Leonard L. Richards

I wanted to read this book because of a half-remembered note in my high school history book: that after losing his bid for re-election, John Quincy Adams did not retire but instead ran for a seat in the House of Representatives and served there until his death. This history focuses on this portion of Adams' career and made me wonder if he was a better congressman than he was a president. John Quincy Adams had strong principles but he also understood how the politics of his day worked and he was able to maintain his seat and advocate for some of the most pressing issues of the time - slavery, westward expansion, and infrastructure investments. This book expanded my understanding of the American Congress during the fraught years leading up to the Civil War and of the political divisions Americans struggled with. I'd recommended this book to anyone wanting to know more about John Quincy Adams or pre-Civil War American politics.… (mehr)

In the interest of time, and because his assessment matches mine, I've plagerized Stuart's 5/12/08 review of this book. As he wrote: "An interesting subject - how California nearly became a slave state, or was nearly severed into two states, one free and one slave. Some nice detail about the infamous Broderick-Terry duel, and some gee-whiz facts about how William Walker got his ass kicked in Nicaragua, not by the Nicaraguans, but by getting on the wrong side of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Unfortunately, for every page of interesting stuff like that, there's 25 pages of mind-numbing detail about the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and exhaustive, blow-by-blow accounts of sundry political in-fighting".
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