Volume 45, Number 7 · April 23, 1998
JQA: For the Defense
By Eric L. McKitrick
John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life
by Paul C. Nagel
Knopf, 432 pp., $30.00
Amistad
a film directed by Steven Spielberg, and produced by Steven Spielberg, by Debbie Allen, by Colin Wilson
Amistad
an opera, musical score by Anthony Davis, libretto by Thulani Davis
Within the past two years or so the historical visibility of John Quincy Adams has been enhanced to a degree that could scarcely have been anticipated a few years earlier. William Lee Miller's Arguing about Slavery was a circumstantial account of how Adams, in his post-presidential career as a Massachusetts congressman, almost singlehandedly beat down the efforts of Southern members to prohibit the House's reception of antislavery petitions.[1] At the end of last year came two dramatic spectacles, each with the same name, one a film and the other an opera, depicting the mutiny in 1839 of black African captives aboard the schooner Amistad who were destined for slavery. Recaptured off the Long Island coast by an American naval vessel and incarcerated in a Connecticut jail, they were eventually released following the powerful plea on their behalf before the Supreme Court by John Quincy Adams. Finally, we have a new biography of Adams himself by Paul Nagel, which aims to exhibit aspects of the man's personality hitherto, the author believes, imperfectly understood.
Review, 6775 words
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