Bob Crawford, author of the national bestseller America’s Founding Son: John Quincy Adams, President to Political Maverick (Zando, 2026)
John Quincy Adams was the great visionary of America’s post-founding era, a writer and orator of consummate skill who reframed the origins and principles of the republic for a new generation. It’s fitting then that as the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of independence, that Adams should be the focus of renewed attention.
One new book in particular caught our eye: America’s Founding Son: John Quincy Adams, from President to Political Maverick by Bob Crawford (Zando 2026). Crawford is perhaps best known as the bassist for the acclaimed folk rock band The Avett Brothers, out of Concord, North Carolina. But he is also the host of not one but two popular podcasts: American History Hotline, on iHeart Radio, and The Road to Now, on SiriusXM’s POTUS channel. With all this going on, we’re very grateful that he could make time to sit down with LOA associate publisher Brian McCarthy for a free-ranging conversation about all things Adams.
Brian McCarthy: Bob Crawford, thank you so much for being with us, for joining the Library of America, to talk about America’s Founding Son: John Quincy Adams, from President to Political Maverick. Before we get to the book and the man of the hour, maybe just take a second and introduce yourself to our community and say a little bit about your day jobs in addition to writing books about John Quincy Adams—day and night jobs, I guess, is a better way of putting it.
Bob Crawford: Don’t quit your day job, as they say. I am the bassist for the Avett Brothers, a position I’ve held for twenty-five years, which is hard to believe. But in that time of touring the world and playing in a band, I have come to take advantage of the window of opportunity to do a lot of reading and to do a lot of thinking. And ultimately that downtime led to this book. The schedule of a musician is really conducive, especially when you’re in your fifties and you go to bed as soon as you possibly can after a concert. And then, as older people will attest, you can’t sleep late. That’s gone from your life. I’m up at six no matter what I do, no matter where I am, no matter when I go to bed. Then you don’t need to be anywhere until soundcheck, about two or three in the afternoon. That gives you a whole day to do research.
Bob Crawford (Kenan Arts)
I fell in love with American history. I’ve always been fascinated by it since my earliest years, but around 2004 is when I really began to pursue it. First it was an interest, a hobby, if you will. Then I began to do history podcasts. I have The Road to Now (in the month of May, we are celebrating our tenth anniversary), and out of that grew a limited John Quincy Adams podcast series that led to this book. And then I have another series called American History Hotline; we’re beginning our second season this summer. So yeah, from small things, big things come. And those are my many jobs and my many hats.
BM: The History Hotline is a great concept where you invite audience members to send in their questions, things they’ve always wondered about, and then you go and find a historian who can help them out. It’s a real public service.
BC: It’s a way to be interactive in the podcast sphere. I’m a big fan of talk radio, and you don’t really get that so much in the podcast world. We have a website, americanhistoryhotline.com, where you can post your question, and we will find the expert and figure out how to get the best answer for you.
John Quincy Adams: Speeches & Writings
BM: So I wanted to meet you and have this conversation because we share something in common, which is that we, at various points in our lives over the last decade or so, have managed to insert John Quincy Adams into probably every conversation we’ve had with friends and family.
The Diaries of John Quincy Adams 1779–1848
Just by way of introduction, here at the Library of America, I was the in-house editor (working with the historian David Waldstreicher) of a three-volume edition of John Quincy Adams’s writings: two volumes of his incredible diaries, and a volume that just came out last year his major speeches. John Quincy Adams is, without question, one of the top five most important American statesmen of our 250-year history. It’s hard to make the case he was a great president, for reasons we can talk about, but over the arc of his career, particularly the part that you focus on in your book, there’s a case for greatness to be made. Why don’t we start by just talking about the title of your book, America’s Founding Son. What was the significance of Adams’s relationship to the founding?
BC: Oh, it is deep and wide. At the age of eight he was an eyewitness to the Battle of Bunker Hill. He and his mother, Abigail, walked a mile to a nearby overlook and they were witnesses to the battle. They saw the flash of the cannon. They smelled the smoke. They heard the reverberations and the echoes of the battle.
The Battle of Bunker Hill by Winslow Homer (Public Domain)
Then two years later, he crosses the Atlantic in winter with his father on a warship while they’re being pursued. The waves turn to chunks of ice that could smash the boat. At one point, the boat is struck by lightning, and a man is killed, and at another moment, they awake in the midst of a storm and they’re holding on to the planks of their beds. And then they overtake a British vessel and take the booty from it. This is on the way to Paris for John Adams to begin to negotiate France into the war.
By the time they arrive, the deal’s been done. But Adams is now going to get what I call an “internship”—a firsthand education—in diplomacy. I would argue he surpasses his father in both intellect and experience.
Ultimately, like you said, he’s one of our greatest American statesmen. He is appointed to his first diplomatic post by George Washington as a young man, and then he serves in Congress post-presidency. He serves alongside Abraham Lincoln. So where does Adams fit? The case I make in this book is he’s our greatest public servant.
BM: That’s a nice way to think about it. I was thinking about “America’s founding son,” because one of the interesting things about the people that we, until recently, conventionally called “the founding fathers” is that strikingly few of them had sons to whom they could pass on a legacy of leadership—something that worked out well if you were trying to establish a republic, an altogether new kind of non-hereditary system of government. George Washington had no sons. Thomas Jefferson’s sons were Black and enslaved at Monticello. Benjamin Franklin’s son was, as they used to say, illegitimate and a loyalist, so therefore out of the picture. The closest peer, in a sense, is Richard Rush, whom Adams will serve with and they will ping-pong offices back and forth. When Adams leaves London as minister to the UK, Richard Rush replaces him. Rush being the son of Benjamin Rush, who was John Adams’s friend and fellow signer.
BC: And the doctor of the revolution.
BM: That’s right. So it’s a singularity of John Quincy Adams that, on top of the fact that his parents, John and Abigail, placed extraordinary amounts of pressure on him to assume the mantle of leadership in the new country, he was also singular in that there weren’t a lot of people who fell into that time span, that remarkable human bridge as you suggest between Washington and Lincoln.
Treaty of Paris, an unfinished 1783 portrait by Benjamin West with John Adams seated in front and Benjamin Franklin beside him (Public Domain)
He starts high in terms of his first position in elected office in the federal government, as US Senator from Massachusetts. And both as a senator and as a diplomat, he very much sees himself as a national figure, and because of the legacy of the founders as well.
BC: Even as a congressman, he’ll go on to see himself as a representative of the union.
BM: Yes. It’s this identification with the nation and the founding of the nation that I think is crucial to his own advancement of his career, because he’s very conscious of the presidency being a kind of Virginia dynasty from the beginning, and he’s very conscious as a New Englander that he cannot be perceived as a sectional figure. I think the sense that he has to transcend his section comes naturally, because he didn’t really grow up there; he grew up in Europe, as you say. But also, he’s extremely ambitious, in many ways more ambitious than he even admits to himself. This comes to a head, as you describe in your book, in 1820. What happens then?
BC: In 1820, he is serving as Monroe’s Secretary of State, and the nation is in the midst of the Missouri Crisis. The Missouri Territory is going to come into the Union. Will it be slave or will it be free? Well, that territory had long been populated by Southerners and their enslaved property, and it seemed like a foregone conclusion, I think, for most, until James Talmadge, a one-term backbench New York congressman, attaches these amendments to the Missouri statehood bill to, essentially, emancipate all enslaved people over a period of time. In return, if Missouri comes into the Union, it ultimately will have to be a free state.
These amendments pass in the House, but they fail in the Senate, and then Congress adjourns, and the country’s left with this cloud of Missouri. The debate goes from Congress to town halls and state legislatures, to taverns and newspapers. And all of a sudden, the nation, which hadn’t really debated the slavery question in earnest since 1789, during the ratification of the Constitution and the three-fifths compromise, is left to face this issue, and it gets ugly. There’s talk of secession, things being thrown back and forth from the North and the South, and Adams is watching it all happen from his office at the State Department.
Scan of John Quincy Adams’s diary entry for February 9, 1825, the day he won the presidency
If there’s one thing your listeners need to know about John Quincy Adams, it’s that he was a diarist. He kept a diary that ultimately runs around 14,000 pages, and he kept that diary from the time he was a teenager up until his death in 1848 at the age of eighty. And it is in the diary that he confesses that slavery is immoral, it’s an abomination, but there’s no real way to solve the issue. He can see no way of it being solved, although it should, and that ultimately it is going to end in a civil war or a servile war or an uprising. And it is in the pages of his diary, over the months when this debate’s going on in the country, that he ruminates on all kinds of things, like should we just dissolve the nation and form a nation of free states and a nation of slave states?
He’s having extended conversations with the war secretary, John C. Calhoun from South Carolina. In the first draft of this book, I put them as friends at this time. My fact checker was from the Massachusetts Historical Society, and she’s like, “You know, around here, we don’t think they were really friends.” We don’t know that Adams had many friends. But they had these very civil, open discussions about slavery. And Adams is confessing that he can’t believe what slavery does to the soul of a man. So at this point, in 1820, where my book begins, Adams is Secretary of State, he’s just negotiated Florida into the Union, and here the nation is suddenly in the throes of this crisis.
BM: In the privacy and safety of his diary, he says—and you quote this line in your book, and it’s amazing—“Oh, if but one man could arise with a genius capable of comprehending, a heart capable of supporting, and an utterance capable of communicating those eternal truths that belong to this question of slavery, to lay bare in all its nakedness, the outrage upon the goodness of God, human slavery, now is the time. And this is the occasion upon which such a man would perform the duties of an angel upon earth.”
BC: Oh boy, if only somebody would stand up.
BM: Right. And then he falls silent and the diary moves on, and he moves on, he becomes president after the highly contested election of 1824. Most of the candidates are members of the cabinet with Adams, and nobody achieves a majority. Adams comes in second after Jackson. The person who came in fourth was Henry Clay, who was the Speaker of the House at the time. The elections then, as would happen now if it came to this, went to the House of Representatives, where the representatives voted by state. And so the question really turned on Henry Clay, where would he throw his support. This leads to one of the most painful episodes in Adams’s life . . .
BC: . . . and Henry Clay’s . . .
BM: . . . and Henry Clay’s, the so-called “corrupt bargain” according to which, it was alleged, Adams promised Clay the coveted position of secretary of state in exchange for his support in the House vote. It’s hard to imagine a public figure less likely to suffer from such an accusation. Adams has a lot of vices, but corruption is not one that comes to mind.
Portraits of Abigail and John Adams by Benjamin Blyth (Public Domain)
BC: It doesn’t appear to be, no. But he was raised to be president. He knows in his mind that this is what John and Abigail always foresaw for him. At one point he writes his father, I think in 1794, trying to figure out what he’s going to do. He’s between diplomatic postings and his father essentially says, “You have been given so much, mediocrity is not an option. If you do not rise, not only to the head of your profession, but of your country, it owes only to your own laziness, slovenliness, and obstinacy.” Don’t squander your inheritance, kid, essentially. So this is that pressure bearing down on him.
The presidency, preceding 1824, is something you ascended to. And it was obviously his turn, and he was obviously the most qualified man to have the job, But the ground shifted beneath him, and beneath the country, because there was a populist wave blowing. The right to vote was extended from property-owning white men to most white men. And these rural Americans, these tradesmen, they saw in Andrew Jackson, the greatest war hero since Washington, a man who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps.
Something I find endlessly fascinating is that John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson were both born in 1767. They both experienced the American Revolution, but their stories could not be more different. Adams is in Paris. He’s going to the opera with Jefferson. He’s learning at the knee of Benjamin Franklin and his father. He’s tasting exotic cuisines. He’s learning how to dance in the parlors of Paris and Versailles.
Andrew Jackson, meanwhile, his father dies about a month before he’s born. He is living in the Waxhaws of North Carolina, which is this wooded border region between North and South Carolina. He’s poor. The revolution comes, and Jackson is this messenger boy for the Continental Army. By the end of the war, his mother is dead from smallpox. He loses two brothers, I believe, and he’s hit upside the head with the butt of a sword by a British officer, which scars him physically and emotionally for life with a hatred of the British. Then he, as a general, wins this amazing, miraculous battle in New Orleans, which is the punctuation at the end of the War of 1812. He’s a man who truly appears to have pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and he largely did. And he’s got a lot of grudges along the way, and some bullets that he will carry from duels for the rest of his life.
But these two men are the most important men of their era, and I think Jackson is the more celebrated of the two. But there’s no doubting that they are two halves of the whole of the American experience in a period that I like to call America’s tortured adolescence.
Rivals Andrew Jackson, by Thomas Sully, and John Quincy Adams, by George Peter Alexander Healy (Public Domain)
BM: You’re quite right to pair the two, I think. You, know, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote an influential book, The Age of Jackson, but nobody’s written The Age of Adams.
BC: And Brian, why haven’t they? Well, William Freehling would argue the three-fifths compromise in the 1800 election swings the vote to Jefferson. And because of that, and I think I quote this in my book, Freehling says the age of Adams became the age of Jefferson.
BM: In terms of the dichotomy of Adams and Jackson, nobody distills things like political sloganeers: “Adams can read, Jackson can lead. Adams can write, Jackson can fight.” Literacy as a drawback for leadership, right?
BC: There’s a great campaign song from, I believe, 1824. Oscar Brand, the great folk artist, recorded it. He did a whole album of campaign songs. But one was for John Quincy Adams, and it goes: “If John Quincy not be coming, war is coming, murder’s coming, robbing’s coming, jobbing’s coming.”
BM: Fun. Wow. So one-term president, just like his dad, doesn’t work out.
In the history of the most impolitic things a president has ever said, Adams might be up there. Do you want to share what Adam says in his address to the union as president?
BC: “We shall not be palsied by the will of our constituents.”
BM: Yes, he urges the members of Congress to embrace his robust vision for national infrastructure improvement.
BC: And look, this is twentieth-century America he’s laying out. He’s saying we need federal investment in roads, bridges, and canals to tie this young country together. We need to invest in lighthouses of the sky, which are telescopes for scientific research. We need a naval academy. We need a national university, which was always the dream of his hero, George Washington. They’re doing this in Europe, and if we want to compete with Europe or be on par, if we want to be one of these great nations, we must as well. He knew his constituents didn’t want to spend tax dollars on this stuff, but he’s essentially saying, “I know better.” And we should know better, so let’s not be palsied by the will of our constituents.
Well, Jackson reads this in the paper and he’s immediately like, “Oh, to think that we would be palsied by the will of our constituents.” And the campaign for 1828 is on.
BM: Yeah, and over.
He uses his diary and his speeches on the floor as these great dramatic and literary moments that I believe really make him one of the greatest American writers of the nineteenth century.
BC: I hate to quote Steve Bannon, but essentially they killed the Adams presidency in the crib right there.
BM: Let’s fast forward then to the greatest second act in American political history. He becomes a congressman from Massachusetts, and I think you’re right he becomes certainly a representative of the nation. But he’s also liberated by the sheer beautiful reality that he’s just representing southeastern Massachusetts and the will of his constituents. And I think that is among the things that liberates him to become this formidable anti-slavery tribune, as one of his congressional foes called him after his death, “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed.”
BC: Henry Wise of Virginia.
BM: That’s right. So, how does that happen?
BC: If you were a Southern congressman of the time and you were out on the campaign trail, and if you tussled in Congress against John Quincy Adams, that was a badge of honor. How does it happen? Well, he loses the election of 1828. He sees it as a rejection by the American people, the people he was groomed to serve. And two months after leaving office, his son commits suicide. George Washington Adams jumps off a steamship (ironically, in some ways, it was called the Benjamin Franklin) and drowns in Long Island Sound. It was not easy to be a member of the Adams family.
But here he is now, rejected by the American people and grief-stricken, and he goes back to Quincy, Massachusetts, and he’s approached to stand for Congress. And he’s like, “Well, I won’t campaign, but if the constituents believe I can serve them, how could I say no?” When his wife reads about it, and according to Louisa Thomas, Louisa Catherine Adams’s biographer, she learns in the newspaper that her husband’s going to stand for the presidency. And Charles Francis Adams, his youngest son, who will go on to be his sole surviving son and carry on the Adams dynasty, says, “Dad, you can’t do this. A president can’t go into the House.” And Adams responds, “If they wanted me to be on city council, how could I say no?” You know, I’m here to serve.
All that is true, but also there’s an ego here. He didn’t see himself piddling around the house for the rest of his life. And he probably wanted to settle a few scores. So the best place to do that was in Congress.
Photographs of Adams and John C. Calhoun (Public Domain)
BM: One of the things I most enjoyed about your book was that you brought to bear some of your own experience as a performer on stage in your portrait of Adams as a congressman, because Adams—Old Man Eloquent—comes to command the floor of Congress as though it were a stage. Can you say a little bit about Adams as almost a showman at this point of his career?
BC: This goes back to his presidency, I believe, and is part of his redemption. As president, he didn’t get the American people. He didn’t get the electorate. He didn’t understand politics. He thought showmanship was beneath someone serving the American people. But the reality is, it’s not. It’s what the American people want. Andrew Jackson being this war hero elevated him in their eyes and made him a folk hero and a celebrity. They created this mythology, right?
Well, in the last year of Adams’s presidency, and you probably know this story, it’s July 4, and there is a ceremonial groundbreaking for an infrastructure project, a canal. Adams is there and he gives a speech to 3,000 people.
BM: Just a quick note that this is only his second public appearance as president.
BC: Excellent point. Adams gives a speech and he’s going to dig a ceremonial first clump of dirt with a golden shovel. He puts the shovel down in the ground and hits a stump. There’s some silence and murmuring, and he’s kind of taken aback. He goes again to try to get that clump of dirt, and he hits a stump again. Now there’s maybe a little gasping, definitely more murmuring. He takes off his coat, he holds the shovel up, and he comes down confident and true and gets a nice, smooth clump of dirt on that shovel and throws it back behind him. And the crowd erupts. It’s like this moment of, “I get it, I get it.” And he’s so excited! All the dignitaries that are there for the event, he invites them back to the president’s house for a drink and he writes in his diary that night that he gave this speech and it didn’t seem to move the people at all. But then this one act of showmanship, this one act of drama, captured them, captured their imagination.
I believe that when he gets into Congress, he learned this lesson. Not only does he, just by his nature, learn every rule of the House and how to use it to his benefit and against his enemies, but he also, you know, as a young man, wanted to be a literary man. There was a time he didn’t want to go into politics; he wanted to write novels and poetry. So he uses his diary and his speeches on the floor as these great dramatic and literary moments that I believe really make him one of the greatest American writers of the nineteenth century.
And so he learns how to work the stage. He knows how to get the ire of the Southern congressman he’s battling against. He really takes his stand in Congress in the battle over petitions, the First Amendment to the Constitution. We have a right to petition our government for a redress of grievances. Well, what happens when all these anti-slavery activists begin to flood Congress with petitions against slavery? Adams is one of the few congressmen who will read them, and he begins to wield them like that sword of that avenging angel that he talked about in 1820.
BM: Beautiful. I think that’s an excellent connection to make. And that story is one of my favorite Adams stories and was one of Louise’s favorite stories, too. I think she said something afterwards like, “If only he would do this kind of thing more often, people would see him for who he really was.”
The last thing I wanted to touch on today is Adams as the nation’s (prior to Lincoln at least) greatest interpreter and reader of the Declaration of Independence. Over the course of his career, as readers of our volume of his speeches and writings will see, he’s often called upon to give high-profile orations . . .
BC: . . . whenever somebody dies, be it Lafayette or Monroe or Madison, he is the man giving the oration.
BM: Right. And so he think a lot, and he thinks really really deeply, about the Declaration of Independence.
This is top of mind for me, because we at the Library of America have just finished working on this new book about the Declaration of Independence (The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text), which collects texts over the course of American history and global history that shows how the Declaration has been for 250 years a living and expanding and breathing text. And Adams plays an essential role in that. So I wonder, by way of conclusion, as we approach the 250th, if you can say a little bit about Adams and the Declaration?
BC: Adams never becomes an abolitionist, but if we want to go back to that idea of 1820 and him musing on slavery, the abolitionists hold the Declaration of Independence up as the ideal: you can’t have the Declaration of Independence and slavery. The two are in absolute opposition to each other.
Like you say, Adams gives these orations throughout his life about the Declaration, and he interprets it and reinterprets it, and he comes to the same conclusion as the abolitionists. He’s a fellow traveler with the abolitionists, but not an abolitionist. And in fact, in the volume of speeches and writings, there are these letters in 1838 and 1839, to his constituents—which means all the citizens of the United States—where he takes down the abolitionists. In the same letter, he trashes the South and he trashes the abolitionists. A pox on both your houses, if you will. But the Declaration of Independence becomes, in this time period, a sacred text. And Adams always holds it up to be so, which is really crazy, because he comes to hate Jefferson. He loathes Jefferson and takes apart his whole legacy.
BM: We could talk for three hours about his relationship with Jefferson.
BC: It could be a book. It should be a book. The way he talks about the Declaration of Independence is—because he’ll be challenged as he fights against the gag rule, this rule that’s passed where you cannot mention slavery in Congress. He wields the Declaration of Independence like a hammer, like a sword, and it becomes his greatest offensive weapon against the forces of slavery in this rhetorical battle. He is on the same path as the abolitionists in that, and he really elevates the document.
Now, he gives this oration on July 4, 1821—and this was not uncommon at the time, in the early history of the country, to have some dignitary read the Declaration of Independence and then comment on it on July 4. He reads the Declaration of Independence and then he asks the question, “What has America given to the world?” And this is in 1821. America is not even fifty years old at this point. And he says, well, we’ve given self-government, the idea of self-government, and this idea of freedom.
Facsimile title page to Adams’s July 4, 1821, address from the LOA edition of his speeches and writings
He’s talking about freedom spreading around the world. Mainly he’s alluding to freedom spreading in South America, which is happening at the time. These Spanish colonies are rising up against Spain and they’re fighting for their independence. He’s talking about America and calling back to Washington’s warning to beware of foreign entanglements. And he says, talking about America, “She does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” So he’s saying, we are not going to go colonize and make the same mistake that Spain is making. But also, we are not going to tolerate the rest of the world trying to colonize in the Western Hemisphere. And for you seeking freedom in the Western Hemisphere, like the Spanish colonies, we are all for you guys rising up and having your freedom, but we might not get involved unless we decide we need to. And this is the Monroe Doctrine.
BM: It’s an amazing speech. And he follows it ten years later with another one that comes during the nullification crisis.
BC: Right, which is being led at the time by John C. Calhoun . . .
BM: He keeps coming up!
BC: . . . who was his old buddy from the Monroe administration, and a man whom he had incredible respect for, whom he had expected great things from on behalf of the nation, but whom he writes about around the same time, “I now expect nothing from him but evil.” By the way, Calhoun was Adams’s vice president, now he’s Jackson’s vice president, and he’s leading this nullification—
BM: —an attempt to delegitimize federal laws within the state of South Carolina and other states in the South.
BC: —so now you have the president, Andrew Jackson, threatening to march troops into South Carolina to go against his vice president. It’s insane. You can’t make it up.
Political cartoon depicting the consequences of nullification (Public Domain)
BM: Nullification is premised on the idea that the United States is a compact of states, that essentially it’s what we were under the Articles of Confederation, just with a slightly different window dressing—that each state retains its fundamental sovereignty and accedes where it chooses to federal laws but withholds its allegiance to laws that it objects to, which of course is chaos, right?
BC: And then, in 1839, on the fiftieth anniversary of Washington’s inauguration and the Jubilee of the Constitution, Adams gives a speech before the New York Historical Society about the Articles of Confederation and what was so bad about them. He says there that the Articles of Confederation are in opposition to the Declaration of Independence, because the Declaration of Independence says that all rights to govern are given by the American people, and so the Constitution is a compact between the people, not the states.
BM: Right. That I think is the key insight. We tend to associate the idea of “we the people” with the preamble to the Constitution, in 1787. Adams says no, it’s 1776. It’s there when “one people” determine that they will remove their allegiance to a foreign crown. It’s one people and it’s we. It’s that essential idea, that insight, as he reads the Declaration, that the union precedes the Declaration. It’s not created by the Declaration, it creates the Declaration. And that is the ultimate rejoinder to the nullifiers, but it’s also the necessary, I think, prerequisite, or table setting, for Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom.” I don’t think we as a nation, as a people, get to the ultimate resolution that we get to in the Civil War without Adams.
BC: You know what burns me up? There are aspects of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that you can trace back to a speech Adams gives the day the gag rule is passed in Congress. God, I’m going to go down this rabbit hole.
So they pass this rule where you can’t mention slavery on the floor of Congress, and the very next issue on the agenda before Congress are these resolutions. There are these Native American wars going on in Georgia and Alabama, because the citizens of Georgia and Alabama have taken Native American lands, which they were granted in treaties. So of course the Native Americans have reprisals against these American citizens and they leave these communities in bad shape. They need rations. They need help. They need aid. So Congress is debating sending aid to these communities in Georgia and Alabama, and Adams gets up and says, “I’m going to vote for this, but I don’t know where in the Constitution we, the Congress, have the power to spend the federal money on these rations for these poor people suffering these depredations here in Georgia and Alabama. But I’m going to vote for it because I think it’s the right thing to do.”
He’s like—and I’m totally paraphrasing here—come to think of it, if we do have the power, it comes as part of our war powers. And there are people who say that Congress has no power to interfere with slavery in the states where it currently exists. But actually, that too rests in our war powers, because let’s say there was a servile war, and as part of ending that war, we had to negotiate peace with those who were uprising in revolt. Maybe we would have to emancipate them and emancipate the enslaved property of this country. So yes, under the war powers, we could free the enslaved.
And Lincoln essentially makes the very same argument when he’s presenting the Emancipation Proclamation. We know Lincoln knew who Adams was, of course. Between all the historians I’ve talked to, all the reading I’ve done, we can put them in the same room a few times. But they never really talk about each other.
Lincoln serves on the funeral committee for Adams when he dies. There’s a party at the home of William Seaton for Whig congressman on February 18 and Adams dies on the 23rd. Adams is there, sitting on a couch and greeting people, and we think Lincoln’s there, too. They probably spoke, but neither wrote about the other or any personal interactions. But you talk about Lincoln’s new birth of freedom; I really sense that Lincoln drew upon John Quincy Adams for the Emancipation Proclamation.
BM: He certainly did. Bob, thank you so much. This has been just a real pleasure and delight. We’ve been talking with Bob Crawford, author of America’s Founding Son: John Quincy Adams, From President to Political Maverick. I encourage everyone to check it out. Bob quotes generously from the diaries and speeches we’ve been talking about, and you can find those in the Library of America edition. We’ll have links to all these books along with this video. And Bob, thank you again. I really appreciate the time.
BC: No, thank you so much This has been great fun.
Bob Crawford is the bassist for the Grammy-nominated band the Avett Brothers, and creator of the iHeart Curiosity podcast series Founding Son: John Quincy’s America and The SiriusXM Volume Channel Docuseries Concerts of Change: The Soundtrack of Human Rights. He’s also co-host of the Road to Now history podcast and The American History Hotline.
