Adams, John Quincy 1767-1848
6th President of the USA

Born in Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts, the son of John Adams, the 2nd President of the USA, at the age of 14 he became private secretary to the US envoy in St Petersburg. After accompanying his father in Paris for the peace negotiations with Great Britain, he began to study at Harvard in 1785 and was admitted to the Bar in 1790. Successively Minister to The Hague, London, Lisbon and Berlin, he was elected to the US Senate from Massachusetts in 1803. He was nominally a Federalist, but he angered his party by supporting Jeffersonian policies such as the 1807 embargo, and in 1808 he was forced to resign his seat. In 1809 he was Minister to St Petersburg; in 1814 a member of the commission to negotiate peace between Great Britain and the USA; and from 1815 to 1817 Minister at the court of St James's, London. As Secretary of State under President James Monroe, he negotiated with Spain the treaty for the acquisition of Florida (1819), and was the principal author of the Monroe Doctrine. He ran for president against Andrew Jackson and others in 1824, and when none of the candidates gained a majority of electoral votes, Adams was chosen as President (1825) by the House of Representatives and was accused by the Jacksonians of having gained the deciding block of votes by making a corrupt bargain with Henry Clay. Plagued by partisan attacks, his administration accomplished nothing of importance. He was defeated by Jackson in 1828 and retired to his home at Quincy, depressed and impoverished. In 1830 he was elected to the House of Representatives, where he became noted as a promoter of antislavery views.

Bibliography: Bennett Champ Clark, John Quincy Adams, "Old Man Eloquent" (1932)