[Social Studies]

Presidents

The Presidents of the United States: http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/

John Adams - The second president of the United States of America
John Adams was born in Quincy, Mass. on October 30, 1735. His father was a farmer. After graduating from Harvard University in 1755, Adams became a lawyer in Boston. He married Abigail Smith in 1764. They had five children.
Adams served as a delegate to both the First and Second Continental Congresses and helped draft the Declaration of Independence.
During the Revolutionary War, Adams served as one of the ministers to France with Benjamin Franklin and negotiated the treaty that ended the war.
Adam took on the difficult position of becoming the first U.S. ambassador to Great Britain - not an easy job since Britain had lost the Revolutionary War and control of the colonies.
In 1789, Adams was elected as the first vice-president of the United States, serving two terms under President George Washington. He belonged to the Federalist Party.
After the popular Washington declined a third term, Adams was elected president for one term in 1797 after beating Thomas Jefferson by three electoral votes. Jefferson became his vice-president as was the law until 1804 when the constitution's 12th Amendment changed this to today's system.
John Adams was the first president to live in the structure we now know as the White House. He and his family moved there in 1800.
Adams was not the wildly popular president that Washington was. He sparked controversy by limiting the rights of free speech and freedom of the press. He made it difficult to become a citizen of the United States. His presidency was marked by division at home and abroad.
A scandal took place during Adams' presidency that almost threw the United States into war with France. It was called the XYZ Affair. In 1798, the United States and France signed a treaty but relations soon cooled. The French were now at war with Britain and the United States was not quick to help. To further aggravate matters, the French began seizing American ships. Adams sent a delegation to France to negotiate a peaceful settlement. The French foreign minister, Charles Tallyrand, refused to meet with the delegation but instead tried to get the United States to lend France $12 million and pay $250,000 in exchange for a treaty. Tallyrand's agents were known as X, Y and Z. Adams' commissioners refused the deal. When word of the attempted bribe got out, the American public was outraged and war with France seemed imminent. Adams angered his own pro-war Federalist Party by negotiating the Treaty to Morfontaine which put an end to the undeclared war. But with his own party and the American public now against him, Adams lost his reelection bid to Jefferson.
Although Adams and Jefferson had been political foes earlier in life, Adams and his vice president exchanged hundreds of letters after Adams retired to his farm in Massachusetts.
On March 4, 1826, Adams' son John Quincy Adams became the sixth president of the United States.
Adams died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. IN a strange historic coincidence, Thomas Jefferson had died earlier that same day. They were the only two presidents to have signed the Declaration of Independence.

This site began in March 1998 and was created by Janet Luch.  This page was last updated on September 30, 2005.
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