| John Bailey | |
| State1: | Massachusetts |
| District1: | 10th |
| Term Start1: | December 13, 1824 |
| Term End1: | March 3, 1831 |
| Office2: | Member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives |
| Term2: | 1814–1817 |
| Office3: | Member of the Massachusetts Senate |
| Term3: | 1831–1834 |
| Birth Date: | 1786 |
| Birth Place: | Stoughton, Massachusetts (now Canton, Massachusetts) |
| Death Place: | Dorchester, Massachusetts |
| Party: | Adams-Clay Republican |
John Bailey (1786June 26, 1835) was an American politician who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from Massachusetts for three terms and part of a fourth from 1824 to 1831.
Born in Stoughton, Massachusetts (in that part of Stoughton which later became Canton). Bailey graduated from Brown University in 1807. Bailey worked as a tutor and librarian in Providence, Rhode Island from 1807 until 1814.
Bailey was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives and served from 1814 to 1817; he served as a clerk in the Department of State in Washington, D.C. from 1817 until 1823.
Bailey was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1816.[1]
Bailey presented credentials as a Member-elect to the Eighteenth Congress, but his election was contested on residency requirements. A House resolution on March 18, 1824, declared he was not entitled to the seat.
Upon returning to Canton, Bailey was elected as an Adams-Clay Republican; his subsequent re-elections allowed him to serve the Nineteenth and Twentieth Congresses. During his tenure Bailey chaired the Committee on Expenditures in the Department of State.
Bailey ran as an Anti-Jacksonian in the Twenty-first Congress but was not a candidate for renomination in 1830.
He was a member of the Massachusetts State senate from 1831 to 1834, and ran as the unsuccessful Anti-Masonic candidate for Governor of Massachusetts in 1834.
He died in Dorchester, Massachusetts the following year.