John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams 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).

Adams, John Quincy (1767–1848), sixth President of the United States.Born in Quincy, Massachusetts, the son of John Adams and Abigail Adams, John Quincy Adams graduated from Harvard College in 1787. Apart from a brief interlude practicing law in Massachusetts, he spent almost his entire adult life in public service and politics. Beginning at age fourteen as the secretary to the U.S. minister to Russia, Francis Dana, he subsequently held overseas posts in England, the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia, Ghent, and again in England before becoming President James Monroe's secretary of state in 1817. A tough, belligerent negotiator, he seemed like “a bull‐dog among spaniels,” according to one English diplomat.

As secretary of state, Adams was an aggressive advocate of expansionism. He not only supported Andrew Jackson's invasion of Spanish Florida in 1819, but used it to bully Spain into negotiating a transcontinental settlement, the Adams‐Onís Treaty (1819), which gave Florida to the United States and ended Spanish claims to the Pacific Northwest. In 1823, when the British foreign secretary suggested a joint Anglo‐American manifesto against further European intervention in Latin America, Adams successfully urged President Monroe to issue such a pronouncement unilaterally and wrote much of what became known as the Monroe Doctrine.

In the four‐way Presidential race of 1824, Adams finished second in both the popular vote and in the electoral college. Since none of the candidates received a majority of the electoral votes, the election went to the House of Representatives where Henry Clay threw his support to Adams over the front runner Andrew Jackson. When President Adams subsequently made Clay secretary of state, Jackson denounced the appointment as a “corrupt bargain,” resigned his Senate seat, and began organizing for the next election. Adams, never popular in the slave states, made Jackson's task easier by laying out a program of national planning that infuriated Thomas Jefferson's strict constructionist followers, violated the concept of states' rights, and thus drove virtually the entire South into Jackson's camp. With most of his nationalistic proposals mocked by the opposition and rejected by Congress, Adams was denied a second term in 1828—the same ignominy his father had experienced in 1800. Jackson defeated him handily, winning 92 percent of the electoral vote in the slave states, 49 percent in the free states.

In 1830, Adams won election to the House of Representatives from the Plymouth district of Massachusetts. Serving until his death in 1848, he led the long (1836–1844) fight against the “gag rule,” a House rule that automatically tabled antislavery petitions and barred Congress from discussing the sensitive slavery issue. He also led the battle against the annexation of Texas (1836) and against the Mexican War (1846–1848). His sharp tongue and tactical dexterity made him a powerful figure in Congress and a folk hero to much of the North, earning him the sobriquet “Old Man Eloquent.”
See also Amistad Case; Early Republic, Era of the; Expansionism; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of State; Federal Government, Legislative Branch: House of Representatives; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Europe; Texas Republic and Annexation.

Bibliography

Mary W.M. Hargreaves , The Presidency of John Quincy Adams, 1985.
Leonard L. Richards , Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams, 1986.

Leonard L. Richards

Adams, John Quincy (1767–1848), 6th President of the U.S. (1825–29), son of John and Abigail Adams, was born in Braintree (now Quincy), Mass., and received his early training by accompanying his father on diplomatic missions to France and Holland. He graduated from Harvard (1787), after which he was admitted to the bar (1790) and entered politics and political discussion. His answer to Paine's Rights of Man, signed “Publicola” (1791), and similar essays, led Washington to appoint him minister to the Netherlands (1794). In 1797 his father appointed him minister to Berlin, and he remained abroad until 1801. Literary results of this residence were his translation of Wieland's poetic romance Oberon (first published 1940) and his Letters on Silesia (1804). In 1803 Adams was elected to the Senate, where his want of allegiance to Federalist tradition caused his resignation (1808). He had already been appointed Professor of Rhetoric and Belles‐Lettres at Harvard, and his college lectures were published (1810). In 1809 he was appointed minister to Russia, and six years later minister to England, to remain until Monroe invited him (1817) to be secretary of state. In this capacity he postponed the Oregon boundary question by treaty with England, secured Florida from Spain, and recognized the rebelling Spanish colonies. The principles underlying his policies were drafted by him in the Monroe Doctrine as it was enunciated by Monroe in 1823. After four years of independent policies as President, he was elected to Congress (1831) without any definite party support, and continued to serve until his death 17 years later. He was considered to be without peer as a parliamentary debater, and worked hard to oppose the extension of slavery and consequently the admission of Texas and the Mexican War. All his actions were characterized by an independence of party. His Memoirs (12 vols., 1874–77) cover half a century, and are valuable both as political commentary and as a study in American letters; they have been described by Allan Nevins in his edition (1928) as written “with malice towards all.” His independent mind is indicated by the diversity of his other writings, which include the minor Poems of Religion and Society (1848), which he himself treasured, and the celebrated Report on Weights and Measures (1821), in which the subject is examined with the exactness of mathematical science, the sagacity of statesmanship, and the wisdom of philosophy.