John Quincy Adams was his father's son. The firstborn of John and Abigail, who took him to watch the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775, he lived a long life of public service.

As a child, he accompanied his father on official missions abroad during the Revolution. He was a U.S. senator, ambassador to Russia and secretary of state for eight years under President Monroe. He followed his one unhappy term as president with nine as a U.S. representative.

		"MR. ADAMS' LAST CRUSADE" By Joseph Wheelan Public Affairs ($26.95)

Adams died in early 1848 at 80 in the U.S. Capitol after collapsing at his desk in the House. He's the only elected president to serve in Congress after leaving office. (Andrew Johnson, who became president upon the death of Abraham Lincoln, was elected to the Senate after finishing the term, but died shortly after.)

Adams, on the other hand, served 17 years representing a Boston-area district. They were difficult ones as Americans found it impossible to ignore the blot of slavery. The stage was being set for the Civil War and the first acts were played out in the Capitol.

The ex-president took an increasingly major role on the abolitionist side, as the 1997 film, "Amistad," told us. Adams argued the case of kidnapped Africans by slavers before the U.S. Supreme Court and won their freedom.

There was much more to the story, relates Joseph Wheelan in his serious treatment of Adams' later years. He was elected president by the House of Representatives in 1825 after he finished second to Andrew Jackson in the general election, but neither man won a majority in the Electoral College. Adams accomplished little during his term and was easily defeated by Jackson in 1828. Three years later, he was sworn in a member of the House.

Adams was a traditionalist in the Federalist mold of his father, who was also denied a second presidential term by a Southerner, Thomas Jefferson, in 1800. He might have been less partisan, however, and his refusal to play politics would isolate him from both parties.

Like his father, Adams bore a grudge against his successor all of his life; on the other hand, his father and Jefferson came to an accommodation in their later years.

Wheelan makes wide use of his subject's extensive diary and other contemporary sources, an approach that brings us closer to the private, if perpetually testy Adams whose unyielding character alienated his fellow representatives.

Sharp-tongued and unrepentant, he focused on attacking the Southern delegation as he grew more and more devoted to opposing slavery and the annexation of Texas.

By the 1840s, the abolitionist movement was in full force, Wheelan explains, making the formerly lonely man from Massachusetts a hero to slavery's foes.

Wheelan's book not only reminds us of John Quincy Adams' stature as a public servant, but also displays the "maturing" of American politics into the venal, self-serving and hypocritical conditions we take for granted these days. Its roots were planted in the early 1800s.

That Adams rose above the fray suggests that he still carried the legacy of those first patriots in his veins, statesmen who put the nation above partisanship. While unabashedly admiring its subject, "Last Crusade" effectively tells Adams' story.