No American has had a more illustrious career in diplomacy that John Quincy Adams.

The second volume, resting like the first on full and unrestricted access to the Adams Family archives, concludes Professor Bemis' basic biography of John Quincy Adams. It covers the "Second Career" of this remarkable statesman and many-sided his election as sixth president of the United States, his program of Liberty with Power, his defeat by Andrew Jackson, the trials of his private life, his return to a humble seat in the House of Representatives from the Plymouth District of Massachusetts, his seventeen-year struggle there for the Union in the great sectional controversy over slavery, and his dramatic death on the floor of the House while protesting the decoration of generals who had won the War with Mexico. In this American Study, Samuel Flagg Bemis has combined the canons of historical scholarship with the interest of the novelist and the insight of the psychologist.