As such, like previous Adams biographers, they recount the standard narrative of a privileged, ambitious, and intelligent politician with a truly nationalistic mindset-one who sought, over the course of four decades, to grapple with slavery in a way that would neither derail his political career nor spark disunion. Waldstreicher and Mason also recount Adams’s increasingly bold anti-slavery stances during the gag rule controversy and the Amistad case of the 1840s. For instance, the authors draw attention to Adams’s oft-cited 1820 private acknowledgment that “ Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union” (76). To be certain, this volume retreads well-worn ground in chronicling Adams’s cautious emergence as a slavery opponent. By letting Adams speak for himself, this work thus allows readers to “see Adams’s diary in part, and increasingly over time, an exercise in managing and working through the problem of slavery” (xv). However, unlike Unger and Wheelan, Waldstreicher and Mason combine excerpts from Adams’s diary with brief explanatory paragraphs.

This work thus parallels other recent works, such as Harlow Giles Unger’s John Quincy Adams (2012) and Joseph Wheelan’s Mr. David Waldstreicher’s and Matthew Mason’s John Quincy Adams and the Politics of Slavery draw from these papers to depict the evolution of Adams’ views towards slavery. The recent efforts of the Massachusetts Historical Society to place Adams’s voluminous papers online has granted scholars unparalleled access to the sixth president’s political and personal life. Sir Anthony Hopkins’ energetic portrayal of Adams as a cantankerous anti-slavery advocate in Amistad (1997) and Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s depiction of an idealistic young president in John Adams (2008) have introduced JQA to a new generation of Americans. To be certain, as the son of a founding father, a successful politician in his own right, and a living link between the Revolutionary and Jacksonian generations, Adams has traditionally occupied a pride of place in early American political history. The past twenty years have witnessed an explosion of historical research on John Quincy Adams. John Quincy Adams and the Politics of Slavery: Selections from the Diary by David Waldstreicher and Matthew Mason.

John Quincy Adams by Harlow Giles Unger