History Week 10 Essay

Information comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Quincy_Adams.

John Quincy Adams was the sixth president of the United States of America, and also served in many political positions in his life time. He was born to John Adams, the second president of the United States, and Abigail Adams on July eleventh, 1767 in Braintree, Massachusetts. He was named after his great-grandfather, Colonel John Quincy, after which Quincy, Massachusetts is named. As a boy, John Quincy Adams did not attend school, but was taught by his cousin James Thax and his father’s law clerk Nathan Rice. Since his father was president and was overseas a lot, John Quincy Adams spent a lot of his childhood accompanying him. In his years overseas, he became fluent s French and Dutch and became familiar with German and other European languages. At the age of twelve, he started a diary that he kept until right before he died. Mainly because of his father, John Quincy Adams starred in classical studies and became very fluent in Latin and in Greek. He went to the first-class college of Harvard and upon entering there he had already translated the philosophers of Virgil, Horace, Plutarch, and Aristotle. In addition to that in six weeks he memorized Greek grammar and translated the New Testament of the Bible. In 1787 he graduated Harvard with a Bachelor of Arts degree, and in 1790 he got his Master of Arts degree from Harvard.

John Quincy Adams began his political career in 1796. He first gained national recognition when he published a series of articles supporting George Washington’s decision to keep America out of the War in France. Soon after, Washington made Adams minister to the Netherlands at the young age of twenty-six in 1793. He would not have probably accepted if his father had not urged him to accept. While at the position of minister to the Netherlands he traveled back and forth from London and The Hague in the Netherlands. While going back and forth, he met and proposed to his wife, Louisa Catherine Johnson, the daughter of a poor American merchant. He married her in the church of All Hallows-by-the-Tower, London. Together they had four children of the names of George Washington, John II, Charles Francis, and Adams was and still is the only president to marry a First Lady born outside of the United States.