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• Born: 11 July 1767
• Birthplace: Braintree, Massachusetts
• Died: 23 February 1848
• Best Known As: President of the United States, 1825-1829

John Quincy Adams was the son of President John Adams, served as U.S. Senator from Massachusetts and was Secretary of State under President Monroe. In the presidential election of 1824, no one candidate received a majority of electoral votes and the election was decided in Adams' favor by Congress. The election of 1828 was the first in which the candidates were chosen by state legislatures instead of congressional caucuses, making the popular vote more of a factor. Adams lost by a wide margin to the Democrat from Tennessee, Andrew Jackson. Although he served only one term as president, Adams was elected in 1830 to the House of Representatives, where he served for the remaining 17 years of his life.

Adams was the sixth president... His wife was Louisa Adams... Their eldest son, George Washington Adams, was named for President George Washington.

(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

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.

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).

For more information on John Quincy Adams, visit Britannica.com.

• 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

• James Truslow Adams, The Adams Family (Boston: Little, Brown, 1930).
• Mary Hargreaves, The Presidency of John Quincy Adams (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985).
• Leonard Richards, The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)

(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.

1767–1848, 6th President of the United States (1825–29), b. Quincy (then in Braintree), Mass.; son of John Adams and Abigail Adams and father of Charles Francis Adams (1807–86). He accompanied his father on missions to Europe, gaining broad knowledge from study and travel—he even accompanied (1781–83) Francis Dana to Russia—before returning home to graduate (1787) from Harvard and study law. Washington appointed (1794) him minister to the Netherlands, and in his father's administration he was minister to Prussia (1797–1801).

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).

(1767-1848)

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.

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.

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:

"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."

See more famous quotes by John Quincy Adams