Joseph Wheelan, author of Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams’s Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress, describes for John J. Miller a very busy ex-president: Adams “battled slavery . . . fought the annexation of Texas . . . defended the right of women to participate in [the] political process … defended the African mutineers on the Amistad . . . and he almost single-handedly preserved James Smithson’s bequeath to America, which, as you know, became the Smithsonian Institution.”