John Quincy Adams

Born in 1767, the eldest son of John Adams, he grew up trailing his father through European diplomacy during the Revolution. He built a legal career in Boston before Washington sent him abroad as minister to the Netherlands and Prussia. Recalled by Jefferson in 1801, he won a Senate seat but broke with the Federalists over foreign policy and lost re-election. Madison dispatched him to Russia, then Britain, where he brokered the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812. As Monroe's secretary of state he negotiated the Adams-Onís Treaty that brought Florida into the Union and helped shape the Monroe Doctrine. The 1824 election sent him to the White House after a House vote and a deal with Henry Clay that opponents branded a "corrupt bargain." His presidency stalled; Congress blocked his infrastructure and education plans, and Jackson crushed him in 1828. In 1830 he returned to Washington as a congressman and never left, joining the Whigs and turning his final years into a crusade against slavery, the gag rule, and the Mexican War. At seventy-three he argued the Amistad case before the Supreme Court and won. He died at his desk in the Capitol in 1848.