John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams (born July 11, 1767, Braintree [now Quincy], Massachusetts [U.S.]—died February 23, 1848, Washington, D.C., U.S.) was the sixth president of the United States (1825–29) and eldest son of President John Adams. In his prepresidential years he was one of America’s greatest diplomats (formulating, among other things, what came to be called the Monroe Doctrine), and in his postpresidential years (as a U.S. congressman, 1831–48) he conducted a consistent and often dramatic fight against the expansion of slavery.

Early life and career

John Quincy Adams entered the world at the same time that his maternal great-grandfather, John Quincy, for many years a prominent member of the Massachusetts legislature, was leaving it—hence his name. He grew up as a child of the American Revolution. He watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from Penn’s Hill and heard the cannons roar across the Back Bay in Boston. His patriot father, John Adams, at that time a delegate to the Continental Congress, and his patriot mother, Abigail Smith Adams, had a strong molding influence on his education after the war had deprived Braintree of its only schoolmaster. In 1778 and again in 1780 the boy accompanied his father to Europe. He studied at a private school in Paris in 1778–79 and at the University of Leiden, Netherlands, in 1780. Thus, at an early age he acquired an excellent knowledge of the French language and a smattering of Dutch. In 1780, also, he began to keep regularly the diary that forms so conspicuous a record of his doings and those of his contemporaries through the next 60 years of American history. Self-appreciative, like most of the Adams clan, he once declared that, if his diary had been even richer, it might have become "next to the Holy Scriptures, the most precious and valuable book ever written by human hands."

In 1781, at age 14, Adams accompanied Francis Dana, United States envoy to Russia, as his private secretary and interpreter of French. Dana, after lingering for more than a year in St. Petersburg, was not received by the Russian government, so in 1782 Adams, returning by way of Scandinavia, Hanover, and the Netherlands, joined his father in Paris. There he acted, in an informal way, as an additional secretary to the American commissioners in the negotiation of the Peace of Paris that concluded the American Revolution. Instead of remaining in London with his father, who had been appointed United States minister to the Court of St. James’s, he chose to return to Massachusetts, where he attended Harvard College, graduating in 1787. He then read law at Newburyport under the tutelage of Theophilus Parsons, and in 1790 he was admitted to the bar association in Boston. While struggling to establish a practice, he wrote a series of articles for the newspapers in which he controverted some of the doctrines in Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791). In another later series he ably supported the neutrality policy of George Washington’s administration as it faced the war that broke out between France and England in 1793. These articles were brought to President Washington’s attention and resulted in Adams’s appointment as U.S. minister to the Netherlands in May 1794.

The Hague was then the best diplomatic listening post in Europe for the War of the First Coalition against Revolutionary France. Young Adams’s official dispatches to the secretary of state and his informal letters to his father, who was then the vice president, kept the government well informed of the diplomatic activities and wars of the distressed Continent and the danger of becoming involved in the European vortex. These letters were also read by President Washington: some of Adams’s phrases, in fact, appeared in Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796. During the absence of Thomas Pinckney, the regular United States minister to Great Britain, Adams transacted public business in London with the British Foreign Office relating to the exchange of ratifications of the Jay Treaty of 1794 between the United States and Great Britain. In 1796 Washington, who came to regard young Adams as the ablest officer in the foreign service, appointed him minister to Portugal, but before his departure his father became president and changed the young diplomat’s destination to Prussia.

John Quincy Adams was married in London in 1797, on the eve of his departure for Berlin, to Louisa Catherine Johnson (Louisa Adams), daughter of the United States consul Joshua Johnson, a Marylander by birth, and his wife, Katherine Nuth, an Englishwoman. Adams had first met her when he was 12 years old and his father was minister to France. Fragile in health, she suffered from migraine headaches and fainting spells. Yet she proved to be a gracious hostess who played the harp and was learned in Greek, French, and English literature. Accompanying her husband on his various missions in Europe, she came to be regarded as one of the most-traveled women of her time.

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Johnson was not, however, Adams’s first love. When he was 14 years old, he had had a “crush” on an actress he saw perform in France, and for years afterward, he confessed, she was in his dreams. At age 22 he fell deeply in love with one Mary Frazier but was dissuaded from marrying her by his mother, who insisted that he was not able to support a wife. Ultimately, Adams could see that, in marrying a rich heiress like Louisa Johnson, he might be able to enjoy the leisure to pursue a career as a writer, but her family suffered business reverses and declared bankruptcy only a few weeks after the wedding.

The union had many stormy moments. Adams was cold and often depressed, and he admitted that his political adversaries regarded him as a “gloomy misanthropist” and “unsocial savage.” His wife is said to have regretted her marriage into the Adams family. The loss of two sons in adulthood—and a daughter in infancy—may have heightened the strains between husband and wife. The eldest son, George Washington Adams, was a gambler, womanizer, and alcoholic whose death by drowning may have been suicide. The second son, John Adams II, succumbed to alcohol. He remains the only son of a president who was married in the White House. On that occasion, the president unbent and danced the Virginia reel. A third son, Charles Francis Adams, brought honor to the family name once again, being elected to the House of Representatives and serving as United States minister to England during the American Civil War.

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While in Berlin, Adams negotiated (1799) a treaty of amity and commerce with Prussia. Recalled from Berlin by President Adams after the election of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency in 1800, the younger Adams reached Boston in 1801 and the next year was elected to the Massachusetts Senate. In 1803 the Massachusetts legislature elected him a member of the Senate of the United States.

At a glance: the Adams presidency