John
Adams
Jr.
Born October 30, 1735
in Braintree, MA
Son of
John Adams and
Susannah Boylston
Brother of
Peter Adams and Elihu Adams
Husband of
Abigail Smith
(Married in
Smith home, Weymouth, MA; 1764)
Father of
Nabby Smith, John Quincy Adams, Susanna Adams, Charles Adams, Thomas Adams and Elizabeth Adams
Died July 4, 1826
in Quincy, MA
About John Adams
John Adams (1735-1826) is most famous as the second president of the United States.
Family Life of John Adams
John Adams was born in Braintree, Massachusetts (now Quincy, MA) to a Puritan deacon and the daughter of a prominent family.
Adams' great-great grandfather, Henry Adams, emigrated circa 1636 from Braintree, England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Henry's 89 grandchildren earned him the modern nickname of "Founder of New England." These descendants produced not only John Adams, but also presidents Calvin Coolidge, Millard Filmore, and William Howard Taft. In terms of contemporaries, John Adams was second cousin to the statesman and colonial leader Samuel Adams.
Adams was highly conscious of his heritage. He considered his Puritan ancestors "bearers of freedom." He also inherited a seal with the Boylston arms on it from his mother. This he loved and used frequently until his presidency, when he thought that the use of heraldry might remind the American public of monarchies.
Adams married in 1764 to a 20-year-old woman named Abigail Smith. They had five children in ten years, and one more, a stillborn daughter, in 1777. Their first son, John Quincy Adams, would become the sixth president of the United States.
Career of John Adams
As a young man, Adams attended Harvard College. His father expected him to become a minister. Instead, Adams graduated in 1755, taught for three years, and then began to study law under James Putnam. He had a talent for interpreting law and for recording observations of the court in action.
He became prominently involved in politics in 1765 as an opponent of the Stamp Act. In 1770, he won election to legislative office in the Massachusetts General Court. He later served as a Massachusetts representative to the First (1774) and the Second (1775-1778) Continental Congresses, as ambassador to Great Britain (1785-1788) and to the Netherlands (1782-1788), and as Vice President under George Washington from 1789 to 1797.
Adams found the role of Vice President to be frustrating. He wrote to Abigail that, "My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." [1]
After George Washington stepped down, Americans narrowly elected John Adams, a Federalist, president over his Democratic-Republican opponent, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson became Adams's Vice President. In 1800, Jefferson finally won the presidential vote, and Adams retired to private life in 1801 when his term of office expired.
Footnotes
- ↑ http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/johnadams/ WhiteHouse.gov Biography of John Adams
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