On this day in 1767, 6th president John Quincy Adams was born in Braintree, Massachusetts

On this day in 1767, 6th president John Quincy Adams was born in Braintree, Massachusetts. He was the first U.S. president to be the son of another U.S. president.

The younger Adams’ time in the White House was marked by the contentious presidential election of 1824 against Andrew Jackson, improvements in infrastructure, and the formation of the Democratic Party. Adams’s election is the only presidential election to have been decided by the U.S. House of Representatives as neither he nor Andrew Jackson had won the majority of the electoral votes.

Did you know? Adams was a strong abolitionist. In fact, he defended the slaves of the slave ship Amistad before the Supreme Court – the 73-year-old ex-president argued for 8.5 hours that the slaves’ rebellion against their captors had been justified by their right to freedom. He won the landmark case.

Though he was an excellent orator, Adams was awkward when making small talk: “I went out this evening in search of conversation; an art of which I never had an adequate idea. Long as I have lived in the world I never have thought of conversation as a school, in which something was to be learned. I never knew how to make, to control, or to change it ¬– I am by Nature a silent animal…”

John Quincy Adams, George Peter Alexander Healy, 1858