John Quincy Adams is the missing link in the classical era of American history which began with the Revolution and ended with Emancipation.

Between these bookends lies the absorbing yet overshadowed epic of a new nation spearheading liberty's cause in a world skeptical of freedom arriving at all, much less in slaver's garb. M. B. Zucker takes readers back to that adolescent country in the care of an enigmatic guide, John Quincy Adams, heir to one president by blood and another, Washington, by ideology. Adams is the missing link between the founders and Abraham Lincoln, and is nigh unanimously regarded as America's foremost Secretary of State. Through Adams' eyes, readers will experience one of history's greatest and most forgotten crises: his showdown with Europe over South American independence, the conflict which prefigured the Monroe Doctrine.