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What John Quincy Adams Tells Us About One-Term Presidents

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John Quincy Adams

If President Barack Obama loses the election in November–and it should be noted that the latest polls find the president widening his lead in swing states such as Ohio and Florida–he will become the 13th American president to have served only one term in office. John Adams, who served eight years as vice president under George Washington, was our first single-term president, and his son John Quincy Adams inadvertently followed in his father’s footsteps as the second. Unlike his father and other one-term presidents, however, John Quincy Adams did not pass quietly into presidential afterlife and fade into obscurity.

The only son of a Founding Father to become president, John Quincy Adams had been raised for greatness by his parents, John and Abigail Adams, and he achieved it before his presidency, becoming American minister to six countries, a fighting senator, and a fearless secretary of state.

Ranked first in John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Profiles in Courage,” John Quincy Adams was born in 1767 and had a hand in 80 years of American history, serving under Washington as a young man and with Lincoln as an aging Congressman. In his early years, he witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill, shared a chateau with Ben Franklin, lunched with Lafayette and Wellington, walked and talked with Russia’s czar and Britain’s king, and dined with Dickens. As America’s envoy in Europe, he negotiated an end to the War of 1812, and as Secretary of State under James Monroe, he engineered the annexation of Florida and wrote the critical elements of the Monroe Doctrine—all this before his election as sixth president of the United States in 1824.

After Adams moved into the White House, an obstructionist Congress shattered his every dream for American progress. Congressional ideologues rejected his plan to build a national network of roads and canals, declaring it a state rather than federal prerogative. They rejected his forward-looking proposal to establish a national university, and scoffed at his calls to explore undiscovered areas of the globe and build a network of astronomical observatories to explore space.

After his defeat for re-election in 1828, he, like his father before him, retreated to his birthplace in Quincy, Massachusetts, outside Boston, to retire on his small farm, but his neighbors would have none of it. They saw greatness in him that he failed to see in himself and sent him back to Washington as their representative to turn his—and their—dreams into law.

As an independent Congressman, John Quincy Adams scorned party affiliations and declared himself a representative of the whole nation. To that end, he helped found the Smithsonian Institution, sponsored construction of nine astronomical observatories to explore the heavens, defeated state efforts to nullify federal laws, and forced the House of Representatives to restore free speech and the rights of citizens to petition Congress.

During 16 years in the House, he was argumentative and politically unpredictable, but consistent in his fierce and constant defense of justice, human rights, and the individual liberties that his father and other Founding Fathers had fought for in the American Revolution. With support from Illinois freshman Congressman Abraham Lincoln, John Quincy Adams forced the House of Representatives to repeal a so-called “gag” rule that banned debate over slavery. He then stunned Congress—and the nation—by demanding that Congress extend constitutional liberties to Americans of African descent by abolishing slavery.

A brilliant Harvard graduate, Adams was an eloquent lawyer as well as congressman. In his most famous Supreme Court triumph, he won freedom for 36 Africans who had killed the captain and mate of the slave ship “Amistad” and tried to sail back to Africa. An American ship forced them to shore in Connecticut, however, and they went to trial as runaway slaves, with some facing death for murder. John Quincy Adams saved them all, proving they had been free men kidnapped by slavers and transported across the Atlantic illegally. The Supreme Court ruled the killings justified—legitimate acts of self-defense against their kidnappers. It ordered the Africans turned over to the President of the United States for transport back to their native land.

In another monumental case, Adams convinced the Supreme Court to overturn a law that made it a criminal offense to criticize the American government and its officials. His triumph secured freedom of speech as a basic right of Americans to this day.

As he approached the end of his life, John Quincy Adams risked death to lead the anti-slavery movement in the House of Representatives. With a roar that still echoes under the Capitol dome, he demanded passage of the first federal laws to abolish slavery in the United States.

John Quincy Adams died on the floor of the House of Representatives, fighting for the rights of his countrymen, and, in a universal outpouring of grief, Americans mourned as they had not done since the deaths of Washington and Franklin. Besides him and his father, the other one-term presidents were Martin Van Buren, James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush.  John Quincy Adams was the only one who turned his defeat into so many years of triumphs for himself and the nation. If President Obama, who recently crossed the 50 percent mark in the battleground state of  Florida, somehow loses momentum and joins the other one-termers on Election Day, he is young, passionate and intelligent enough to follow the example of John Quincy Adams.

Harlow Giles Unger is author of 20 books. His newest, John Quincy Adams, was published this month.

[Correction: An earlier edition of this post misspelled Franklin Pierce.]

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