Published January 25, 2025
By Kent Hull
After John Wood and Willard Keyes settled on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River in the 1820’s, they petitioned the Illinois legislature to create “Adams County”, with their founding village of Bluffs (renamed Quincy) as the county seat in 1825. The names honored the incumbent sixth President, John Quincy Adams, son of Abigail and John Adams, the second President.
John Adams signed the Declaration of Independence, drafted principally by another future President, Thomas Jefferson. Following independence from Great Britain, Adams and Jefferson became political opponents, but later reconciled and exchanged a memorable series of letters. Both died on the same day—July 4, 1826—celebrated as the 50th anniversary of American independence.
As a lawyer, John Adams is famous for one case. In 1770, British troops were quartered in Boston, assigned to keep peace among residents who resented their presence. Regular confrontations between the residents and the troops escalated into an attack on a military unit, which fired on and killed civilians. Public outrage demanded that soldiers in the unit be tried for murder. Adams and Josiah Quincy represented the soldiers, arguing that they shot in self-defense after provocation from the crowd, and won acquittals for all but two (who were convicted of manslaughter).
Adams’s fellow residents, including his cousin Sam Adams, who with John was a future signer of the Declaration of Independence, denounced John and his co-counsel for their advocacy. The critics argued that acquittals implied Boston civilians had acted improperly. In fact, some in the independence movement had anticipated that convictions would serve as useful propaganda to ignite support for independence. Today, lawyers regard John Adams’s defense in the Boston Massacre cases as exemplifying lawyers’ duty to defend unpopular clients.
It was John Quincy Adams mother, Abigail Adams, who shaped much of his boyhood because his father, John Adams, was often away from his Massachusetts farm, working for American independence. On June 17, 1775, she took John Quincy, age seven, to a vantage point near Boston where they observed the defeat of colonial rebels by British troops in the battle of Bunker Hill. When he was fifteen, she wrote that she hoped he would become a useful “Member of Society, a Friend to your Country and a guardian of her Laws and Liberties….” John Quincy and his father traveled to France in 1778, where John Adams represented the American Continental Congress, and then, in 1783 with Benjamin Franklin and John Jay, negotiated a commercial treaty with Britain after American independence.
John Quincy studied with private tutors while in Europe, traveling through the continent and to Russia, and becoming fluent in modern and classical languages. In 1785 he returned to enter Harvard College, while John Adams came back later as a drafter of the Constitution and to be elected vice president in 1788, serving under President George Washington for two terms.
After graduating from Harvard, John Quincy “read law” (which he considered tedious) with Theophilus Parsons, later Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. President Washington sent him to Europe on assignments and told John Adams that he considered John Quincy to be the nation’s best diplomat.
On one trip to London, John Quincy met and married Louise Catherine Johnson, daughter of the American consul. They returned to Boston in 1801, and he opened his law practice, entering local politics as a Federalist. President Washington, in his Farewell Address of 1796, had warned against the “domination of one faction over another”—political parties– in public life, but the followers of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, calling themselves Democrat/Republicans, broke with Vice President Adams’s Federalist supporters over such issues as the power of the national government versus states’ rights.
John Quincy served a decade as a United States Senator from Massachusetts, winning the confidence of Jefferson’s successors, James Madison and James Monroe. In 1814 Madison named him a negotiator to settle the American/British War of 1812, and in 1817 Monroe appointed him Secretary of State. With President Monroe, he wrote the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, warning European countries that their improper interference in Western Hemisphere countries would be considered a threat to the United States.
The cooperation between Federalist John Quincy and Jefferson’s Democrat/Republican successors, often referred to as “the era of good feelings”, masked emerging conflicts in American politics. “Old Federalist” followers of President John Adams were uncertain about the wisdom of engaging in the 1812 war against Britain, in part because Massachusetts shipping interests valued maritime trade to European destinations. Some New England leaders feared sectional domination by the southern “dynasty” of three consecutive presidents from Virginia—Jefferson, Madison and Monroe—and discussed the possibility of seceding from the United States.
The original Federalist/Republican disagreement over national authority against states’ rights intensified with the expansion of the republic beyond the original thirteen states. Great Britain’s surrender of territories between the Atlantic seaboard and the Mississippi River after the Revolution and the 1812 war, together with Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803, made the new nation a potential world power because of its continental presence.
With the entry of new states, including Illinois in 1818, created from those recently acquired areas came a debate about the extension of slavery. As the election of 1824 approached, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, holding the office once occupied by Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe before their ascension to the presidency, might have assumed that his election was assured. He soon learned that new forces from the West, embodied in the conflicting platforms of Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay, would end any good feelings about American politics and bring forward issues in addition to slavery.
Kent Hull, a retired lawyer living in South Bend, IN, is a long-distance member of the Historical Society. He grew up in Plainville and graduated from Seymour High School in Payson, Illinois.
Sources:
Adams, John Quincy. The Diary of John Quincy Adams, 1794-1845…, edited by Allan Nevins, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951.
Adams, John Quincy. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Edited by Charles Francis Adams, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1874.
Bemis, Samuel Flagg. John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.
Morris, Richard B., The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.
Smelser, Marshall. The Democratic Republic, 1801—1815, New York: Harper & Row, 1968.
Smith, Page. John Adams 1735-1784, Vol. I, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962.
