The Presidency of John Quincy Adams
Uploaded by sls465 on Apr 19, 2007
The Presidency of John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States, was the son of the second president, John Adams, making him the first son of a president to actually become president himself. Born in Braintree, Massachusetts in 1767, he watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from the top of Penn’s Hill above the family farm. As he grew up with the new nation, his parents literally trained him for the highest office. During his long lifetime he had two distinguishable careers, separated by an unfortunate interlude of presidency. In his first career, he went from an American diplomat to secretary of state. In his second great era, he was a member of the House of Representatives and a strong opponent to slavery. These two positions were interrupted by his four-year presidency, in which time the states rested very uneasily upon his shoulders. Never publicly popular and often reproached by his enemies, John Quincy Adams nevertheless ended his life in the “sunshine of national esteem.”
As a young boy, Adams obtained most of his lustrous education from his mother and father. At the age of ten he began to accompany his father on diplomatic trips to Europe, where he learned French fluently, and eventually studied at the University of Leiden. Extraordinarily cultured and educated, he returned to the U.S. in 1785 to finish his formal education at Harvard. Five years later he settled down in Boston to practice law.
At some point during his law profession, Adams began writing articles in local newspapers defending George Washington’s policy of neutrality against the diplomatic attacks of Citizen Guret, the new French minister to the United States. This luckily caught Washington’s attention, and he in turn appointed Adams as minister to The Netherlands. Later he was promoted to minister of Berlin. While negotiating about the Jay Treaty in England, he married Louisa Catherine Johnson on July 26, 1797.
Adams was relieved of his post by his father immediately following Jefferson’s election in 1801. He resumed his law career for a couple of years, only to be elected as a Federalist to the U.S. Senate in 1803. The federalist leaders of Massachusetts were deeply dismayed by Adams’ independent course as senator, and as a result, recanted him by electing a successor two years early. He went back to practicing law and served as a professor at Harvard,...