
Two days later, on
February 23, he died with his wife and son at his side in the
Speaker's Room inside the Capitol Building
in Washington, D.C.
His last words were reported to have been,
"This is the last of Earth. I am content."
His
original interment was temporary, in the public vault at the
Congressional Cemetery
in Washington, D.C.
. Later, he was interred in the family burial
ground in Quincy at the First Unitarian Church, called Hancock
Cemetery
. After his wife's death, his son, Charles Francis Adams, had him
reinterred with his wife in a family crypt in the United First Parish Church
across the street. His parents are also
buried there, and both tombs are viewable. Adams' original tomb at
Hancock Cemetery is still there, marked simply "J.Q. Adams".
Family

John Quincy Adams' original tomb at
Hancock Cemetery, across the street from United First Parish
Church.
John Quincy Adams and
Louisa Catherine Adams had
three sons and a daughter. Louisa was born in 1811 but died in 1812
while the family was in Russia. They named their first son
George Washington Adams (1801-1829)
after the first president. Both George and their second son, John
(1803-1834), led troubled lives and died in early adulthood.
(George committed suicide and John was expelled from Harvard before
his 1823 graduation.)
Adams' youngest son,
Charles
Francis Adams (who named his own son
John Quincy), also pursued a career in
diplomacy and politics. In 1870 Charles Francis built the first
memorial
presidential library
in the United States, to honor his father. The Stone Library
includes over 14,000 books written in twelve languages.
The
library is located in the "Old House" at Adams National
Historical Park
in Quincy, Massachusetts
.
The actor
Mary Kay Adams is a
descendant of John Quincy Adams.
John Adams and John Quincy Adams were the first father and son to
each serve as president (the others being
George H. W. Bush
and
George W. Bush). In addition, each Adams served only
one term as President.
See also
Pronunciation note
Notes
References
- Fulltext in Swetswise, Ingenta and Ebsco. Louisa Adams was with
JQA in St. Petersburg almost the entire time. While not officially
a diplomat, Louisa Adams did serve an invaluable role as
wife-of-diplomat, becoming a favorite of the tsar and making up for
her husband's utter lack of charm. She was an indispensable part of
the American mission.
- Bathroom Readers' Institute. Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring
Bathroom Reader. Information on death of Adams. ISBN
1-57145-873-5.
- Bemis, Samuel Flagg. John Quincy Adams and the Foundations
of American Foreign Policy. vol 1 (1949), John Quincy
Adams and the Union (1956), vol 2. Pulitzer prize
biography.
- Fulltext in Project Muse. Adams role in antislavery petitions
debate 1835-44.
- Holt, Michael F. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig
Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War.
1999.
- Lewis, James E., Jr. John Quincy Adams: Policymaker for the
Union. Scholarly Resources, 2001. 164 pp.
- Fulltext online at Ebsco
- Shows that both men considered splitting the country as a
solution.
- Nagel, Paul C. John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private
Life (1999)
- Fulltext online at Jstor and Ebsco. He tried and failed to
create a national observatory.
- Fulltext online at Swetswise and Ebsco. Adams adapted classical
republican ideals of public oratory to America, viewing the
multilevel political structure as ripe for "the renaissance of
Demosthenic eloquence." Adams's Lectures on Rhetoric and
Oratory (1810) looks at the fate of ancient oratory, the
necessity of liberty for it to flourish, and its importance as a
unifying element for a new nation of diverse cultures and beliefs.
Just as civic eloquence failed to gain popularity in Britain, in
the United States interest faded in the second decade of the 18th
century as the "public spheres of heated oratory" disappeared in
favor of the private sphere.
- Shows how the classical tradition in general, and Ciceronian
rhetoric in particular, influenced his political career and his
response to public issues. Adams remained inspired by classical
rhetorical ideals long after the neo-classicalism and deferential
politics of the founding generation had been eclipsed by the
commercial ethos and mass democracy of the Jacksonian Era. Many of
Adams's idiosyncratic positions were rooted in his abiding devotion
to the Ciceronian ideal of the citizen-orator "speaking well" to
promote the welfare of the polis.
Primary sources
- Butterfield, L. H. et al., eds., The Adams Papers
(1961- ). Multivolume letterpress edition of all letters to and
from major members of the Adams family, plus their diaries; still
incomplete.[2153]
- Adams, John Quincy, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory,
1810 (facsimile ed., 1997, Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints,
ISSN 9780820115078).
External links
- Official NPS website: Adams National Historical Park
- White House Biography
- John Quincy Adams Biography and Fact File
- Biography of John Quincy Adams
- Biography of
John Quincy Adams by Appleton's and Stanley L. Klos
- Inaugural Address
- State of the Union Addresses:
1825, 1826, 1827, 1828
- July 4, 1821 Independence Day Speech
- Medical and Health history of John Quincy Adams
- Armigerous American Presidents Series
- The Jubilee of the Constitution: A
Discourse
- Dermot MacMorrogh,: or, The conquest of
Ireland. An historical tale of the twelfth century.
In four cantos./ By John Quincy Adams
- Essay on John Quincy Adams and essays on each
member of his cabinet and First Lady from the Miller Center of
Public Affairs
- Poems of religion and society.: With notices of his
life and character by John Davis and T. H. Benton
- Encyclopedia Britannica: Adams, John
Quincy
- Collection of John Quincy Adams Letters
- Nagel, Paul. Descent from Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams
Family. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
- Adams, John Quincy. Life in a New England Town, 1787, 1788: Diary of
John Quincy Adams. Published in 1903. Diary of J.Q.Adams
while he apprenticed as a lawyer in Newburyport,
Massachusetts
under Theophilus
Parsons.
- Index entry for John Quincy Adams at Poets'
Corner