Long relegated to the sidelines of history as the hyper-intellectual son of John and Abigail Adams, John Quincy Adams has never basked in the historical spotlight. Remembered, if at all, as an ineffective president during an especially rancorous era, Adams was one of the most cosmopolitan Americans of his time, a vital link to the Enlightenment attitudes that had shaped the Revolution. William Cooper reintroduces the sixth president as a fierce opponent of slavery at a time when abolitionism was unpopular even in the North, a curmudgeon whose impassioned public pronouncements and arguments in the Amistad trial would eventually make him an unlikely national hero.