John Quincy Adams was born in Braintree, Massachusetts, (in a part of town which is now Quincy, Massachusetts), and acquired his early education in Europe at the University of Leiden. He graduated from Harvard University in 1787. He studied law, then was admitted to the bar and commenced practice in Boston, Massachusetts. He was appointed Minister to the Netherlands in 1794, Minister to Portugal in 1796 and Minister to Prussia in 1797. He was elected to the Massachusetts State Senate in 1802, and was an unsuccessful candidate for election to the U.S. House of Representatives in the same year. He was elected as a Federalist to the United States Senate and served from March 4, 1803, until June 8, 1808, when he resigned, a successor having been elected six months early after Adams broke with the Federalist party. He was Minister to Russia from 1809 to 1814, a member of the commission which negotiated the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, and Minister to England from 1815 to 1817. He was Secretary of State in the Cabinet of President James Monroe from 1817 to 1825.The decision in the Presidential Election of 1824 fell, according to the U.S. Constitution, upon the House of Representatives, as none of the candidates had secured a majority of the electors chosen by the States. Adams, who stood second to Andrew Jackson in the electoral vote, was chosen and served from March 4, 1825, to March 4, 1829.
Adams was then elected as a Democratic-Republican to the U.S. House of Representatives for the Twenty-second and to the eight succeeding Congresses, becoming a Whig in 1834. He served from March 4, 1831, until his death. He was chairman of the Committee on Manufactures (Twenty-second through Twenty-sixth, and Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth Congresses), the Committee on Indian Affairs (Twenty-seventh Congress) and the Committee on Foreign Affairs (Twenty-seventh Congress).
He was an unsuccessful candidate for Governor of Massachusetts in 1834. In 1841, Adams represented the Amistad Africans in the Supreme Court of the United States and successfully argued that the Africans, who had seized control of a Spanish ship where they were being held as illegal slaves, should not be returned to Spain, but returned home as free people.
Adams died in the Capitol Building, Washington, D.C.. His interment was in the family burial ground at Quincy, Massachusetts and subsequently reinterred in the United First Parish Church.