That Time Charles Adams Streaked Across Harvard Campus

This week we are discussing how the son of a president may have streaked across the campus of one of the most prestigious universities in the United States.

To be completely transparent, there wasn't a lot of reliable sources for this story. I don't remember when I first heard it, but it has intrigued me since then. Most of the sources I found were blogs or online articles. No primary sources.

This will be a short post, but as it's a story that has intrigued me for years, I want to tell it

To clarify, this is about Charles Adams, son of President John Adams and younger brother of President John Quincy Adams. If you came looking for Charles Addams, creator of The Addams Family, this is the wrong place. Sorry.

Charles Adams was born in 1770 to John and Abigail Adams, who would later become President and First Lady in 1797. He began attending Harvard University in 1785, at the age of fifteen.

Several sources have all stated pretty much the same story. Charles had been involved in a scandal while at Harvard where several boys were reprimanded for running across campus naked, which is known as streaking. This very well might be one of the first streaking events at a university on American soil.

When people think of the time the United States was established, a lot of the time people imagine uptight proper people, but they were just as human and rambunctious as we are today in 2020. To think the son and brother of two presidents streaked across the campus of one of the most prestigious universities in the country is just so funny to me.

Charles seems like someone I could have gone to college with. I love stories that humanize these icons who people idolize.

Charles would go on to live a short life. He died in 1800, a the age of 30, leaving behind his wife and two daughters Sadly, his father disowned him two years before his death. John Adams wrote to his wife, that their son was "a Madman possessed of the Devil".

I would like to go deeper into Charles' life and maybe write a biographical post about him, because his short life intrigues me. He apprenticed with Alexander Hamilton. There is speculation that he may have been queer.

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