John Quincy Adams

Long before he entered the White House, John Quincy Adams had already lived close to the making of a new nation. Born on July 11, 1767, in Braintree, Massachusetts, now Quincy, he was the eldest son of John Adams and Abigail Adams. His childhood was shaped by the American Revolutionary War, by long separations from his father, and by letters that urged him toward books, discipline, and public duty. Under tutors at home and later in Europe, he studied languages, law, and classical writers, keeping a diary from 1779 until shortly before his death in 1848.

Adams grew up partly on the family farm and partly among diplomats. In 1778 he traveled to Europe with his father, who served in American diplomatic missions in France and the Netherlands. As a young man he studied at schools including Leiden University, went to Saint Petersburg in 1781 as secretary to the American diplomat Francis Dana, and later accompanied his father to Great Britain. Returning to the United States in 1785, he entered Harvard College, joined Phi Beta Kappa, graduated second in his class in 1787, studied law, and opened a Boston legal practice in 1790.

Public service soon drew him in. President George Washington appointed him U.S. minister to the Netherlands in 1794, and President John Adams later named him minister to Prussia. Though first a Federalist like his father, Adams broke with the party over foreign policy and lost its support after his election to the United States Senate in 1802. President James Madison then appointed him minister to Russia, and later to Great Britain, where Adams led negotiations for the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812, and began talks for the Rush-Bagot Treaty.

His greatest strength was diplomacy. As secretary of state under President James Monroe from 1817 to 1825, Adams negotiated the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, which transferred Spanish Florida to the United States. He also helped formulate the Monroe Doctrine, which became a key tenet of American foreign policy. In 1824 he ran for president as a Democratic-Republican against William H. Crawford, Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson. With no majority in the Electoral College, the election went to the House of Representatives, where Adams won with Clay’s support. He served as the sixth president from 1825 to 1829, advocating federally funded infrastructure, a national university, and engagement with Latin America, though Congress rejected many of his plans.

After losing the 1828 election to Jackson, Adams did something no other former president has done: he returned to Congress as a member of the House of Representatives. Elected in 1830, first as an Anti-Masonic candidate and later affiliated with the Whig Party, he became increasingly outspoken against slavery and against the annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War, which he viewed as efforts to extend slavery’s power. He fought to repeal the House gag rule on antislavery petitions and, at age 73, successfully defended enslaved mutineers in the Amistad case before the Supreme Court.

Adams died in the House chamber on February 23, 1848, after a public life that stretched from the Revolution’s diplomacy to the great moral conflicts before the Civil War. Historians often rank him as an average president, but one of the greatest diplomats and secretaries of state in American history. His words still fit the man: “Try and fail, but never fail to try.” In office, out of office, and back in the arena, he kept arguing, writing, and speaking for the causes he believed the country could not avoid.