10 Fun Facts about John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams was the sixth president of the United States, from 1825 to 1829. He was also a diplomat, a senator, a secretary of state, a congressman, and an antislavery advocate. Here are some fun facts about John Quincy Adams.

1. John Quincy Adams was a sloppy dresser.

By his own admission, John Quincy Adams was “careless of dress.” (1) As a young man, he wrote to his future wife, Louisa, that “the tailor and the dancing-master must give me up, as a man of whom nothing can be made.” (2) In 1822, a Philadelphia newspaper claimed that Adams wore neither a waistcoat nor a cravat, and sometimes went to church barefoot. Adams admitted this was true “only as regards the cravat, instead of which, in the extremity of the summer heat, I wear round my neck a black silk riband.” (3)

A British visitor observed that Adams wore, in warm weather, “a striped seersucker coat, and white trousers, and dirty waistcoat, spotted with ink.” On colder days, the presidential candidate could be spotted “in a plain blue coat, much the worse for wear, and other garments in proportion.” Adams’ slippers were described as “down at the heel” and “his whole dress, altogether, [was] not worth a couple of pounds.” (4)

In keeping with his preference for plain clothing, John Quincy Adams was the first president to wear full-length trousers, rather than knee breeches, to his inauguration. He took the oath of office in a homespun black suit, and without a powdered wig.

2. He had bad manners.

Both friends and foes commented on John Quincy Adams’ lack of social graces. In 1810, when Adams was the American ambassador to Russia, a young member of his staff complained that he “has no manners, is gauche, never was intended for a foreign Minister, and is only fit to turn over musty law authorities. You would blush to see him in society, and particularly at Court circles, walking about perfectly listless, speaking to no one, and absolutely looking as if he were in a dream.” (5) Later, a British diplomat wrote that Adams had “a vinegar aspect” and “sat in the frivolous assemblies of [Saint] Petersburg like a bulldog among spaniels.” (6) When Adams was secretary of state, Massachusetts congressman Elijah Hunt Mills observed that he had “no talent to entertain a mixed company, either by conversation or manners.” (7)

Adams acknowledged his “forgetfulness of the courtesies in society.” (8) He wrote in his diary in 1819:

I am a man of reserved, cold, austere, and forbidding manners; my political adversaries say a gloomy misanthropist, and my personal enemies an unsocial savage. With a knowledge of the actual defect in my character, I have not the pliability to reform it. (9)

3. He was a theatre fan.

John Quincy Adams spent much of his youth in Europe, where he acquired a love of live theatre. In 1792, he was a founding member of a citizens’ committee that sought to repeal a law that banned theatrical entertainments in Massachusetts. He subsequently became an original shareholder in Boston’s Federal Street Theatre.

Back in Europe as a diplomat, Adams saw at least 248 plays between 1794 and 1800. (10) He told the American actor James Henry Hackett, “my admiration of Shakespeare is little short of idolatry.” (11) In 1839, when Hackett wrote to Adams saying that he had recently heard of an analysis by the latter of Shakespeare’s ‘Othello,’ Adams noted in his diary: “This extension of my fame is more tickling to my vanity than it was to be elected President of the United States.” (12) Hackett later published Adams’ correspondence with him regarding Shakespeare.

When Louisa asked Adams why he frequented the theatre, he replied:

I have all my life had a very extravagant fondness for that species of entertainment, and always indulge myself with it, unless when motives of prudence or propriety or pride, or duty of some kind, real or imaginary, prescribe to me the self-denial of them. … The stage has been to me a source of much amusement, for more than forty-years. But I have always enjoyed it with discretion. First with reference to expense; but secondly and chiefly with respect to morals. To which end, I have made it a rule to make no acquaintance with actresses. (13)

4. He loved to swim.

Beginning at age 50, John Quincy Adams went swimming almost every summer in the Potomac River in Washington, DC. He swam for exercise and for enjoyment, finding it “conducive to health, cleanliness and comfort.” (14) Adams swam in the nude, wearing only a bathing cap and swim goggles.

In 1825, less than three months after being sworn in as president, John Quincy Adams had an adventure that led to rumours he had drowned. He was crossing the Potomac in a small canoe with his valet, Antoine, with the intention of swimming back. The boat started to leak and soon filled with water, so they jumped overboard.

We were as near as possible to the middle of the river, and swam to the opposite shore. Antoine, who was naked, reached it with little difficulty. I had much more, and while struggling for life and gasping for breath, had ample leisure to reflect upon my own discretion. My principal difficulty was in the loose sleeves of my shirt, which filled with water and hung like two fifty-six pound weights upon my arms. I had also my hat….

By the mercy of God our lives were spared, and no injury befell our persons. … I had been about three hours in the water…. This incident gave me a humiliating lesson and solemn warning not to trifle with danger. … Among my motives for swimming, that of showing what I can do must be discarded as spurious, and I must strictly confine myself to the purposes of health, exercise, and salutary labor. (15)

Despite this adventure and the protests of his wife and friends, John Quincy Adams continued to swim until he was 78 years old.

5. He disapproved of Lord Byron.

Lord Byron was a popular English poet, famous for his scandalous private life as well as his work. In 1816, John Quincy Adams he wrote to his mother, Abigail: “[Lord Byron] has been married little more than a year, and is already separated from his wife – partly, as his verses acknowledge, in consequence of some fault of his own, and partly as they allege, by the suggestions of an evil spirit in the shape of a governess, intriguing to embitter and envenom the resentment of his wife, and to make it unplacable. … Lord Byron leaves England immediately, and will probably close tragically his wild and eccentric career.” (16) Adams later warned his son John about the poet:

There is no character in human society so dangerous as that of great genius, combined with a depraved heart; and there is no popular writer of modern times, the tenor of whose individual vices has so deeply affected the moral purport of his writings as Lord Byron. … It will generally be found that even his love of freedom is full of bitterness, and his compassion of sensuality. Misanthropy, lubricity and desperation burst out in open day or lurk in disguise throughout all his writings…. I wish not to dissuade you from reading his production, but to urge you to keep well upon your guard against them. (17)

When Byron died at the age of 36 in Greece in 1824, Adams commented: “Bad as he was [his death] struck me as a public calamity. What might he not have been, if he had properly applied his talents?” (18)

6. John Quincy Adams liked to measure things.

John Quincy Adams liked to measure things, like the width of a river or the distance between two points, by counting his steps. He noted in 1812: “I have found, by experiments frequently repeated, that my ordinary pace is two feet six inches and eighty-eight one-hundredths of an inch, or about twenty-nine French inches, and that in my ordinary pace I walk one hundred and twenty steps to a minute.” (19) When Adams became Secretary of State in 1817, his fascination with measurements coincided with the desire of Congress to establish a uniform standard for weights and measures across the United States. After three-and-a-half years of obsessive work, which frustrated Louisa to no end, Adams produced his massive Report Upon Weights and Measures. He thought it would be his most important literary accomplishment.

It is, after all the time and pains that I have bestowed upon it a hurried and imperfect work; but I have no reason to expect that I shall ever be able to accomplish any literary labour more important to the best ends of human exertion, public utility, or upon which the remembrance of my children may dwell with more satisfaction. (20)

7. Group meditation annoyed him.

John Quincy Adams was a Protestant, and puritanical in his insistence on hard work and attention to duty, but he was not a Quaker. In 1821 he attended a Quaker meeting with his friend, Dr. William Thornton.

There were from forty to fifty men present, and about as many females. We sat nearly two hours in perfect silence – no moving of the spirit; and I seldom, in the course of my life, passed two hours more wearily. Perhaps from not having been inured to this form of public worship, I found myself quite unable to reduce my mind to that musing meditation which makes the essence of this form of devotion. It was rambling from this world to the next, and from the next back to this, chance-directed; and, curious to know what was really passing in the minds of those around me, I asked Dr. Thornton, after we came out, what he had been thinking of while we had been there. He said he did not know; he had been much inclined to sleep. Solitude and silence are natural allies, and social silence may be properly allied with social labor. But social meditation is an incongruity. I felt, on coming from this meeting, as if I had wasted precious time. (21)

8. He put a controversial billiard table in the White House.

John Quincy Adams was the first president to install a billiard table in the White House. He noted in his diary that it was “a resource both for exercise and amusement.” (22) He liked to play billiards before he went to bed. Although Adams paid for the second-hand table and its related expenses with his own money, the costs were mistakenly included in a list of public expenditures printed by Congress. Supporters of Andrew Jackson – Adams’ electoral opponent – seized on the opportunity to embarrass the new president. Although billiards was a popular game in Europe, it was less common in the United States and had an unsavory reputation. Jackson’s advocates published many critical newspaper articles, along the lines of this passage in the United States Telegraph:

Can it be that the President’s House is to be converted into a place of resort, where gamblers may idle away an hour? Is it right that the President, as the head and father of a moral, religious and money-saving people, should set such an example – should throw the weight of his character and situation on the side of games of hazard? (23)

By the time the error was officially corrected, the damage had been done. The image of Adams as an extravagant aristocrat who encouraged gambling contributed to his defeat by Jackson in the 1828 presidential election.

9. He is in the oldest known photo of a US president.

John Quincy Adams is the subject of the oldest existing confirmed photograph of a US president. It was taken in March 1843 by Philip Haas in Washington, DC. Adams had two daguerreotype sessions with Haas that month. After the first, Adams wrote:

I walked this morning to Mr. Haas’s shop, and he took from his camera obscura three Daguerreotype likenesses of me. The operation is performed in half a minute, but is yet altogether incomprehensible to me. Mr. Haas says it is a chemical process upon mercury, silver, gold and iodine. It would seem as easy to stamp a fixed portrait from the reflections of a mirror; but how wonderful would that reflection itself be, if we were not familiarized to it from childhood. (24)

Haas made a total of six daguerreotypes of Adams, two of which survive. One is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The other, which is actually a reverse copy (circa 1850) of an 1843 Haas original, is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Haas was not the first person to attempt to photograph John Quincy Adams. Adams sat for a daguerreotype in Boston in September 1842, but fell asleep during that session. He had two daguerreotypes taken at another Washington studio in April 1843. Adams wrote, “I did not see either of them nor do I feel any curiosity to see them. They are resemblances too close to the reality and yet too shadowy to be agreeable.” (25) Later that year, he noted:

The features of my old age are such as I have no wish to have transmitted to the memory of the next age. They are harsh and stern beyond the true portraiture of the heart; and there is no ray of interest in them to redeem their repulsive severity. (26)

Yet Adams continued to allow himself to be photographed. He sat for about 50 daguerreotypes in total, not all of which turned out.

10. He died in the Capitol building.

In 1831, John Quincy Adams became a member of the US House of Representatives, representing Massachusetts. On February 21, 1848, Adams collapsed in the House from a massive stroke. He died on February 23, 1848, in the Capitol. According to then Speaker of the House, Robert Winthrop:

Mr. Adams rose impulsively…with a paper in his outstretched hand, exclaiming, with  more than his usual earnestness and emphasis: ‘Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker!’ … But before he could…add another syllable, his hand fell to his side and he sank upon the arm of his chair, only saved from dropping to the floor by being caught by the member nearest to him. … Business was at once suspended, and the excitement and confusion which ensued can be imagined better than described. More than two hundred Representatives…were seen rising from their seats and pressing forward toward their beloved and revered associate….

Fortunately there were several physicians among the members of the House. Dr. William A. Newell, afterward the Governor of New Jersey…took the lead in repressing the throng, securing air for the sufferer, and rendering all the medical aid which was possible. He cooperated with the others in removing Mr. Adams on a sofa into the Rotunda, and thence, with but little delay, at my urgent instigation into the Speaker’s official chamber.

‘This is the end of earth,’ was heard from his lips, as he fell, or when he was placed on the little couch which was hastily prepared for him, with the addition, as was alleged, ‘I am composed,’ or ‘I am content.’ But all signs of consciousness soon ceased, and he lingered, entirely insensible, until a quarter past seven on Wednesday evening, the 23d. (27)

John Quincy Adams was 80 years old. Abraham Lincoln was among the committee members who arranged his funeral, which was held in the hall of the House of Representatives on February 26.  Thousands of people filed past Adams’ glass-covered coffin. “It was the most numerous funeral procession I ever witnessed,” wrote President James K. Polk. (28)

More facts about John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams was born on July 11, 1767 in what is now Quincy, Massachusetts. He was also buried there. Quincy is pronounced KWIN-zee.

John Quincy Adams was elected president despite losing both the popular vote and the electoral college vote in 1824. Andrew Jackson narrowly won both, but did not receive the necessary majority in the electoral college. Under the terms of the 12th Amendment, the presidential election was decided by the House of Representatives, which chose Adams.

John Quincy Adams and his father, 2nd president John Adams, were the first father and son to serve as president. The only other father-son presidents were George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush.

John Quincy Adams’ wife, Louisa, was the first foreign-born First Lady of the United States. She was born in London, England, to an American father and an English mother. The only other foreign-born First Lady was Melania Trump, from Slovenia.

John Quincy Adams was the first president to serve in Congress after his term in office (Andrew Johnson later served in the Senate), and the only former president to serve in the House of Representatives.

John Quincy Adams was in Paris when Napoleon escaped from Elba and returned to France in 1815. He saw Napoleon at the theatre there.

As US Secretary of State in 1821, Adams plays an important role in Napoleon in America.

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1. “From John Quincy Adams to Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, 23 August 1822,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-03-02-4138.
2. “John Quincy Adams to Louisa Catherine Johnson, 9 July 1796,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-11-02-0174.
3. Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Vol. VI (Philadelphia, 1875), pp. 54-55.
4. “Sketches of the Five American Presidents, and of the Five Presidential Candidates, From the Memoranda of a Traveler,” Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 15, No. 88 (May 1824), pp. 511-512.
5. Nina N. Bashkina, Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, John H. Brown, et al., eds., The United States and Russia: The Beginning of Relations, 1765-1815 (Washington, 1980), p. 666.
6. “W.H. Lyttleton to Sir Charles Bagot,” January 22, 1827, in Josceline Bagot, ed., George Canning and His Friends, Vol. II (London: John Murray, 1909), p. 362.
7. Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. 19 (Sept., 1881), p. 28.
8. “From John Quincy Adams to Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, 16 December 1814,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-03-02-2706.
9. Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Vol. IV (Philadelphia, 1875), p. 388.
10. George B. Bryan, “Pilgrim at the Shrine of a Saint: John Quincy Adams on Shakespeare,” Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Dec., 1968) p. 516.
11. James Henry Hackett, Notes and Comments Upon Certain Plays and Actors of Shakespeare, Third Edition, (New York, 1863), p. 229.
12. Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Vol. X (Philadelphia, 1876), p. 138.
13. “From John Quincy Adams to Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, 28 August 1822,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-03-02-4145.
14. John Quincy Adams diary 31, 1 January 1819 – 20 March 1821, 10 November 1824 – 6 December 1824, page 136 [electronic edition]. The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection. Boston, Mass.: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2004. https://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/php/.
15. Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Vol. VII (Philadelphia, 1875), pp. 28-29.
16. “From John Quincy Adams to Abigail Smith Adams, 23 April 1816,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-03-02-3075.
17. “From John Quincy Adams to John Adams, 13 October 1823,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-03-02-4328.
18. “From John Quincy Adams to Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, 27 June 1824,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-03-02-4422.
19. Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Vol. II (Philadelphia, 1873), p. 353.
20. Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Vol. V (Philadelphia, 1875), pp. 132-133.
21. Ibid., p. 335.
22. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Vol. VII, p. 22.
23. “The National Billiard Table,” from the Vicksburg (MI) Eagle, United States Telegraph(Washington, DC), November 21, 1826.
24. John Quincy Adams diary 43, 1 January 1842 – 8 July 1843, page 447 [electronic edition]. The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection. Boston, Mass.: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2004. https://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/php/.
25. John Quincy Adams diary 43, 1 January 1842 – 8 July 1843, page 500 [electronic edition]. The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection. Boston, Mass.: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2004. https://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/php/.
26. John Quincy Adams diary 44, 9 July 1843 – 31 December 1844, page 41 [electronic edition]. The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection. Boston, Mass.: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2004. https://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/php/.
27. Robert C. Winthrop, “Historic Moments: The Death of John Quincy Adams in the Capitol,” Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. 13, No. 3, New York, March 1893, pp. 389-390.
28. Milo Milton Quaife, ed., The Diary of James K. Polk During His Presidency, 1845 to 1849, Vol. III (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1910), p. 363.