Michele Bachmann acknowledged Tuesday that she misspoke when she claimed yesterday that actor John Wayne was from her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa. But the 2012 GOP hopeful refused to dial back on another one of her notable gaffes: Her claim that the nation's Founding Fathers "worked tirelessly to end slavery."
In an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, the Minnesota congresswoman insisted she was right on the slavery claim and pointed to the career of John Quincy Adams, the nation's sixth president who was not yet nine years old when the Declaration of Independence was drafted with the help of his father, John Adams.
Bachmann insisted John Quincy Adams, who later worked to end slavery, should be considered a "Founding Father."
"He was a very young boy when he was with his father serving essentially as his father's secretary," Bachmann told ABC. "He tirelessly worked throughout his life to make sure that we did in fact one day eradicate slavery."
But Stephanopoulos interjected, insisting that the younger Adams had never been considered one of the Founding Fathers.
"Well, John Quincy Adams most certainly was a part of the Revolutionary War era. He was a young boy but he was actively involved," Bachmann replied.
A little historical research reveals that not only was John Quincy Adams "absolutely part of the revolutionary era," he is, in fact, Michele Bachmann's grandfather. Here are a few more surprising historical facts about America's favorite Founding Child:
After introducing the telegraph to Native American tribes in Minnesota, John Adams settled with his family in Iowa where they founded the University of Iowa and established the Iowa primaries. At the age of nine, a precocious John Quincy Adams, already an accomplished flutist and gifted baseball player, made significant improvements to Jefferson's muddled and rambling first draft of the Constitution, which J.Q. then signed in extra-large block letters so Pope Anastasius IV could easily read it without his contact lenses.
After the Constitutional Convention, J.Q. traveled to Vermont, where he was instrumental in helping cheesemaker and patriot Paul Revere fire guns and ring bells in order to warn the Spanish not to tread on the battleship Maine.
Having successfully liberated the peoples of Arizona and Hawaii from Spain, J.Q. set his sights on finally ending slavery as Jesus had told him to do during the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. After Admiral Nelson fired on Fort Apache, J.Q. led the first all-Christian Navy SEAL team - which included Sgt. Alvin York, most famous for being Michele Bachmann's other grandfather - into the Washington Beltway, where they easily defeated the liberal elites who were desperately trying to preserve slavery.
Following the Civil War, J.Q. changed the course of science and history by suggesting to Albert Einstein the addition of the "m" to his famous equation. After delivering the first atomic bomb to Hiroshima as the pilot of the B-29 christened "The Gipper," J.Q. led the quiet life of a retiree and gentleman factory farmer in rural Indiana, and died peacefully in his sleep in 1973.
