John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams, byname Old Man Eloquent, (born July 11, 1767, Braintree [now Quincy], Massachusetts [U.S.]—died February 23, 1848, Washington, D.C., U.S.), 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. (For a discussion of the history and nature of the presidency, seepresidency of the United States of America.).

Adams, John Quincy An overview of John Quinc

John Quincy Adams

Key events in the life of John Quincy Adams. 

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 Hillfrom 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."

Birthplace of John Quincy Adams, in Quincy (formerly Braintree), Massachusetts, photograph c. 1855. Detroit Publishing Company Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 

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.

Adams, John Quincy John Quincy Adams at 16 years old, 1783; copy of an engraving after a portrait by Izaak Schmidt, located in the Old House, Adams National Historical Park, Quincy, Massachusetts. 

U.S. National Park Service

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 Treatyof 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.

Adams, Louisa Louisa Adams, oil on canvas by Charles Bird King, 1821–25. 

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 honour to the family name once again, being elected to the House of Representativesand serving as United States minister to England during the American Civil War.

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.

Break with the Federalists

Up to this time John Quincy Adams was regarded as belonging to the Federalist Party, but he found its general policy displeasing. He was frowned upon as the son of his father by the followers of Alexander Hamilton and by reactionary groups, and he soon found himself practically powerless as an unpopular member of an unpopular minority. Actually he was not then, and indeed never was, a strict party man; all through his life, ever aspiring to higher public service, he considered himself a “man of my whole country.” Adams arrived in Washington too late to vote for ratification of the treaty for the purchase of Louisiana, which had been opposed by the other Federalist senators, but he voted for the appropriations to carry it into effect and announced that he would have voted for the purchase treaty itself. Nevertheless, he joined his Federalist colleagues in voting against a bill to enable the president to place officials of his own appointment in control of the newly acquired territory; such a bill, Adams vainly protested, overstepped the constitutional powers of the presidency, violated the right of self-government, and imposed taxation without representation. In December 1807 he supported President Jefferson’s suggestion of an embargo to essentially stop all commerce with other nations (an attempt to gain British recognition of American rights) and vigorously urged instant action, saying: “The President has recommended the measure on his high responsibility. I would not consider, I would not deliberate; I would act!” Within five hours the Senate had passed the embargo bill and had sent it to the House of Representatives. Support of this measure, hated by the Federalists and unpopular in New England because it stifled the region’s economy, cost Adams his seat in the Senate. His successor was chosen on June 3, 1808, several months before the usual time of electing a senator for the next term, and five days later Adams resigned. In the same year he attended the Republican congressional caucus, which nominated James Madison for the presidency, and thus he allied himself with that party. From 1806 to 1809 Adams was Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard College.

In 1809 President Madison sent Adams to Russia to represent the United States at the court of Tsar Alexander I. He arrived at St. Petersburg at the psychologically important moment when the tsar had made up his mind to break with Napoleon. Adams therefore met with a favourable reception and a disposition to further the interests of American commerce in every possible way. From this vantage point he watched and reported Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the final disastrous retreat and dissolution of France’s Grand Army. On the outbreak of the war between the United States and England in 1812, he was still in St. Petersburg. That September the Russian government suggested that the tsar was willing to act as mediator between the two belligerents. Madison precipitately accepted this proposition and sent Albert Gallatin and James Bayard to act as commissioners with Adams, but England would have nothing to do with it. In August 1814, however, these men, with Henry Clay and Jonathan Russell, began negotiations with English commissioners that resulted in the signing of the Treaty of Ghent on December 24 of that year. Adams then visited Paris, where he witnessed the return of Napoleon from Elba, and next went to London, where, with Clay and Gallatin, he negotiated (1815) a “Convention to Regulate Commerce and Navigation.” Soon afterward he became U.S. minister to Great Britain, as his father had been before him, and as his son, Charles Francis Adams, was to be after him. After accomplishing little in London, he returned to the United States in the summer of 1817 to become secretary of state in the cabinet of President James Monroe. This appointment was primarily due to his diplomatic experience but also due to the president’s desire to have a sectionally well-balanced cabinet in what came to be known as the Era of Good Feelings.

Treaty of Ghent The Treaty of Ghent, signed on December 24, 1814, ended the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the United States. Signatories: Lord James Gambier, Henry Goulburn, William Adams, John Quincy Adams, James Bayard, Henry Clay, Jonathan Russell, and Albert Gallatin. National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Secretary of state

As secretary of state, Adams played the leading part in the acquisition of Florida. Ever since the acquisition of Louisiana, successive administrations had sought to include at least a part of Florida in that purchase. In 1819, after long negotiations, Adams succeeded in getting the Spanish minister to agree to a treaty in which Spain would abandon all claims to territory east of the Mississippi River, the United States would relinquish all claims to what is now Texas, and a boundary of the United States would be drawn (for the first time) from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. This Transcontinental Treaty was perhaps the greatest victory ever won by a single man in the diplomatic history of the United States. Adams himself was responsible for the idea of extending the country’s northern boundary westward from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific—considered a stroke of diplomatic genius. To use his own word, it marked a triumphant “epocha” in U.S. continental expansion. Before the Spanish government ratified the Transcontinental Treaty in 1819, however, Mexico (including Texas) had thrown off allegiance to the mother country, and the United States had occupied Florida by force of arms.

Adams, John Quincy John Quincy Adams, portrait by Gilbert Stuart, 1818

As secretary of state, Adams was also responsible for conclusion of the treaty of 1818 with Great Britain, laying down the northern boundary of the United States from the Lake of the Woods (at the border of what is now Minnesota and Canada) to the Rocky Mountains along the line of latitude 49° N. Years later, as a member of the House of Representatives, he supported latitude 49° N as the boundary of Oregon from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean: “I want that country for our Western pioneers.” In fact, President James K. Polk’s Oregon treaty of 1846 drew that boundary along the line of 49°. The Monroe Doctrine rightly bears the name of the president who in 1823 assumed the responsibility for its promulgation, but its formulation was the work of John Quincy Adams more than of any other single man.

Presidency and feud with Jackson

As President Monroe’s second term drew to a close in 1824, there was a lack of good feeling among his official advisers, three of whom—Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, and Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford—aspired to succeed him. Henry Clay, speaker of the House, and General Andrew Jackson were also candidates. Calhoun was nominated for the vice presidency. Of the other four, Jackson received 99 electoral votes for the presidency, Adams 84, Crawford 41, and Clay 37; because no one had a majority, the decision was made by the House of Representatives, which was confined in its choice to the three candidates who had received the largest number of votes. Clay, who had for years assumed a censorious attitude toward Jackson, cast his influence for Adams, whose election was thereby secured on the first ballot. A few days later Adams offered Clay the office of secretary of state, which he accepted. Jackson’s supporters charged a “corrupt bargain” and turned Adams’s term in office into a four-year campaign to win for their man what they regarded as his rightful place, the presidency.

American presidential election, 1824 Results of the American presidential election, 1824Sources: Electoral and popular vote totals based on data from the United States Office of the Federal Register and Congressional Quarterly's Guide to U.S. Elections, 4th ed. (2001)

Up to this point Adams’s career had been almost uniformly successful, but his presidency (1825–29), during which the country prospered, was in most respects a political failure because of the virulent opposition of the Jacksonians. Adams worked hard, rising between four and six o’clock in the morning and often going for a walk around the city or for a swim in the Potomac River before breakfast. Once he almost drowned as the sleeves of his blouse filled with water and weighed him down. But he knew he was not a man of the people. He had admitted in his inaugural address that he was “less possessed of your confidence…than any of my predecessors.” He favoured, among other forward-looking proposals, creating a national university and a national astronomical observatory; he wished the western territories to be held in trust by the federal government and developed only gradually; and he proposed a vast expansion of the country’s roads with federal aid. Congress turned a generally deaf ear to his initiatives.

Adams, John Quincy John Quincy Adams, portrait by John Singleton Copley. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-DIG-det-4a31347)

In 1828 Jackson was elected president over Adams, with 178 electoral votes to Adams’s 83. It was during Jackson’s administration that irreconcilable differences developed between his followers and those of Adams, the latter becoming known as the National Republicans, who, with the Anti-Masons, were the precursors of the Whigs. Adams’s intense dislike of Jackson and what he represented remained unabated. When Harvard College in 1833 awarded Jackson an honorary degree, Adams refused to attend the ceremony at his alma mater. He avowed that he would not "be present to witness [Harvard’s] disgrace in conferring its highest honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and could hardly spell his own name."

American presidential election, 1828 Results of the American presidential election, 1828Source: United States Office of the Federal Register

Adams had retired to private life in 1829 in the Massachusetts town of Quincy, but only for a brief period; in 1830, supported largely by members of the Anti-Masonic movement (a political force formed initially in opposition to Freemasonry), he was elected a member of the national House of Representatives. 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 a selectman of his town. He served in the House of Representatives from 1831 until his death, in 1848. But he had not abandoned his hopes for a reelection to the presidency—whether as nominee of the Anti-Masonic Party (in which he was very active as long as that party had political possibilities) or of the National Republican Party or of a union of both or even of the later Whig Party—always in his own mind as a “man of the whole nation.” Gradually, these hopes faded.

Second career in Congress

Adams’s long second career in Congress was at least as important as his earlier career as a diplomat. Throughout, he was conspicuous as an opponent of the expansion of slaveryand was at heart an abolitionist, though he never became one in the political sense of the word. In 1839 he presented to the House of Representatives a resolution for a constitutional amendment providing that every child born in the United States after July 4, 1842, should be born free; that, with the exception of Florida, no new state should be admitted into the Union with slavery; and that neither slavery nor the slave tradeshould exist in the District of Columbia after July 4, 1845. The “gag rules,” a resolution passed by Southern members of Congress against all discussion of slavery in the House of Representatives, effectively blocked any discussion of Adams’s proposed amendment. His prolonged fight for the repeal of the gag rules and for the right of petition to Congress for the mitigation or abolition of slavery was one of the most dramatic contests in the history of Congress. These petitions, from individuals and groups of individuals from all over the Northern states, increasingly were sent to Adams, and he dutifully presented them. Adams contended that the gag rules were a direct violation of the First Amendment to the federal Constitution, and he refused to be silenced on the question, fighting indomitably for repeal in spite of the bitter denunciation of his opponents. Each year the number of antislavery petitions received and presented by him grew greatly. Perhaps the climax was in 1837 when Adams presented a petition from 22 slaves and, threatened by his opponents with censure, defended himself with remarkable keenness and ability. At each session the majority against him decreased until, in 1844, his motion to repeal the standing 21st (gag) rule of the House was carried by a vote of 108 to 80, and his long battle was over.

Adams, John Quincy John Quincy Adams, who led the effort to repeal the gag rule. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 

repeal of gag rules Motion by John Quincy Adams to include his statement on the gag rules in the House Journal, dated May 27, 1836. It states, “I hold the resolution to be in direct violation of the Constitution of the United States, of the Rules of this House, and of the rights of my constituents.” National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Another spectacular contribution by Adams to the antislavery cause was his championing of the cause of Africans arrested aboard the slave ship Amistad—slaves who had mutinied and escaped from their Spanish owners off the coast of Cuba and had wound up bringing the ship into United States waters near Long Island, New York. Adams defended them as freemen before the Supreme Court in 1841 against efforts of the administration of President Martin Van Buren to return them to their masters and to inevitable death. Adams won their freedom.

As a member of Congress—in fact, throughout his life—Adams supported the improvement of the arts and sciences and the diffusion of knowledge. He did much to conserve the bequest of James Smithson (an eccentric Englishman) to the United States and to create and endow the Smithsonian Institution with the money from Smithson’s estate.

Perhaps the most dramatic event in Adams’s life was its end. On February 21, 1848, in the act of protesting an honorary grant of swords by Congress to the generals who had won what Adams considered a “most unrighteous war” with Mexico, he suffered a cerebral stroke, fell unconscious to the floor of the House, and died two days later in the Capitol building. His obsequies in Washington and in his native Massachusetts assumed the character of a nationwide pageant of mourning. Senator Thomas Hart Benton, the main eulogist at the service in the Capitol, asked: “Where would death have found him except at the place of duty?”

The collapse of John Quincy Adams from a fatal stroke on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, February 21, 1848. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian InstitutIon

Death of John Quincy Adams, lithograph by Nathaniel Currier, c. 1848. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Adams, John Quincy John Quincy Adams, sketched a few hours before his death by Arthur J. Stansbury, 1848. Lithograph by Sarony & Major. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C

Personality

Few men in American public life have possessed more independence, more public spirit, and more ability than did Adams. Still, throughout his political career he was handicapped by a certain personal reserve and austerity and coolness of manner that prevented him from appealing to the imaginations and affections of the people. He had few intimatefriends, and not many men in American history have been regarded, during their lifetimes, with so much hostility or attacked with so much rancour by their political opponents.