As a Harvard student and later as a diplomat, US President, member of Congress, and attorney before the Supreme Court, John Quincy Adams had a unique relationship with slavery. He danced with abolitionists. But he never became one.

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In this sweeping narrative centered around the thread of slavery and abolition, historian Jeff Denman reveals how one of America’s most underrated statesmen viewed and challenged the “peculiar institution” through his decades-long, remarkable, and often controversial public life.

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The prickly and curmudgeonly Adams, Denman reveals, found himself squarely in the middle of America’s greatest struggle. Although he despised slavery and the southern slaveholders who defended it, Adams never fully supported abolition. To do so was to hasten the coming of a Civil War, Adams believed.

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Yet, after his presidency, when he returned to Washington as a member of Congress, Adams became increasingly strident in his dramatic attempts to outsmart Southern politicians and to keep slavery in the forefront of Congressional activities and even argued the case of the Amistad Africans, while continuing his awkward dance with abolitionists and obsessing over his legacy and the future of the country he held dear.

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Informed by Adams’s revealing and often tormented private musings from his vast diary, rich historical context, appearances from the movers and shakers of the day, and dramatic showdowns on the floor of the House of Representatives and even in the US Supreme Court, historian Jeff Denman offers a unique and gripping account of John Quincy Adams’s battle with slavery while exploring the many fault lines in American society that led to the Civil War.