America's Founding Son

John Quincy Adams, from President to Political Maverick

By: Bob Crawford

Narrated by: Bob Crawford

An accessible and entertaining biography of our nation’s greatest public servant and original political maverick John Quincy Adams, from the bassist of the Grammy-nominated band the Avett Brothers.

During the tumultuous period between the era of the Founding Fathers and the disunion of the Civil War, John Quincy Adams was the man standing in the breach. After an unsuccessful presidential reelection campaign, he was left reckoning with his political legacy. But Adams would be dragged back into the fray in ways he never expected, pitting him against the slavocracy and Southern congressmen and solidifying him as a key ally to the antislavery cause.

America’s Founding Son tells the tale of Adams’s turbulent government career and his evolving views on slavery. Adams, along with lesser-known abolitionists Benjamin Lundy and Theodore Weld, found himself at the center of the coalition that leveled the first blow against slave power in the United States. The battles they fought would be foundational in the push for emancipation to follow. An entertaining deep dive into an under explored period in American history, America’s Founding Son shows how John Quincy Adams and the grassroots activism of the 1830s and ’40s shifted American politics forever.

I now know how consequential JQA was to American history and especially the fight to end slavery in the US!

As a longtime fan of the Avett Brothers and a fan of historical politics, I was excited to get into this book. Bob Crawford does a magnificent job of bringing his excitement to this audio book and I learned so many things about a president who is often just known as John Adams' son. I bounced between the audio book and the book itself, but I enjoyed the audio book for this one more!

Post-presidential JQA is the best.

I especially loved the post-presidential years. The thing that stands out about the best public servants, is how they are changed by their experience.