America's Founding Son
John Quincy Adams, from President to Political Maverick
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER
“A riveting account of the extraordinary life of John Quincy Adams, America’s sixth president.” —Ken Burns, award-winning filmmaker
“Brilliantly rendered...every page crackles with fresh insights and telling anecdotes.” —Douglas Brinkley, New York Times bestselling author, and professor of history at Rice University
An accessible and entertaining biography of our nation’s greatest public servant and original political maverick John Quincy Adams, from the bassist of the Grammy-nominated band the Avett Brothers.
During the tumultuous period between the era of the Founding Fathers and the disunion of the Civil War, John Quincy Adams was the man standing in the breach. After an unsuccessful presidential reelection campaign, he was left reckoning with his political legacy. But Adams would be dragged back into the fray in ways he never expected, pitting him against the slavocracy and Southern congressmen and solidifying him as a key ally to the antislavery cause.
America’s Founding Son tells the tale of Adams’s turbulent government career and his evolving views on slavery. Adams, along with lesser-known abolitionists Benjamin Lundy and Theodore Weld, found himself at the center of the coalition that leveled the first blow against slave power in the United States. The battles they fought would be foundational in the push for emancipation to follow. An entertaining deep dive into an under explored period in American history, America’s Founding Son shows how John Quincy Adams and the grassroots activism of the 1830s and ’40s shifted American politics forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Crawford, a bassist for the Avett Brothers and "history enthusiast," debuts with a fantastic, boosterish biography of famous "founding son" John Quincy Adams. Crawford focuses on the second and third acts of Adams's long life, when he transformed from the failed ex-president who lost to Andrew Jackson into a "national hero." Specifically, Crawford keys in on Adams's post-presidency role in Congress as a representative from Massachusetts who bedeviled pro-slavery Southern politicians through his "verbal jujitsu." Famously coining the term slavocracy to define the opposition, Adams found a new calling—much to his family's dismay—as an increasingly vocal advocate for abolitionism. Along the way, Crawford weaves in the stories of two lesser-known abolitionists who teamed up with Adams: Benjamin Lundy (with whom Adams formed a "tender bond") and Theodore Weld ("the very definition of a grassroots activist"). The trio worked tirelessly throughout the 1830s and '40s against proslavery forces in Congress—Adams, most dramatically, by finding ways to subvert the Southern-instituted "gag rule" that prohibited presentation on the House floor of the thousands of antislavery petitions that were being sent to Congress during this time period. Throughout, Crawford offers up amusingly modern allusions—"as we would say today, antislavery debates in Congress went viral"—and pithy insights that link antebellum America to today's politics. This is enormously fun and heartening.
