John Quincy Adams was a United States senator, secretary of state, president, and member of Congress. The eldest son of John and Abigail Smith Adams, he was born in Braintree, Massachusetts. In 1778 he accompanied his father to France, where he studied French and Latin at an academy in Passy, and attended the Latin School of Amsterdam. He matriculated at Leyden University in January 1781, but soon interrupted his studies to serve in Saint Petersburg as secretary to America's minister to Russia. Returning to the Hague in 1783, he resumed the study of classics before returning to the United States, where he entered Harvard as a junior. In 1787, Adams graduated from Harvard and began his legal apprenticeship in Newburyport. He was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1790.

In 1779 young Adams began a diary that he continued to keep throughout most of his life. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, comprising Portions of...