After his defeat by Jackson in 1828, Adams refused to attend the victor's inauguration, just as his father had boycotted Jefferson's in 1801. He wrote in his diary that, "The sun of my political life set in the deepest gloom." Filled with sadness for the nation, Adams stayed in Washington for a few months before returning to his hometown, Quincy, Massachusetts. When neighbors asked him to run for Congress from his Massachusetts district, the former President agreed under two conditions: he would never solicit their votes and he would follow his conscience at all times. His election (on the Anti-Masonic Party ticket, a new third party opposed to Jackson) was one of the greatest satisfactions in Adams's life.


Antislavery Congressional Career

Adams served nine post-presidential terms in Congress from 1830 to 1848, usually voting in the minority. He supported the rechartering of the Bank of the United States, opposed the annexation of Texas and the war with Mexico, and struggled for eight years to end the House's notorious "gag" rule to table without debate any petition critical of slavery. Adams attempted to read into the record at every opportunity the hundreds of antislavery petitions which abolitionists around the country sent him on a regular basis. The House finally relented and repealed the rule in 1844.

As one of the House's most articulate and forceful spokesmen opposed to slavery, Adams earned the nickname of "Old Man Eloquent." Whenever he rose to speak, especially in his twilight years, silence swept over the chamber as the congressmen turned their attention to the former President. In 1841, Adams argued successfully before the Supreme Court to win freedom for fifty-three slave mutineers aboard the Spanish ship Amistad. The Africans had mutinied against their Spanish captors on the high seas and were then captured by an American warship off Long Island. The court ruled that the mutineers were free men because international slave trade was illegal under British and U.S. law.

Keeping in character with Adams's devotion to education and the sciences, he championed the bequest of James Smithson of England, who willed $500,000 to the U.S. for the creation of an institution dedicated to knowledge -- later called the Smithsonian Institution. At the age of seventy-six, in 1843, Adams also traveled to Cincinnati to officiate at the laying of the cornerstone of the Cincinnati Observatory.

On February 21, 1848, a severe stroke hit John Quincy Adams just minutes after casting a loud "No!" vote against a motion to decorate certain Army officers serving in the Mexican War. It happened on the House floor in the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Two days later, he slipped into a coma moments after uttering these last words: "This is the end of earth. But I am content." On February 25, 1848, at the age of eighty, the former President died. For two days, mourners filed by his open casket in a House committee room. His body was buried next to his parents, John and Abigail Adams, beneath the Congregational church in Quincy. The man whom many historians consider the most learned person ever to have served as President left his 8,500-volume library and personal papers, as well as his home and lands, to his surviving son, Charles Francis Adams. He divided the remainder of his estate between his wife, daughter-in-law Mary Helen Adams (widow of his son John Adams II), granddaughter Mary Louisa Adams, and son.