Book Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: OF PUBLIC MEN. JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. In the summer of 1846, I had the pleasure of an introduction to John Quincy Adams, in the City of Washington. He was then a member of Congress, and had been President of the United States. I had through life entertained a profound respect for the character and public services of his father, John Adams, the successor of Washington in the Presidential chair. He was one of the boldest and most uncompromising patriots of the revolution. Mr. Jefferson, in the latter part of his life, after a long estrangement with Mr. Adams, spoke of his honesty, purity and patriotism as above reproach. The father of John Adams was a small farmer and shoemaker in Massachusetts. In his writings, edited by his grandson, John Adams mentions his being a laborer on his father's farm in early life. He graduated at Cambridge, and intended to devote himself to the ministry, but afterwards read law, and practiced his profession till the breaking out of the American revolution. He married Miss Smith, the daughter of a clergyman, who was the mother of John Quincy Adams. She was a woman of remarkable endowments, and was strongly suspectedof having an undue influence over the mind of her husband whilst he was President of the United States. There was at one period of their lives a strong friendship between her and Thomas Jefferson, which Mr. Jefferson attempted to revive after his retirement from public life, but she would not be reconciled to him though her husband was. I was introduced to John Q. Adams by Mr. Grinell, a member of Congress from Massachusetts. Mr. Adams was the representative of the township of Sherbarn, the ancestral home of my father, and his ancestors for two centuries past. My father moved to South Carolina in 1784, and I was anxious to know if any ...