LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Bob Crawford has two careers. One is as the bassist for The Avett Brothers, a folk rock band that's had a following for more than 20 years.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AINT NO MAN")
THE AVETT BROTHERS: (Singing) There ain't no man can save me. There ain't no man can enslave me. Ain't no man or men that can change the shape my soul is in.
FADEL: Crawford's other career is history. He's been researching and writing a book in between concerts.
BOB CRAWFORD: I came about this work in the quiet hours of driving eight, nine hours a day, filling the time up with reading American history.
FADEL: Crawford wrote a book about one of the less distinguished presidents. John Quincy Adams was defeated for reelection just as his father, President John Adams, had been a generation earlier. But Quincy Adams' post-presidency became something more. He returned to Washington as a member of Congress, and he spent his days tormenting the supporters of slavery. Steve Inskeep spoke to Bob Crawford about his book, "America's Founding Son: John Quincy Adams, From President To Political Maverick."
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
What was Adams' place in American life in that moment as he was leaving office in 1829?
CRAWFORD: He was swept out of office by a populist wave that was led by a guy named Andrew Jackson. They elected a war hero, a common man for the common man, who they thought was Andrew Jackson. So John Quincy Adams, he is the epitome of the establishment, son of a president. He had a incredible career as a diplomat. And so he was a Washington insider who got swept out with the tide of a populist wave.
INSKEEP: Why, in the aftermath of that defeat, would a former president run for Congress?
CRAWFORD: He was raised to serve this country. His parents sacrificed so much to establish this country and it was up to his generation to preserve it. And there was some ego, I'm sure, and maybe a little of wanting to settle some scores. So I think all of the above.
INSKEEP: How did he come to present anti-slavery petitions in Congress?
CRAWFORD: So back in this day, we didn't reach out to our politicians by going on their website and filling out a form to petition the government for a redress of grievances. You literally sent a petition to your congressman. And congressman would literally read a petition from a Mr. Inskeep in my district. But they also came in from abolitionists. And so, while Adams didn't agree with the abolitionists and their tactics, he nonetheless felt it was his job as a congressman to read their petitions and have their voices heard.
INSKEEP: Maybe you should explain why he would not agree with abolitionists when most of us would obviously agree with them today.
CRAWFORD: Right. They were radicals. They were a minority group, mostly in the North, of a religious bent, right? They were the radical Christians. You know, this is 1831. By 1835, these things are arriving at the Capitol by the wagonload, to the point where Southern congressmen begin to get unnerved by them. To raise the issue of slavery was to disrupt the status quo. And this could cause a civil war.
INSKEEP: OK. So Adams did not agree with slavery but accepted that it existed in some states, that it was constitutionally protected, that it'd be dangerous to be an activist against. And yet he decided it was his duty to read these anti-slavery petitions. What was the response?
CRAWFORD: They want to shut him up. They want to stop him because what happens here in these years is you have the Nat Turner uprising. You have these, like, uprisings of slaves in the South. And so they feel like the noise being made by the abolitionists and a very few people in Congress is being heard and filtered down to the South, and it's creating instability in the slave regime. And so they pass this rule in 1836 called the gag rule, which essentially says, these petitions arrive, they're immediately tabled, which means they don't exist.
And in some ways, it was an anti-John Quincy Adams rule because by this point, he kind of becomes the leader of the offering of these petitions. But now you're not talking about abolition. You're talking about the First Amendment. You're talking about the right to petition the government, which is protected. And so he becomes a defender of the abolitionists, not necessarily on the grounds of abolition, but on the grounds of free speech.
INSKEEP: So they passed this gag rule that just says no one can talk about slavery in the House of Representatives.
CRAWFORD: Essentially, yes.
INSKEEP: How did John Quincy Adams respond to that?
CRAWFORD: He lost his mind (laughter). He began to devise these ways - see, the thing about Adams is when he went into Congress, he memorized all the rules. Like, he's a former president. He's a lifelong diplomat. He took the gig seriously. So he knows all the parliamentary maneuvers, and he begins to use these things as ways to talk about slavery (laughter). He would, like, provoke them. Like, he would offer a petition that may or may not have been real.
At one point, he offers this petition and it's from a group of enslaved people. And the whole body, like, loses their mind. Like, Southerners are like, can't we burn it? Just burn it on the floor. And then he goes on and says, but this petition, you didn't let me read on. It says that they want to continue slavery.
INSKEEP: (Laughter).
CRAWFORD: Like, so he would do all these things.
INSKEEP: He was trolling them.
CRAWFORD: He would troll them and then they would try to censure him. And he'd be, like, well, if you're going to censure me, I need to be able to defend myself. And he would take weeks defending himself and then they would give up.
INSKEEP: Did the pro-slavery members of Congress ultimately provoke more conversation about slavery and more attention to slavery by trying to censure that discussion?
CRAWFORD: Absolutely. You can't snuff out an idea. The attempt to snuff it out becomes the story. He says, I can do more good for this movement arguing about freedom of speech. But then, Steve, he represents - there's a slave ship that has mutinied off the coast of Long Island. It's called the Amistad. Steven Spielberg made a movie about it.
The case rises all the way to the Supreme Court. And the leaders of the abolitionist movement ask John Quincy Adams to defend these captives before the Supreme Court, and he does, and he wins. And it's at that moment that I believe all the hurt and the bitterness of being a one-term president - he is finally appreciated by his fellow Americans. That is when he becomes elevated to kind of an American hero.
INSKEEP: It seems that he was comfortable being hated by large numbers of people.
CRAWFORD: He had no problem with that. He hated large numbers of people (laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN WILLIAMS' "MR. ADAMS TAKES THE CASE - AMISTAD/SOUNDTRACK VERSION")
FADEL: That was Bob Crawford talking to our cohost, Steve Inskeep. Crawford is the author of "America's Founding Son: John Quincy Adams, From President To Political Maverick."
(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN WILLIAMS' "MR. ADAMS TAKES THE CASE - AMISTAD/SOUNDTRACK VERSION") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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