John Adams (1735–1826), president of the United States, 1797–1801, was born in Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard College in 1755, and taught school briefly before his admission to the bar in 1758. He married Abigail Smith in 1764. Adams first achieved prominence by drafting resolves and writing a series of newspaper essays opposing the Stamp Act in 1765. Three years later he moved his family to Boston, where he became a representative in the General Court. That body elected Adams to both the First and Second Continental Congresses, where he distinguished himself as an advocate of American nationhood and served with TJ on the committee that prepared the Declaration of Independence. In 1778 he traveled to France to help negotiate a treaty of alliance. Adams returned to Massachusetts the following year and took the lead in writing a constitution for the state before traveling back to France to continue negotiations. After concluding peace with England, he became the first American minister to the Court of Saint James in London. Returning to the United States in 1788, Adams was a vocal supporter of the new federal constitution and served as the first vice president of the United States, 1789–97. He succeeded George Washington as president in the latter year, but his administration was plagued by difficult relations with France and divisive struggles within the Federalist party that contributed to his defeat for reelection by TJ, his vice president (ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 1999, 24 vols. description ends ; DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; Sibley’s Harvard Graduates description begins John L. Sibley and others, eds., Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 1873– , 18 vols. description ends , 13:513–20; Lyman H. Butterfield and others, eds., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols. [1961]; Butterfield, Richard Alan Ryerson, C. James Taylor, and others, eds., Adams Family Correspondence [1963– ]; Robert J. Taylor, Ryerson, C. James Taylor, and others, eds., Papers of John Adams [1977– ]; David McCullough, John Adams [2001]).

The pieces of homespun were John Quincy Adams’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Delivered to the Classes of Senior and Junior Sophisters in Harvard University, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1810; Sowerby, description begins E. Millicent Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 1952–59, 5 vols. description ends no. 4659). Their arrival after Adams’s covering letter initially caused TJ to take the playful reference to homespun at face value (TJ to Adams, 21, 23 Jan. 1812). Adams’s daughter Abigail Adams smith had recently undergone surgery for breast cancer. Her husband was Revolutionary War veteran William Stephens Smith (ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 1999, 24 vols. description ends ; McCullough, John Adams, 601–2).