John Quincy Adams Biography

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

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. 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 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. 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.