John Quincy Adams

On July 11, 1767, in Braintree, Province of Massachusetts Bay, John Quincy Adams was born into the political household of John and Abigail Adams. He traveled in Europe during the Revolution, studied at Leiden, graduated from Harvard College in 1787, and entered the law in Boston. Diplomatic training began so early in his life that foreign service became the natural foundation of his career.

Adams served as minister to the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain, negotiated the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, and then became secretary of state under James Monroe. In that office he helped shape the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 and the diplomatic framework associated with the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. After a single presidential term from 1825 to 1829, he returned to the House of Representatives and spent the 1830s and 1840s fighting the gag rule and speaking against the expansion of slavery.

Adams linked the diplomacy of the Early Republic to the sectional politics that preceded the Civil War. His long antislavery service in the House influenced later congressional resistance to the gag rule and helped prepare the constitutional politics that surrounded abolition and the Civil War amendments.