John Quincy Adams

by Harlow Unger

  That infant was the second child and first son of John and Abigail Adams, of Braintree, Massachusetts, a farming community about six miles south of Boston, later renamed Quincy. At birth, John Quincy was the most recent in a long line of illustrious forebears who helped shaped the destiny of the English-speaking world. The first recorded Quincy sailed with William the Conqueror across the English Channel from Normandy in 1066 to crush English forces at Hastings. A century and a half later, in 1215, Saer de Quincy, Earl of Winchester, rode to Runnymede and helped force King John to sign the Magna Carta, which guaranteed English freemen the right to trial by a jury of their peers.

  Subsequently, the Quincy and Adams clansa produced a host of distinguished noblemen, churchmen, physicians, and scientists—among the last, Thomas Boylston, a renowned English surgeon who emigrated to Massachusetts with his son, Zabdiel Boylston, who pioneered smallpox inoculation in the New World. The Adams family also included ordinary craftsmen, of course—among them, John Alden, who may have been the least significant until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow rhymed him into poetic immortality in The Courtship of Miles Standish. A cooper on the Mayflower , Alden caught Longfellow’s odic fancy by wedding Priscilla Mullins. John and Priscilla Alden’s granddaughter would marry Joseph Adams Jr., great-grandfather of John Quincy Adams. His son, Joseph Adams III, tied his family’s academic future to Harvard College, becoming the first of a long line of Adamses to study there. The second was John Adams, John Quincy’s father, who graduated in 1755 at the age of twenty.

  Harvard was the first college established in the New World, and within a decade of its founding in 1636, it had evolved into more than a mere college: it was a “school of prophets”—a divinity school engaged in “a noble and necessary work”6 to create and lead a new sort of nation conceived in liberty. From the first, its students and graduates were extraordinaries—and Americans recognized them as such.b Their motto was “Veritas”—a “truth,” enhanced by the divine, that gave Harvard men the wisdom of both God and man to transform America’s wilderness into a Paradise.

  Although John Adams’s parents hoped he would enter the ministry after Harvard, the school broadened its curriculum to include secular studies, and he opted for teaching at first, then law. After winning admission to the bar, he settled in Braintree to practice law, fell in love, and, on October 25, 1764, married Abigail Quincy Smith. Abigail was the second of three daughters of the Reverend William Smith of nearby Weymouth and granddaughter of Colonel John Quincy, longtime Speaker of the Massachusetts colonial legislature. Unlike the illustrious Quincys, many of the Smiths lived in the shadows of humanity—victims of genetically transmitted mental illnesses, including alcohol abuse, that usually led to premature death. Abigail Smith’s brother, William Smith Jr., suddenly and inexplicably abandoned his wife and children to poverty and plunged into humanity’s gutter—whoring, drinking, and finally dying at an early age. In raising her own children, Abigail Adams resolved to instill in them principles of self-discipline and prayer to protect them from alcohol and other sins. “Nothing,” she believed, “bound the human mind but religion.”7

  Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, America’s second President, and mother of John Quincy Adams, America’s sixth President. Her family’s roots stretched back to the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. (NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE, ADAMS NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)

  Deprived of formal education as a woman, she more than compensated by devouring the books in her father’s huge library of religious and literary works, including Shakespeare’s plays, the English poets, and a wide range of classical tales that gave her a broader education than that of most men. Indeed, Harvard’s young John Adams found Abigail more than an intellectual equal as well as a romantic match. Nine months after she married John Adams, she gave birth to their first child, a daughter they named Abigail but called “Nabby” to distinguish her from the senior Abigail. Two years later, on July 11, 1767, Abigail’s second child was born—a son they named John Quincy Adams, after the infant’s father and maternal grandfather.

  The ninety-five-acre Adams family farm, in Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts, with the birthplace of John Quincy Adams on the left, the birthplace of his father, John Adams, to its immediate right, and John and Abigail Adams’s retirement “mansion” on the far right. In the rear is Penn’s Hill, where Abigail Adams took seven-year-old John Quincy to witness the Battle of Bunker’s Hill. (NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE, ADAMS NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)

  At John Quincy’s birth, his father’s reputation had spread far beyond Braintree. “The disputes [with Britain] grew,” John Quincy explained, and “agitated no household more than that in which this boy was growing up. My father, from pursuing a professional life, began to feel himself impelled more and more into the vortex of controversy. . . . My mother’s temperament readily caught the rising spirit of popular enthusiasm and communicated it to me.”8

  A move from Braintree to Boston put John Quincy’s father close to the state’s most influential clients—and at the center of popular anger over British rule. “America is on the point of bursting into flames,” Boston’s Sons of Liberty warned,9 and on March 5, 1770, two years after John Quincy’s family had settled in town, an angry mob transformed the Sons of Liberty’s warning into the Boston Massacre, with British troops killing two men and wounding eight, two of whom quickly died from their injuries.

  To prevent disorder from spreading, the royal governor ordered the soldiers and commanding officer arrested and charged with murder. He thwarted accusations of favoritism by naming John Quincy’s father and his mother’s cousin Josiah Quincy—two outspokenly anti-British lawyers—to defend the soldiers in an out-of-town trial before a jury of farmers, none of them Tories. Motivated in part by political ambition, Adams gambled that, win or lose, the case would show him as a man of stature who eschewed hatred in favor of the law and the right of every free Englishman to a trial by a jury of his peers. Fearing reprisals against his family, he sent his wife, who had just given birth to their second son, Charles, to the safety of their Braintree farm with their children. He need not have worried. After his brilliant summation, the jury unanimously acquitted the soldiers, saying they had legitimately defended themselves against unprovoked mob assault.

  His courtroom triumph gained John Quincy’s father national and international fame—and election as Boston’s representative in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. The trial also ended mob protests; the troops retired, and with Boston at peace, the Adams family moved back to town, where Abigail gave birth to their third son, Thomas Boylston Adams.

  Although street disorders ended for a while, new import duties provoked more smuggling, and by the end of 1773, protests against a British tea tax climaxed with a mob boarding three ships in Boston Harbor and dumping more than three hundred chests of tea, worth about $1 million, overboard. British troops returned to Boston, declared martial law, and closed the city to commerce, threatening to keep it closed until Bostonians either repaid the East India Company for the vandalized tea—or starved.

  “Boston became a walled and beleaguered town,” John Quincy recounted. “Among the first fruits of war, was the expulsion of my father’s family from their peaceful abode in Boston to take refuge in his and my native town of Braintree.”10

  Outraged by the British threat to starve the innocent with the guilty, colonial leaders elsewhere convened a Continental Congress in the fall of 1774 to respond, and after ensuring his family’s safety in Braintree, John Quincy’s father rode off to Philadelphia with four other Massachusetts delegates. Although the First Continental Congress ended indecisively in late October, orders arrived in the spring for British troops to crush the rebellion and “arrest the principle actors and abettors in the Congress,”11 including John Adams. John Quincy never forgot the terror he felt when he heard of the threat to arrest his father: “My mother with her infant children, dwelt every hour of the day and of the night liable to be b
utchered in cold blood, or taken and carried into Boston as hostages by any foraging or marauding detachment of men.”12

  In May 1775, John Quincy’s father again left for Philadelphia and a Second Continental Congress, where forty-three-year-old George Washington arrived in uniform dressed for war. At six foot three, he towered over other delegates—especially forty-year-old John Adams, who, even his wife Abigail conceded, was “short, thick and fat.”13 Nonetheless, their mutual interest in farming gave Adams and Washington common ground to form a firm friendship that often included dining and attending church services together.

  On June 2, a letter from Dr. Joseph Warren, a close family friend of the Adamses and president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, urged the Continental Congress to take control of disorganized New England militiamen laying siege to Boston by appointing a commander in chief. “The sword should, in all free states, be subservient to the civil powers,” Warren argued. “We tremble at having an army (although consisting of our own countrymen) established here without a civil power to provide for and control them.”14

  In a more dire letter, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband of the chaos engulfing Braintree, with their home a “scene of confusion—soldiers coming in for lodging, for breakfast, for supper, for drink, &c. &c.”

  Sometimes refugees from Boston tired and frightened seek an asylum for a day or night, a week—you can hardly imagine how we live. . . . I wish you were nearer to us. We know not what a day will bring forth nor what distress one hour may throw us into.15

  John Adams, second President of the United States and father of John Quincy Adams, the nation’s sixth President. He had been a prominent lawyer before attending the first two Continental Congresses, and his Thoughts on Government served as the basis for constitutions in nine of the thirteen states after independence. (AFTER A PORTRAIT BY JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY; NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE, ADAMS NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)

  Visibly upset by Abigail’s letter, John Adams replied by return, “Oh that I was a soldier! I will be. I am reading military books. Everybody must and will and shall be a soldier. . . . My dear Nabby and Johnny and Charley and Tommy are never out of my thoughts. God Bless, preserve and prosper them.”16

  A few days later, John Adams reacted to Dr. Warren’s warning and asked Congress to draft patriot forces besieging Boston into a Continental Army and appoint a supreme commander. Congress agreed, and again Adams rose to speak. He had mingled discreetly with delegates from middle and southern colonies and discovered “a jealousy against a New England Army under the command of a New England General,” who, if he defeated the British, might give law to the other states.

  “I had no hesitation to declare,” he responded, “that I had but one gentleman in mind for that important command, and that was a gentleman from Virginia . . . whose skill and experience as an officer, whose independent fortune, great talents, and excellent universal character, would command the approbation of all the colonies better than any other person in the Union.”17 Two days later, Boston’s John Hancock, the president of Congress, wrote to Dr. Joseph Warren, “The Congress here have appointed George Washington, Esq., General and Commander-in-Chief, of the Continental Army.”18 As Hancock penned his inimitable signature, however, Warren already lay dead on the field of battle at Breed’s Hill, on the Charlestown peninsula opposite Boston.

  Like Boston, Charlestown sat in Boston Bay on what was nearly an island, connected to the mainland by a narrow neck. Two hills dominated the neck, Bunker’s Hill, as it was then called, near the mainland, and the smaller Breed’s Hill, nearer the water. Warren had gone to Bunker’s Hill to warn the commander of ammunition shortages and joined the troops behind a makeshift fortification on Breed’s Hill.

  When she heard the first cannon blasts, Abigail Adams shuddered, then suppressed her fears of running into British soldiers and took seven-year-old John Quincy to a hilltop behind their home in Braintree, where they watched a battle unfold across the bay. By day’s end, the battle had turned into a slaughter. The first British troops to land had set Charlestown aflame, while 2,400 of their comrades swarmed up the hillside like ants—only to topple by the hundreds under a rain of American fire from above.

  “The town all in flames around them,” Abigail wrote to her husband, “and the heat from the flames so intense as scarcely to be borne . . . and the wind blowing the smoke in their faces . . . the reinforcements not able to get to them.”19

  An 1830 map of Boston Harbor shows Quincy Bay at the bottom, with the site of President John Quincy Adams’s home indicated in small print.

  Seven-year-old John Quincy and his mother watched a second wave of British troops surge upward over their fallen comrades—only to fall back again, regroup, and charge a third time, tripping over lifeless bodies, sprawling to the ground into pools of blood and torn flesh, then crawling upwards on their hands and knees until enough reached the summit to silence the few patriot arms not out of ammunition. One thousand dead British soldiers covered the hillside; 100 dead patriots and 267 wounded lay on the hilltop. John Quincy said the battle and the carnage it left made “an impression in my mind” that haunted him the rest of his life.

  Seven-year-old John Quincy Adams witnessed the Battle of Bunker’s Hill with his mother from a distant hilltop. Nearly 270 patriots perished, including Dr. Joseph Warren, the Revolutionary War leader and the Adams family’s physician, seen in the throes of death in an engraving by Gotthard von Muller, after the painting by John Trumbull. (NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION)

  “I saw with my own eyes the fires of Charlestown,” he exclaimed, “and heard Britannia’s thunders in the battle . . . and witnessed the tears of my mother and mingled them with my own at the fall of Dr. Joseph Warren, a dear friend of my father, and a beloved physician to me.”20 Only days before his death, Warren had devised an ingenious array of splints to save John Quincy’s forefinger from amputation after the boy had suffered a bad fracture.

  John Quincy watched his mother sob as she described Warren’s death to her husband: “Our dear friend . . . fell gloriously fighting for his country—saying better to die honorably in the field than ignominiously hang upon the gallows.”21

  When the last patriot lay still on Bunker’s Hill and the British had ceased firing, Abigail led her frightened seven-year-old home, and together they recited the Lord’s Prayer. “My mother was the daughter of a Christian clergyman,” John Quincy explained, “and therefore bred in the faith of deliberate detestation of war.”22 Abigail made John Quincy promise to repeat the Lord’s Prayer each morning before rising from his bed—a promise he kept for the rest of his life. The memory of Bunker’s Hill, he said, “riveted my abhorrence of war to my soul . . . with abhorrence of tyrants and oppressors . . . [who] wage war against the rights of human nature and the liberties and rightful interests of my country.”23

  A few days later, Abigail and John Quincy were still shaken by the slaughter at Bunker’s Hill. “We live in continual expectation of hostilities,” she wrote to her husband. “Scarcely a day that does not produce some, but like good Nehemiah . . . we will say unto them, ‘Be not afraid. Remember the Lord who is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your sons, and your daughters, your wives, and your houses.’”24 Her sorrow over Warren’s death soon turned into fury, however, and Abigail declared a personal war against the British. With John Quincy at her side, unwrapping each piece and handing it to her, she melted all her prized pewter spoons in molds to make musket balls for patriot soldiers.

  In the days that followed, John Quincy lived “in unintermitted danger of being consumed with my family in a conflagration kindled by a torch in the same hands which . . . lighted the fires of Charlestown.”25 As dangerous as the threat of fire was that of disease. Eight neighbors died of dysentery, distemper, and other maladies that raged through Braintree and nearby hamlets. Hunger spared no one; soldiers and refugees alike plundered kitchen gardens and root cellars of whatever food they could find, o
ften stealing into the Adams house and terrifying Abigail and the children as they searched.

  “Does every member feel for us?” Abigail pleaded to her husband about his colleagues in Congress. “Can they realize what we suffer?”26

  Despite the disorder, Abigail and John maintained their regular correspondence, each addressing the other as “My Dearest Friend,” with Abigail always conveying their children’s love and “duty” to their father. Whenever his letters arrived, she told him, “You would laugh to see them run upon the sight of a letter—like chickens for a crumb when the hen clucks.”27

  With schools closed and her husband absent, Abigail Adams took command of John Quincy’s education, encouraging him to read ever more books from his father’s library and calling in John Thaxter, a cousin who was studying law in John Adams’s office, to tutor the boy in mathematics and science. When she discovered her son turning pages of some prose or poetry without reading, the resourceful mother complained aloud about her eyes and asked John Quincy to read to her. After writing to her husband about her ruse, John Adams replied that he was “charmed with your amusement with our little Johnny. Tell him I am glad to hear he is so good a boy as to read to his Mamma for her entertainment and to keep out of the company of rude children.”28

  John Adams went on to provide a complete curriculum for “our little Johnny.”

  I am under no apprehension about his proficiency in learning. With his capacities and opportunities he can not fail to acquire knowledge. But let him know that the sentiments of his heart are more important than the furniture of his head. Let him be sure that he possesses the great virtue of temperance, justice, magnanimity, honor, and generosity, and with these added to his parts, he cannot fail to become a wise and great man.