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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. John Quincy Adams was the 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 —and in his postpresidential years (as a U.S. congressman, 1831–48) he ...
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- John Quincy Adams
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John Quincy Adams was the 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—and in his postpresidential years (as a U.S. congressman, 1831–48) he fought against the expansion of slavery.
What was John Quincy Adams’s childhood like?
John Quincy Adams was the eldest son of John and Abigail Adams. Growing up during the American Revolution, he watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from Penn’s Hill and heard the cannons roar across the Back Bay in Boston. He accompanied his father on diplomatic missions to Europe and studied in Paris and Leiden, Netherlands.
How did John Quincy Adams become president?
In the U.S. presidential election of 1824, Andrew Jackson received 99 electoral votes, Adams 84, William Crawford 41, and Henry Clay 37. Because no one had a majority, the House of Representatives chose between the three top candidates. Clay supported Adams, ensuring his victory and the bitter opposition of the Jacksonians to all his initiatives.
What was John Quincy Adams’s occupation?
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 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."
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.
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 Treaty of 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.
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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.
- Samuel Flagg Bemis
Oct 27, 2009 · John Quincy Adams (1767‑1848) served as the 6th U.S. president, from 1825 to 1829. He was the son of former president John Adams, a Founding Father. Quincy Adams was outspoken in his opposition ...
- Diplomatic achievements. John Quincy Adams had a remarkable career as a diplomat before becoming President. Some of his notable diplomatic accomplishments include
- Monroe Doctrine. As Secretary of State under President James Monroe, John Quincy Adams was a primary architect of the Monroe Doctrine, a cornerstone of American foreign policy.
- Acquisition of Florida. John Quincy Adams played a pivotal role in negotiating the Adams-Onís Treaty, also known as the Transcontinental Treaty, with Spain in 1819.
- Tariff of 1828. John Quincy Adams supported and signed into law the Tariff of 1828, although it was highly controversial and faced opposition, particularly from Southern states.
- John Quincy Adams was elected president despite losing both the popular and electoral votes. The election of 1824, which saw John Quincy Adams face off against Andrew Jackson, is the only presidential election that had to be decided by the U.S. House of Representatives, as neither candidate won the majority of electoral votes.
- John Quincy Adams loved morning cardio. When it comes to personal fitness, early birds have an edge. Nobody understood the virtues of morning exercise better than Adams.
- John Quincy Adams was an avid skinny-dipper. As president, Adams got his exercise by taking a daily dip in the Potomac … naked. Every morning, he would walk to the river, strip down, and go for a swim.
- John Quincy Adams enjoyed a good game of pool. Adams installed a billiards table in the White House shortly after becoming president. The new addition quickly became a subject of controversy when Adams accidentally presented the government with the $61 tab (in reality he had paid for it himself).
A Childhood Abroad John Quincy was born on July 11, 1767. In 1778 the 10-year-old accompanied his father on his first diplomatic mission to France.
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Jun 25, 2018 · John Quincy Adams was born on July 11, 1767, in Braintree, Massachusetts. He was elected as the sixth president of the United States in 1824 and took office on March 4, 1825. , the second president of the United States and the erudite , John Quincy Adams had an interesting childhood. He personally witnessed the with his mother.
