John Quincy Adams Biography Quotes 10 Report mistakes

Attr: Attr.: Mathew Brady

10 Quotes
Occup.	President
From	USA
Born	July 11, 1767
Died	1848

Early Life and Family
John Quincy Adams was born on July 11, 1767, in Braintree, Massachusetts, a town later renamed Quincy in honor of his maternal forebears. He was the eldest son of John Adams, a principal figure in the American Revolution and the second President of the United States, and Abigail Smith Adams, whose letters and counsel profoundly shaped his mind and character. From childhood he inhabited the world of statecraft. He watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from a nearby hillside, crossed the Atlantic as a boy to accompany his father on diplomatic missions, and read widely in history, languages, and political thought. Abigail Adams pressed her son to bind learning to virtue; John Adams demanded discipline, self-scrutiny, and public service. The combination left an indelible mark.

Education and Formation
Adams' formative years unfolded amid the courts of Europe. He studied in Paris and Leiden while his father negotiated with French and Dutch officials. As a teenager he served as secretary to Francis Dana on a mission to St. Petersburg, an apprenticeship that taught him the routines of diplomacy even when formal recognition did not come. Returning to Massachusetts, he graduated from Harvard College in 1787 and trained in the law under Theophilus Parsons at Newburyport. He began his legal practice in Boston while publishing essays on public questions, including the widely read "Publicola" letters, which argued for constitutional government and sober republicanism. His early writings revealed a sober, analytical style that would define his public life.

Apprenticeship in Diplomacy
Recognized for his ability, Adams entered national service under George Washington, who appointed him minister to the Netherlands in 1794. Two years later he became minister to Portugal in designation and soon after to Prussia, an appointment confirmed during his father's presidency. In Europe he honed the habits of precise note-taking and daily reflection that fueled a lifelong diary and informed his diplomatic work. He married Louisa Catherine Johnson, the London-born daughter of the American consul Joshua Johnson, in 1797. Louisa would prove a resilient partner across decades of postings, political battles, and family grief.

Senator and Political Realignment
Adams returned to Massachusetts and served in the state senate before winning a seat in the United States Senate in 1803 as a Federalist. He soon clashed with party leaders by supporting measures he believed were in the national interest regardless of faction, notably his qualified backing of Thomas Jefferson's 1807 embargo. The breach cost him support at home; he resigned in 1808 rather than persist as a party renegade. He taught rhetoric and oratory at Harvard, adding a humanistic dimension to a career more often associated with policy and negotiation.

Return to Diplomacy and Peace with Britain
James Madison drew Adams back into foreign service as minister to Russia in 1809. In St. Petersburg he developed a candid relationship with Alexander I while reporting meticulously on European affairs as the Napoleonic wars reshaped the continent. With the War of 1812 underway, Madison named him to the American peace commission. In Ghent, Adams chaired a team that included Henry Clay, Albert Gallatin, James A. Bayard, and Jonathan Russell. Their often-fractious negotiations concluded with the Treaty of Ghent in December 1814, restoring peace with Britain without territorial loss. Adams then served as minister to the Court of St. James's from 1815 to 1817, repairing relations with a former enemy and reinforcing fisheries and boundary arrangements begun earlier.

Secretary of State: Framing a Continental Republic
James Monroe appointed Adams Secretary of State in 1817, and in that office Adams earned a reputation as one of America's finest diplomats. He helped shape the Convention of 1818 with Britain, fixing the U.S.-Canada boundary along the 49th parallel to the Rockies and providing joint occupation of the Pacific Northwest. He was the intellectual engine of the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 with Spain, negotiated with Luis de Onis, which transferred Florida to the United States and defined a transcontinental boundary to the Pacific. When British foreign secretary George Canning suggested a joint Anglo-American declaration against new European colonization in the Americas, Adams counseled Monroe to speak independently. The result was the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, whose core principles Adams articulated: no future European colonization in the Western Hemisphere and nonintervention combined with American abstention from European wars. The doctrine set a lasting framework for U.S. foreign policy.

Election of 1824 and the Adams Presidency
The presidential election of 1824 pitted Adams against Andrew Jackson, William H. Crawford, and Henry Clay. No candidate won an electoral majority, and the decision moved to the House of Representatives under the Twelfth Amendment. Clay, eliminated from contention, supported Adams, who prevailed in the House. Adams then named Clay Secretary of State, prompting Jacksonian charges of a "corrupt bargain". The accusation shadowed his administration. John C. Calhoun served as his vice president.

Adams entered office with a comprehensive national program: internal improvements, a scientific and statistical infrastructure, promotion of commerce, and the diffusion of knowledge. He proposed a national university, an astronomical observatory he called a "lighthouse of the sky", and a strengthened coastal survey. He championed roads and canals, including the extension of the National Road and federal support for waterway development, to bind a continental republic. He believed the Constitution permitted such measures as instruments of the general welfare.

Domestic Agenda and Political Headwinds
Adams' aspirations collided with an increasingly disciplined opposition led by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. Jacksonians portrayed Adams as elitist and out of touch, while southern and western members resisted federal activism they feared would entangle slavery or privilege certain regions. Though Adams advanced the arts and sciences and fortified the civil service with merit-based standards, many of his proposals stalled. Late in his term Congress passed a steep protective tariff in 1828, denounced in the South as the "Tariff of Abominations". Adams signed the measure in a climate already inflamed by sectional anxiety. In the bitter rematch of 1828, Jackson defeated Adams decisively. The outgoing President retired briefly to Massachusetts, wounded by political defeat yet unshaken in his convictions.

Return to Congress and Antislavery Leadership
In a singular reversal of American political tradition, Adams sought and won election to the House of Representatives in 1830, taking his seat in 1831. There he became an independent force, beholden to no party and relentless in debate. He opposed the annexation of Texas on constitutional and antislavery grounds and resisted policies he viewed as aggrandizing slavery's power. When the House adopted a "gag rule" in 1836 to bar the reception of antislavery petitions, Adams made the right of petition his great cause. Day after day he filed petitions and forced votes, often facing hostile motions to censure him. He gathered allies such as Joshua R. Giddings from Ohio and built a procedural campaign that, after years of persistence, culminated in the repeal of the gag rule in 1844. His success did not make him an abolitionist in the mold of William Lloyd Garrison, but it established him as Congress's most indefatigable defender of civil liberties against the demands of slaveholding power.

The Amistad Case and the Courts
Adams also used the courtroom to advance liberty. In 1841 he joined Roger Sherman Baldwin to argue before the Supreme Court on behalf of Africans who had seized the schooner Amistad after being kidnapped and sold into the illegal transatlantic slave trade. Drawing on natural law, treaty law, and the ideals of the Revolution, Adams spoke for hours in a densely argued plea. The Court, in an opinion by Justice Joseph Story, held that the captives were free. The case underscored Adams' conviction that the nation's promises had binding moral force beyond political convenience.

Personal Life, Habits, and Family
Adams' marriage to Louisa Catherine Adams was a partnership tested by travel, uncertain health, and the deaths of children. They had three sons who reached adulthood, George Washington Adams, John Adams II, and Charles Francis Adams, and a daughter, Louisa Catherine, who died in infancy. Tragedy visited the family repeatedly: George Washington Adams died in 1829 under grievous circumstances, and John Adams II died young a few years later. Charles Francis Adams would emerge as the family historian and later as a distinguished diplomat. Louisa proved a resourceful figure in Washington, maintaining a salon and managing the social pressures of politics even as she endured long separations and painful losses.

Adams cultivated rigorous personal habits. He rose early, walked prodigiously, and swam in the Potomac well into his later years. He read in multiple languages and kept an extraordinary diary that he began as a boy and continued for more than half a century. That diary records not only events but his steady self-examination, his doubts, his austerity, and his striving for moral clarity.

Scholarship, Science, and the Nation's Institutions
A man of letters as well as action, Adams lectured on rhetoric and bequeathed to the country a vision of public education as a civic good. His belief that knowledge enhanced liberty shaped his support for a national astronomical observatory and for surveys that cataloged the nation's resources. In the House he played a central role in securing the bequest of James Smithson for the United States and in establishing the Smithsonian Institution, seeing in it the national university he had long imagined in another form. He viewed such institutions not as ornaments but as engines of republican improvement.

Final Years and Death
Even in advanced age Adams refused to retreat. He suffered a stroke in 1846 but returned to the floor to oppose measures he believed unconstitutional or unjust, including resolutions celebrating the Mexican-American War, which he regarded as an expansionist conflict. On February 21, 1848, he collapsed at his desk in the House of Representatives and was carried to the Speaker's Room, where he died two days later. To contemporaries his last recorded words, "This is the last of earth; I am content", captured a life of ceaseless duty.

Legacy
John Quincy Adams is remembered as the sixth President of the United States, but his reputation rests even more securely on his mastery of diplomacy and his principled congressional career. He helped define the nation's boundaries and international posture as Secretary of State under James Monroe, working with counterparts like Luis de Onis and negotiating alongside Henry Clay and Albert Gallatin. As President he advanced a program of national development that later generations would realize in pieces. As a representative he confronted the power of slavery through procedure, speech, and law, and he kept faith with Abigail and John Adams's charge that public office is a trust. In the long trajectory from the revolutionary era of his father to the sectional crisis that followed his death, he stands as a bridge, erudite, exacting, and relentless in the service of an American republic grounded in law, liberty, and learning.

Our collection contains 10 quotes who is written by John, under the main topics: Leadership - Freedom - Faith - Peace - Honesty & Integrity.

Other people realated to John: Henry B. Adams (Historian), Abigail Adams (First Lady), Henry Adams (Historian), Anthony Hopkins (Actor), James Smithson (Scientist), William Wirt (Statesman), Lewis Tappan (Businessman), John C. Calhoun (Statesman), Robert Dale Owen (Politician), Andrew J. Bacevich (Educator)

John Quincy Adams Famous Works