How tall was John Quincy Adams?

How tall was John Quincy Adams?

John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States, is recorded on this site at 171 cm (about 5′7″). Wikidata records the same 171 cm, though without a cited reference. Expressed in feet and inches, 171 cm is about 5′7½″; the commonly quoted 5′7″ converts to 170.2 cm.

It is important to be candid about the evidence. Unlike Thomas Jefferson, whose 6′2½″ was recorded by an overseer who saw him daily, or Abraham Lincoln, whose height was documented by many observers, John Quincy Adams left no well-known contemporary measurement. The 5′7″ figure comes from later compilations, and the sources behind them are rarely cited. What the record does support is a picture of a man of medium height for his time, whose build changed noticeably over a long life.

A life lived in the public eye, from Bunker Hill to the House floor

Few Americans have had a longer public career, which is one reason his appearance was described across so many decades. According to the National Park Service and the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, he watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from Penn's Hill as a boy, went to Europe with his father at ten, and at about fourteen served as secretary and translator to the American envoy Francis Dana in St. Petersburg. He graduated from Harvard in 1787, was admitted to the bar in 1790 and was appointed minister to the Netherlands by George Washington in 1794.

He went on to be minister to Prussia, a U.S. senator (1803–1808), minister to Russia from 1809, a negotiator of the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812, minister to Britain, and secretary of state under James Monroe from 1817 to 1825. After a single term as president he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1830, and Wikipedia notes he remains the only former president elected to that chamber. He served from December 1831 until he collapsed at his desk in February 1848.

That span means Adams was seen, painted and eventually photographed at almost every stage of adult life, from the young diplomat to the elderly congressman. None of those accounts makes a point of his height, which is itself evidence that he was neither notably tall nor notably short.

The earliest photograph of a president

The best visual evidence of how Adams looked is a daguerreotype made in 1843. Wikipedia notes that some sources contend it is the earliest confirmed photograph of a U.S. president, although others maintain that William Henry Harrison posed for one in 1841. The original is in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.

A seated portrait cannot tell us someone's height, but it shows the compact frame of a man in his mid-seventies, then still an active member of Congress. No painted likeness or written description consulted for this page records his stature, so the image remains one of a medium-sized man rather than a measured one.

Father and son: two Adamses of similar size

John Quincy Adams and his father John Adams were the first father and son to both serve as president, and they were also nearly the same height. The site lists the father at 170 cm and the son at 171 cm. A single centimeter separates them.

The comparison is interesting because the younger Adams was raised in very different conditions. The Miller Center notes that he spent seven years of his youth in Paris, the Netherlands and St. Petersburg, with shorter visits to England, Sweden and Prussia, and had his first formal schooling at the Passy Academy outside Paris alongside Benjamin Franklin's grandsons. Despite that cosmopolitan childhood, the two Adamses are listed within a centimeter of each other.

Only one other father and son have both reached the White House:

Adams compared with the presidents of his era

Set against his predecessors and successors, Adams belongs to the shorter half of the early presidents. The table uses the site's canonical heights.

Three comparisons stand out.

Monroe, his boss. For eight years as secretary of state, Adams worked closely with James Monroe, who at 182 cm was about 11 cm taller. Together they shaped the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and the Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819.

Jackson, his rival. The contests of 1824 and 1828 pitted Adams against Andrew Jackson. In 1824 no candidate won a majority of electoral votes and the House of Representatives chose Adams, according to Wikipedia. At 185 cm Jackson was about 14 cm taller.

Jefferson, his early hero. As a young man Adams admired Jefferson and considered his Notes on Virginia a brilliant piece of writing, according to the Miller Center. Jefferson stood about 18 cm taller, the same gap as between a 5′7″ man and a 6′2½″ man today.

Changing build: portly diplomat, lean swimmer

If his height is poorly documented, his build is unusually well described, largely thanks to his own diary.

When he returned from Europe in 1817 to become secretary of state, European dining had left him rather portly, according to Shannon Selin's compilation from his diaries. He responded with a strict routine: walking and running in cool weather and swimming in the Potomac in warm weather. Compiled from the diaries, the regimen in summer 1818 had him up between 4 and 5 a.m., walking two miles to the river, bathing for about half an hour and walking home, about two hours in all. Some years later, the congressman Charles Jared Ingersoll wrote that Adams credited his good health to swimming and described him as extremely thin.

The swims became part of Washington lore:

• 25 August 1824. He swam across the Potomac with his son John, taking exactly an hour and a half from shore to shore by his own account; John was ten minutes faster.
• 13 June 1825. As president, he and his valet Antoine Michel Giusta set out across the river in a small canoe that leaked itself half full before they were halfway over, forcing both men to swim, as the White House Historical Association recounts from his diary. Adams wrote that his loose shirt sleeves filled with water and hung on his arms like two fifty-six-pound weights. He lost an old summer coat, a white waistcoat and one shoe, but both men returned unharmed.
• July 1846. On 13 July, two days after his 79th birthday, his diary records him walking at dawn to the river for another swim.

For a man of about 171 cm, these accounts sketch a compact, physically resilient figure who managed his weight with real discipline over decades. No weight was ever officially recorded, so this page does not give one.

Medium height for his generation

How did 5′7″ compare with other men of his time? Monticello's summary of research by the economic historians Kenneth Sokoloff and Georgia Villaflor puts the average final height of American recruits around 1779 at about 68.1 inches, or 173 cm. Adams, born in 1767, would have been roughly 2 cm below that average, essentially an ordinary height for an American man of his generation.

Measured against today's men, the picture is similar. In the CDC's NHANES survey for August 2021 to August 2023, the median height for American men aged 20 and over is 175.2 cm, and the 25th percentile is 170.0 cm. At 171 cm, Adams would sit at roughly the 30th percentile of American men today: a little below average, but well within the normal range. You can try any height in the height percentile calculator, or see the long-term trend on the United States average height page.

Converting the competing figures

Because the published figures differ by half an inch, it helps to see exactly what each one means in metric terms:

• 5′7″ = 67 inches × 2.54 = 170.2 cm
• 5′7½″ = 67.5 inches × 2.54 = 171.5 cm
• Site value: 171 cm, which is 5′7.3″

The whole disagreement amounts to 1.3 cm, less than the thickness of a finger and smaller than the difference a pair of 19th-century boots would make. For a quick look at what that range means in feet and inches, see the page for 170 cm in feet.

Why presidential heights before 1850 are uncertain

Adams's case is a good illustration of a broader problem. Before photography, standard medical exams and official records, a public figure's height usually survives only if someone thought it worth writing down. Tall men, like Jefferson, Washington and Lincoln, prompted comment. Men of ordinary height rarely did. That is why the heights of very tall and very short presidents are often better documented than those in the middle.

Adams himself recorded a great deal about his body in his diary, from his exercise regimen to the length of his swims, yet none of the excerpts consulted for this page dwell on his stature. When you see a precise figure such as 5′7½″ for Adams, it is best read as a reasonable estimate that fits the portraits and descriptions, not as a measurement taken with a rule. The site records 171 cm because it fits the range of published figures. If a primary record ever surfaces in the Adams family papers, that number would take precedence.

The old man of the House

Adams's final 17 years, spent as a congressman from Massachusetts, are where his physical stamina is best documented, and they help explain why contemporaries who saw him then remembered his energy rather than his size.

According to the National Park Service, several of his most important achievements came in his seventies:

• 1841, the Amistad case. At 73, Adams championed the cause of the Africans of the slave ship Amistad, held captive by Spanish slave merchants, before the Supreme Court.
• 1844, the gag rule. After years of fighting the House rule that blocked debate on antislavery petitions, his motion to repeal it passed by 108 votes to 80.
• 1846, the Smithsonian. He was largely responsible for steering the congressional charter of the Smithsonian Institution, which, fittingly, now holds the 1843 daguerreotype of him.

He was still on the House floor on 21 February 1848, protesting the U.S.-Mexican War according to the National Park Service, when he collapsed at his desk. He died in the Capitol two days later. Among the members of that House was a congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, who served from 1847 to 1849 and at 193 cm was some 22 cm taller than the elderly Adams. The contrast is a neat bookend: a son of the Revolution, who had watched Bunker Hill as a child, sharing a chamber with the man who would lead the country through the Civil War.

Seeing Adams at scale

To picture John Quincy Adams beside a modern person, enter 171 cm into the height difference calculator along with your own height. A woman of average modern American height (161.2 cm in NHANES) would be about 10 cm shorter. Lined up with the other early presidents in the height comparison tool, he stands almost exactly level with his father, 8 cm above Madison and 17 to 18 cm below the two Virginians, Washington and Jefferson.