Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. I.djvu/297

Rh shortly after his father's inauguration as president of the United States. He spent two years in Washington, and then, returning to Boston, studied law in the office of Daniel Webster. He was admitted to the Suffolk bar in 1828 and the next year married the youngest daughter of Peter Chardon Brooks, whose elder daughters were the wives of Edward Everett and Rev. Nathaniel L. Frothingham. From 1841 to 1846 Mr. Adams served in the Massachusetts legislature. He was a member of the whig party, but, like others of his vigorous and free-thinking family, he was extremely independent in politics and inclined to strike into new paths in advance of the public sentiment. After 1836 he came to differ more and more widely from the leaders of the whig party, with whom he had hitherto acted. In 1848 the newly organized free-soil party, consisting largely of democrats, held its convention at Buffalo and nominated Martin Van Buren for president and Charles Francis Adams for vice-president. There was no hope of electing these candidates, but this organization developed, six years later, into the great republican party. In 1858 Mr. Adams was elected to Congress by the republicans of the 3d district of Massachusetts, and in 1860 he was reëlected.

In the spring of 1861 President Lincoln appointed him minister to England, a place which both his father and his grandfather had filled