CSPAN - Washington Journal Bob Crawford
Aired: 2026-03-16
Duration: 46:59


=== America's Tortured Adolescence (03:57) ===

[00:00:00]  Congregating.
[00:00:06]  Thank you, everybody.
[00:00:18]  It isn't just an idea.
[00:00:20]  It's a process.
[00:00:21]  A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles.
[00:00:29]  It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted.
[00:00:34]  Democracy in real time.
[00:00:37]  This is your government at work.
[00:00:39]  This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered.
[00:00:49]  Welcome back to Washington Journal.
[00:00:50]  We're joined now by Bob Crawford.
[00:00:52]  He is a musician and a historian and the author of the book called America's Founding Son, John Quincy Adams, from president to political maverick.
[00:01:01]  Bob, welcome to the program.
[00:01:03]  Thank you for having me, Mimi.
[00:01:04]  Tell us about your day job.
[00:01:06]  Okay, well, my day job is as the bassist for the Avet Brothers, and we've been around for 25 years.
[00:01:12]  We're, like you say, I think folk rock band.
[00:01:15]  I think that's an okay way to describe us.
[00:01:17]  I think we're in that Americana genre.
[00:01:21]  For those who haven't heard us, you know, we started out upright bass, banjo, guitar, me and two brothers with those like Everly Brothers type harmonies.
[00:01:32]  And then over the years, we've become more of a rock band.
[00:01:36]  We have seven on stage now.
[00:01:38]  So you're not just a musician, you're a historian.
[00:01:40]  So tell us about that kind of combination.
[00:01:44]  Yeah, well, on the road, there's a lot of downtime.
[00:01:48]  And if you think about the rock musicians of the 60s, 70s, 80s, what did they do with their downtime?
[00:01:54]  They practiced the art of self-destruction.
[00:01:57]  Well, these days, myself, and I'm noticing a lot more musicians, we're making use of that time, working on other projects, exercising, trying to find like healthy food on the road.
[00:02:09]  But I found it, I love history.
[00:02:11]  I've always loved history.
[00:02:13]  And I used that time to research, and I wrote a book about John Quincy Adams.
[00:02:19]  And you were definitely going to talk about John Quincy Adams, but you said in a recent New York Times interview that you used to watch C-SPAN as a kid.
[00:02:26]  Well, back, yes, and in college in the 90s, I would watch C-SPAN.
[00:02:33]  And it's funny because when I said that, I had old friends from those days reach out to me and they were like, yeah, we used to watch C-SPAN too.
[00:02:42]  Like there was a college band that I was good friends with and they had a song that had a line about watching C-SPAN.
[00:02:51]  Well, let's talk about John Quincy Adams.
[00:02:53]  How did you become interested in him specifically and want to write a book about him?
[00:02:59]  Well, in the early 2000s, traveling around the country on tour.
[00:03:05]  At this point, we weren't in a tour bus yet.
[00:03:07]  We were in a conversion van.
[00:03:10]  I picked up a book by historian Sean Willentz, The Rise of American Democracy from Jefferson to Lincoln.
[00:03:17]  It covers that period between Jefferson and Lincoln.
[00:03:20]  Look, we learn about the Revolution in school.
[00:03:24]  We learn about the Civil War.
[00:03:26]  But what happened in between?
[00:03:28]  And so when I, the story that Willence told, as it unfolded, I was just amazed by all the characters and all the crises the nation went through at the time.
[00:03:39]  You call it America's Adolescence.
[00:03:41]  America's tortured adolescence.
[00:03:44]  And Adams, he was a character, a person who kept popping up in the narrative.
[00:03:50]  He is Monroe's Secretary of State.
[00:03:53]  He's the architect of the Monroe Doctrine.
[00:03:55]  He disappears from the narrative.

=== The Anti-Slavery Gag Rule (15:37) ===

[00:03:57]  He comes back.
[00:03:57]  There's this election in 1824 that is really controversial.
[00:04:02]  Some say it was corrupt.
[00:04:04]  He has a failed one-term presidency.
[00:04:08]  You continue reading on, and then all of a sudden, he's in the House of Representatives.
[00:04:13]  And that was the moment I was like, I've never heard of a president after their presidency going into Congress.
[00:04:22]  And I was just hooked, and I couldn't believe that we as a nation don't understand more about his life.
[00:04:30]  Well, this book really focuses on John Quincy Adams' anti-slavery work.
[00:04:36]  How did he first get involved in the anti-slavery cause?
[00:04:41]  Well, so I'm sure a lot of your viewers know that the anti-slavery activists of the time, they were called abolitionists.
[00:04:49]  And they were a radical minority of the population.
[00:04:54]  And Adams found them to be wackos, right?
[00:05:00]  He always abhorred slavery, but he did not believe in their tactics.
[00:05:06]  And he did not believe that emancipation was possible.
[00:05:09]  So he thought they were kind of foolish.
[00:05:12]  But in 1836, Congress passed a rule in the House called the gag rule.
[00:05:18]  And you could not talk about slavery on the House floor.
[00:05:22]  Just because they didn't want to deal with it?
[00:05:24]  They didn't want to hear about it.
[00:05:25]  They were getting paranoid about it.
[00:05:27]  It was uncomfortable.
[00:05:28]  See, First Amendment, you petition your government for a redress of grievances.
[00:05:33]  Back then, like today, we go online and we send a message in the email to our congressmen.
[00:05:38]  Maybe we stop by their local office.
[00:05:41]  Back in the 1800s, you literally sent a petition to your congressmen and there was time set aside on the House floor for the reading of petitions.
[00:05:51]  And anti-slavery activists, abolitionists, they were like, let's flood Congress with these anti-slavery petitions.
[00:05:59]  That's how we'll have our voice heard.
[00:06:02]  And a lot of congressmen didn't want to read them.
[00:06:05]  But Adams was part of a small coterie of congressmen who were brave enough to read them.
[00:06:11]  Not because Adams agreed with them, but because he believed all citizens have a right to have their voices heard.
[00:06:17]  So when the gag rule was passed, Adams thought, he's like, this is no longer about emancipation and slavery.
[00:06:25]  Now this is about the First Amendment.
[00:06:28]  And if you take away the right to petition your government, next will be the right to peaceably assemble, the right to freedom of religion, freedom of speech.
[00:06:38]  And he really became a First Amendment activist initially.
[00:06:43]  Over time, he grows closer to the cause.
[00:06:47]  You say, quote, it was John Quincy Adams who struck the first blow against slave power.
[00:06:53]  Was it his fight against this gag rule that did that?
[00:06:56]  Well, that, I agree with that.
[00:06:58]  And that's a quote from Theodore Weld, who was an abolitionist of the time.
[00:07:02]  And you can make the argument that he did in a few ways.
[00:07:08]  In defying the gag rule, Adams would use, I call it verbal jiu-jitsu on the House floor.
[00:07:16]  You're not supposed to mention slavery.
[00:07:17]  If they're debating something else, he would start debating what the issue of the moment was, and he would turn it into a fight against slavery.
[00:07:25]  He always subverted the gag rule.
[00:07:28]  He did it many times.
[00:07:30]  In fact, they tried to censure him twice, and he defeated their censures.
[00:07:35]  That's one blow against the slave power, which they called, the abolitionists would call, the slaveocracy.
[00:07:41]  And then in the 1839, the Amistad, which was A mutinied slave ship that was found off the coast of Long Island.
[00:07:53]  Adams defended those captives before the Supreme Court and wins.
[00:07:57]  And that was a pivotal moment in the anti-slavery fight.
[00:08:02]  If you'd like to join our conversation, Bob Crawford is in the studio with us.
[00:08:06]  He'll be with us until the end of the program.
[00:08:08]  He's a historian, an author, a musician.
[00:08:11]  We're talking about John Quincy Adams.
[00:08:13]  The lines are bipartisan.
[00:08:14]  Democrats are on 202-748-8000.
[00:08:17]  Republicans on 202-748-8001.
[00:08:20]  And Independents 202-748-8002.
[00:08:23]  You can start calling in now.
[00:08:24]  Can you talk about the sources that you used for writing this book?
[00:08:27]  There is a great source that we all have access to.
[00:08:30]  It's primary sourcecoop.org, primary sourceco-op.org.
[00:08:40]  It is a group, Primary Source Co-op.
[00:08:43]  They partner with the Massachusetts Historical Society.
[00:08:46]  And John Quincy Adams had a diary he kept from when he was a teenager to almost when he passed away at the age of 80.
[00:08:55]  It is 14,000 pages long.
[00:08:58]  And Primary Source Co-op has created a database of it.
[00:09:02]  So you can search the year, the day, a topic, a name.
[00:09:07]  And that was by far the greatest source I referenced.
[00:09:12]  Also, all the congressional records are online going back to the founding of the nation.
[00:09:19]  The University of North Texas has a great resource for them that I often used.
[00:09:25]  I also referred to Adams' letters and, of course, prior secondary sources, books written about Adams.
[00:09:32]  I want to show you something and have you comment on a quote from your book.
[00:09:37]  And this is about his anti-slavery actions.
[00:09:42]  It says this: John Quincy Adams had long struggled with the issue of slavery.
[00:09:47]  Like his parents, he did not believe in owning enslaved people.
[00:09:50]  However, Adams accepted slavery as a reality in America, a political expedience to yield to Southern sentiment for the sake of preserving harmony in the Union.
[00:10:01]  Privately, he found it repulsive.
[00:10:03]  He preferred not to think about it at all.
[00:10:07]  The day would come when it was all he would think about.
[00:10:10]  Yeah, as Secretary of State, he defended, he argued with Great Britain about reparations for enslavers, Southern slaveholders, who lost their slave property during the War of 1812.
[00:10:24]  You know, there was a big sense of not upsetting the status quo because if you mess with slavery, if you talk about it, if you try to change the way things are in the present, that will lead to a civil war.
[00:10:43]  It will lead to a dissolution of the Union.
[00:10:45]  So Adams, like many Northerners, didn't even want to talk about it.
[00:10:49]  And in fact, when the abolitionist movement really began to gain steam in the 1830s and 1840s, they received a lot of the violence that was perpetrated against them came in the North from their fellow Northerners who were just terrified that this anti-slavery movement was going to tear apart the nation.
[00:11:12]  Adams made some predictions about the future of the country.
[00:11:16]  What did he predict and how accurate was he?
[00:11:18]  In 1820, when the nation is debating the Missouri Compromise.
[00:11:23]  So you've got to understand, Missouri Territory is about to come into the Union in 1819.
[00:11:29]  There's a bill before the House for Missouri statehood.
[00:11:33]  There's a Northern congressman named James Talmich.
[00:11:36]  He offers two amendments that would essentially end enslavement in Missouri when it becomes a state.
[00:11:43]  That bill passes the House and Congress adjourns.
[00:11:49]  And so Missouri is not yet a state, but it's looking like it could possibly come in as a free state and Southerners lost their minds and it ignited the slavery debate, the debate over slavery in the country, like it had not been discussed since the Constitutional Convention.
[00:12:11]  So it was like ripping a, if the three-fifths compromise was a band-aid, it ripped the band-aid off of that compromise.
[00:12:19]  So Adams, he keeps this diary, and he doesn't have a vote.
[00:12:25]  He's the Secretary of State, but he's writing.
[00:12:27]  He's writing about the debate going on in the country, in state legislatures, in newspapers, and how it's beginning to rip the country apart.
[00:12:36]  He says the only way slavery is going to end will be through violence.
[00:12:40]  It will be through a civil war because the enslavers in the South will never willingly give up their property.
[00:12:47]  He met Abraham Lincoln.
[00:12:49]  We believe he had to have.
[00:12:52]  There's not a lot of firm evidence, right?
[00:12:57]  I found, and my friend Chris DeRose, he pointed me to this.
[00:13:02]  He wrote a book about Congressman Lincoln.
[00:13:05]  So Adams is very old.
[00:13:07]  He's still in Congress when Lincoln comes in for his one term.
[00:13:12]  And they don't talk about each other very much in their writings.
[00:13:16]  But there is a party at the home of Seton, William Seton, who was the longtime mayor of D.C., and he was the editor of the Washington Intelligence newspaper.
[00:13:29]  He was a Whig, and he has a party, and this is a few days, like five days before Adams dies.
[00:13:36]  And it's for Whig congressmen.
[00:13:38]  And this Southern congressman who's at this party writes that Adams was sitting on a couch greeting people.
[00:13:48]  And we think Lincoln was there.
[00:13:50]  So obviously they met.
[00:13:52]  There's another writing about Adams at his desk surrounded by congressmen from Illinois, like from all, from the congressional delegation of Illinois.
[00:14:02]  So we think he met there.
[00:14:04]  It's possible that Lincoln was in the House when Adams died because Adams was fallen by a stroke.
[00:14:12]  Oh, no, no, I want to talk about it.
[00:14:13]  We'll get to that.
[00:14:14]  The greatest death in American history, maybe.
[00:14:17]  And finally, Lincoln is part of the funeral committee for Adams, for Adams' funeral.
[00:14:24]  So there's no hard evidence, you know?
[00:14:27]  So you really talk about him as the bridge between Jefferson and Lincoln.
[00:14:33]  Absolutely.
[00:14:34]  No doubt.
[00:14:35]  No doubt.
[00:14:35]  And the Revolution and the Civil War, that he's the pivotal figure in the middle.
[00:14:41]  Mimi, Washington appoints him to his first diplomatic post, and he serves with Lincoln in Congress.
[00:14:48]  Again, when we first sat down here, I said, there's the revolution we learn.
[00:14:53]  There's the Civil War we learn.
[00:14:55]  What happened in between?
[00:14:57]  You know, there's the promise of the Declaration of Independence, and then there's the rebirth of freedom.
[00:15:04]  And the man standing in the breach was John Quincy Adams.
[00:15:10]  Let's talk to callers.
[00:15:11]  Mike, Indianapolis, on the Independent Line, you're on the air with Bob Crawford.
[00:15:16]  Thank you for taking my call.
[00:15:18]  I appreciate the information on John Quincy Adams.
[00:15:22]  Just a question.
[00:15:23]  What party does Mr. Crawford believe that he would be part of today, a Democrat, Republican, or would he be an Independent like most people, I think, in this country?
[00:15:32]  And if he could talk about what he thinks about America's involvement in foreign wars, I'll just hang up now.
[00:15:38]  Thank you.
[00:15:39]  These are great questions.
[00:15:41]  So Adams was a member, initially a member of the Federalist Party.
[00:15:46]  He defied his party as a senator by supporting Thomas Jefferson and the Embargo Act and the Louisiana Purchase.
[00:15:54]  So he's kind of drummed out of the Federalist Party.
[00:15:56]  He was definitely drummed out of the Senate by Federalist Party elders.
[00:16:00]  And then he serves the Virginia dynasty, right?
[00:16:03]  He's a diplomat under Madison, and he's a diplomat under Monroe.
[00:16:09]  And at this point, era of good feelings, Federalist Party's kind of dissolved.
[00:16:13]  Everybody's one party, seemingly.
[00:16:17]  Adams eventually, he joins the Whigs, but he's always independent.
[00:16:22]  He's a very independent.
[00:16:25]  If you read his diary and when the election cycle would come up, the presidential election cycle would come up, he would trash all the candidates.
[00:16:34]  So he really was, he considered himself a representative for the Union.
[00:16:39]  And so where would he be right now?
[00:16:43]  Well, whatever the majority is, he'd be in the opposition, if not by title, but by effort.
[00:16:50]  And Mike asked about America's involvement in foreign wars.
[00:16:53]  But before you answer that, I want to show you what Senator Rand Paul said.
[00:16:57]  This was on March 5th, so this is very current.
[00:16:59]  He said this.
[00:17:00]  But had Congress debated war with Iran, we would have been wise to recall the words of John Quincy Adams, who, as Secretary of State, advocated a foreign policy of restraint, quote, wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, Adams argued, there will America's heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be.
[00:17:24]  But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
[00:17:28]  And a few days later, Pete Hegseth used that same quote when he was talking about America policy in South America, that conference of the Americas.
[00:17:42]  And he used it in a different context.
[00:17:46]  So where does Adams stand on foreign wars?
[00:17:51]  He was, see, the Monroe Doctrine is like, it's like we're not going to, okay, all these South American colonies were in revolt against Spain and their imperialist overlords.
[00:18:05]  And Adams was saying, Holy Alliance, Prussia, Austria, France, Prussia, you stay out of our hemisphere.
[00:18:16]  You don't belong here anymore.
[00:18:18]  Britain, you too, we support these freedom movements in South America, but we're not going to get involved unless at some point we feel like we need to get involved.
[00:18:30]  So it's really vague.
[00:18:33]  And I bet some of your callers know this better than I, but I've begun to ask myself the question, because this wasn't the focus of my book, but in before World War II, the isolationist movement in this country, I wonder if they used that quote.
[00:18:52]  Let's talk to David, Republican, Poughkeepsie, New York.
[00:18:55]  David, good morning.
[00:18:57]  Good morning.
[00:18:59]  Building on what was just discussed, I was wondering if Bob covered anything about John Clincy Adams' staunch opposition to paying tribute to the Barbary pirates back then and advocating instead for military action to secure the American shipping rights.
[00:19:22]  I wonder, did he ever cover that in his book?
[00:19:26]  I did not cover that in the book, but you can see where he's kind of vague on the use of military force, right?

=== Henry Clay and the Whigs (13:26) ===

[00:19:35]  So this would have been during Jefferson's presidency.
[00:19:37]  He would have been Secretary of State at the time?
[00:19:39]  Oh, no, during Jefferson's presidency, he was in the Senate.
[00:19:42]  He was in the Senate.
[00:19:42]  He was a senator.
[00:19:43]  And he did, again, like I said, he defied his Federalist Party to support Jefferson at least a few times.
[00:19:53]  Ari, tell us about John Quincy Adams' death.
[00:19:56]  It's epic.
[00:19:58]  He is 80 years old.
[00:20:00]  He is still showing up to Congress every day.
[00:20:04]  He suffered a stroke in, I think, 1846.
[00:20:07]  He recovered.
[00:20:08]  He returns to the House, standing ovation, and he's serving.
[00:20:13]  And this is at the end of the Mexican War.
[00:20:17]  And he did not, like Congressman Lincoln, Adams never supported the Mexican War.
[00:20:24]  And there's a proclamation or some procedural vote accommodating generals and American generals in the Mexican War.
[00:20:36]  And Adams, while they're debating it, he yells out, no.
[00:20:40]  And then at one point, he tries to stand up to speak.
[00:20:45]  And as is reported in the newspapers of the time, he's like trying to grab his desk.
[00:20:50]  It's hard for me to not like do that here.
[00:20:53]  But he's trying to stand up and he falls over and he's caught.
[00:20:57]  And of course, there's a gasp in the room.
[00:21:00]  Mr. Adams is dying.
[00:21:02]  And they bring over a couch.
[00:21:05]  They lay him on a couch.
[00:21:08]  A couch that's still at the Capitol today.
[00:21:11]  Really?
[00:21:11]  We have that couch?
[00:21:12]  We have that couch.
[00:21:13]  Do they let people sit on it?
[00:21:15]  I sat on it.
[00:21:16]  Yes, and they do.
[00:21:17]  And in fact, people sit on that couch every day because it is in the women's powder room, which at the time of Adams' death was the speaker's chamber.
[00:21:29]  It's right off of the rotunda floor.
[00:21:33]  And they carried him into that room.
[00:21:36]  Henry Clay comes over from the Senate, kneels next to him, holds his hand, is weeping.
[00:21:42]  They go get his wife.
[00:21:43]  His wife comes.
[00:21:46]  He's almost, by the time his wife got there, he had lost consciousness.
[00:21:50]  But before he loses consciousness, he says, this is the end of earth.
[00:21:54]  I am composed.
[00:21:56]  And then he loses consciousness.
[00:21:58]  And he dies a day and a half later on that couch in the Capitol.
[00:22:05]  Having never been moved from there.
[00:22:07]  He died in the Capitol.
[00:22:08]  First, they put him on the couch, and this is February.
[00:22:11]  And they're like, he needs air.
[00:22:12]  So they take him outside.
[00:22:14]  And they're like, no, it's too cold.
[00:22:15]  They take him back inside.
[00:22:17]  And then they take him to the Speaker's Chamber.
[00:22:21]  Steve in Massachusetts Independent Line, you're on with Bob Crawford.
[00:22:25]  Oh, hi.
[00:22:25]  Thanks.
[00:22:26]  I love this topic.
[00:22:28]  You just gave away.
[00:22:29]  I wanted to bring up of how he met his demise on the floor of the House.
[00:22:34]  I don't know if you brought up before, I think you said quick, but he was known as Old Man Eloquent.
[00:22:40]  And he was a staunch, he hated slavery with a passion.
[00:22:45]  And I believe it was the government that prevented him from trying to abolish slavery.
[00:22:52]  He was also, I don't know if you brought this up, he had the highest IQ of all presidents.
[00:22:56]  If you want to talk about nepotism, he had it.
[00:23:02]  His family had so much to do with the founding of the country.
[00:23:06]  Going back to the father of the revolution, Sam Adams, his father was a landowner, and England took all the land.
[00:23:14]  It's just a great history, and this is what we should be teaching our children.
[00:23:18]  Amen.
[00:23:18]  I just want to say, hey, you know, Sank, this is just a great topic.
[00:23:22]  One of the greatest presidents ever, he never got it done.
[00:23:25]  You know, that's where he sits in with Kennedy and other presidents.
[00:23:28]  And as far as Rand Paul comparisons go, I think this man would be on Trump's side.
[00:23:34]  What Trump is trying to do is much bigger than anything.
[00:23:38]  And I believe that when God chose Trump for all his fallacies or his bad things, this was one of them.
[00:23:48]  He had the guts to do this.
[00:23:50]  And other presidents, it was laid right before him.
[00:23:53]  I'm not going to mention their names, but they chose not to, whether it would be out of fear or whatever.
[00:24:02]  And thank God for Pete Hegsets because we know he's not a deep stater.
[00:24:07]  All right, Steve.
[00:24:08]  Go ahead, Bob.
[00:24:10]  Some good comments in there.
[00:24:11]  Some I probably don't agree with, but we don't know where Adams would sit.
[00:24:15]  You know, we don't know where we do know this.
[00:24:19]  You know, he lost re-election to a populist politician.
[00:24:25]  Tell us about Andrew Jackson.
[00:24:28]  So, well, you need to talk about 1824 to talk about 1828 because 1824 sets up 1828.
[00:24:36]  You have four men standing for the presidency.
[00:24:39]  You have the Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams.
[00:24:43]  His resume is impeccable.
[00:24:46]  And the Secretary of State position was the stepping stone to the presidency at the time.
[00:24:51]  You have William H. Crawford, the Treasury Secretary.
[00:24:54]  He and Adams are enemies for the first time.
[00:24:56]  Any relation to you?
[00:24:58]  Not that I have been able to find.
[00:25:00]  No, he was from Georgia.
[00:25:02]  He was the, you know, it stinks.
[00:25:05]  A lot of his letters were burned, were lost in a fire.
[00:25:09]  But he was the heel of, like, how I understand it, through Adams' eyes at least, he was the heel of the cabinet.
[00:25:16]  He used his, the Treasury Secretary had a lot of spoils to spread around, a lot of patronage, and he used it to his political advantage.
[00:25:27]  And then also running was the Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, and of course, Andrew Jackson, the war hero, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, a common man for the common man, but a wealthy man, an enslaver, owned over 100 slaves.
[00:25:45]  And so these four men are standing for the presidency.
[00:25:48]  And when the election comes and the votes are counted, Jackson has won a plurality, but not a majority.
[00:25:57]  He has come out of nowhere.
[00:25:59]  Adams is the one you think is going to win.
[00:26:02]  Reminds me of 2016, the resume of Hillary Clinton versus the populist fervor and popular appeal of Donald Trump.
[00:26:12]  And so Jackson, but he doesn't win a majority.
[00:26:15]  So what happens?
[00:26:16]  Well, based on the 12th Amendment, the vote goes to the House.
[00:26:20]  Every state delegation gets one vote.
[00:26:24]  Henry Clay, so the top three candidates are involved in that.
[00:26:28]  So it's Crawford, it's Jackson, and it's Adams.
[00:26:32]  Henry Clay cannot be president, but he can be kingmaker.
[00:26:36]  And there are in Adams' diary, he talks about being visited by friends of Clay, and they talk about men and things and events.
[00:26:48]  Clay and Adams themselves meet personally.
[00:26:52]  Henry Clay hated Andrew Jackson.
[00:26:55]  Hated him.
[00:26:57]  Henry Clay wanted to be the first president from the West, not Andrew Jackson.
[00:27:03]  Andrew Jackson had a really controversial past, and the two men could not be more opposite.
[00:27:10]  So when the vote comes February 9th, 1825 in the House, Adams wins.
[00:27:16]  He wins 13 votes straight out, gives him the majority.
[00:27:20]  He is the president.
[00:27:22]  Not by the acclamation of the American people, but by the vote of a fail-safe vote in the Congress.
[00:27:31]  And immediately, so Kentucky during the election.
[00:27:35]  So the supporters of Andrew Jackson feel like it was stolen.
[00:27:39]  They cry, corrupt bargain, corrupt bargain, because why is it a corrupt bargain?
[00:27:44]  About a week or so after being president-elect, Adams names Henry Clay to be his Secretary of State, which, like I've said several times so far today, is a stepping stone to the presidency.
[00:27:59]  Gil, Jamestown, North Carolina, Democrat, you're on the air.
[00:28:03]  Yes, good morning, Mr. Crawford and Mimi.
[00:28:07]  Morning to you both.
[00:28:10]  I'm presently reading David McCullough's biography about John Adams, John Q. Adams' father.
[00:28:19]  It's a fascinating and wonderfully written book.
[00:28:22]  I'm looking forward to your book.
[00:28:24]  But what I wanted to comment was on the parties, Democratic-Republican parties.
[00:28:29]  Of course, our Constitution back when in the time of George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, there were no parties that were favored until you just mentioned the Jacksonian Democrats.
[00:28:44]  And from the Jacksonian Democrats, they then, you know, we move into the Civil War and Reconstruction.
[00:28:54]  The comment that I want to make, I'm trying not to get ahead of myself.
[00:28:59]  With John Q. Adams, I really admire him because after he became president and then he lost the next election, he went back to Congress.
[00:29:11]  He actually defended the mutineers of the Amistad mutiny off of Long Island, which I thought was absolutely phenomenal, that a former president would go back to Congress and then defend mutineers who were against slavery.
[00:29:29]  So my point is, the Jacksonian Democrats who were for slavery, and they then evolved into the present-day Dixiecrats, who I call Dinos, Democrats in name only, and these Democrats in name only are the present-day faction of Republicans that are white supremacists and racist.
[00:29:57]  And so this I posed to Mimi, anytime a caller calls in and says that the Democrat Party were against slavery, were against civil rights, please push back on the shibboleth that the Dixiecrats and the like are not the Democratic Party of FDR, of Harry Truman, of Bill Clinton, of Jimmy Carter,
[00:30:26]  of John F. Kennedy, of Barack Obama, the New Deal Democrats.
[00:30:33]  Please push back on any caller that comes in and says, oh, Democrats were for slavery.
[00:30:40]  Democrats were against the civil rights movement.
[00:30:44]  All right, got it, Gil.
[00:30:46]  Let's get Bob to respond.
[00:30:47]  Well, you know, we have similar names.
[00:30:50]  Really, the Democratic Party, the Whig Party was the party in the time of Adams.
[00:30:56]  It was the Whigs and the Democrats.
[00:30:57]  And of course, yes, the Democrats.
[00:30:59]  Martin Van Buren, who's a character in this book, he's the architect of that first Democratic Party, which was the Jacksonian Party.
[00:31:10]  They considered it the heir to the Jeffersons party.
[00:31:15]  And Van Buren's notable because he creates that top-down party structure, right?
[00:31:22]  There's a state party, and all these local parties feed into the state party.
[00:31:27]  The state party feeds into the national party.
[00:31:31]  They embrace conventions and he really, that two-party system, though the names have changed, though the ideals and the ideologies have changed, sometimes these parties, they just change different clothes.
[00:31:50]  They trade each other's clothes.
[00:31:52]  But the Dixiecrat Party was an insurgency.
[00:31:55]  This is not my area of expertise here.
[00:31:58]  I didn't write a book about the Dixiecrats.
[00:32:00]  It'd be a worthy book.
[00:32:01]  I didn't write it.
[00:32:02]  But the Dixiecrat Party was an insurgency within the Democratic Party, and they became ultimately Republicans today.
[00:32:10]  We have a question for you on X from Jersey Girl, who says, how does Mr. Crawford's book differ or add to Militant Spirit by James Traub?
[00:32:19]  Oh, I love that book.
[00:32:21]  It is the child of that book.
[00:32:24]  Yeah.
[00:32:25]  So this book, my book, so my book is not cradle to grave like his is.
[00:32:30]  Mine is from 1820 to 1848.
[00:32:33]  And it's really about Adams and how he changes.
[00:32:38]  He makes an internal, an internal and external turn in his life about how he views slavery and understands slavery.
[00:32:48]  But I have tremendous respect for James Troud.
[00:32:51]  His book is amazing.
[00:32:52]  And I did a podcast series about John Quincy Adams that was the predecessor to the book.
[00:32:58]  And he is on that series.

=== Adams' Turn Against Slavery (13:38) ===

[00:33:01]  And I'm so honored to have him on there.
[00:33:03]  All right, let's talk to Charles.
[00:33:04]  Preston, Connecticut, Independent Line.
[00:33:06]  Go ahead, Charles.
[00:33:08]  Yeah, hi.
[00:33:09]  I'm going to be 83 years old in April.
[00:33:12]  And I heard a song on the radio called No Hard Feelings.
[00:33:16]  And I had to get that song, so I got it through a music store in Mystic, Connecticut.
[00:33:21]  And when I listen to that song, it just cracks me up, chokes me up.
[00:33:26]  I mean, it's so, so emotional for me.
[00:33:29]  And I wonder if any other people feel the same way.
[00:33:32]  Thanks a lot.
[00:33:33]  Bye.
[00:33:34]  Thank you for your call.
[00:33:35]  And I do.
[00:33:37]  I do.
[00:33:38]  I can't.
[00:33:38]  When we first recorded that song, I told my wife I won't be able to play this without crying.
[00:33:44]  What's it about?
[00:33:46]  It's about dying.
[00:33:47]  No hard feelings.
[00:33:48]  Yeah.
[00:33:48]  I'll cry right now.
[00:33:50]  It's a beautiful song.
[00:33:51]  And yeah, thank you.
[00:33:53]  That beautiful call.
[00:33:54]  Thank you.
[00:33:55]  You talked about how his wife, Louisa, was with him at the Capitol when he was dying.
[00:34:01]  What kind of a father was he?
[00:34:03]  What kind of a husband was he?
[00:34:05]  Not so great.
[00:34:07]  Not so great.
[00:34:09]  So Louisa wasn't with him.
[00:34:11]  It's so, this is so tragic.
[00:34:13]  There's a great, Louisa Catherine Adams was an incredible person.
[00:34:19]  And a writer, a great writer named Louisa Thomas wrote a biography about her that your viewers and listeners should check out.
[00:34:30]  Louisa Thomas is the author.
[00:34:32]  It's her book about Louisa Catherine Adams.
[00:34:35]  So when Adams dies, they go get her, right, when he's collapsed.
[00:34:42]  And they allow her to sit with him for like five hours, something like that.
[00:34:47]  And when his breathing quickens, when they think he's close to death, they usher her out.
[00:34:53]  Why?
[00:34:54]  Because she's a woman.
[00:34:56]  You know, I don't know.
[00:34:58]  They ushered her out of the room.
[00:34:59]  She wanted to be the one to close his eyes.
[00:35:01]  It's very tragic and very sad.
[00:35:04]  That being said, they had a tough marriage.
[00:35:06]  They had a long marriage.
[00:35:07]  They suffered a lot.
[00:35:09]  They lost three children, many miscarriages.
[00:35:13]  They endured a lot of grief together.
[00:35:16]  And I think there was real love there.
[00:35:17]  There was a lot of love there.
[00:35:20]  But Adams, to marry into that family, it would be awful.
[00:35:26]  Because John and Abigail, you know, there's a lot of pressure to be their child.
[00:35:33]  And to be their daughter-in-law.
[00:35:34]  And especially to be their daughter.
[00:35:36]  I don't think Abigail liked Louisa Catherine.
[00:35:38]  She was British.
[00:35:40]  She was our first foreign-born first lady.
[00:35:45]  And when John Quincy, he would go, so her father was from Maryland and her mother was English and they lived in London.
[00:35:54]  And a lot of the American diplomats would go visit.
[00:35:58]  They had quite a scene at their house in London.
[00:36:01]  He had like, Mr. Johnson had like four or five daughters.
[00:36:05]  They were all very beautiful.
[00:36:06]  They all played music.
[00:36:07]  And so Adams would hang out there and he just kind of liked the scene.
[00:36:10]  You know, he just kind of liked being there.
[00:36:12]  I think he maybe at first had a crush on one of her sisters and they get married.
[00:36:16]  But yeah, John and Abigail were not, they didn't think that a future president should have a foreign-born wife.
[00:36:24]  But love does what love does and they got married.
[00:36:27]  But it was a very difficult.
[00:36:30]  And of course he was hard on his sons like his father was hard on him.
[00:36:35]  Also, we believe alcoholism ran through Abigail's family line and two of Louisa's and John Quincy's sons die.
[00:36:45]  One commits suicide.
[00:36:47]  Two months after he loses reelection, George Washington Adams jumps off the back of a steam ship coming from Quincy to D.C. to help his parents move back north.
[00:36:59]  And then their other son, John Adams II, essentially drinks himself to death and dies in 1834.
[00:37:06]  And Charles Francis, just as John Quincy is his parents' surviving son, Charles Francis Adams, the youngest son of John Quincy and Louisa, becomes the surviving son, and he is the son that will become minister to Great Britain in the Lincoln administration and goes on to have a great career.
[00:37:29]  But in Charles Francis' diary, he's thinking about his brothers and he's wondering if alcohol, if alcoholism doesn't exist as a disease, but he wonders if this alcohol that his brothers have been so addicted to, he wonders, is this actually a disease?
[00:37:50]  It's really remarkable.
[00:37:52]  But yeah, they had a tough personal life.
[00:37:54]  You called John Quincy Adams our most extraordinary ex-president.
[00:37:58]  You talked about how extraordinary it was that a president after leaving office would run for office and join the House of Representatives.
[00:38:07]  Why did he do that?
[00:38:08]  I mean, why not just retire and write and be an elder statesman?
[00:38:14]  Well, I think he was raised to be a public servant.
[00:38:18]  He was raised to preserve the nation that his parents sacrificed so much to found.
[00:38:25]  There's also some ego involved.
[00:38:27]  He was also, he was, he had been just, this is right after he loses re-election, you know, well, within about a year.
[00:38:38]  And he's a grieving father.
[00:38:41]  And he's newly retired, which he probably didn't love that.
[00:38:47]  And he has an ego.
[00:38:49]  He probably had some scores to settle with the people who he thought were out to get him and lost him re-election.
[00:38:56]  So all of the above.
[00:38:58]  But he says his son, Charles Francis, and his wife are against him, like doing this.
[00:39:05]  They're like, this is like a demotion.
[00:39:07]  Why would you be in the House after being president?
[00:39:10]  But Adams said, if the constituents ask me to serve, I'll serve on the town council.
[00:39:16]  Whatever I'm asked to do.
[00:39:18]  That's what every American citizen should do for their country.
[00:39:22]  I want to read another portion of your book just for the audience.
[00:39:25]  It says this, with one hand reaching back to the founding and the other reaching forward toward the Civil War, John Quincy Adams is a bridge and perhaps the best representation of America's tortured adolescents.
[00:39:38]  John Quincy Adams may not have been an extraordinary president like Washington and Lincoln, but he is our most extraordinary ex-president, a maverick, a public servant, an American hero.
[00:39:51]  Yes, I agree.
[00:39:55]  Let's talk to Abby in Inglewood, California, Democrat.
[00:39:58]  Good morning.
[00:40:01]  Yeah, this is Abby.
[00:40:02]  I say, I was calling that.
[00:40:04]  Didn't George Washington and Thomas Jefferson own slaves?
[00:40:09]  Yes, they did.
[00:40:10]  Absolutely, they did.
[00:40:11]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:40:12]  And John Quincy Adams as well?
[00:40:14]  He did not.
[00:40:15]  He did not.
[00:40:16]  But his wife's family.
[00:40:18]  So Adams abhorred slavery and he would not allow, but he would not own them.
[00:40:25]  However, Louisa, like I said, her father was a Marylander.
[00:40:30]  She was technically a Southerner.
[00:40:32]  And her sisters.
[00:40:34]  Was it Thomas?
[00:40:36]  Sorry, go ahead, Abby.
[00:40:38]  Did you have a further question?
[00:40:42]  Sir, I wasn't talking Thomas Jefferson that had slaves, too.
[00:40:46]  Yes, Thomas Jefferson owns many slaves.
[00:40:49]  Absolutely.
[00:40:52]  So Adams was around enslaved people.
[00:40:56]  In D.C., if you moved in those high society circles in which the Adamses did, you were going to be in contact with enslaved individuals.
[00:41:05]  And in fact, you know, Louisa Catherine's sisters and their husbands owned slaves.
[00:41:13]  And when Adams went to the White House, he was taking care of some of his nieces and nephews, and they were living with him.
[00:41:23]  And their enslaved people also lived in the Adams White House.
[00:41:27]  Doug, you're Belinda, California, Republican.
[00:41:30]  Good morning, Doug.
[00:41:32]  Good morning.
[00:41:33]  I was just wondering if Bob thought about having a concert on C-SPAN to promote the book.
[00:41:41]  And I noticed he's not coming to Los Angeles on the book tour, but if you're ever in the area, that'd be great.
[00:41:48]  Hey, is it Doug?
[00:41:49]  Doug.
[00:41:50]  Okay, Doug.
[00:41:53]  Next Saturday, this Saturday, we're playing in Ontario, California, which is 45 minutes east of L.A.
[00:42:02]  And we are playing at a baseball park there with Dwight Yoakum and the iguanas.
[00:42:09]  So if I know L.A. traffic probably stinks, but come on out 45 minutes east to Ontario, and we'd love to see you.
[00:42:17]  And yes, hopefully we'll get a book tour.
[00:42:19]  I'm going to be out in San Francisco and Seattle this week.
[00:42:22]  Hopefully at some point I'll get to do something in LA.
[00:42:24]  Thank you.
[00:42:25]  Thank you.
[00:42:27]  This is a text that we got from David.
[00:42:32]  Oh, so he said I was cut off before I could finish my question about the Barbary Pirates.
[00:42:36]  Could Bob discuss about how Adams changed his views about military force to secure the shipping lanes through the Strait of Gibraltar?
[00:42:46]  That is a great question.
[00:42:48]  And that is not the focus of my book.
[00:42:51]  And I don't want to misspeak.
[00:42:54]  So I thank you for your question.
[00:42:57]  And this also now from Nelson in Florida.
[00:43:01]  Can Mr. Crawford explain why Andrew Jackson beat John Quincy Adams for president?
[00:43:06]  In 1828, talk about a dirty election.
[00:43:11]  Our elections are so, so brutal these days.
[00:43:16]  Well, this may have been the ugliest election this nation has ever seen.
[00:43:22]  I know it's hard for us today to believe that.
[00:43:24]  Adams won straight out.
[00:43:26]  You know, no, sorry.
[00:43:28]  Jackson won.
[00:43:29]  There was no debate about who won the 1828 election.
[00:43:32]  Did he win the popular vote?
[00:43:34]  Oh, yes.
[00:43:34]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:43:38]  Here's the problem with Adams as president.
[00:43:40]  He has a failed one-term presidency.
[00:43:42]  He was not, you know, he was a minority president from the time he took the oath of office.
[00:43:48]  But what really killed him is his agenda for his presidency was infrastructure.
[00:43:58]  He wanted federally funded roads, bridges, canals.
[00:44:03]  He wanted to tie this nation together.
[00:44:06]  He wanted the government to invest in a naval academy.
[00:44:10]  He wanted the government to invest in a national university, a national university that was first proposed by George Washington.
[00:44:17]  And so in his first annual message to Congress, what we would today consider the State of the Union address, he says to Congress, when he's asking, he's laying out his agenda, he says, we cannot be palsied by the will of our constituents.
[00:44:34]  Basically saying, your constituents don't want to spend taxpayer dollars on these things, on infrastructure, but they don't know what's good for them.
[00:44:45]  We need to do this regardless of what they think.
[00:44:48]  And it was essentially, he essentially called half the nation a basket of deplorables.
[00:44:54]  And the Jackson men and Jackson himself immediately jumped on that comment.
[00:44:58]  Palsied by the will of your constituents became the basket of deplorables of 1828.
[00:45:06]  Let's talk to Leanne, Arlington, Texas.
[00:45:08]  Democrat, good morning.
[00:45:10]  Good morning.
[00:45:12]  I just wanted to know, do you have from Quincy Adams?
[00:45:23]  Do you know what happened to his DNA?
[00:45:27]  Who are his kids who are living to this day?
[00:45:32]  Oh, that is a great question.
[00:45:34]  I've just done some online, just curious.
[00:45:38]  I do know that the Adams family, the Adams family, they do get together at Peacefield, at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, that you can visit.
[00:45:49]  I think once a year they all gather.
[00:45:52]  None of them, I believe, are in public office today, but he did have, you know, Charles Francis, his son went on to have a great career.
[00:46:01]  And of course, Charles Francis Jr. fought in the Civil War.
[00:46:05]  And we know Henry Adams as being the great historian and writer that he was.
[00:46:10]  You mentioned you're continuing to go on tour with your band.
[00:46:14]  I just wonder if your fellow bandmates and the crew are sick and tired of hearing about John Quincy Adams.
[00:46:20]  If they are, which I'm sure they are, they're too nice to say anything about it.
[00:46:24]  All right.
[00:46:25]  Well, that's Bob Crawford.
[00:46:26]  He's a musician with the Abbott Brothers.
[00:46:28]  He's a historian, author of the book called America's Founding Son, John Quincy Adams, from President to Political Maverick.
[00:46:36]  Thanks so much for coming in.
[00:46:36]  Mimi, thank you for having me.
[00:46:38]  It's been a blast.

=== Bandmates Tired of John Quincy (00:20) ===

[00:46:39]  Today, members of Congress, local leaders, and business executives convene at the Congressional City Conference to discuss housing affordability, clean energy, and transportation, among other topics.
[00:46:49]  From the National League of Cities, watch live coverage starting at 3:30 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 3, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, And cspan.org.
[00:46:59]  Yeah.