America at 250 Series
John Quincy Adams was born in 1767 in Braintree, Massachusetts, the son of a revolutionary and a remarkable mother. At ten, he watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from a hilltop with Abigail. At fourteen, he was secretary to an American envoy in Russia. He had been raised to serve, and he never quite learned to do anything else.
He spoke seven languages. He negotiated the treaty that ended the War of 1812. As secretary of state, he drafted the words that became the Monroe Doctrine, and he bought Florida from Spain.
In 1824, he won the presidency in a bargain the country never forgave, and he lost it four years later to Andrew Jackson. Most men would have gone home.
He went to Congress instead, and for seventeen years he fought the slave power from the House floor — until he collapsed at his desk, in 1848.
