JQA’s Consistency as a Diary Keeper

Beginning at the age of 12 and continuing until shortly before his death at age 80, John Quincy Adams (JQA) recorded the details of his daily life in 51 diary volumes. In addition to the line-a-day format featured here, he also often recorded the day’s events in draft and long entries in different volumes. He kept his diary for 68 years with minimal gaps!

Sixteen years ago this month, the Massachusetts Historical Society began to share his daily line-a-day diary entries on Twitter, now X.

About JQA and How Researchers Access His Diary

John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), the son of John and Abigail Adams, ably served his country in numerous roles over the course of his life. It is no simple feat to summarize all the positions he held and the scope of his life. In the book Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy described JQA’s career this way:

John Quincy Adams—until his death at eighty in the Capitol—held more important offices and participated in more important events than anyone in the history of our nation, as Minister to the Hague, Emissary to England, Minister to Prussia, State Senator, United States Senator, Minister to Russia, Head of the American Mission to negotiate peace with England, Minister to England, Secretary of State, President of the United States and member of the House of Representatives. He figured in one capacity or another, in the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the prelude to the Civil War. Among the acquaintances and colleagues who march across the pages of this diary are Sam Adams (a kinsman), John Hancock, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Lafayette, John Jay, James Madison, James Monroe, John Marshall, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Hart Benton, John Tyler, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster … and many others.

John Quincy Adams’s diaries are part of the Adams Family Papers, the most important manuscript collection at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The depth and breadth of the information they contain make them a significant historical resource. Although JQA’s career placed him in the middle of many significant events of the early National period, his diary entries cover more than his professional career: they contain information about his family, activities, places he visited, and names of people he encountered, both famous and lesser known.

The sheer number of diary volumes, pages, and entries created by John Quincy Adams is both impressive and daunting and over the years there have been many different approaches to providing access to this historical treasure trove. JQA’s son, Charles Francis Adams, edited an abridged edition focusing on JQA’s public career, but even this “abridged” edition was massive—12 volumes. Access to the original manuscripts was made possible to scholars via a microfilm edition of all the Adams Family Papers, including all 51 diary volumes. In 1981, the Adams Papers documentary project published two letterpress volumes of JQA’s diary entries for the years 1779-1788.

More recently, the Massachusetts Historical Society completed two significant projects to make the full diary available online. In 2005, MHS successfully completed a grant funded by Save America’s Treasures, a federal program, that enabled the conservation of the original manuscript diary volumes and the creation of a website presenting digital images of every page of the diary. Visitors to the website can browse all the diaries page by page and/or search for all pages containing entries for specific dates. Because of the size of the diary and the overall budget, the digital images of all the diary pages were created from the microfilm edition.

In 2024, the Adams Papers documentary editors completed a multi-year project generously funded by several agencies to create authoritative transcriptions of all of JQA’s diary entries. This edition includes enhanced name encoding and topic tagging and offers extensive search options.

Anniversary of Sharing Line-a-day Entries via Social Media

On 5 August 2025 MHS will celebrate the 16th anniversary of sharing JQA’s line-a-day diary on Twitter/X. Each morning the entry containing JQA’s summary of what happened 200 years previously is posted. MHS staff decided to start sharing JQA’s line-a-day entries on Twitter in the spring of 2009, following a class visit of archives students from Simmons College (now Simmons University). During that visit, one student commented that JQA’s succinct line-a-day entries resembled tweets, which for many years were limited to 140 characters. The MHS launched the JQA Twitter project on 5 August 2009 with JQA’s 5 August 1809 entry about his departure from Charlestown, Mass., en route to St. Petersburg, Russia.