John Quincy Adams

A magisterial journey through the epic life and transformative times of John Quincy Adams

In this masterful biography, historian Randall B. Woods peels back the many layers of John Quincy’s long life, exposing a rich and complicated family saga and a political legacy that transformed the American Republic.

Born the first son of John and Abigail Adams, he was pressured to follow in his father’s footsteps in both law and politics. His boyhood was spent amid the furor of the American Revolution, and as a teen he assisted his father on diplomatic missions in Europe, hobnobbing with monarchs and statesmen, dining with Ben Franklin, sitting by Voltaire at the opera. He received a world-class education, becoming fluent in Latin, Greek, German, and French. His astonishing intellect and poise would lead to a diplomatic career of his own, in which he'd help solidify his fledgling nation’s standing in the world.

He was intertwined with every famous American of his day, from Washington to Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, Jackson, Calhoun, Clay, and Webster. He was on stage, frequently front and center, during the Revolutionary Era, the fractious birth of American party politics, the War of 1812, the Era of Good Feelings, and the peak of Continental Expansion. It was against this backdrop that he served as an ambassador, senator, secretary of state, and, unhappily, as president. The driving force behind both the Transcontinental Treaty and the Monroe Doctrine, this champion of Manifest Destiny spent the last years of his life fighting against the annexation of Texas because it would facilitate the spread of slavery.

This deeply researched, brilliantly written volume delves into John Quincy’s intellectual pursuits and political thought; his loving, yet at times strained, marriage to Louisa Catherine Johnson, whom he met in London; his troubling relationships with his three sons; and his fiery post-presidency rebirth in Congress as he became the chamber’s most vocal opponent of slavery.“A historian delves into letters and diary entries to craft this thorough biography of the sixth president of the United States, from the Enlightenment education imparted on him by his father to his contribution to the Monroe Doctrine for U.S. policy abroad.”
—The New York Times

“Randall Woods gives us a thorough and appropriately cerebral account of Adams—a man who performed his share of portentous deeds.... Mr. Woods doesn’t write tales of heroes—even flawed ones—and villains. Instead he portrays human beings: men like Adams, who, despite personal shortcomings, stood up under adversity for important principles when it counted most.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“John Quincy Adams gives the sixth president's life the sweep and scope it deserves.”
—Associated Press

“Through wonderful prose and a deft blend of primary sources, Woods captures the complexities of John Quincy Adams’ sense of purpose and ego, his naked ambition alongside his patriotic need to serve, and his sincere devotion to God’s providence interwoven with his self-importance. It makes for great, and inspirational, reading.”
—Law & Liberty

“Woods writes with great authority... He has enormous admiration for his subject.”
—The New York Sun

“Informative, entertaining, and insightful... This magisterial biography rightly places John Quincy Adams at the forefront of great American statesmen.”
—The New York Journal of Books

“This splendid biography is a genuine Life and Times story of a remarkable American who served his country for more than a half century as diplomat, senator, secretary of state, president, public intellectual, and in a unique post-presidential career as gadfly of the slave power in Congress.  Randall Woods skillfully interweaves the narrative of these events with intimate accounts of Adams' personal and family life in a warmly human manner.”
—James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“Randall Woods’ John Quincy Adams: A Man for the Whole People is a real treasure. Stretching from the American Revolution to the Mexican-American War, Woods provides a fascinating portrait of John Quincy Adams—a man known for his presidency and later abolitionism but little known for his romantic temperament and sociability. Woods’ true passion for John Quincy comes through in his selected anecdotes and eloquent descriptions, articulating a comprehensive image of the life of the sixth president. From narrating his studies at Harvard to his uphill fight against the gag rule, Woods highlights John Quincy in a new light, one that underscores his relatability to, connectivity with, and importance in the present moment. Woods’ volume is an insightful read and a tour de force.”
—Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prize winning author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“Beautifully written biographies are rare gems, and Randall Woods’s John Quincy Adams is truly one of the most exquisite. In this contemporary moment when our democracy feels so fragile, and when the question of what defines us a nation—what will make us the most egalitarian, the most just—feels so pressing, this vibrant and rich look at the life of a man who was at the very center of an earlier so-similar moment in our nation’s past is sobering, hopeful, and needed.”
—Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy

“Masterly and magisterial, a compelling, complex, deeply researched and engagingly-written modern biography of John Quincy Adams that brings to life not only an American political dynasty but also a time and a world at the vital moment of the creation of American state and power.”
—Simon Sebag Montefiore, New York Times bestselling author of The World: A Family History of Humanity

“Long hidden behind a mask of his own making, America's sixth president John Quincy Adams emerges in Randall Woods's masterful biography as privately passionate, obsessed with the presidency, and eager to honor his founding father and to meet the high expectancy of his demanding mother. A master of diplomacy, a disaster at popular politics, Quincy Adams devotes a long public life to upholding the principles of the Declaration of Independence while struggling with the contradictions of the Constitution. This tell-all, intimate portrait of a president and his family provides a deeply-researched, insightful panorama of the early nation for readers curious about the origins of American politics.”
—Willard Sterne Randall, author of The Founders’ Fortunes

“Intensively readable... A tremendous history lesson through the life of this insuppressible voice for liberty and justice.”
—Kirkus, starred reviewRandall Woods is a John A. Cooper Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, where he has taught since 1971. His books include LBJ: Architect of American Ambition and Fulbright: A Biography, which won the Robert H. Ferrell Prize.1

The Adamses of Braintree

John Quincy Adams was a child of the Enlightenment, of the American Revolution, and, perhaps most important, of John and Abigail Adams. Highly intelligent, public-spirited, intellectually curious, and intensely ambitious, the Adamses were a formidable couple. Born British, they would play a leading role in the Revolution and then in imagining and shaping the republic that emerged from it. John and Abigail would become among the best-known Americans of their generation: he the coauthor of the Constitution and second president of the United States, and she-through her voluminous correspondence-a voice for women's rights and a noted commentator on life and letters. They knew virtually every American of prominence during the Revolutionary Era and the Early Republic.

John Quincy would both reflect and transcend his famous parents. While they were alive, they would be their eldest son's most intimate confidants. Their formidable moral and intellectual universe would be his touchstone. John Quincy was molded by his parents' fierce patriotism; by their religious beliefs, which were both fundamental and discerning; and by their devotion to the country that they helped bring into being. Their history was his, their friends and enemies his. Especially their enemies. In the Adams clan, public service took pride of place only after God and family. When, in 1812, the younger Adams was serving as U.S. minister to Imperial Russia, he experienced profound doubt about a life in politics and diplomacy. He and his family were in extremis, suffering physically from the Russian winter and emotionally from separation from their two eldest sons. An inadvisable and potentially disastrous war between the United States and Great Britain loomed. Perhaps, John Quincy wrote his father, it would be best for him to return home to a life of law and literature. Do not deceive yourself, John wrote back. You are a patriot, both architect and servant of the republic of which you are a citizen. Often, I wish it were not so, the father confided, but it is undeniable that your very soul is intertwined with that of America's. Your country will never leave you be; it will continue to seduce you, disappoint you, thrill you, but, above all, demand everything that you have until your dying day.

The lives of fathers and sons are typically inextricably intertwined, for better or worse. In the case of John and John Quincy Adams, it was surely for the better. From the time he was eleven until he was sixteen, while his father served as minister plenipotentiary to the Netherlands and France during the American Revolution, John Quincy was John's bosom companion. The motherless boy and wifeless man were a solace to each other. During their travels and travails, the boy seemed absolutely secure. When he was not in school, John Quincy accompanied his diplomat father to theatrical performances, dinners, receptions, and even official functions. Given their transience, the only constant in the education of John Quincy was his father, one of the major intellects of his time and a leading figure in the American Enlightenment. As they lived their lives, John and John Quincy nourished each other emotionally and intellectually as one and then the other took his place at the center of national politics and diplomacy. Theirs was a relationship unique in American history.


John Adams was born on October 19, 1735, in Braintree, Massachusetts, to John and Susanna Boylston Adams. John the elder was a farmer and cordwainer by vocation, and a prominent member of the community, serving as a deacon in the local Congregationalist church and holding several offices in the civil government and militia. His great-grandfather Henry Adams had immigrated to Massachusetts Bay Colony from Braintree, Essex, England, around 1638. Susanna, twenty years younger than her husband, was the daughter of a prominent Massachusetts family. The Adamses revered their Puritan forefathers but embraced a more liberal theology that rejected notions of predestination and irredeemable sin. But as John later recalled, his parents “held every species of libertinage in contempt and horror,” continually warning their children against the evils of sexual promiscuity, drunkenness, and sloth.

Young John relished the outdoor life he experienced as a child on the family's fifty-acre farm, but his parents envisioned a larger world for their eldest son. His father found farming laborious and monotonous; both of his grandfathers had attended Harvard College, and they intended that John would follow in their footsteps. The boy attended Braintree's Latin School until his tutors deemed him ready for admission to college. At age fifteen, terrified, he survived the grueling admission interview. Steeped in the classics and in moral and natural philosophy, John graduated in 1755, ranked fourteenth out of his class of twenty-five.

John's parents wanted him to become a minister. He thought otherwise. The ordeal of the Reverend Lemuel Bryant, whose liberal theological views had prompted his conservative congregation to put him on trial in Deacon Adams's parlor, was burned into John's memory. Bryant's persecution aside, the younger Adams had on his own come to have grave doubts concerning the received Calvinist doctrines of New England's Congregationalist establishment. The doctrine of innate human depravity and predestination struck him as spiritually absurd and contrary to the teachings of the New Testament. By his early twenties, he had embraced Unitarianism, whose followers rejected both the trinity and the divinity of Christ. This is not to say that he was not a believer; he was, and his faith in a loving God sustained him through incredible trials and tribulations. The very existence of the universe, its "surprising diversity" amidst "Uniformity," was in itself proof of a Grand Design. He believed that humans were born with an innate moral sense, and that the function of religion was to cultivate and sharpen that sense. "Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company," he would observe to Thomas Jefferson.

But if not the ministry, what then? The law seemed a likely means to achieve a decent living and to play a prominent role in the public life of the colony. But the elder Adams, like many of his class and vocation, regarded attorneys as either shysters or predators, so John accepted a position teaching Latin in Worcester, a town some fifty miles west of Boston. He took an immediate dislike to his new life, and in 1756, he persuaded James Putnam, Worcester's leading lawyer, to tutor him for two years.

Adams's studies completed, his father invited him to return home to Braintree, where at the time there was no practicing attorney. The town was part of the greater Boston legal district, and it was there that the younger Adams would have to be admitted to the bar. The dean of Boston's legal community, Jeremiah Gridley, agreed to examine him. John passed with flying colors. He was duly admitted and hung out his shingle. During 1759 and 1760, John barely scraped by, but he was persistent and so ambitious that his friends could not but laugh at him sometimes. He watched and mimicked Putnam and the renowned James Otis; he read; he observed; he practiced rigid self-discipline, a trait that would remain with him for the rest of his life. He was driven by a "passion for superiority," he once observed of himself, while at the same time he was determined to "subdue every unworthy Passion and treat all men as I wish to be treated by all." Gradually, the professional tide began to turn, and the cases came.

Initially Adams was as unlucky in love as he was in the law. Somewhat shy and socially awkward, he twice fell in love and was twice rejected. But then, in late 1759, he met Abigail Smith. It was not love at first sight. Abigail's father, "a crafty and designing man," put him off. He observed in his diary of Abigail, then barely fifteen, and her sister Mary that they were "Not fond, not frank, not candid." Apparently the Smith sisters had found the young barrister somewhat pompous and had cut him down to size. It would be two years before they met again, but that next time John found Abigail Smith increasingly irresistible.

Abigail was born to the Reverend William Smith and his wife, Elizabeth Quincy Smith, in 1744 at her father's parsonage in Weymouth, a rustic community some fourteen miles southeast of Boston. Smith had married well. The Quincys were among Massachusetts Bay's most distinguished families, their arrival dating back to 1633. Abigail's grandfather had served as the speaker of the colony's House of Representatives during her childhood. The Reverend Smith augmented his meager clerical salary by working two farms, one of which was apparently supplied by the affluent Quincys. To assist him in his labors, he bought four slaves. William and Elizabeth were serious about their religious calling. In 1751, Weymouth was devastated by a diphtheria epidemic that in a year killed a hundred fifty of the town's twelve hundred residents. Elizabeth, accompanied by her six-year-old daughter, Abigail, made the rounds of the bereaved, providing not only consolation but food and clothing.

As she grew, Abigail, an intelligent and intellectually restless girl, became increasingly aware that she was not receiving the same education as the young men of her age. A few Massachusetts academies admitted female students, but William and Elizabeth were not willing to send their daughter away to school. Most young women of the time were educated by their families and received tutelage in nothing more than reading, writing, and simple arithmetic.

As she approached young womanhood, Abigail immersed herself in a group of like-minded and education-hungry peers; she and her companions learned French and discussed contemporary literature. But it was not until the arrival of Richard Cranch that her horizons really began to expand. While courting Mary, Cranch introduced the Smith sisters to fine literature-Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope. It was Cranch who would reintroduce his good friend John Adams to Abigail.

By the spring of 1763, the two were finding it increasingly difficult to be separated. A physical attraction on his part was understandable. At seventeen, Abigail, with olive skin and dark hair and eyes, was growing into a beauty. John, on the other hand, was plain with a round face and an equally round body. But Abigail sensed a kind heart and a noble spirit, sufficient, apparently, to trump his annoying pomposity. In later life she observed that her paramour "confirmed my taste and gave me every indulgence that books could afford." She also perceived in him a common outlook on what it meant to be a human being.

Abigail and her friends were deeply influenced by a new cultural movement known as sensibility. Superficially it meant developing a taste for fine art, fine literature, and fine wine. At a deeper level, it meant acknowledging the universality of empathy as a human trait. A "man of feeling" (the title of a popular novel published in 1771 by Henry Mackenzie) was incapable of hearing about another person's distress and desires without being moved. In part, sensibility was a reaction to John Locke's depiction of infants as clean slates upon which the world wrote their life stories. During the eighteenth century, other thinkers-Adam Smith, for example-insisted that human beings were born with an innate moral sense. This notion would constitute the base upon which John and Abigail Adams's moral and political philosophies would rest. "Humanity obliges us to be affected with the distresses and miseries of our fellow creatures"-even those with whom one was not personally acquainted, Abigail wrote. She and John became not only lovers and friends but soulmates.

In public the couple talked of every subject under the sun. In private they kissed and caressed. Forced to be away on business, John longed for "her fair complexion, her crimson blushes and her million charms and graces." John wanted to propose, but he feared he could not yet support a wife and children. His patron, Jeremiah Gridley, had advised him to "Pursue the law itself rather than the gain of it. . . . I advise you not to marry early." John took the counsel to heart. "[A]lthough my propensity to marriage was ardent enough, I determined I could not indulge it, till I saw a clear prospect of business and profit to support a family without embarrassment." Nevertheless, after some prompting from Abigail, he proposed. There was a short delay while John recovered from the effects of a smallpox inoculation, and the two were married on October 25, 1764. John was twenty-eight and his bride nineteen. Parson Smith presided and completely changed John's earlier bad opinion of him by endowing the couple with a generous sum of money, enough, John later recalled, to purchase "an orchard and very fine piece of land near my paternal house and homestead."

The newlyweds' first residence was a traditional New England saltbox-style structure featuring two stories in front and a single story in back, all covered by a roof sloping from front to rear. The clapboard-sheathed structure boasted two bedrooms on the top floor and a kitchen and a parlor on the bottom. A massive fireplace used for heating and cooking was situated in the middle of the house. The single story in back could accommodate two additional bedrooms. The steeply pitched roof protected the house from the region's heavy snowfalls. On July 14, 1765, Abigail gave birth to the couple's first child, also named Abigail but known henceforth within the family as "Nabby." The baby girl was born eight and a half months after the couple took their wedding vows, meaning that Abigail might have been pregnant at the time of her marriage. In this she was not alone. Despite Puritan New England's frequently expressed fears about sexual licentiousness, fully one-third of the region's brides were with child when they wed. On July 11, 1767, just days before Nabby's second birthday, Abigail delivered a boy, whom she and John named John Quincy, the middle name honoring Abigail's grandfather, who at the time lay dying. John was a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of raising two children in the manner he and his wife thought appropriate. "But what shall we do with this young fry?" John wrote his brother-in-law, Richard Cranch, whose wife, Mary, had also just given birth. "In a little while Johnny must go to college, and Nabby must have fine clothes, aye, and so must Betcy [the Cranch child] too. . . . And very cleverly you and I shall feel when we recollect that we were hard at work . . . and Johnny and Betcy at the same time raking and fluttering away our profits. Aye, and there must be dancing schools and boarding schools and all that, or else, you know, we shall not give the polite education-better not have been born you know than not have polite educations."

Meanwhile, the ties that bound Britain's thirteen American colonies to the mother country were fraying. In 1760, Britain crowned a new king, George III. He and his supporters in the Tory Party managed to maneuver the Whigs, champions of representative government, out of control of Parliament. In 1763, the king named George Grenville, a Whig, his new prime minister. Under his leadership, the British government took the position that the American colonists existed solely for the benefit of the mother country. Whatever rights they enjoyed were the product of Britain's tolerance and generosity. This marked a sharp reversal of policy. Under previous ministries, which had believed that giving the colonial governments and economies the freest possible hand would lead to the prosperity of all, the provincial governments had grown increasingly independent and at times defiant. The French and Indian War-1754 through 1763-had effectively put an end to France's North American empire but had nearly bankrupted Britain. King George and his prime minister-and the Parliament they controlled-believed that the American colonies had benefited most from the war and ought to be taxed to refill the exchequer's coffers. The colonists resisted, declaring that they had done most of the fighting in the Anglo-French conflict, and insisted that they were English citizens. Thus, "no taxation without representation."