Published February 22, 2025
By Kent Hull
When John Quincy Adams left the White House after his defeat in the election of 1828, he thought his public life had ended. His wife, Louisa Catherine Adams, welcomed the change because she disliked the partisan and personal conflict in Washington. She had always preferred Massachusetts. Louisa was born in London and grew up in Britain and France. Her father was an American merchant and served as American consul to Great Britain. She met John Quincy in London while he served as US minister to the Netherlands, then to Portugal. The couple married in 1797.
After diplomatic service in Prussia, they returned to Massachusetts in 1801. He was appointed as the first U. S. minister to Russia and served as U. S. minister to Britain. He subsequently served in the Massachusetts Senate, then the U.S. Senate, and as President Monroe’s Secretary of State until 1825. A stateman who spoke several languages, he negotiated the treaty that ended the War of 1812 and authored the Monroe Doctrine.
After his 1828 defeat, John Quincy intended to write and revisit classical literature, just as his father had done in his post-presidential years. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson reconciled their political differences and left a remarkable written correspondence with each other in those years. Both Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day, July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of American independence.
Andrew Jackson’s election marked the beginning of the modern Democratic Party. John Quincy’s Federalists, more a loose association of allies than a political party, faded and evolved into the Whig Party, which continued the Federalists’ support for strong central government. In the mid-1850’s, the Whigs evolved further into the modern Republican Party, electing Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860.
Massachusetts voters opposed to Jackson supported John Quincy’s election to Congress in 1830. He ran against the advice of his wife, Louisa, and his son, Charles Francis, being only one of two presidents to return to public office after their presidency. He was 64 when he entered the House of Representatives.
His principal achievement in the House was to defend the right of citizens petitioning members of Congress to support or oppose legislation. The petitions of antislavery advocates led Southern congressmen to stop the groups’ lobbying by imposing a “gag rule,” which prevented members of the House from discussing the petitions during congressional proceedings. John Quincy challenged the rule, pointing to the First Amendment to the Constitution and its guarantee of the people’s right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Adams’s later years are best remembered for his advocacy in the Supreme Court Amistad case. A group of African adults and children had been captured in 1839 by slave traders in what is now Sierra Leone. The hostages were transported to Cuba, then transferred to a second ship, the Amistad, a vessel engaged in illegally importing slaves to the United States. Federal law had a prohibited the slave trade after 1808.
While the Amistad had searched for a place to land the hostages on the eastern American coast, they revolted and killed most of the crew. They ordered the pilot to return them to Africa, but he guided the ship to the Connecticut shore, where an American naval ship seized the vessel. The pilot and one other surviving crew member accused the hostages of murder. They were brought before a federal court. Antislavery groups intervened and asked John Quincy to represent the hostages as the case proceeded to the Supreme Court. The issue in the case was the hostages’ legal status. If they were slaves, they were “chattels,” mere personal property under common law. A maritime law considered them to be cargo which could be sold. So argued the administration of President Martin VanBuren, a position endorsed by Southern congressmen and shared by many of their constituents whose votes VanBuren sought in the upcoming 1840 election.
As lawyers for the hostages, John Quincy and his co-counsel, Roger Baldwin, faced a court over which Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a Maryland slaveholder, presided. Perhaps in recognition of John Quincy’s stature as a former President, the court allowed the arguments to continue for days. In modern Supreme Court practice, each side is usually permitted only thirty minutes, which includes questions from the justices. Recently Chief Justices have stopped lawyers in mid-sentence because their time had expired.
John Quincy first apologized to the court because he had decades earlier ceased practicing law. He then argued the hostages had been free people in Africa before being kidnapped and therefore were entitled to resist their captivity. They had not mutinied on the ship, but justifiably regained freedom by taking control of the Amistad from their captors.
He emphasized that the Supreme Court alone should decide the legal question presented, regardless of political considerations influencing the VanBuren administration. Justice Joseph Story’s opinion for the court agreed (with one justice dissenting) and ordered the hostages released.
Antislavery groups arranged their return to their homeland. The 1997 movie Amistad, directed by Steven Spielberg, dramatized the case, with Anthony Hopkins portraying John Quincy.After that legal victory, he resumed his congressional duties. He saw President Martin Van Buren (who had been a fierce and effective opponent of John Quincy’s presidency) defeated for reelection in 1840 by the Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison.
In Congress John Quincy opposed the Mexican War and subsequent admission of Texas to the Union because the new state expanded the territory permitting slavery. He collapsed while speaking on the floor of the House of Representatives and died on February 23, 1848.
His wife, Louisa, lived until 1852. Charles Francis, the only surviving son of the Adams’ four children, served as a congressman and a diplomat. In 1844 he traveled west and visited Nauvoo, Illinois where he met Joseph Smith. He was given Emma Smith’s Book of Mormon. According to his diary, he was unimpressed with Smith and called him a mountebank. He remained active in reform politics throughout the later nineteenth century.
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, Charles Francis. Diary 1807-1886, Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964.
Adams, John Quincy., The diary of John Quincy Adams, 1794-1845 : American diplomacy and political, social, and intellectual life from Washington to Polk. Edited by Allan Nevins, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951.
Bemis, Samuel Flagg. John Quincy Adams and the Union, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956.
Lawrence, Benjamin N. Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.
Remini, Robert V. John Quincy Adams, New York: Times Books, 2002.
United States v. Schooner Amistad, 40 U.S. 518 (1841), Findlaw: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/40/518.html.
