Bob Crawford — America's Founding Son
Biography of John Quincy Adams as the original American political maverick — a president defined by principle over party at a formative moment in the republic.
Why we picked this
John Quincy Adams's career — son of a founder, president, then congressman for seventeen years fighting slavery — is a genuinely strange American story that Crawford makes newly legible.
Bob Crawford’s biography of John Quincy Adams recovers one of the more complicated figures in American political history: a man who served as president, was voted out after one term, and then spent nearly two decades in Congress fighting against the expansion of slavery — a role he found more meaningful than the presidency itself. Crawford presents Adams as a political maverick before the concept existed, someone whose commitment to principle consistently put him at odds with his own party and era.
Crawford draws on Adams’s voluminous diaries and correspondence to render a figure who was difficult, principled, often isolated, and ultimately consequential. The biography situates Adams not just in his own time but as a template for a particular kind of American political character — one that resurfaces in later figures across party lines.
The talk will be open to audience questions and is suited for anyone interested in early American politics, political biography, or the question of how principled dissent functions within democratic institutions.