The son of America’s second president, John Adams, and his wife Abigail, John Quincy Adams was one of the most cultivated, well-educated people to become president of the United States.  His mother advised him as a ten year old, when he first travelled to Europe with his father, to “improve your understanding for acquiring useful knowledge and virtue, such as will render you an ornament to society, an honour to your country and a blessing to your parents.”

After pursuing much of his boyhood schooling in Europe, John Quincy went to Russia in 1781 as a diplomatic secretary and translator. Two years later he was secretary to his father in Paris during negotiations to end the Revolutionary War.  In addition to his native English, he became fluent in Dutch, French and German and he studied Greek and Russian.  In 1785, Adams returned to Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard.  After practicing law in Boston, he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1802. He led the American delegation to negotiate the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812 and served, at various points in his career, as U.S. Minister to Holland, to Prussia, to Russia and to Great Britain. 

Adams won a bitter election against Andrew Jackson and became the 6^th president of the United States in 1825. Jackson won the popular vote by a large margin, but Congress gave Adams the presidency as the result of a possibly corrupt deal between Adams and House Speaker Henry Clay, who Adams then made his Secretary of State (considered at that time to be a stepping stone to the presidency).  Four years later, in 1829, Jackson reversed the outcome in a rematch and defeated Adams; like his father, John Quincy was a one term president. 

Adams returned to his law practice but eventually ran again for public office and served for the next twenty years in the House of Representatives railing against slavery (he was ahead of his time).  When, in 1839, illegally kidnapped and enslaved Africans staged a successful mutiny aboard the Spanish schooner Amistad off the coast of Long Island and were seized by U.S. authorities, Adams defended them before the Supreme Court and won their release.

John Quincy wrote in a diary daily from his 29^th birthday until his death.  As president, he rose precisely at 5:00 am every morning, made his own fire, read his Bible (he read the Bible cover to cover every year), and took a morning walk and a skinny dip in the Potomac.  Due to his thin physique, he was the first president to wear long trousers, rather than knee britches.  He enjoyed gardening and shooting pool (he planted fruit trees on the White House grounds and had a billiards table installed in the White House).  As for his culinary choices, despite broad exposure to fine dining, he showed little interest in food.  Adams once claimed that “five or six small crackers and a glass of water give me a sumptuous dinner.”  He enjoyed fresh fruit and, like his parents, preferred simple New England fare. 

In 1848 he collapsed in the House of Representatives from a stroke and was carried to the Speaker’s Room where, two days later, he died at the age of 80.