The Adamses were the first family of the American republic. At its head stood John Adams, the second president, and his wife Abigail Adams, whose letters remain among the most quoted correspondence of the founding era. Their eldest son, John Quincy Adams, rose to become the sixth president, making the household a rare case of two chief executives raised under one roof.
The family's public life ran deep and wide. John Adams's second cousin Samuel Adams was a driving figure of the Revolution in Massachusetts, placing two branches of the name at the center of independence. In the next generation, John Quincy's son Charles Francis Adams served as United States minister to Britain during the Civil War, a diplomatic post his father and grandfather had also held. His own sons, the historian Henry Adams and the writer Brooks Adams, carried the family from elected office into letters and scholarship.
As a genogram, the Adams line is a study in succession by preparation rather than mere inheritance. Abigail and John raised John Quincy inside the diplomatic missions of the new nation; he was serving as a secretary and observing heads of state while still in his teens. The family seat at Quincy, Massachusetts, anchored a household that treated public service as a duty passed deliberately from parent to child.
The Adamses were the first father and son to each hold the presidency — John from 1797 to 1801, and John Quincy from 1825 to 1829 — a distinction matched only once more in American history, by the Bush family more than a century and a half later.
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