Not Your Father's Founders Read Free Page B

in Congress refused to support the president’s initiatives. Jackson ran against Adams again in 1828 on an anticorruption platform and won election by a wide margin.
    John Quincy Adams returned to Massachusetts to retire. His retirement did not last long. Like his parents, he did not have the patience to sit and do nothing when there were constituents to serve.
    FEDERAL FACTS
    In the 1824 presidential election, Andrew Jackson won 43.1 percent of the popular vote and 99 of the 261 available Electoral College votes. Adams got 30.5 percent and 84 votes respectively. The other two candidates, William Crawford and Henry Clay, split the rest almost evenly. Since no one candidate had a majority of electoral votes, the decision as to who would be president fell into the hands of the U.S. House of Representatives.
    Quotations to Live (and Die) By!
    â€œP ATIENCE AND PERSEVERANCE HAVE A MAGICAL EFFECT BEFORE WHICH DIFFICULTIES DISAPPEAR AND OBSTACLES VANISH.”
    â€”J OHN Q UINCY A DAMS
    Any bitter feelings he experienced following the presidential election of 1828 dissipated after the people of Massachusetts elected him to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1830.
    For the next eighteen years, John Quincy Adams concentrated on abolishing slavery. At first, he was like a man with laryngitis whispering into a gale force wind: Nobody heard his message. Gradually, he started winning converts. By the time his tenure in Congress—and his life—came to a close, he had made significant progress in bringing about the end of slavery.
    Adams did not live to see it happen. He suffered a stroke in the House of Representatives on February 21, 1848, and died two days later.
    It was a fitting end for a man who strived diligently to uphold the virtues and goals of his father and his contemporaries: His political career ended in a legislative building as he was fighting for what he and they believed in so strongly.

SAMUEL ADAMS
    Boston, Massachusetts
September 27, 1722−October 2, 1803
Liberty, Not Beer
    Samuel Adams was a master politician—literally. He earned a master of arts degree from Harvard at age twenty-one and ultimately worked as a tax collector. Because he was a disaster as a businessman, he had to do something in the public realm. Using his political skills, he occupied seats in the Massachusetts Assembly and in the First and Second Continental Congresses. He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a delegate to the Massachusetts state constitutional convention in 1781, and lieutenant governor and governor of Massachusetts. He never made good beer, though.

Starting Out
    Like many young men of his era, Adams struggled trying to find an occupation that suited him. It was difficult for him to find a lasting job because he was obsessed with politics and colonial independence.
    A growing number of colonists were distraught with British taxation policies leading up to the Revolutionary War. Adams was among them; he considered the policies taxation without representation. Ironically, he was a tax collector.
    The Boston Town Meeting elected Samuel Adams as a tax collector in 1756, but he made a mess of that job. He frequently failed to collect taxes owed. By 1764, his accounts were short more than £8,000, and he was out of the job. Eventually, Adams and some of his friends paid part of the missing funds and the town meeting wrote off the rest.
    REVOLUTIONARY REVELATIONS
    Samuel Adams’s father was a merchant and brewer. Young Samuel worked for a while at the family brewery, but he did not have the head for it—or for business in general.
Have Faith in Samuel
    Samuel Adams did not become an active opponent of British taxation policies until 1763, when the citizens of Boston formed a committee to let the king and Parliament know how they felt about the new levies. They appointed Samuel Adams to the committee, putting him in the ironic position of protesting British-imposed taxes while he was