The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics

Cooper, professor emeritus of history at LSU and winner of the 2000 Los Angeles Times book prize for Jefferson Davis, American, explores the life of John Quincy Adams, America’s sixth president, who after his presidency served 17 years in Congress. Cooper begins with Adams’s achievements as secretary of state under Pres. James Monroe, which included Adams’s authorship of the enduring Monroe Doctrine and central role in the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty through which the U.S. gained Florida as well as territory from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. Adams’s presidency was unsuccessful in comparison and Cooper closely analyzes the growing populism and political polarization that presaged Adams’s defeat by Andrew Jackson in the 1828 presidential election. Adams’s subsequent tenure in Congress was distinguished, however, and Cooper sympathetically highlights Adams’s opposition to the spread of slavery in the face of the era’s territorial expansion, which included the annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War, and the settling of an expansive border for the Oregon territory. Cooper also details Adams’s dramatic Supreme Court argument in the historic Amistad case, which gained the freedom of Africans who had revolted while being transported on a Spanish slave ship. Cooper’s balanced, well-sourced, and accessible work focuses on a rarely examined yet pivotal period in American history. (Oct.)