Adams, CHARLES FRANCIS

Adams, CHARLES FRANCIS, an American diplomatist, the son of John Quincy Adams, was born in Boston on the 18th of August 1807. He passed his childhood mostly in St Petersburg and London, graduated at Harvard, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1828. He served for five years in the legislature of Massachusetts. He was nominated at Buffalo, in August 1848, for the office of vice-president by the convention of Free-soilers. In 1858, and again in 1860, he was elected to congress for Massachusetts. In 1861 he was appointed minister to England, where he acquitted himself with credit in the difficult and important controversies that arose between his government and Great Britain during the great civil war in the United States. He resigned this office in 1868, and was an arbitrator in the Alabama claims tribunal at Geneva (1871-72). He published Life and Works of John Adams (10 vols. 1850-56). He died Nov. 21, 1886. See Life by son (1900).