Journey Through the Adams and Kennedy Dynasties
Part One: Road tripping to the historic homes of John and John Quincy Adams
Three presidents, two political dynasties from Massachusetts
Three American presidents were born and raised in Massachusetts: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and John F. Kennedy. More than 130 years passed between the second Adams presidency and the election of Kennedy, yet these two families are linked in ways that transcend their home state.
For starters, the Adams and Kennedy families belong to an exclusive club of American political dynasties. Between them, they produced three presidents, two Senators who ran for president, and several Congressmen, Cabinet secretaries, and ambassadors. Only a few other families can lay claim to having as many members serve at the upper echelon of American politics.
Moreover, all three of the Adams and Kennedy presidencies took place at an inflection point for American democracy.
John Adams was the first president after George Washington and the winner of the country’s first seriously contested election in 1796. Four years later, he was the first incumbent president to lose an election, defeated by Thomas Jefferson after a bitter campaign. After his loss, though, Adams helped establish a vital precedent for American democracy by allowing a transition to the next administration to proceed peacefully.
At the time, there was no model for the transfer of power from one political party to another one, but Adams had no desire to sabotage the democracy he had helped build by trying to deny Jefferson the presidency. After Adams, this precedent held strong for 220 years, until in 2020 Donald Trump became the first president to try overturning the results of an election he lost.
John Quincy Adams, meanwhile, was president when the country was transitioning to more of a mass democracy. By the 1820s, the requirement that voters be property holders was disappearing and more Americans were gaining the right to vote. Although it would take well over another century before women and Blacks fully won the right to vote, this was the first tentative step in opening democracy to all citizens.
The 1824 election that sent Adams to the White House happened to be the first contest in which a nationwide popular vote was compiled. And when Adams lost his bid for re-election, it was at the hands of Andrew Jackson, the first president from what was then the American frontier in Tennessee. After his presidency, Adams returned to Congress for 17 more years, where he became a prominent voice in the anti-slavery movement.
Finally, John Kennedy was famously the first Catholic to be elected president. This was a big deal in a nation where many voters then feared that a Catholic might take orders from the Vatican. “Nobody asked me if I was a Catholic when I joined the United States Navy,” Kennedy told voters at the time, reminding them not only that he had fought for his country in World War II but also that his older brother had been killed in battle.
Kennedy’s presidency managed to put the issue of religion to rest, and in 2020 nobody blinked an eye when Joe Biden became the second Catholic president. And, save for some evangelicals, few people considered Mitt Romney’s Mormonism an issue when he nearly won the 2012 election.
So let’s delve a bit more into the lives of these Massachusetts political dynasties via a travel piece that takes a look at their historic homes and presidential libraries. These families were from communities near enough to Boston that these sites can all be reached via subway, if you’re so inclined. It’s an opportunity to journey across nearly two centuries of American politics and through the lives and careers of all three men. We’ll start with the John and John Quincy Adams homes, then look at the Kennedy sites in a second post.
The John and John Quincy Adams birthplaces
A good place to begin this journey is with the Adams family in Quincy, just south of Boston. In the center of town on Hancock Street is the headquarters for the Adams National Historical Park. It’s just one block from the United First Parish Church where John and Abigail Adams, and John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams, are buried, and about another mile to the birthplaces of the two future presidents.
Guided tours are required to see the inside of the historic homes and are typically offered from spring to late fall, but it’s a treat to explore these homes, which predate the birth of the United States.
The farmhouse where John Adams was born in 1735 is the oldest surviving presidential birthplace in the country. Three decades later, John and Abigail Adams moved into the neighboring home, where John Quincy was born in 1767.
The houses are separated by just 75 feet and are constructed in the saltbox style, with two stories in front and one in the rear on the back end of a sloping roof. They have clapboard siding, wide plank wooden floors and a central chimney. Adams set up a law office in one room of his home, with a separate entrance for clients. For a decade, the Adamses lived here while John built a prosperous law practice.
Eventually, though, John’s growing political reputation, along with the advent of the Revolutionary War, transformed the family forever.
Beginning in 1774, John spent most of the next ten years away from home, serving as a delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and then as minister to France and the Netherlands. The young John Quincy went along on these European journeys, inaugurating a lifetime of involvement in the affairs of his country.
While enduring this long separation from her husband and eldest son, Abigail managed the family farm and raised three other children. Several of these years were at the height of the Revolutionary War, when she could sometimes hear the roar of the battlefield from her home.
After the war, Abigail joined her husband in London, when he was the new nation’s first Ambassador to Great Britain, and then in New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., during his 12 years as vice president and president.
The Adams home at Peacefield
When John’s political career ended in 1801, the couple retired to Quincy and moved permanently into a new home they had acquired in 1787. This property is just over a mile from their old farmhouse and Adams christened it Peacefield. “It is but the farm of a Patriot,” he remarked.
Over the years, the house (seen in the cover photo above) was enlarged from seven rooms to 21 as it became home to four generations of the Adams family, including John Quincy Adams (the sixth president), Charles Francis Adams (Ambassador to England during the Civil War), and Henry and Brooks Adams (prominent writers and historians). Members of the Adams family lived in the home from 1788 to 1927.
The local boulevards are busier now than they were in the early 19th century, but Peacefield still sits serenely off the road in a thicket of trees and gardens. Inside, the house is a repository for an astonishing compendium of American history. There is a mahogany dining table used by John and Abigail, an original portrait of George Washington, and an early reproduction of the Declaration of Independence.
History buffs will get a thrill after climbing 17 creaky wooden stairs to the second floor study that served as a summer White House for two presidents. It’s where John Adams spent many hours in retirement, composing an extraordinary collection of letters to Thomas Jefferson. His spectacles are still on the writing desk where he worked, and the wingback chair in the corner is where he suffered a stroke before his death.
Adams died in this home on July 4, 1826, on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (and on the same day that Jefferson passed away in Virginia).
The house also contains a mesmerizing collection of other family artifacts, from a walking stick used by the second president to a desk used by great-grandson Henry, author of the 1907 Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. One can almost feel the intergenerational mingling of the Adams clan radiating from the paneled walls and antique bookcases.
Next door to the main residence is the Stone Library, built in 1870, long after the two Adams presidents had passed from the scene. Draped in vines and sitting along the gravel paths of a garden planted by Abigail Adams, it’s the first library built to store presidential books and papers. It contains 12,000 volumes (the Adamses were voracious readers), as well as the desk where John Adams wrote the Massachusetts Constitution in 1779 and another desk used by John Quincy Adams in Congress.
The library is a fitting memorial to the Adamses, who were devoted to the life of the mind as much as they were to the founding of an American democracy.
While marveling at their collection of books, or strolling the gardens outside and reflecting on the family’s contributions to government, it’s somewhat poignant today — with democracy seemingly teetering on the edge of a cliff — to recall another quote by the second president, from a 1775 letter to his wife, Abigail.
“Liberty once lost,” he wrote, “is lost forever.”
Coming next week: Part two of historic presidential sites in the Boston area with “John F. Kennedy’s Boston.”
(Photos: Except where otherwise noted, all photos by Bob Riel.)