john quincy adams

#6 FACTS:

--Adams was the son of President John Adams and Abigail Adams, and was the first President whose father had also been President (George W Bush and George H.W. Bush being the other example to date). The name "Quincy" came from Abigail's maternal grandfather, Colonel John Quincy.

As a diplomat, Adams was involved in many international negotiations, and helped formulate the Monroe Doctrine as Secretary of State. Historians agree he was one of the great diplomats in American history.

--In the election of 1824 Andrew Jackson won, although narrowly, pluralities of the popular and electoral votes, but not the necessary majority of electoral votes. Under the terms of the 12th Amendment, the presidential election was thrown to the House of Representatives to vote on the top three candidates: Jackson, Adams, and William Crawford. Henry Clay had come in fourth place and thus was ineligible, but he retained considerable power and influence as Speaker of the House.

Clay's personal dislike for Jackson and the similarity of his views to Adams' position on tariffs and internal improvements caused him to throw his support to Adams, who was elected by the House on February 9, 1825, on the first ballot. Adams' victory shocked Jackson, who had gained the plurality of the electoral and popular votes and fully expected to be elected President. When Adams appointed Clay as Secretary of State—the position that Adams and his three predecessors had held before becoming President—Jacksonian Democrats were outraged, and claimed that Adams and Clay had struck a "corrupt bargain". This contention overshadowed Adams' term and greatly contributed to Adams' loss to Jackson four years later.

--Adams was elected a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts after leaving office, the only President ever to do so, serving for the last 17 years of his life with far greater success than he had achieved in the presidency. In the House he became a leading opponent of slavery and argued that if a civil war ever broke out the President could abolish slavery by using his war powers, which Abraham Lincoln partially did during the American Civil War in the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. Deeply troubled by slavery, Adams correctly predicted the dissolution of the Union on the issue, though the series of bloody slave insurrections he foresaw never came to pass.

--Much of Adams' youth was spent accompanying his father overseas. John Adams served as an American envoy to France from 1778 until 1779 and to the Netherlands from 1780 until 1782, and the younger Adams accompanied his father on these journeys. At some point during his stay in the Netherlands, John Quincy was secretly kidnapped by Dutch elves and replaced with a doppleganger, and in fact this fey doppleganger remains the only fully non-human U.S. President to date (Martin Van Buren was mostly human).