John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams was the sixth president of the United States and, by most accounts, a far greater secretary of state and congressman than he was a president. He was the eldest son of John Adams, watched the battle of Bunker Hill from a hilltop with his mother at seven, and accompanied his father's missions to Europe as a boy, serving as secretary to the American envoy in Russia at fourteen. He was minister to the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia and Britain, and negotiated the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812. As Monroe's secretary of state from 1817 he acquired Florida from Spain, fixed the border with British North America along the 49th parallel, and drafted the substance of the Monroe Doctrine. The election of 1824 went to the House of Representatives, which chose him over Andrew Jackson although Jackson had more popular and electoral votes; Jackson's supporters called it a corrupt bargain and the charge crippled the presidency that followed. Adams proposed national roads, a university and an observatory, and Congress refused him nearly everything. Jackson beat him in 1828. He then did something no other former president has done: he returned to the House and served there for seventeen years, where he fought the gag rule that barred antislavery petitions until it fell in 1844, and argued the Amistad case before the Supreme Court and won. He collapsed at his desk in the House and died two days later. He kept a diary for nearly seventy years, one of the fullest personal records in American history, and swam naked in the Potomac most mornings as president. He was also the last president before Lincoln to take a consistently antislavery position in office.

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