John Adam BiographyJohn Adams was born on October 30, 1735, in Quincy, Massachusetts. At the age of sixteen, Adams earned a scholarship to attend Harvard University, which he finished at age 20 in 1755 as a lawyer. Barely 29 years old, Adams married Abigail Smith in 1764. Together they had six children, Abigail, John Quincy, Susanna, Charles, Thomas Boylston, and Elizabeth. In 1776, Congress approved Adams’s preposition that the colonies should each have their own governments. He wrote the preamble to this preposition, which was approved in May, leading the way towards the Declaration of Independence. On June 7, 1776, John Adams seconded Richard Harvey Lee’s resolution of independence that was then shortly adopted by Congress on July 2. Congress then appointed John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman, to draft the declaration. The first draft was approved on July 4, thus creating Independence Day. In 1781, Adams was one of the American diplomats sent to France to negotiate the Treaty of Paris, thus ending the Revolutionary War. John Adams was a founding father and America’s first vice president along side George Washington.
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From there on, Adams was a very active member of congress, engaging in as many as ninety committees, and chair about twenty five during the second Continental Congress. In 1796, Adams was elected as the Federalist nominee for President with Thomas Jefferson leading the opposite side for the Democratic-Republican Party. Adams barely won the election, becoming the second president of the United States, the first Federalist president. He is the only Federalist president in all of American History. A war between the French and British was causing political problems for the U.S. When the entire U.S. found out about the war, everyone was in favor of war. Adam, on the other hand, did not call for a declaration of war. By 1800, the war had ended and Adams lost his re-election by only a few less electoral votes than Thomas Jefferson. Adams retired after his presidency, moving back to the family farm in Abigail in Quincy, where he continued writing to Jefferson. Both Adams and Jefferson died on July 4, 1826. Completely unaware that Jefferson had died hours before, Adam’s last words were, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” Both presidents died on the 50th anniversary of American Independence. John Quincy Adams, John Adam’s son, would become the sixth president of the United States, carrying on the family legacy, even though he was a member of the opposite party, the Democratic-Republicans.
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