#6 John Quincy Adams

1825--1829

--Adams was the son of President John Adams and Abigail Adams, and was the first president whose father had also been president (George W Bush and George H.W. Bush being the only other example to date). The name "Quincy" came from Abigail's maternal grandfather, Colonel John Quincy.

--As a diplomat, Adams was involved in many international negotiations, and helped formulate the Monroe Doctrine as Secretary of State. Historians agree he was one of the great diplomats in American history.

--Adams would swim naked in the Potomac river every morning at 5 o'clock when he was president, back when doing such a thing was considered "being folksy" instead of "being creepy". He also had a pet alligator that he kept in the East Room of the White House (the alligator was "re-gifted" to Adams by the Marquis de Lafayette during his tour of America in 1824/25).

--Adams was elected a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts after leaving office, the only president ever to do so, serving for the last 17 years of his life with far greater success than he had achieved as president. In the House he became a leading opponent of slavery and argued that if a civil war ever broke out the president could abolish slavery by using his broad war powers, which Abraham Lincoln partially did during the American Civil War with the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. Deeply troubled by slavery, Adams correctly predicted the dissolution of the Union on the issue, though the series of bloody slave insurrections he foresaw never came to pass.

--Much of Adams' youth was spent accompanying his father overseas. John Adams served as an American envoy to France from 1778 until 1779 and to the Netherlands from 1780 until 1782, and the younger Adams accompanied his father on these journeys. At some point during his stay in the Netherlands, John Quincy was secretly kidnapped by Dutch elves and replaced with a doppleganger, and in fact this fey doppleganger remains the only fully non-human U.S. president to date (Martin Van Buren was mostly human).