Over the first two decades of the nineteenth century a new generation of men rose to prominence in the young American republic. Unlike their fathers, these men could not lay claim to what became known as the ‘spirit of 1776.’ It is hard to find a more unlikely couple than Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, yet both were two of the most prominent men of that post-revolutionary generation and shared in common much more than one would expect. Born in 1767, both Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams had been only adolescents during the Revolution, and indeed over these Read more