Writings of John Quincy Adams. Edited by Worthington Chauncey Ford. Volume 6: 1816-1819

"I am a man of reserved, cold, austere, and forbidding manners . . ." penned John Q. Adams in his memoirs. Yet this independent-minded statesman and sixth president of the United States, ridiculed by his enemies as an intellectual and 'aristocrat,' was also a man with an unbending sense of justice which, more often than not, got him into trouble. His protectionist policies alienated the South and his own New England, his attempt to bolster federal power earned him the hostility of states' rights advocates like Andrew Jackson (who would defeat Adams in the next presidential election), and his denunciations of slavery as a Congressman in his final years caused pandemonium among the Whig party with which he had once aligned himself.