John Quincy Adams was born in Braintree, Massachusetts on July 11, 1767. He was the first President who was the son of a President, George W. Bush being the other one. John Quincy, in many respects, paralleled the career as well as the temperament and viewpoints of one of the country’s founding fathers and his own father John Adams. He watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from the top of Penn’s Hill with his mother. He regularly saw soldiers passing through his hometown. The Revolutionary War was not some distant event but an immediate and frightening reality, especially since his father was one of the revolutionaries that signed the Declaration of Independence, not only putting himself in danger, but also his family.
His early years were spent living between Braintree and Boston. Some references state that John Quincy came from Quincy Massachusetts but Quincy didn’t became a city until 1888 when it split off from Braintree. The town was named after Colonel John Quincy, maternal grandfather of Abigail Adams and after whom John Quincy Adams was named. His doting father and affectionate mother taught him mathematics, languages, and the classics. His father was absent from his childhood more often than he was present, leaving much of the raising and educating of the children to Abigail.
His father groomed his son to become president of the new nation and from 1778 to 1779 eleven year old John Quincy traveled with his father to France where he served as a diplomatic envoy. John Quincy would spend a total of seven years traveling with his father to Paris, the Netherlands, and St. Petersburg, with shorter visits to England, Sweden, and Prussia. His first formal schooling was at the Passy Academy outside of Paris where studied of Benjamin Franklin’s grandsons. As secretary to his father in Europe, he became an accomplished linguist, his father called him “the greatest traveler of his age.”
In 1780 Charles and John Quincy accompanied their father to the Netherlands to negotiate a loan. Charles was unhappy in Europe and went home after a year and a half. John Quincy’s education was interrupted when the U.S. emissary to St. Petersburg, Francis Dana, asked that he accompany him as a translator and personal secretary. A year later, John Quincy traveled alone for five months from St. Petersburg to The Hague, to rejoin his father. When he returned to America in 1785, John Quincy enrolled in Harvard College and completed a Bachelor Degree in Arts in two years.
In 1787 he started to study law and fell deeply in love with a young woman he met in Newburyport, Massachusetts. The romance lasted for several months before his mother persuaded him to put off marriage until he could support a wife. John Quincy respected his mother’s opinion and the couple eventually parted ways, which he always regretted.
John Quincy earned his Master of Art degree from Harvard in 1790 and passed the Massachusetts bar exam. He was admitted to the bar 1791 and started practicing law in Boston. As a new, young lawyer, he had difficulty attracting paying clients, even with his father being the vice president of the United States. John Quincy wrote articles in support of the Washington administration and finally, in 1794, President George Washington, aware of his fluency in French and Dutch, appointed him minister to the Netherlands.
After his father was elected president in 1796 he made John Quincy minister to Prussia where he meet Louisa Catherine Johnson, the daughter of Joshua Johnson, an American merchant who had married an Englishwoman. John Quincy first meet her when she was only four. Louisa had grown into a pretty 22-year-old woman and John Quincy was a 30-year-old diplomat and the son of the President of the United States. John Quincy’s parents initially objected, they did not think it wise for a future President to have a foreign-born wife but this time against his parent’s opinion, they became married on July 26, 1797. The couple had four children, a daughter that didn’t reach her first birthday, George Washington Adams, who died at age 28 of apparent suicide, John Adams II died at age 31 from alcoholism. The surviving son, Charles Francis Adams, became a congressman from Massachusetts and ambassador to Britain during the Civil War.
After John Adams lost the presidency to Thomas Jefferson in 1800, Jefferson recalled John Quincy from Europe, he returned to Boston and reopened his law practice. The following year he was elected to the Massachusetts State Senate, and in 1803 the state legislature chose him to serve in the U.S. Senate. John Quincy was known as a member of the Federalist Party but once he was in Washington he voted against the Federalist Party line on several issues. The Federalist-controlled Massachusetts state legislature was infuriated by John Quincy’s pro-Jeffersonian conduct and expressed their displeasure by appointing his successor a year before his term was complete. John Quincy resigned his Senate seat in June 1808 and returned to Harvard, where he became a professor.
President James Madison called Adams back into diplomatic service in 1809 and appointed him ambassador to the Russian court of Czar Alexander I. While in St. Petersburg, John Quincy observed Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and later the withdrawal of the French army. War broke out between the United States and Britain, and in 1814 Madison called John Quincy to Belgium to negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812. John Quincy then began serving (like his father before him) as U.S. minister to Great Britain and later his son, Charles Francis Adams, would hold the same post during the American Civil War.
President James Monroe appointed John Quincy as the Secretary of State for two consecutive terms, from 1817-1824. While in this position he arranged with England for the joint occupation of the Oregon country, helped formulate the Monroe Doctrine, negotiated U.S. fishing rights off the Canadian coast, established the present U.S.-Canadian border from Minnesota to the Rockies, and achieved the transfer of Spanish Florida to the United States in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819. Within the State Department, he appointed staff on the basis of merit and left behind a highly efficient diplomatic service with clear accountability procedures and a system of regularized correspondence in place.
In the political tradition of the early 19th century, Adams as Secretary of State was considered the political heir to the Presidency. But the old ways of choosing a President were changing in 1824 to a populace vote. When he entered the race for the presidency he faced a handicap, he was widely respected, but was less widely liked and the southern states objected him because he opposed slavery.
John Quincy entered a five-way race for the presidency with two other members of Monroe’s cabinet–Secretary of War John C. Calhoun and Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford–along with Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House, and the military hero General Andrew Jackson. John Quincy carried the New England states, most of New York and a few districts elsewhere, but finished behind Jackson who won in both the electoral and popular votes. However, no candidate received a majority of electoral votes, and the election was decided by the House of Representatives. The Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, gave his support to Adams, who would later name Clay as the secretary of state. Andrew Jackson’s supporters claimed that this was a “corrupt bargain,” and Jackson himself resigned from the Senate declaring that he would win the next presidential election. He didn’t like to lose, especially when he won both the popular and electoral votes and didn’t become president because he didn’t accept Henry Clays offer before he went to John Quincy.
After the contested presidential election, John Quincy was elected the sixth President of the United States. As President, he rose precisely at five A.M. (4:15 in the summers), made his own fire, read his Bible, and then took a morning walk or a swim in the Potomac. In a study conducted in 2008, a fitness chain concluded that he was the fittest president in American history, thanks to his habit of walking more than three miles daily and swimming in the Potomac River. Once he was swimming naked and Journalist Anne Royall stole his clothes and wouldn’t return them until she was given an interview. Besides swimming, he enjoyed shooting billiards (he installed the first billiard table in the White House), reading, observing nature, domesticating wild plants, walking, horseback riding, attending the theater, and partaking of fine wines. He even owned a pet alligator which he kept in the East Room of the White House, it was given to him by the Marquis de Lafayette.
But he didn’t spend much time with his wife Louisa, except for breakfast and an occasional dinner, during which they both read papers and rarely talked. They often went for weeks without much communication and by his second year in office, they began taking separate summer vacations.
John Quincy faced continuous hostility from the Jacksonians in Congress, which explains his few accomplishments while in the White House. The Erie Canal was completed while he was in office, linking the Great Lakes to East Coast and enabling a flow of products to Eastern markets. He also sought to provide Native Americans with territory in the West, but this also failed to find support in Congress.
Not only did he have what appeared to be an unsuccessful presidency, his father died on July 4th, 1826 when he was president, the man he continually tried to impress. Maybe the “corrupt bargain” scandal was too much for his father to see him go through.
John Quincy and Andrew Jackson didn’t personally campaign in 1828, but their political followers organized rallies, parades, and demonstrations. In the press, the personal attacks reached a level of cruelty and misrepresentation. Jackson was accused of multiple murders (he was in a number of pistol duels), of extreme personal violence, and having lived in sin with his wife, Rachel, who herself was attacked as a bigamist since they got married before her divorce was finalized. John Quincy, on the other hand, was attacked for his legalistic attitudes, for his foreign-born wife, and for reportedly having procured young American virgins for the Russian czar as the primary achievement of his diplomatic career. John Quincy’s critics referred to him as “His Excellency” while Jackson came under attack as an ill-mannered, barely civilized, backwoods Indian killer.
The branding of Jackson’s wife as an “American Jezebel” and convicted adulteress backfired as an election strategy, voters didn’t approve of humiliating a woman who had lived for 40 years as the devoted wife of General Jackson. To many Americans, Jackson’s duels, brawls, executions, and unauthorized ventures represented the victory of what was right and good over John Quincy’s stiff-minded and narrowly construed principles. The attacks simply enhanced Jackson’s image as an authentic American hero who fought “heathen savages” and was one of the main generals in the War of 1812, especially winning the final battle in New Orleans.
John Quincy’s elitist attitude and his disliked contact with ordinary people had said, “If the country wants my services, she must ask for them.” He refused to campaign for his own re-election because he felt that political office should be a matter of service and not a popularity contest.
It was the first campaign in history to extensively use election materials such as campaign buttons, slogans, posters, tokens, flasks, snuffboxes, medallions, thread boxes, matchboxes, mugs, and fabric images. Almost all of these campaign trinkets depicted some aspect of the candidate’s popular image. Jackson’s status as a war hero and frontiersman played far better with the public than John Quincy’s stiff-looking elder statesman stance.
The campaign turned out more than twice the number of voters who had cast ballots in 1824. Jackson won the election by a landslide, and by a wide margin of 95 electoral votes. John Quincy carried New England, Delaware, part of Maryland, New Jersey, and sixteen of New York’s electoral votes, nine states in all. Jackson carried the remaining fifteen states of the South, Northwest, mid-Atlantic, and West. John Quincy became the second president in U.S. history to fail to win a second term, the first being his own father in 1800.
After his defeat by Andrew Jackson in 1828, John Quincy refused to attend the new president’s inauguration, just like his father when he boycotted Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801. He returned to Massachusetts, expecting to spend the remainder of his life enjoying his farm and his books but unexpectedly, the Plymouth district elected him to the House of Representatives in 1830. He would serve as a powerful leader for nine consecutive terms until the end of his life in 1848.
As one of the House’s most articulate and forceful spokesmen against slavery, John Quincy earned the nickname of “Old Man Eloquent.” Whenever he speak silence would sweep over the chamber as congressmen turned their attention to the former President. In 1841, John Quincy argued successfully before the U.S. Supreme Court to win freedom for slave mutineers aboard the Spanish ship Amistad. The court ruled that the mutineers were free men because international slave trade was illegal under British and U.S. law.
Keeping in character with his devotion to education and the sciences, he oversaw the donation of James Smithson of England, who willed $500,000 to the United States for the creation of an institution dedicated to knowledge, later called the Smithsonian Institution. In 1843, at the age of seventy-six, he also traveled to Cincinnati to oversee the laying of the cornerstone of the Cincinnati Observatory.
On February 21, 1848, John Quincy suffered a stroke on the House floor of the U.S. Capitol building discussing a matter he strongly opposed. He subsequently slipped into a coma after uttering these last words: “This is the end of earth. But I am content.” John Quincy died on February 23 and for two days mourners filed by his open casket in one of the House committee room. He was eventually interred next to his parents, John and Abigail Adams, beneath the First Congregational Church in Quincy Massachusetts. He left his 8,500-volume library and personal papers, as well as his home and lands, to his only surviving son, Charles Francis Adams. He divided the remainder of his estate between his wife, daughter-in-law Mary Catherine Hellen Adams (widow of his second son John Adams II), and granddaughter Mary Louisa Adams.
Many historians consider him to be the most learned person ever to have served as President He kept a diary most of his life that the biographer Fred Kaplan calls “the most valuable firsthand account of an American life and events from the last decades of the 18th century to the threshold of the Civil War.” He started his diary in 1779 when he was 12 years old and continued writing in it until his death, it consisted of 51 volumes with more than 14,000 pages. His diary reflected that he suffered from depression most of his life.
He was the first president to have his photograph taken the date was April 13, 1843. In 1970 someone had purchased a daguerreotype photograph of John Quincy at an antique store for fifty cents, it was later purchased for an undisclosed four digit sum and donated to a museum.
Quotes
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”
“Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.”
“The will of the people is the source and the happiness of the people the end of all legitimate government upon earth.”
“From the experience of the past we derive instructive lessons for the future.”
“In unfolding to my countrymen the principles by which I shall be governed in the fulfillment of those duties my first resort will be to that Constitution which I shall swear to the best of my ability to preserve, protect, and defend. That revered instrument enumerates the powers and prescribes the duties of the Executive Magistrate, and in its first words declares the purposes to which these and the whole action of the Government instituted by it should be invariably and sacredly devoted–to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to the people of this Union in their successive generations. Since the adoption of this social compact one of these generations has passed away. It is the work of our forefathers. Administered by some of the most eminent men who contributed to its formation, through a most eventful period in the annals of the world, and through all the vicissitudes of peace and war incidental to the condition of associated man, it has not disappointed the hopes and aspirations of those illustrious benefactors of their age and nation. It has promoted the lasting welfare of that country so dear to us all; it has to an extent far beyond the ordinary lot of humanity secured the freedom and happiness of this people. We now receive it as a precious inheritance from those to whom we are indebted for its establishment, doubly bound by the examples which they have left us and by the blessings which we have enjoyed as the fruits of their labors to transmit the same unimpaired to the succeeding generation.”
“The best guarantee against the abuse of power consists in the freedom, the purity, and the frequency of popular elections.”
“Posterity: you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.”
“I cannot ask of heaven success, even for my country, in a cause where she should be in the wrong.”
“Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.”
“All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse.”
“America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her 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 commend 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. The frontlet on her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit…. Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind.”
“The Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission upon earth … it laid the corner stone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity, and gave to the world the first irrevocable pledge of the fulfilment of the prophecies, announced directly from Heaven at the birth of the Saviour and predicted by the greatest of the Hebrew prophets six hundred years before.”
“Roll, years of promise, rapidly roll round, till not a slave shall on this earth be found.”
“To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is … the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence.”
“The highest, the transcendent glory of the American Revolution was this — it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the precepts of Christianity.”
“Individual liberty is individual power, and as the power of a community is a mass compounded of individual powers, the nation which enjoys the most freedom must necessarily be in proportion to its numbers the most powerful nation.”
“The radical principle of all commercial intercourse between independent nations is the mutual interest of both parties. It is the vital spirit of trade itself; nor can it be reconciled to the nature of man or to the primary laws of human society that any traffic should long be willingly pursued of which all the advantages are on one side and all the burdens on the other. Treaties of commerce have been found by experience to be among the most effective instruments for promoting peace and harmony between nations whose interests, exclusively considered on either side, are brought into frequent collisions by competition. In framing such treaties it is the duty of each party not simply to urge with unyielding pertinacity that which suits its own interest, but to concede liberally to that which is adapted to the interest of the other.”
“The origin of the political relations between the United States and France is coeval with the first years of our independence. The memory of it is interwoven with that of our arduous struggle for national existence. Weakened as it has occasionally been since that time, it can by us never be forgotten, and we should hail with exultation the moment which should indicate a recollection equally friendly in spirit on the part of France.”
“Of the two great political parties which have divided the opinions and feelings of our country, the candid and the just will now admit that both have contributed splendid talents, spotless integrity, ardent patriotism, and disinterested sacrifices to the formation and administration of this Government, and that both have required a liberal indulgence for a portion of human infirmity and error.”
“My wants are many, and, if told, would muster many a score; and were each wish a mint of gold, I still would want for more.”
Links
https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/presidents/johnquincyadams
http://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/john-quincy-adams
http://millercenter.org/president/jqadams
http://www.americaslibrary.gov/aa/jqadams/aa_jqadams_subj.html
http://www.ushistory.org/us/23e.asp
http://www.potus.com/jqadams.html
http://americanhistory.si.edu/presidency/timeline/pres_era/3_667.html
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/John_Quincy_Adams.aspx
Timeline of the life of John Quincy Adams
http://www.john-adams-heritage.com/timeline-john-quincy-adams/
The Oldest Known Photographs of a U.S. President
A Principled Warrior
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/books/review/john-quincy-adams-by-fred-kaplan.html?_r=0
“Oh my sweet little farm…”
https://www.nps.gov/adam/index.htm
John Quincy Adams’s diary
http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/php/
The Death of Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts
John Quincy Adams Facts
http://www.john-adams-heritage.com/john-quincy-adams-facts/
Fun Facts on John Quincy Adams
http://www.fun-facts.org.uk/american-presidents/john-quincy-adams.htm
John Quincy Adams perfectly defined leadership
Books
John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit
John Quincy Adams: American Visionary
John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life
John Quincy Adams: The often ignored sixth President of the United States
Video’s
John Quincy Adams – Mini Biography
John Quincy Adams Addresses the U.S. Supreme Court.wmv
Amistad: The Best of John Quincy Adams
Who is the Real John Quincy Adams? Biography, Education, Quotes (1998)
James Traub: The Militant Spirit of John Quincy Adams
1828: The Worst Election in History | Andrew Jackson VS John Quincy Adams | Laughing Historically
#06 John Quincy Adams