John Quincy Adams

Official White House portrait of John Quincy Adams[edit]
Administration and Cabinet

OFFICE NAME TERM

President John Quincy Adams 1825–1829
Vice President John C. Calhoun 1825–1829

Secretary of State Henry Clay 1825–1829
Secretary of the Treasury Richard Rush 1825–1829
Secretary of War James Barbour 1825–1828
Peter Porter 1828–1829
Attorney General William Wirt 1825–1829
Postmaster General John McLean 1825–1829
Secretary of the Navy Samuel Southard 1825–1829




Supreme Court appointments
Robert Trimble – 1826
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States admitted to the Union
None


Election of 1828
Main article: United States presidential election, 1828
After the election of Adams in 1825 [1] [2], Jackson resigned from his senate seat. For four years he worked hard, with help from his supporters in Congress, to defeat Adams in the Presidential election of 1828. The campaign was very much a personal one. Although neither candidate personally campaigned, their political followers organized many campaign events. Both candidates were rhetorically attacked in the press. This reached a low point when Jackson's wife, Rachel, was accused of bigamy. She died a few weeks after the elections and Jackson never forgave Adams for this.

In the end, Adams lost the elections in a landslide. He won exactly the same states that his father had won in the election of 1800: the New England states, New Jersey, and Delaware. Jackson won everything else except for New York, which gave 16 of his electoral votes to Adams.


Later life
After his defeat Adams didn't attend the inauguration of his successor Andrew Jackson, just as his father John Adams did 28 years earlier with Jefferson's in 1801. But rather than retire, he went on to win election as a National Republican and Whig to the House of Representatives, serving from 1831 until his death. He was asked by his neighbors to run, and he agreed under two conditions: he would never solicit their votes and he would follow his conscience at all times.

In congress, he was chairman of the Committee on Manufactures (for the 22nd through 26th, 28th and 29th Congresses), the Committee on Indian Affairs (for the 27th Congress) and the Committee on Foreign Affairs (also for the 27th Congress). He was an important antislavery voice in congress.

In 1834 he was an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Massachusetts. In 1841, Adams represented the Amistad Africans in the Supreme Court of the United States and successfully argued that the Africans, who had seized control of a Spanish ship where they were being held as illegal slaves, should not be taken to Cuba but should be returned home as free people.

Adams died of a cerebral hemorrhage on February 23, 1848, in the Speaker's Room inside the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.. His interment was in the family burial ground at Quincy, and he was subsequently reinterred after his wife's death in a family crypt in the United First Parish Church across the street, where his tomb can be viewed today. His parents are also interred there.

Adams's son Charles Francis Adams also pursued a career in diplomacy and politics.

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