America’s Founding Son: John Quincy Adams, from President to Political Maverick

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. (Mar.)