Harrison Gray Otis, by Gilbert Stuart

Harrison Gray Otis, the Urbane Federalist, as biographer Samuel Eliot Morison called him, served Boston as congressman, senator and mayor, and helped develop Beacon Hill. One of three homes designed for him by Charles Bulfinch serves today as headquarters of the preservation society Historic New England, which has traced the history of the Otis House over the years.

"Only since the Bay State became Democratic has she become famous for political corruption," historian Morison writes in his Otis biography, which on its re-release in 1969 was noted by a reviewer to bestow "enlarged praise" on New England Federalism.

"Reading this volume tempts one to succumb, as Morison may have, to Otis' yearning for a nation ruled by merchant princes and country squires," Paul C. Nagel wrote in the Journal of American History. "Morison contends that this combination brought America leadership that was honest, efficient, and genuinely concerned with reform."

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Time covers: Brooke * Saltonstall * Herter

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John Quincy Adams, alternately a Federalist, a Democratic-Republican, and a Whig, was the first son to succeed his father in the White House (W being the second). He was the only president to go on to serve in the House of Representatives after leaving the White House, and died in 1848 after collapsing from a stroke on the floor of Congress.

From a piece in National Review of Nov. 6, 2000:

John Quincy Adams was arguably the most intelligent man to occupy the White House. As a boy, he hobnobbed with Jefferson, Lafayette, and his own extremely intelligent father, and lived in France, Holland, and Russia, as well as America. He had been Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard. He wrote competent poetry, and had a passionate amateur interest in astronomy. In a four-way race in 1824, he managed to squeak to victory, but in 1828 he went head-to-head with Andrew Jackson, a frontier general and politician who had never been abroad or written a book. (Adams privately called him a "barbarian.") Old Hickory cleaned his clock.

When Andrew Jackson was awarded an honorary degree by Harvard in 1833, Adams refused to attend.

Mr. Jackson was regarded as a boor by the Brahmins of Boston, who were apoplectic when Harvard bestowed an honorary degree on him. John Quincy Adams, an overseer of the school, wrote that it was a disgrace to confer honors upon "a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name."

It's interesting to note the president regarded as a founder of the modern Democratic Party was the one the Cambridge crowd of his day considered a boob.