Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams’s Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress
By Joseph Wheelan
Though many former US presidents have retired from the public eye, not all have been content with quiet pursuits. Thomas Jefferson, among his other accomplishments, founded a university in his home state of Virginia. William Howard Taft, defeated in the election of 1912, changed branches of government when he became chief justice of the Supreme Court nine years later. In our time, Jimmy Carter has built houses for the poor, aided relief efforts, and provoked controversy with his views on the Mideast.
Then there’s the extraordinary instance of John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts. Son of illustrious Founding Father and second president John Adams, Adams fils was a one-term president (1825-29) of middling rank. Outmaneuvered by his enemies in Congress, President Adams could not get much done while in office. In the election of 1828, the charismatic Andrew Jackson inflicted a humiliating defeat on Adams, a stiff, reserved man who loathed campaigning. Adams looked finished in politics, but in the defeat lay the seeds of a new beginning.
Persuaded by friends back home, Adams took an unlikely turn and stood for the US House of Representatives from the Plymouth district, winning a seat in 1830. (At 63, he was the oldest freshman congressman elected that year.) Moving from the commanding heights of the White House into the trenches of Congress might be seen as a step down, but Adams would flourish there. Arguably, he was a better congressman than president. He developed a powerful speaking style - his admirers dubbed him “Old Man Eloquent” - ferociously jousting with his Southern colleagues over the fate of slavery, which would become Adams’s signature issue.
In “Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade,” journalist and historian Joseph Wheelan has written a solid and entertaining account of Adams’s 17-year congressional career. Though Wheelan can be critical of his subject’s limitations, this is a portrait written in admiration. Wheelan salutes Adams’s stubborn devotion to principle, which would set him at odds with even his own allies. “Almost alone among his fellow congressmen,” Wheelan writes of this throwback to a bygone political era, “Adams believed in and upheld the principles of the Founding Fathers, embodied in the individual liberties of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, in the soaring words of the Declaration of Independence, and in the antiquated ethic . . . of nonpartisanship and selfless public service.”

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