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Oxford Companion to the US Supreme Court:
John Quincy Adams |
(b. Braintree [now Quincy], Mass., 11 July 1767; d. Washington, D.C., 21 Feb. 1848), lawyer, president of the United States, 1825–1829. The son of John and Abigail Adams, John Quincy Adams graduated from Harvard College in 1787, read law with Theophilus Parsons, and passed the bar in July 1790. In mid‐1794, President George Washington commissioned him minister to Holland. In 1803, the Massachusetts legislature sent him to the United States Senate; a year later, he was admitted to the Supreme Court bar. After arguing for the defendant in Fletcher v. Peck (1810), Adams accepted an ill‐paid post as ambassador to Russia; shortly afterward, he turned down President James Madison's more lucrative appointment as associate justice of the Supreme Court. In 1817, Adams became secretary of state; in 1824 he was elected president of the United States.
Following Andrew Jackson's victory in 1828, Adams was elected to the House of Representatives, where he opposed nullification, the imposition of a gag rule, and annexation of Texas. In 1841, abolitionists persuaded him to defend the right to freedom of fifty‐three Africans before the Supreme Court in United States v. The Amistad (1841). Justice Joseph Story termed Adams's argument “extraordinary, for its power [and] bitter sarcasm.” After resuming his House seat, Adams doggedly pressed the antislavery cause; in 1842, he introduced a bogus petition advocating the dissolution of the union to cordon off slavery, for which he was rewarded with threats of expulsion from the House. On 21 February 1848, during the House roll call, Adams suffered a cataclysmic stroke. He died two days later.
— Sandra F. Van Burkleo
Oxford Dictionary of the US Military:
John Quincy Adams |
Adams, John Quincy (1767-1848) 6th president of the United States, diplomat, secretary of state, and U.S. congressman, born in Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts, the son of 2nd President John Adams. He conceived the Monroe Doctrine (1823). As president, he strove to launch a vast program of national public works, such as road and canal construction.
In the close three-way election of 1824, neither Adams, Henry Clay, nor Andrew Jackson received an electoral majority; the election was decided in the House of Representatives, and, with Clay's support, Adams was made president. With only 31 percent, he holds the record for the lowest percentage of the popular vote.See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.
Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:
John Quincy Adams |
John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) was the sixth president of the United States. A brilliant statesman and outstanding secretary of state, he played a major role in formulating the basic principles of American foreign policy.
Born in Braintree (now Quincy), Mass. on July 11, 1767, John Quincy Adams was the eldest son of John and Abigail Smith Adams. In 1779, at the age of 12, he accompanied his father to Europe. Precocious and brilliant - at 14 he accompanied Francis Dana, the American minister, to Russia as a French translator - he served as his father's secretary during the peace negotiations in Paris. Except for brief periods of formal education, he studied under his father's direction. When he entered Harvard in 1785, he was proficient in Greek, Latin, French, Dutch, and German.
After his graduation Adams studied law and began to practice in Boston in 1790. More interested in politics than the law, he made a name for himself with political essays supporting the politics of President George Washington. Those signed "Publicola" (his answer to Thomas Paine's Rights of Man) were so competent that they were ascribed to his father, who was then vice president.
The Diplomat
In 1793 Washington appointed young Adams minister to the Netherlands. From this vantage point he supplied the government with a steady flow of information on European affairs. Sent to London in connection with Jay's Treaty, he met Louisa Catherine Johnson, the daughter of the American consul, and married her on July 26, 1797. Although it was not a love match, the marriage was a happy one marked by deep mutual affection. In 1797 Adams became minister to Prussia, concluding a commercial treaty incorporating the neutral-rights provisions of Jay's Treaty.
On his return to the United States in 1801, Adams was elected to the Massachusetts Senate. Two years later he became a U.S. senator. Nominally a Federalist, he pursued an independent course. He was the only Federalist senator from New England to vote for the Louisiana Purchase. The Massachusetts Federalists forced him to resign in 1808 because they were angered by his support of Jefferson's commercial warfare against Great Britain and his presence at a Republican presidential nominating caucus.
Adams severed his connections with the Federalists and in 1809 accepted an appointment from Republican president James Madison as minister to Russia. He did much to encourage Czar Alexander's friendly disposition toward the United States. It was partly due to Adams's encouragement that Russia made an offer to mediate between Great Britain and the United States, which led to direct peace negotiations to end the War of 1812. As a member of the peace commission at Ghent, Adams and his colleagues (Henry Clay, Albert Gallatin, James A. Bayard, and Jonathan Russell) found the British commissioners so intransigent that they were obliged to conclude a treaty short of American expectations. In 1815, as minister to great Britain, Adams worked to lessen the tension between the two nations by welcoming Lord Castlereagh's friendly overtures.
The Secretary of State
In March 1817 President James Monroe appointed Adams secretary of state. Adams, who was then 50, was not a prepossessing figure. He was short, plump, and bald; his best feature was his penetrating black eyes. Inclined to be irascible, and very much aware of his own intellectual powers, he disciplined himself to conceal his impatience. "I am," he wrote in his diary, "a man of reserved, cold, austere, and forbidding manners…"Hewasillat ease in large gatherings, but in intimate circles he could be an entertaining companion. Imposing rigid moral standards on himself, he was inclined to judge others harshly. He had an almost Puritan sense of duty and a passion for work, which kept him at his desk for long hours not only in connection with official duties but in the scholarly researches that gave him so much pleasure. Every day he found time to make lengthy entries in his diary, which constitutes one of the most revealing sources for the political events of his era. His wife, witty and gracious, somewhat compensated for her husband's social shortcomings; Louisa Adams's weekly evening parties were among the most popular in the capital.
Adams and Monroe worked together in the greatest harmony and understanding, for they were in complete agreement on the basic objectives of American foreign policy. They wished to expand the territorial limits of the nation, to give American diplomacy a direction distinct from that pursued by the European states, and to compel the other powers to treat the United States as an equal. Monroe closely controlled foreign affairs, but he relied heavily on Adams, who proved a shrewd adviser, an adroit negotiator, and a talented writer whose state papers formulated administration policy with logic and a tremendous command of the relevant facts.
The most difficult negotiations undertaken by Adams were those culminating in the acquisition of Florida and the definition of the western boundary of Louisiana. In 1819 Adams was able to exploit Andrew Jackson's invasion of Florida to force Spain to settle both issues in the Transcontinental Treaty, which Spain ratified in 1821. Adams's familiarity with the complexities of the history of Louisiana enabled him to obtain a boundary settlement favorable to the United States and to fix the northern boundary so that American interests in the Columbia River region were protected. During the crisis precipitated by Jackson's unauthorized seizure of Spanish posts in Florida, Adams was the only Cabinet member to recommend that the administration completely endorse the general's conduct.
Equally taxing and less successful were the prolonged negotiations with the French minister over indemnities for confiscation of American ships and cargoes during the Napoleonic Wars, France's commercial rights in Louisiana, and trade relations in general. In 1822 Adams concluded a treaty providing only for a gradual reduction of discriminatory duties. His efforts to persuade Great Britain to open West Indian trade to American ships were unsuccessful. In the midst of these demanding negotiations, Adams conducted an extensive correspondence with American diplomats, reorganized the State Department, and drafted a masterly report for Congress on a uniform system of weights and measures. In 1822 Monroe formally recognized the new independent states in Latin America. Adams's instructions to the first American emissaries reflected his misgivings about the future of these states, which were largely dominated by authoritarian regimes.
When France intervened in Spain in 1823 to suppress a revolution, Adams did not share the view that this presaged a move on the European powers, who had banded together in the Holy Alliance, to restore Spanish authority in South America. He was far more concerned about Russian attempts to expand along the Pacific coast. Consequently, he welcomed Monroe's decision in 1823 to make a policy declaration expressing American hostility to European intervention in the affairs of the Americas. To the President's declaration, later known as the Monroe Doctrine, Adams contributed the noncolonization principle, which affirmed that the United States considered the Americas closed to further European colonization. In 1824 the American minister in Russia, acting on instructions from Adams, obtained an agreement in which Russia withdrew north of latitude 54'40", but Adams was not able to persuade the British to vacate the Columbia River region.
The President
In 1824 Adams was involved in a bitter four-cornered presidential contest in which none of the candidates received a majority of the electoral votes. Adams with 84 votes, largely from New England and New York, ran behind Andrew Jackson with 99 but ahead of William H. Crawford with 41 and Henry Clay with 37. The contest was resolved in Adams's favor in the House of Representatives when Clay decided to support him. Adams's subsequent choice of Clay as secretary of state raised a cry of "corrupt bargain"; there was no overt agreement between them, but the charge was most damaging.
Adams's presidency added little to his fame. In the face of the absolute hostility of the combined Jackson-Crawford forces, he was unable to carry out his nationalist program. His proposals for Federal internal improvements, a uniform bankruptcy law, federally supported educational and scientific institutions, and the creation of a department of the interior were rebuffed. His sole success in dealing with Congress was the appointment in 1826 of two delegates to attend the Panama Congress, arranged by Simón Bolívar. This Adams achieved only after acrimonious debates in which hostile congressmen made much of the fact that American delegates would be participating in a conference attended by black representatives from Haiti.
Committed to a protectionist policy, Adams signed the Tariff of Abominations (engineered by the Jacksonians in 1828), although it was certain to alienate the South and displease New Englanders, whose manufactures were not granted additional protection. He never permitted political expediency to override his rigid sense of justice. Consequently, he alienated much Southern and Western opinion by his efforts to protect the interests of the Cherokees in Georgia. He also declined to use the power of patronage to build up a national following, although Postmaster General John McLean was appointing only Jackson men. Pilloried as an aristocrat hostile to the interests of the "common man," Adams was overwhelmingly defeated by Jackson in the election of 1828.
The Congressman
At the end of his presidency, Adams expected to concentrate on the scholarly interests which had always absorbed so much of his time, but his retirement was brief. In 1831 he was elected to the House of Representatives, where he served for eight successive terms until his death. Although generally associated with the Whigs, he pursued an independent course. For 10 years he was chairman of the Committee on Manufactures, which drafted tariff bills. He approved Jackson's stand on nullification, but he considered the compromise tariff of 1833, which was not the work of his committee, an excessive concession to the nullifiers. After 1835 he was identified with the antislavery cause, although he was not an abolitionist. From 1836 to 1844, when his efforts were finally successful, he worked to revoke the gag rule that required the tabling of all petitions relating to slavery. Session after session "old man eloquent," as he was dubbed, lifted his voice in defense of freedom of speech and the right to petition. True to his nationalist convictions, he continued to advocate internal improvements and battled to save the Bank of the United States.
Adams suffered a stroke on the floor of the House of Representatives on Feb. 21, 1848. He was carried to the Speaker's room, where he died 2 days later without regaining consciousness.
Further Reading
The most important printed sources are Adams's diary, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams…, edited by Charles Francis Adams (12 vols., 1874-1877), and Worthington Chauncey Ford's edition of The Writings of John Quincy Adams (7 vols., 1913-1917), which stops in 1823. The best biography is Samuel Flagg Bemis's two volumes, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (1949) and John Quincy Adams and the Union (1956). Adams's election to the presidency is covered fully by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections (4 vols., 1971). Studies of Adams's diplomacy are Dexter Perkins, The Monroe Doctrine, 1823-1826 (1927; new ed. 1966); Philip C. Brooks, Diplomacy and the Borderlands: The Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 (1939); Arthur Preston Whitaker, The United States and the Independence of Latin America, 1800-1830 (1941); Bradford Perkins, Castlereagh and Adams: England and the United States, 1812-1823 (1964). See also George A. Lipsky, John Quincy Adams: His Theory and Ideas (1950).
Oxford Guide to the US Government:
John Quincy Adams, 6th President |
• Born: July 11, 1767, Braintree, Mass.
• Political party: Federalist, Democratic-Republican, Whig
• Education: Harvard College, A.B., 1787
• Military service: none
• Previous government service: minister to the Netherlands, 1794; minister to Prussia, 1797; Massachusetts Senate, 1802; U.S. Senate, 1803–8; minister to Russia, 1809–14; negotiator of Treaty of Ghent, 1814; minister to Great Britain, 1815–17; U.S. secretary of state, 1817–25
• Elected President, 1824; served, 1825–29
• Subsequent government service: U.S. House of Representatives, 1831–48
• Died: Feb. 23, 1848,Washington, D.C.
John Quincy Adams spent much of his youth accompanying his father, John Adams, on diplomatic missions. He was educated in Amsterdam, Leipzig, London, Leiden, and Paris. In 1781, at the age of 14, he served as private secretary to Francis Dana, the American envoy to Russia. The following year he served as secretary to the American emissaries negotiating peace with Great Britain. After graduating from Harvard in 1787 and becoming a lawyer, he served as the American envoy to the Netherlands in 1794, and Washington wrote to Vice President Adams that his son “is the most valuable public character we have abroad.” In 1797 he served as minister to Prussia during his father's Presidency and negotiated a commercial treaty with Prussia.
Adams returned home shortly after his father left the White House in 1801 and served in the U.S. Senate. He supported Jefferson's purchase of Louisiana and voted for Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807. Both of these acts alienated the Federalists in Massachusetts and induced Adams to resign from the Senate a year early. He then joined the Democratic-Republicans and, after teaching at Harvard for two years, accepted the position of minister to Russia. He declined James Madison's offer of a Supreme Court appointment in 1810. He was one of three American commissioners who negotiated an end to the War of 1812 on terms favorable to America by negotiating the Treaty of Ghent (1814) with Great Britain.
Adams capped his career as a diplomat with eight years of service as James Monroe's secretary of state. He performed brilliantly, negotiating a treaty with Great Britain in 1818 to extend the U.S.-Cana-dian border along the 49th parallel; arranging future arbitration of the disputed Oregon boundary; and obtaining Florida from Spain in return for a renunciation of U.S. claims on Texas. His policy of benevolent neutrality, a"tilt" to the former colonies and away from Spanish efforts to reconquer them, assured the success of Latin American independence movements without leading to war with Spain. The Monroe Doctrine, which warned European states against interference in the Western Hemisphere, was largely Adams's work: President Monroe was willing to accept a joint declaration with the British to warn the French, Spanish, and Russians against attempts to dominate the Ameri-cas, but Adams insisted that the United States issue the doctrine unilaterally. Adams is considered by many to be the greatest secretary of state in American history.
Meanwhile, the Federalist party had disappeared, and in the misnamed Era of Good Feelings, as Monroe's Presidency was known, only the “National Republicans” under President Monroe remained. In the Presidential election of 1824, Adams was one of four regional candidates from this party. Andrew Jackson received a plurality of the popular vote (he got the mostvotes, but fewer than 50 percent), defeating Adams 153,000 to 114,000 in states where electors were chosen by popular vote. Jackson's 99 electoral college votes put him ahead of Adams's 84, Senator William Crawford's 41, and Representative Henry Clay's 37.
Since no one had received a majority of the electoral college votes, the election went to the House of Representatives, where each state would have one vote. Crawford had meanwhile suffered a stroke and was not in serious contention. Clay, who had come in fourth, was ineligible in the House election according to the 12th Amendment. But Clay was Speaker of the House and threw his influential support to Adams, who received a winning 13 votes to only 7 for Jackson and 4 for Crawford on the first ballot. Jackson's followers claimed there had been a “corrupt bargain." It is believable that a bargain had been involved-because Adams named Clay his secretary of state only three days after the election.
Adams's Presidency was tainted by the questions surrounding his election and the violent opposition of the Jacksonians. He had no personal following among the people or in Congress and accomplished little. He backed Clay's “American system," which called for protective tariffs that would raise the prices of foreign goods to encourage U.S. industry, land sales to encourage settlement of the West, and enlargement of foreign markets for American agricultural products. Adams also proposed the creation of a national university and naval academy, new scientific missions to explore American coastal waters and lands, and expeditions to the South Seas. His proposals were scornfully ignored in Congress. Adams, Clay, and Secretary of the Treasury Richard Rush did manage to get Congress to pass measures subsidizing canals, harbors, and roads. Adams was more successful in foreign affairs. Together with Secretary of State Clay, he negotiated commercial treaties that improved trade with a number of European nations and with Mexico.
The midterm elections of 1826 gave a large majority in Congress to anti-Adams factions. Meanwhile, Andrew Jackson organized his followers and in 1828, running under the label Democrat or Democratic-Republican, defeated Adams, who ran on the ticket of the National Republicans.
Adams was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1830 and served there for 18 years. In the House he won the nickname Old Man Eloquent for speaking out vigorously against slavery and for defeating a “gag rule” that Southern representatives had imposed against antislavery petitions.
He was a tireless opponent of slavery and offered a plan for its gradual elimination. In 1841 he argued a case, United States v. Amistad, before the Supreme Court that resulted in overturning the convictions of the African crew members who had mutinied aboard the slave ship Amistad.
In 1848, John Quincy Adams suffered a stroke at his desk in the House chamber, shortly after making an impassioned speech against extending slavery to the Western territories won in the Mexican-American War. He died in a nearby room. A bronze marker on the floor indicates where Adams's desk once stood. Visitors to the Capitol know it as the “whispering spot” in Statuary Hall.
See also Jackson, Andrew; Monroe Doctrine; Monroe, James
Sources
Houghton Mifflin Companion to US History:
Adams, John Quincy |
(1767-1848), sixth president of the United States, diplomat, congressman, U.S. senator, and secretary of state. As the eldest and most gifted son of John Adams, second president of the United States, Adams enjoyed many opportunities that prepared him for later public service.
In 1802 Adams was elected a U.S. senator from Massachusetts as a Federalist, but he was too independent of mind to follow a regular party line. During the international tensions that arose from the Napoleonic Wars, he supported the policies of the Jefferson administration. His stand, contrary to the position of his party, resulted in his replacement as senator. He resigned, however, before the end of his term, only to be appointed to a series of important diplomatic posts. He was one of the American commissioners who arranged for the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812. As secretary of state, he drafted the Monroe Doctrine and acquired Florida from Spain for the United States.
He was the New England candidate for the presidency in 1824, but neither he nor any of the other candidates commanded the electoral majority the Constitution required. Therefore the election was decided by the House of Representatives, each state casting one vote. Henry Clay threw his support to Adams, who was then elected over Andrew Jackson. When Adams made Clay his secretary of state, the disapproving Jacksonians accused the president of entering into "a corrupt bargain" with Clay. From then until the end of his administration, Adams was the target of highly charged partisan abuse.
Adams was probably the most experienced and intelligent of all American presidents, but his ideas about the role of the national government in developing the nation were too far in advance of then current economic thinking. An advocate of national planning that would have extended to a federally funded system of internal improvements, canals, turnpikes, and the like, Adams also proposed the establishment of a national university and recommended substantial government support for scientific investigation. As part of his program of national planning, Adams favored a protective tariff. He also supported a national banking system that would provide uniform currency and regulate credit. These policies were to a considerable degree an extension of Alexander Hamilton's ideas, especially in economic affairs, but they were more visionary and less class-oriented in other areas of public responsibility. They were, in addition, a formative influence on the evolution of Whig party doctrine. His first message to Congress that introduced his policies stands as a brilliant state paper. But his administration, bedeviled by partisan attack, must be accounted a failure. Savagely attacked as an aristocrat and a quasi Federalist, Adams lost his reelection bid to Andrew Jackson in 1828.
In 1831, Adams was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Although no abolitionist, he battled single-handedly against a southern-dominated House for the right to present petitions from antislavery groups. Subjected to a gag rule and threatened with censure and even expulsion, Adams persisted in his efforts to defend a constitutional right. Finally, in 1844, Congress repealed its gag rule and the right of petition was restored. In many ways Adams's congressional record as a champion of civil rights was the crowning point of his long career in public service.
Bibliography:
S. F. Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union (1956); George Dangerfield, The Era of Good Feelings (1952).
Author:
John Niven
See also Adams-Onís Treaty; Corrupt Bargain; Elections: 1824 , 1828; Monroe Doctrine.
Columbia Encyclopedia:
John Quincy Adams |
In 1803 he became a U.S. senator as a Federalist, but his independence led him to approve Jeffersonian policies in the Louisiana Purchase and in the Embargo Act of 1807; the Federalists were outraged, and he resigned (1808). Sent as minister to Russia in 1809, he was well received, but the Napoleonic wars eclipsed Russian-American relations. He then helped to draw up the Treaty of Ghent (1814), and served as minister to Great Britain. As secretary of state (1817-25) under James Monroe, Adams gained enduring fame. He negotiated a major treaty with Spain, which secured for the United States a great expanse of land that stretched to the Pacific. Perhaps most notably, Adams was also the architect of the somewhat misleadingly named Monroe Doctrine (1823).
In 1824 Adams was a candidate for the U.S. presidency. Neither he, nor Andrew Jackson, nor Henry Clay received a majority in the electoral college, and the election was decided in the House of Representatives. There Clay supported Adams, making him president. Adams appointed Clay secretary of state, over the Jacksonians' cry that the appointment fulfilled a corrupt bargain. With little popular support and without a party, Adams had an unhappy, ineffective administration, despite his attempts to institute a broad program of internal improvements.
After Jackson won the 1828 election, Adams retired to Quincy, but returned to new renown as a U.S. representative (1831-48). His eloquence, persistence, and moral forcefulness brought an end (1844) to the House gag rule on debate about slavery, and he attacked all other measures that would extend that institution, as well as Jackson's forced removal of southeastern tribes (1837) and the 1846 invasion of Mexico.
Cold and introspective, Adams was not generally popular, but he was respected for his high-mindedness and knowledge. His interest in science led him to promote the Smithsonian Institution. His diary (selections ed. by C. F. Adams, 12 vol., 1874-77, repr. 1970; abridged by A. Nevins, 1928 and 1951) is a valuable document. Most of his writings were edited by W. C. Ford (7 vol., 1913-17); some appear in The Selected Writings of John and John Quincy Adams (ed. by A. Koch and W. Peden, 1946).
Bibliography
See the definitive biography by S. F. Bemis (2 vol., 1949 and 1956), other biographies by J. T. Morse (1883, repr. 1972), B. C. Clark (1932), P. C. Nagel (1997), and R. V. Remini (2002); J. T. Adams, The Adams Family (1930); M. B. Hecht, John Quincy Adams: A Personal History of Independence (1972); R. Brookhiser, America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918 (2002).
Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature:
Works by John Quincy Adams |
| 1791 | An Answer to Paine's Rights of Man. Adams begins a series of articles, published in the Columbian Sentinel under the signature "Publicola," that defends the rights of the minority against Thomas Paine's insistence on the absolute power of the majority. Adams defines the Federalist argument for a strong judiciary to protect minority rights. |
| 1874 | The Memoirs of John Quincy Adams. The first of Adams's massive twelve-volume diary is published (completed in 1877). Recording his thoughts and activities for more than sixty years, the memoirs provide a unique perspective on people and events that shaped American history. |
Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: History:
Adams, John Quincy |
A political leader of the early nineteenth century. John Quincy Adams was the son of John Adams and was president of the United States from 1825 to 1829, between James Monroe and Andrew Jackson. The defeat of the scholarly Adams by the uneducated Jackson in the presidential election of 1828 is considered a turning point in the journey toward democracy in American politics.
West's Encyclopedia of American Law:
Adams, John Quincy |
John Quincy Adams was more than just the United States' sixth president. He was a child of the American Revolution, having witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill. He was the son of the nation's second president, John Adams. And he was a successful diplomat. Chosen president by the House after finishing second in the electoral college, Adams became the first president to wear long trousers, rather than breeches, at his inauguration, on March 4, 1825. After one term as president, he went on to serve with distinction for seventeen years in the House of Representatives.
Adams was born on July 11, 1767, in Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts. As the son of one of the nation's founders, he had many opportunities not available to other young men. Before reaching the age when young people today graduate from high school, Adams had established himself as a diplomat. He accompanied his father on diplomatic missions to Europe in 1778 and 1780, where he studied in Paris, France, and in Amsterdam and Leiden, the Netherlands. In 1781, at the age of fourteen, Adams traveled with Francis Dana, the first American minister to Russia, as Dana's private secretary and French interpreter. In 1783, the young Adams joined his father in Paris, where he served as one of the secretaries to the American commissioners in the negotiations of the peace treaty that concluded the American Revolution. Fearing alienation from his own country, Adams returned home in 1785 and, by virtue of his earlier studies, was able to enroll as a junior at Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1787.
For three years, Adams read law at Newburyport, Massachusetts, under Theophilus Parsons, and in 1790, he was admitted to the bar. While struggling to find clients, Adams engaged in political journalism. He wrote a series of eleven articles controverting some of the doctrines presented in Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791-1792). In a second series of articles, he defended President George Washington's policy of neutrality in the war between France and England in 1793. His third series of articles attacked those who wanted the United States to join France in a war against Britain. These articles impressed Washington so much that he appointed Adams U.S. minister to the Netherlands in May 1794.
President Washington thought Adams one of the ablest officers in the foreign service. In 1796, he appointed Adams minister to Portugal. However, before Adams's departure for that new post, his father became president. Both Adamses felt that it was undesirable for the son of a president to hold a post in the father's administration, but Washington urged that the younger Adams remain in the diplomatic corps, calling him the most valuable public person abroad. President Adams then appointed his son minister to Prussia.
Before taking up his new post in Prussia, Adams was married, in London, to Louisa Catherine Johnson (1775-1852), daughter of the U.S. counsel in London.
In September 1801, with a new president, Thomas Jefferson, in the White House, Adams was called back from Prussia. In 1802, he was elected to the Massachusetts Senate. One year later, the state senate elected him to the U.S. Senate. (Prior to the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, U.S. senators were elected by the senates of the individual states.)
Adams had always considered himself a political independent, and he was given a chance to prove this in the U.S. Senate. After his election, he was set upon by forces opposed to the Federalist party, of which Adams was considered a member, and political enemies of his father. Instead of accepting his fate as a powerless and unpopular member of an unpopular political minority, Adams asserted his political independence. He began to vote with President Jefferson and the opposition Democratic-Republicans, and broke with his party completely in 1807 by supporting the Embargo Act (46 App. U.S.C.A. § 328). This act, backed by Jefferson, placed an embargo on all foreign commerce. The act was opposed by the Federalists and the New England states, who wanted to encourage trade with the British. They feared that the Embargo Act would stifle New England's economy. Adams voted for the Embargo Act, against the wishes of his party and region, believing that it benefited the nation as a whole.
Adams paid the price for breaking with his party. Federalist leaders in Massachusetts who felt that Adams had betrayed them elected another man to the Senate several months before the 1808 elections. Adams resigned, and later that year, in a move indicative of his political independence, attended a Democratic-Republican congressional caucus meeting, where James Madison was nominated for president, thus allying himself with that party.
Adams attempted to retire from public life and devote himself to a teaching position at Harvard College, but the lure of public service was too strong. In 1809, President Madison persuaded him to accept an appointment as minister to Russia. In 1814 and 1815, Adams played a key role in the negotiations resulting in the Treaty of Ghent, with the British, ending the War of 1812. The negotiations helped Adams gain respect as a diplomat.
In 1817, President James Monroe called Adams back to the United States to serve as his secretary of state. Adams's most important achievement in this office was the development of the Monroe Doctrine. It was Adams who made the first declaration of that policy in July 1823, several months before Monroe formally announced it in his annual message to Congress, on December 2, 1823. At that time, the United States feared that Russia intended to establish colonies in Alaska and, more important, that the continental European states would intervene in Central and South America to help Spain recover its former colonies, which had won their independence in a series of wars in the early nineteenth century. Adams believed that the Americas were no longer subject to any European colonial establishment, and that they should make their own foreign policies. The Monroe Doctrine set forth three basic policy statements aimed at protecting the Western Hemisphere from European intervention: North and South America were closed to further European colonization; the United States would not intervene in wars in Europe and would not interfere with European colonies and dependencies in the Americas; and the United States would regard any intervention by a European power in the independent states of the Western Hemisphere as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.
Adams served as secretary of state for the entire eight years under President Monroe. When the presidential election of 1824 came around, Adams was considered a favorite; after all, the previous two presidents, Madison and Monroe, had also served as secretaries of state. But 1824 was no normal year for politics in the United States. All four candidates were members of the same political party, the Democratic-Republican party, and party affiliation had given way to sectionalism. Secretary of the Treasury William Harris Crawford, of Georgia, who had recently suffered a paralytic stroke, was nominated by a congressional caucus. The Tennessee legislature nominated Andrew Jackson, and the Kentucky legislature nominated Henry Clay. Adams was nominated by an eastern faction of the party in Boston. On Tuesday, November 9, 1824, voters went to the polls and cast 153,544 votes for Jackson, 108,740 for Adams, 46,618 for Clay, and 47,136 for Crawford. (These figures are from Kane, Facts about the Presidents 41 [6th ed. 1993]. Figures in other sources differ.) The electoral vote results were as follows: Jackson, 99; Adams, 84; Crawford, 41; and Clay, 37. As no candidate received a majority of the electoral votes, the House of Representatives was called upon to choose the president, as set forth under Article II, Section 1, Clause 3, of the Constitution. After Clay gave his support to Adams, the House elected Adams the sixth president in February 1825.
For one who had led so accomplished a life, Adams must have viewed his presidency as a failure. He got off to a rocky start when Jackson's supporters in Congress decried what they called a corrupt bargain between Adams and Clay. Only days after the House selected Adams president, Clay was offered the office of secretary of state, which he accepted. This deal split the Democratic-Republican party, and Adams's group became known as the National Republicans. Jackson's group fought with Adams for the next four years.
Adams threw all his energies into the presidency. In his inaugural address, he called for an ambitious program of national improvements including the construction of highways, canals, weather stations, and a national university. He urged Congress to use the powers of government for the benefit of all people. Congress disagreed. Many of the programs advocated by Adams were not realized until after his death.
Despite his best efforts, Adams felt worn down by the burdens and demands of the presidency. His personal reserve, austerity, and coolness of manner prevented him from appealing to the imagination and affections of the people. He had not even tried to defend himself against the attacks of Jackson and his followers, feeling that it was below the dignity of the president to engage in political debate. Throughout Adams's presidency, Jackson gained in popularity, so much so that in the elections of 1828, he defeated Adams by 178 electoral votes to 83. Jackson won a popular vote proportionally larger than that of any other presidential candidate during the rest of the 1800s.
Once again, Adams sought to retire from public life, but the people of Massachusetts called him back. In 1830, he defeated two other candidates and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing a district from Plymouth. When it was suggested to him that his acceptance of this position would degrade a former president, Adams replied that no person could be degraded by serving the people as a representative in Congress, or, he added, as a selectman. Indeed, Adams said that his election as president was not half so gratifying as his election to the House.
Adams shone brightly from 1831 to his death in 1848. He remained independent of party politics, and held important posts in Congress, serving at times as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and of the Committee on Manufactures. Adams was conspicuous as an opponent of the expansion of slavery and was at heart an abolitionist, though he never became one in the political sense of the word. He took center stage during debates over the gag rules, which resulted when abolitionists sent many petitions to Congress urging that slavery be abolished in the District of Columbia and the new territories. Southern members of Congress who did not want to discuss slave issues passed a series of rules, known as the gag rules, that kept the abolitionists' petitions from being read on the House floor, effectively blocking any discussion of slavery. Adams fought the gag rules as violations of the right of free speech and the right of citizens to petition their government as guaranteed in the First Amendment. As the leading opponent of the gag rules, Adams became the person abolitionists sent their petitions to. He, in turn, tried to have the House consider those petitions, only to run up against the gag rules. For several years, Adams tried unsuccessfully to have the rules repealed, but he was able to win supporters to his side each time he tried, and in 1844, he finally succeeded in having the rules abolished.
Another contribution of Adams to the antislavery cause was his championing of Africans on the slave ship Amistad. The slaves had mutinied off the coast of Cuba, capturing their masters. The slaves, unfamiliar with navigation, asked their captives to help them sail to a country where slave trade was illegal. The former masters took advantage of the slaves' navigational inexperience and directed the ship into U.S. waters near Long Island, hoping to find sympathetic U.S. authorities. Adams was one of two attorneys who argued the case of the Africans before the U.S. Supreme Court, defending the blacks as free people. President Martin Van Buren had taken the position that the slaves must be returned to their masters and to their inevitable death. Adams helped win their freedom (United States v. Amistad, 40 U.S. [15 Pet.] 518, 10 L. Ed. 826 [1841]).
Adams's support of the arts and sciences was evident in his battle to uphold the dying wishes of an eccentric Englishman named James Smithson. Smithson was the illegitimate son of the first duke of Northumberland. At his death in 1829, he bequeathed his entire estate to his nephew. His will further provided that if the nephew were to die without heirs, which he did in 1835, the entire estate was to be given to the U.S. government to found what Smithson asked be called the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge. Adams led a ten-year fight for acceptance of the endowment, which was valued at $508,000 in 1835, and the Smithsonian Institution was established on August 10, 1846.
On November 19, 1846, Adams suffered a stroke, from which he never fully recovered. However, he continued to serve in Congress until, on February 21, 1848, he suffered a second stroke and collapsed in the House of Representatives. He was carried from his seat to the Speaker's room, where he lay until his death two days later, on February 23.
Quotes By:
John Quincy Adams |
Quotes:
"Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish."
"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost."
"Where annual elections end where slavery begins."
"Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air."
"La molesse est douce, et sa suite est cruelle."
"Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her [Americas] 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. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit."
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John Quincy Adams
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
John Quincy Adams |
| John Quincy Adams | |
|---|---|
| Photographic copy of a daguerreotype taken in 1843 | |
| 6th President of the United States | |
| In office March 4, 1825 – March 4, 1829 |
|
| Vice President | John Calhoun |
| Preceded by | James Monroe |
| Succeeded by | Andrew Jackson |
| Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts's 8th district |
|
| In office March 4, 1843 – February 23, 1848 |
|
| Preceded by | William Calhoun |
| Succeeded by | Horace Mann |
| Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts's 12th district |
|
| In office March 4, 1833 – March 4, 1843 |
|
| Preceded by | James Hodges |
| Succeeded by | George Robinson |
| Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts's 11th district |
|
| In office March 4, 1831 – March 4, 1833 |
|
| Preceded by | Joseph Richardson |
| Succeeded by | John Reed |
| 8th United States Secretary of State | |
| In office September 22, 1817 – March 4, 1825 |
|
| President | James Monroe |
| Preceded by | James Monroe |
| Succeeded by | Henry Clay |
| United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom | |
| In office April 28, 1814 – September 22, 1817 |
|
| Nominated by | James Madison |
| Preceded by | Jonathan Russell (Acting) |
| Succeeded by | Richard Rush |
| United States Ambassador to Russia | |
| In office November 5, 1809 – April 28, 1814 |
|
| Nominated by | James Madison |
| Preceded by | William Short |
| Succeeded by | James Bayard |
| United States Senator from Massachusetts |
|
| In office March 4, 1803 – June 8, 1808 |
|
| Preceded by | Jonathan Mason |
| Succeeded by | James Lloyd |
| United States Ambassador to Prussia | |
| In office December 5, 1797 – May 5, 1801 |
|
| Nominated by | John Adams |
| Preceded by | Position established |
| Succeeded by | Henry Wheaton |
| United States Ambassador to the Netherlands | |
| In office November 6, 1794 – June 20, 1797 |
|
| Nominated by | George Washington |
| Preceded by | William Short |
| Succeeded by | William Vans Murray |
| Personal details | |
| Born | July 11, 1767 Braintree, Massachusetts Bay (now Quincy) |
| Died | February 23, 1848 (aged 80) Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Political party | Whig (1838–1848) |
| Other political affiliations |
Federalist (Before 1808) Democratic-Republican (1808–1830) National Republican (1830–1834) Anti-Masonic (1834–1838) |
| Spouse(s) | Louisa Johnson |
| Children | Louisa George John Charles |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Profession | Lawyer |
| Religion | Unitarianism[1][2] |
| Signature | |
John Quincy Adams
i/ˈkwɪnzi/ (July 11, 1767 – February 23, 1848) was the sixth President of the United States (1825–1829). He served as an American diplomat, Senator, and Congressional representative. He was a member of the Federalist, Democratic-Republican, National Republican, and later Anti-Masonic and Whig parties. Adams was the son of former President John Adams and Abigail Adams. As a diplomat, Adams played an important role in negotiating many international treaties, most notably the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812. As Secretary of State, he negotiated with the United Kingdom over America's northern border with Canada, negotiated with Spain the annexation of Florida, and authored the Monroe Doctrine. Historians agree he was one of the greatest diplomats and secretaries of state in American history.[3][4]
As president, he sought to modernize the American economy and promoted education. Adams enacted a part of his agenda and paid off much of the national debt.[5] He was stymied by a Congress controlled by his enemies, and his lack of patronage networks helped politicians eager to undercut him. He lost his 1828 bid for re-election to Andrew Jackson. In doing so, he became the first President since his father to serve a single term.
Adams is best known as a diplomat who shaped America's foreign policy in line with his ardently nationalist commitment to America's republican values. More recently Howe (2007) portrayed Adams as the exemplar and moral leader in an era of modernization. During Adams' lifetime, technological innovations and new means of communication spread messages of religious revival, social reform, and party politics. Goods, money and people traveled more rapidly and efficiently than ever before.[6]
Adams was elected a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts after leaving office, the only president ever to be so, serving for the last 17 years of his life with far greater success than he had achieved in the presidency. Animated by his growing revulsion against slavery,[7] Adams became a leading opponent of the Slave Power. He predicted that if a civil war were to break out, the president could abolish slavery by using his war powers. Adams also predicted the Union's dissolution over the slavery issue, but said that if the South became independent there would be a series of bloody slave revolts.[8]
John Quincy Adams was born on July 11, 1767 to John Adams and his wife Abigail Adams in Braintree, Massachusetts, what is now Quincy, Massachusetts.[9] John Quincy Adams Birthplace is now part of Adams National Historical Park and open to the public. He was named for his mother's maternal grandfather, Colonel John Quincy, after whom Quincy, Massachusetts, is named.[10][pn 1] Adams first learned of the Declaration of Independence from the letters his father wrote his mother from the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. In 1779, Adams began a diary that he kept until just before he died in 1848.[11] The massive fifty volumes are one of the most extensive collections of first-hand information from the period of the early republic, and are widely cited by modern historians.[12]
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.[13] 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 Saint 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.[14] During these years overseas, Adams became fluent in French and Dutch and became familiar with German and other European languages. He entered Harvard College and graduated in 1787 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, Phi Beta Kappa.[15] Adams House at Harvard College is named in honor of Adams and his father. He later earned an A.M. from Harvard in 1790.[16] He apprenticed as a lawyer with Theophilus Parsons in Newburyport, Massachusetts, from 1787 to 1789. He gained admittance to the bar in 1791 and began practicing law in Boston.[17]
Adams' personality was much like that of his father, as were his political beliefs.[18] Throughout his life, he always preferred reading in seclusion to social engagements, and several times had to be pressured by others to remain in public service. Historian Paul Nagel argues that, like Abraham Lincoln after him, Adams suffered from depression for much of his life. Early in his life he sought some form of treatment. Adams thought his depression was due to the high expectations demanded of him by his father and mother. Throughout his life he felt inadequate and socially awkward because of his depression, and was constantly bothered by his physical appearance.[18] He was closer to his father, whom he spent much of his early life with abroad, than he was to his mother. When he was younger and the American Revolution was going on, his mother told her children what their father was doing, and what he was risking, and because of this Adams grew to greatly respect his father.[19] His relationship with his mother was rocky; she had high expectations of him and was afraid her children might end up a dead alcoholic like her brother.[20] John's brother Charles would eventually follow this fate. He fell in love shortly after he finished school, but his mother did not approve and the relationship ended. When he fell in love with his future wife, Louisa Johnson, his mother likewise disapproved. Nagel argues that this disapproval motivated him to marry Johnson, despite reservations that she, like his mother, was too strong.[20]
Adams first won national recognition when he published a series of widely read articles supporting Washington's decision to keep America out of the growing hostilities surrounding the French Revolution. Soon after, George Washington appointed Adams minister to the Netherlands (at the age of 26) in 1794. He did not want the position, preferring to maintain his quiet life of reading in Massachusetts, and probably would have rejected it if his father had not persuaded him to take it. On his way to the Netherlands, he was to deliver a set of documents to Chief Justice John Jay, who was negotiating the Jay Treaty. After spending some time with Jay discussing the treaty, Adams wrote home to his father, in support of the emerging treaty because he thought America should stay out of European affairs. Historian Paul Nagel has noted that this letter reached Washington, and that parts of it were used by Washington when drafting his farewell address.[21] While going back and forth between The Hague and London, he met and proposed to his future wife. Though he wanted to return to private life at the end of his appointment, Washington appointed him minister to Portugal in 1796, where he was soon promoted to the Berlin Legation. Though his talents were far greater than his desire to serve, he was finally convinced to remain in public service when he learned how highly Washington felt of his abilities.[22] Washington called Adams "the most valuable of America's officials abroad," and Nagel believes that it was at this time that Adams first came to terms with a lifetime of public service.[22]
He became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1797.[23] 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 First Lady born outside of the United States.
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 afterwards entered politics. John Quincy Adams was elected a member of the Massachusetts State Senate in April 1802. In November 1802 he ran as a Federalist for the United States House of Representatives and lost.[24]
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.[25] While a member of the Senate, Adams also served as a professor of rhetoric at Harvard University.[26]
New President James Madison appointed Adams as the first ever United States Minister to Russia in 1809 (though Francis Dana and William Short had previously been nominated to the post, neither presented his credentials at Saint Petersburg). Louisa Adams was with him in Saint 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.[27] In 1812, Adams reported to Washington the news of Napoleon's invasion of Russia and Napoleon's 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, a post that had first been held by his father.[25]
Adams served as Secretary of State in the Cabinet of President James Monroe from 1817 until 1825. Typically, his views concurred with those espoused by Monroe. As Secretary of State, he negotiated the Adams–Onís Treaty (also known as the Florida Treaty), the Treaty of 1818, and wrote the Monroe Doctrine. Many historians believe that he was one of the greatest secretaries of state in American history.[3][4]
The Floridas, still a Spanish territory but with no Spanish presence to speak of, became a refuge for runaway slaves and Indian raiders. Monroe sent in General Andrew Jackson who pushed the Seminole Indians south, executed two British merchants who were supplying weapons, deposed one governor and named another, and left an American garrison in occupation.[28] President Monroe and all his cabinet, except Adams, believed Jackson had exceeded his instructions. Adams argued that since Spain had proved incapable of policing her territories, the United States was obliged to act in self-defense. Adams so ably justified Jackson's conduct that he silenced protests from either Spain or Britain; Congress refused to punish Jackson. Adams used the events that had unfolded in Florida to negotiate the Florida Treaty with Spain in 1819 that turned Florida over to the U.S. and resolved border issues regarding the Louisiana Purchase.[28]
With the ongoing Oregon boundary dispute, Adams sought to negotiate a settlement with England to decide the border between the western United States and Canada. This would become the Treaty of 1818.[citation needed] Along with the Rush–Bagot Treaty of 1817, this marked the beginning of improved relations between the British Empire and its former colonies, and paved the way for better relations between the U.S. and Canada. The treaty had several provisions, but in particular it set the boundary between British North America and the United States along the 49th parallel through the Rocky Mountains.[citation needed] This settled a boundary dispute caused by ignorance of actual geography in the boundary agreed to in the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War. That earlier treaty had used the Mississippi River to determine the border, but assumed that the river extended further north than it did, and so that earlier settlement was unworkable.
By the time Monroe became president, several European powers, in particular Spain, were attempting to re-establish control over South America.[29] On Independence Day 1821, in response to those who advocated American support for independence movements in many South American countries,[30] Adams gave a speech in which he said that American policy was moral support for independence movements but not armed intervention. He stated that America "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy."[31] From this, Adams authored what came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, which was introduced on December 2, 1823. It stated that further efforts by European countries to colonize land or interfere with states in the Americas would be viewed as acts of aggression requiring U.S. intervention.[32] The United States, reflecting concerns raised by Great Britain, ultimately hoped to avoid having any European power take over Spain's colonies.[29] It became a defining moment in the foreign policy of the United States and one of its longest-standing tenets, and would be invoked by many U.S. statesmen and several U.S. presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and others.
As the 1824 election drew near people began looking for candidates. New England voters admired Adams' patriotism and political skills and it was mainly due to their support that he entered the race. The old caucus system of the Democratic-Republican Party had collapsed; indeed the entire First Party System had collapsed and the election was a fight based on regional support. Adams had a strong base in New England. His opponents included John C. Calhoun, William H. Crawford, Henry Clay, and the hero of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson. During the campaign Calhoun dropped out, and Crawford fell ill giving further support to the other candidates. When Election Day arrived, Andrew Jackson won, although narrowly, pluralities of the popular and electoral votes, but not the necessary majority of electoral votes.[33]
Under the terms of the Twelfth Amendment, the presidential election fell to the House of Representatives, which was to choose from the top three candidates: Jackson, Adams, and Crawford. Clay had come in fourth place and thus was not on the ballot, but he retained considerable power and influence as Speaker of the House.
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 won the most 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.[33]
Adams served as the sixth President of the United States from March 4, 1825, to March 4, 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.[35][36] The Adams administration's record was mixed, as it recorded some domestic policy achievements, as well as some minor foreign policy achievements. He supported internal improvements (roads, ports and canals), a national university, and federal support for the arts and sciences. He favored a high tariff to encourage the building of factories, and restricted land sales to slow the movement west. Opposition from the states' rights faction of a hostile congress killed many of his proposals.[37] He also reduced the national debt from $16 million to $5 million, the remainder of which was paid off by his successor.[5] Historian Paul Hagel argues that his political acumen was not any less developed than others were in his day, and notes that Henry Clay, one of the era's most astute politicians, was a principal advisor and supporter throughout his presidency. Nagel argues that Adams' political problems were the result of an unusually hostile Jacksonian faction, and Adams' own dislike of the office.[38] A product of the political environment of his day, he refused to play politics and was not as aggressive in courting political support as he could have been. He was attacked by the followers of Jackson, who accused him of being a partner to a "corrupt bargain" to obtain Clay's support in the election and then appoint him Secretary of State.[39] Jackson defeated Adams in 1828, and created the modern Democratic party thus inaugurating the Second Party System.[40]
During his term, Adams worked on transforming America into a world power through "internal improvements," as a part of the "American System". It consisted 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 mixed, mainly due to opposition from Jackson's followers. His critics, still angry over the 1824 election, accused him of unseemly arrogance despite his narrow victory, and opposed many of his initiatives.[41]
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 Chesapeake and Delaware Canal and the Louisville and Portland 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.[42] One of the issues which divided the administration was protective tariffs, of which Henry Clay was a leading advocate. After Adams lost control of Congress in 1827, the situation became more complicated. By signing into law the Tariff of 1828 (labeled by critics as the "Tariff of Abominations"), quite unpopular in parts of the south, he further antagonized the Jacksonians.[43]
Adams' generous policy toward Native Americans caused him trouble. 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. 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).[44]
Adams is regarded as one of the greatest diplomats in American history, and during his tenure as Secretary of State, he was the chief designer of the Monroe Doctrine.[45] He had witnessed the Barbary Wars against the Islamic pirates of North Africa, and the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Turks. Adams accepted that the Greek fight for independence from the Turks was only the beginning of a long conflict between Islam and the West. Although he sympathised with the Greeks, and held a deep mistrust of the defeated Muslims,[46] he was reluctant to support America's involvement in continuing wars far from home.[47]
On July 4, 1821, he gave an address to Congress:
... But she [the United States of America] 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.[31]
During his term as president, however, Adams achieved little of long-term consequence in foreign affairs. A reason for this was the opposition he faced in Congress, where his rivals prevented him from succeeding.[45] Among his diplomatic achievements 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.[48]
| The Adams Cabinet | ||
|---|---|---|
| Office | Name | Term |
| President | John Quincy Adams | 1825–1829 |
| Vice President | John C. Calhoun | 1825–1829 |
| Secretary of State | Henry Clay | 1825–1829 |
| Secretary of Treasury | Richard Rush | 1825–1829 |
| Secretary of War | James Barbour | 1825–1828 |
| Peter B. Porter | 1828–1829 | |
| Attorney General | William Wirt | 1825–1829 |
| Secretary of the Navy | Samuel L. Southard | 1825–1829 |
None
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.[49] 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.
Although both Adams, and his father, served one full term in office, John Quincy Adams departed the presidency having served one day longer than his father. John Adams served during the year 1800, which did not have a leap year.
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. He won all the same states that his father had won in the election of 1800: the New England states, New Jersey, and Delaware, as well as parts of New York and a majority of Maryland. Jackson won the rest of the states, picking up 178 electoral votes to Adams' 83 votes, and succeeded him. Adams and his father were the only U.S. Presidents to serve a single term during the first 48 years of the Presidency (1789–1837). Historian Thomas Bailey observed, "Seldom has the public mind been so successfully poisoned against an honest and high-minded man."[50]
Adams did not retire after leaving office. Instead he ran for and won a seat in the United States House of Representatives in the 1830 elections. 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. In Congress, he was chair of the Committee on Commerce and Manufactures, the Committee on Indian Affairs and the Committee on Foreign Affairs.[51] In authoring a change to the Tariff of 1828, he was instrumental to the compromise that ended the Nullification Crisis. When James Smithson died and left his estate to the U.S. government to build an institution of learning, congress wanted to appropriate the money for other purpose. Adams was key to ensuring that the money was instead used to build the Smithsonian Institution.[52] He also led the fight against the gag rule, which prevented congress from hearing anti-slavery petitions. Throughout much of his congressional career, he fought it, evaded it, and tried to repeal it. In 1844 he assembled a coalition that approved his resolution to repeal the rule.[53] He was considered by many to be the leader of the anti-slavery faction in congress, as he was one of America's most prominent opponents of slavery.[53]
Adams quickly became an important antislavery voice in the Congress. In 1836 Southern Congressmen voted in a rule, called the “gag rule,” that called for the immediate tabling of any petitions about slavery. He became a forceful opponent of this, and almost got himself censured over his opposition to it. He turned the debate on his proposed censure to a two week-long attack on slavery.[54] Later he led a committee that sought to reform congress's rules, and he used this opportunity to try to repeal the gag rule outright. He spent two months building support for this move, though due to northern opposition the rule narrowly survived.[55] He fiercely criticized northern congressmen and senators, in particular Stephen Douglas, who seemed to cater to the slave faction in exchange for southern support.[55] His opposition to slavery made him, along with Henry Clay, one of the leading opponents of Texas annexation and the Mexican–American War. He predicted, correctly, that these would both help lead to civil war.[55] After one of his reelection victories, he said that he must "bring about a day prophesied when slavery and war shall be banished from the face of the earth."[55] He prided himself on being "obnoxious to the slave faction."[55]
Adams sat for the earliest confirmed photograph still in existence of a U.S. president in 1843, although other sources contend that William Henry Harrison had posed even earlier for his portrait, in 1841.[56] The original daguerreotype is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution.[57] 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, though Martin Van Buren knew Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and his mentor Aaron Burr and met the young Lincoln while on a campaign trip through Illinois.
Besides his opposition to slavery and the gag rule (discussed below), his congressional career is remembered for several other key accomplishments. Shortly after entering Congress, the Nullification Crisis threatened civil war over the Tariff of 1828. Adams authored an alteration to the tariff, which weakened it and diffused the crisis. Congress also passed the Force Bill which authorized President Andrew Jackson to use military force if Adams' compromise bill did not force the belligerent states to capitulate. There was no need, however, because Adams' compromise defused the issue. The compromise actually did not alter the tariff as much as the southern states had hoped, though they agreed not to continue pursuing the issue for fear of civil war.[58]
Adams also became a leading force for the advancement of science. As president, he had proposed a national observatory, which did not win much support. In 1829 British scientist James Smithson died, and left his fortune for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge". In Smithson's will, he stated that should his nephew, Henry James Hungerford, die without heirs, the Smithson estate would go to the government of the United States to create an "Establishment for the increase & diffusion of Knowledge among men". After the nephew died without heirs in 1835, President Andrew Jackson informed Congress of the bequest, which amounted to about US$500,000 ($10,100,997 in 2008 U.S. dollars after inflation). Adams realized that this might allow the United States to realize his dream of building a national institution of science and learning. Adams thus became Congress' primary supporter of what would become the Smithsonian Institution. He also relentlessly pursued support for astronomical efforts and observatories, seeking a national observatory for the United States.[59][60] His efforts eventually lead to what is now the United States' oldest, still-operational scientific institution, the United States Naval Observatory. In 1825 Adams signed a bill for the creation of a national observatory just before leaving presidential office – which became the Naval Observatory. Adams in fact spent many nights at the Observatory, with celebrated national astronomer and oceanographer, Matthew Fontaine Maury, watching and charting the stars, which had always been one of Adams' avocations.
As for efforts to found the Smithsonian Institution, the money was invested in shaky state bonds, which quickly defaulted. After heated debate in Congress, Adams successfully argued to restore the lost funds with interest.[61] Though Congress wanted to use the money for other purposes, Adams successfully persuaded Congress to preserve the money for an institution of science and learning.[62] Congress also debated whether the federal government had the authority to accept the gift, though with Adams leading the initiative, Congress decided to accept the legacy bequeathed to the nation and pledged the faith of the United States to the charitable trust on July 1, 1836.[63]
A longtime opponent of slavery, Adams used his new role in Congress to fight it. He refused to honor the House’s gag rule banning discussion or debate of the slavery issue. Since the gag rule prevented him from bringing slavery petitions to the floor, he used a petition from a Georgia citizen over another matter to bring a separate petition to the floor. This petition urged disunion due to the continuation of slavery in the south. Though he certainly did not support it (which he made clear at the time), he was purposely trying to antagonize the pro-slavery faction of Congress into an open fight on the matter.[54] This infuriated his congressional enemies, many of whom were agitating for disunion. They moved that he be censured over the matter. He drew the debate over his censure to a two week-long attack on slavery. He changed the focus from his own actions to those of the slaveholders, knowing he would probably be acquitted. He decided that if he were censured, he would resign and run again - and probably win easily.[54] When his opponents realized what they had gotten themselves into, they tried to bury the censure and move on, but Adams made sure this did not happen and the censure continued to be debated. He attacked slavery and slaveholders as immoral, and condemned the institution while calling for it to end.[54]
Adams took advantage of his right to defend himself in front of the members to deliver days of prepared and impromptu remarks against slavery and in favor of abolition.[54] He spoke against the slave trade and the ownership of slaves. As others continued to attack him and call for his censure, Adams continued to debate the issues of slavery and the evils of slaveholding.[64] Adams also called into question the actions of a House that would limit its own ability to debate and resolve questions internally. After the two week-long debate, a vote was held and he was not censured. The whole time he delighted in the misery he was inflicting on the slaveholders he so hated.[65] Although any move to censure Adams over the slavery petition was ultimately abandoned, the House did address the issue of petitions from enslaved persons. Adams rose again to argue that the right to petition was a universal right granted by God so that those in the weakest positions might always have recourse to those in the most powerful. The gag rule was ultimately retained.[66] The discussion ignited by his actions and the attempts of others to quiet him raised questions of the right to petition, the right to legislative debate, and the morality of slavery.[67] During the censure debate, Adams said that he took delight in the fact that southerners would forever remember him as "the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of southern slavery that every existed".[62]
Before 1820, Adams was best known as an exponent of American nationalism. Later in life, especially after his election to the House, he was famous as the most prominent national leader opposing slavery. He was not an abolitionist, say biographers Nagle and Parsons.[69][70] Remini notes that Adams thought the end of slavery would come by either civil war or the consent of the slave South, but definitely not through the work of abolitionists.[71]
The turning point came with the debate on the Missouri Compromise in 1820 when he broke with his friend John C. Calhoun, who became the most outspoken national leader in favor of slavery. They became bitter enemies. Adams vilified slavery as a terrible evil and preached total abolition, while Calhoun countered that the right to own slaves had to be protected from interference from the federal government to keep the nation alive. Adams said slavery contradicted the principles of republicanism, while Calhoun said that slavery was essential to American democracy, for it made all white men equal. Both men pulled away from nationalism, and started to consider dissolution of the Union as a way of resolving the slavery predicament. Adams predicted that if the South formed a new nation, it would be torn apart by an extremely violent slave insurrection. If the two nations went to war, Adams predicted the president of the United States would use his war powers to abolish slavery. The two men became ideological leaders of the North and the South.[72] In the House Adams became a champion of free speech, demanding that petitions against slavery be heard despite a "gag rule" that said they could not be heard.[73]
In 1841, Adams 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 (a Spanish colony where slavery was legal) but should be considered free. Under President Martin Van Buren, the government 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.[74] The speech was directed not only at the justices of this Supreme Court hearing the case, but also to the broad national audience he instructed in the evils of slavery.[75]
Adams repeatedly spoke out against the "Slave Power", that is the organized political power of the slave owners who dominated all the southern states and their representation in Congress.[76] He vehemently attacked the annexation of Texas (1845) and the Mexican War (1846–48) as part of a "conspiracy" to extend slavery.[77]
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!'[78] He rose to answer a question put forth by the Speaker of the House.[79] Immediately thereafter, Adams collapsed, having suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage.[80] 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 "This is the last of earth. I am content." He passed away at 7:20 P.M.[79]
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 across from the First Parish Church, called Hancock Cemetery. After his wife's death, his son, Charles Francis Adams, had him reinterred with his wife in the expanded family crypt in the United First Parish Church across the street, next to his parents. Both tombs are viewable by the public. Adams' original tomb at Hancock Cemetery is still there and marked simply "J.Q. Adams".[81]
John Quincy Adams and Louisa Catherine (Johnson) 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.[82][83] (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.
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.
Disowned by the Federalists and not fully accepted by the Republicans, Adams used his Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard as a new base.[84] Adams' devotion to classical rhetoric shaped his response to public issues. He 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.[85] Adams was influenced by the classical republican ideal of civic eloquence espoused by British philosopher David Hume.[86] Adams adapted these 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 19th century as the "public spheres of heated oratory" disappeared in favor of the private sphere.[87]
Adams was the first president to have his photograph taken.[88] He is probably best known as a diplomat who shaped America's foreign policy in accordance with his ardently nationalist views, and is widely considered by historians to have been one of the greatest diplomats in American history.[3] He was key to the negotiation of several important treaties, such as the Treaty of Ghent which ended the War of 1812, and the Florida Treaty which resulted in the annexation of Florida. He also formulated the Monroe Doctrine, which is still evoked to the present day. He is viewed by many as the exemplar and moral leader in an era of modernization. During this era, new technologies and networks of infrastructure and communication brought to the people messages of religious revival, social reform, and party politics, as well as moving goods, money and people ever more rapidly and efficiently.[6]
Though he was always quite hostile to slavery, nearly to be point of being an abolitionist (although he doubted the abolitionists could successfully end slavery), he grew even more hostile to it later in life.[7] Adams became a leading opponent of slave power and articulated a theory whereby the president could abolish slavery by using his war powers, a correct prediction of Abraham Lincoln's use of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Adams predicted the likelihood of the Union's dissolution over the slavery issue, and was a key opponent of the Mexican–American War for this reason.[8] Though he later described his presidency as the unhappiest time of his life,[13] scholars rate John Quincy Adams in the second quartile in the majority of historical presidential rankings.
One of Adams' most important legacies is his massive diary,[12] which he began at age 11 with the simple entry "A journal, by me, J.Q.A." It covers, in extraordinary detail, his life and experiences up to his death in 1848.[11] The massive fifty volumes are one of the most extensive collections of first-hand information from the period of the early republic, and are cited by historians in a wide range of matters from that period.[12]
Historians have often included Adams among the leading conservatives of his day.[89][90][91][92][93] Russell Kirk, however, sees Adams as a flawed conservative who was imprudent in opposing slavery.[89]
Adams occasionally is featured in the mass media. In the PBS miniseries The Adams Chronicles (1976), he was portrayed by David Birney, William Daniels, Marcel Trenchard, Stephen Austin, Steven Grover and Mark Winkworth. He was also portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in the 1997 film Amistad, and again by Ebon Moss-Bachrach in the 2008 HBO television miniseries John Adams; the HBO series received criticism for needless historical and temporal distortions in its portrayal.[94]
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