John Quincy Adams met both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln was born a decade after George Washington died, which is to say that their only overlap comes on lists of the greatest U.S. presidents. At least one person met both of them, however: John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States. Adams was a 22-year-old law student when he met Washington in 1789 while visiting his father, then-Vice President John Adams, in New York.
The younger Adams was an ardent admirer of the nation’s first president, so when Washington visited Newburyport, Massachusetts, later that year, Adams was chosen to write an address welcoming him to town, and met Washington a second time. After coming to admire a series of essays Adams had written under the pen name Marcellus, Washington later nominated him to be U.S. minister to the Netherlands.
Adams’ meeting with Lincoln came more than half a century later in 1847, when both men were serving in the House of Representatives. It was Lincoln’s sole term in Congress, 13 years before he was elected president in 1860. The meeting came shortly before Adams’ death in 1848. He collapsed after standing up and voting “nay” on a measure to honor veterans of the Mexican-American War, a conflict he vehemently opposed, and died two days later. His final words were, “This is the last of Earth. I am content.” Lincoln was present in the House chamber when Adams collapsed, and was even named to the committee in charge of the funeral, though he didn’t actually play a role in the arrangements.
