Background
Jonathan Russell, the son of Jonathan and Abigail (Russell) Russell, was born at Providence, R. I. On his father's side he was a descendant of John Russell who was in Charlestown, Massachussets, as early as 1640.
https://www.amazon.com/President-communicating-Information-relative-Government/dp/B000LODOVC?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000LODOVC
Jonathan Russell, the son of Jonathan and Abigail (Russell) Russell, was born at Providence, R. I. On his father's side he was a descendant of John Russell who was in Charlestown, Massachussets, as early as 1640.
He was graduated in 1791, with highest honors, from Rhode Island College (later Brown University). He also studied law but did not practice it.
Russell was engaged in mercantile pursuits for a number of years. On July 4, 1800, in the Baptist Meeting House in Providence, Russell delivered an oration which seems to have coincided with the opinions of the political revolution of that year; it was published and went through more than twenty editions. In 1810 he was appointed charge d'affaires at Paris by Madison, and by appointment of July 27, 1811, filled the same office in London.
From January 1814 to October 1818 he served as United States minister to Sweden and Norway, at Stockholm. In 1814, Russell joined John Quincy Adams, James A. Bayard, Henry Clay, and Albert Gallatin at Ghent, to engage in the negotiation of the treaty of peace with Great Britain; in the course of the negotiations he alone voted with Clay against Gallatin's proposal to concede the free navigation of the Mississippi in exchange for express recognition of the right to the Northeastern fisheries.
After four years in Sweden, he was recalled by Monroe, and returned to America by way of Germany and Italy. Of this tour he kept an interesting journal, which was printed a century later in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (vol. LI, 1918).
In 1819 he settled at Mendon, and in the following year was elected to the General Court in May, to the constitutional convention at Boston in October, and to the United States House of Representatives in November. Here he served one term (1821 - 23). In 1822 he had a controversy with John Quincy Adams, who believed that Russell, as the tool of Clay, was seeking to destroy Adams' reputation in the West by pointing him out as one of the majority of the Ghent commissioners who had been ready to trade free navigation of the Mississippi for the restoration of the Northeastern fisheries.
Russell published what purported to be a copy of his letter of February 11, 1815, to Secretary Monroe, setting forth his dissent from the majority; Adams secured the original letter from President Monroe, accused Russell of treachery, and published The Duplicate Letters, the Fisheries and the Mississippi: Documents Relating to the Transactions at the Negotiation of Ghent (1822), calling attention to the differences in phrasing between Russell's "copy" and the original. Although he later found sufficient reason to forgive Clay, he wrote of Russell more than a year after the latter's death, "He is gone to his account, and is sufficiently punished in this world for his perfidy" (Adams, Memoirs, post, IX, 3).
For many years, to "Jonathan Russell" an opponent was current political slang in New England for overwhelming him in a dispute. This controversy with Adams is supposed to have been the cause of Russell's retirement from public life, although as late as March 1829, "a broken down man" as the result of "two or three paralytic shocks, " he was said to have been expecting a foreign post from Jackson (Ibid. , VIII, 111). Russell died in Milton, Massachusetts. His remains were ultimately buried in Forest Hills.
Russell was married on April 3, 1794, to Sylvia Ammidon of Mendon, Massachussets, by whom he had four children, and on April 2, 1817, to Lydia Smith, who also bore him four children. She was the daughter of Barney Smith, Boston merchant and owner of the Hutchinson house on Milton Hill.