On New Year’s Eve of 1835, former president John Quincy Adams wrote a long letter to a friend about Othello. Three months later most of that letter appeared in American Monthly Magazine as an essay on “The Character of Desdemona.” In it, Adams vilifies Desdemona for desiring and then marrying a black man:

Adams has little patience for critics who accuse him of misreading the play in light of the increasingly fraught racial politics of America in 1835, and even less for those who in recent years had begun to claim that Desdemona’s “love for Othello is not unnatural, because he is not a Congo negro but only a sooty Moor.” Othello himself says that he is black (and had been “sold to slavery” (1.3.140) earlier in his adventurous life). For Adams, there can be only one conclusion: “the passion of Desdemona for Othello is unnatural, solely and exclusively because of his color,” and because of this “her elopement to him, and secret marriage with him, indicate a personal character not only very deficient in delicacy, but totally regardless of filial duty, of female modesty, and of ingenuous shame.”

Contemporaries may well have been surprised to see these words appear under the former president’s familiar initials—“J. Q. A.”—and not simply because of the harsh views expressed here. Adams, a tireless writer, whose correspondence and daily journal entries totaled many thousands of pages, was widely admired as one of the most literate individuals of his day. But he was also a cautious politician, extremely reticent about expressing his opinions in print, especially controversial ones, so published surprisingly little in his long career, and absolutely nothing on interracial marriage.

Stranger still, he was doubling down on a companion piece he had just published (that had prompted the attack on the “criticism of 1835”). This too was on Shakespeare—“Misconceptions of Shakspeare Upon the Stage”—and had appeared earlier that month in the New England Magazine. While this first essay dealt with his views on King Lear and Juliet, it included a few choice words for Desdemona’s interracial marriage that anticipated his subsequent and longer diatribe. As this earlier essay unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that it is Desdemona’s physical intimacy with Othello that so discomforts Adams: “her fondling with Othello is disgusting.” That essay similarly concludes that “the great moral lesson of the tragedy of Othello is, that black and white blood cannot be intermingled in marriage without a gross outrage upon the law of Nature; and that, in such violations, Nature will vindicate her laws.” Insistent on being understood, Adams puts this even more bluntly. Any pity we might feel as we watch Othello kill Desdemona must give way to the grim satisfaction that she got what was coming: “when Othello smothers her in bed, the terror and the pity subside immediately into the sentiment that she has her deserts.”

Why had a former president and now member of Congress felt it necessary to weigh in publicly not once, but twice, and so unflinchingly, on Desdemona’s interracial marriage? It’s the sort of claim that we might expect from a Southern slaveholder. But John Quincy Adams was from Massachusetts, which as far back as 1783 had renounced slavery. More puzzling still, Adams was widely recognized as one of the leading abolitionists in the land. He had spearheaded the opposition to the Gag Rule (intended to prevent petitions against slavery from being acknowledged by Congress), would fight against the annexation of Texas and thereby the creation of additional slave states, and would soon successfully argue the Amistad case (in which he defended captured African slaves) before the Supreme Court. Adams’s advocacy led to a spate of death threats. His congressional opponent (and later Confederate general) Henry Wise called him “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of southern slavery that ever existed”—and Wise didn’t mean this as a compliment.

Disturbing prints by the Philadelphia artist E. W. Clay that circulated in 1839 tried to stir up racial antagonism through depictions of interracial mingling, called at the time amalgamation (the term “miscegenation” was not invented until 1864). In one of those prints, “Practical Amalgamation,” a black man and woman are seated on a couch, each with a white lover. Behind them, in framed portraits, three men look down approvingly on the scene: Arthur Tappan (a fierce abolitionist about whom it was reported, falsely, that he was married to a black woman); Daniel O’Connell (who was the Irish leader of the Catholic Emancipation movement and another strong abolitionist); and, on the right, J. Q. Adams. How could a man seen by opponents of interracial union as one of their greatest foes publish a pair of essays condemning Desdemona for marrying a black man and claiming that in her murder at his hands she got what she deserved?

A partial answer, at least to what precipitated Adams’s surprising decision to publish his views on Desdemona, can be traced back to a disastrous encounter at a dinner party a few years earlier. The occasion was the arrival in the United States of one of the most celebrated Shakespeare actors of the day, Fanny Kemble. The Kembles were British theatrical royalty. Fanny Kemble’s uncle and aunt, John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons, had been the greatest Shakespeare actors of their time, and Fanny’s father, Charles Kemble, who had performed alongside his famous siblings in minor roles, was a notable actor in his own right, and joint owner of the Covent Garden Theatre. Her mother acted as well. When threatened with bankruptcy in 1829, her parents persuaded the nineteen-year-old Fanny Kemble to enter the family business. She studied the role of Juliet for three weeks, then made a triumphant debut at Covent Garden in October 1829. She was an immediate success, and the family’s financial ruin was averted. Fanny Kemble was quick at learning parts (a new one every month, including those of Portia and Beatrice) and was enormously popular, both onstage and in London’s social scene, where as a well-informed and engaging conversationalist she more than held her own. With the retirement, decline, and deaths of John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, and the no less celebrated Edmund Kean, Fanny Kemble stood at or very near the pinnacle of the London theater world.

By 1832 she was not only acting in plays but also writing them. By then, however, insolvency again threatened. Charles Kemble persuaded his reluctant daughter to accompany him on what turned out to be a lucrative two-year tour of the United States. Fanny Kemble was at the peak of her career when she arrived in the States, a celebrity as much as a star performer. Her warm reception in prominent circles in Britain had ensured that even in American states known for their suspicion of actors she would be a much sought-after guest.

The Kembles set sail in August 1832 and the following month began performing in New York. Audiences (as well as suitors) flocked to see Fanny Kemble. The praise in the New York Evening Post was typical: Fanny Kemble conveyed “an intensity and truth never exhibited by an actress in America.” A young Walt Whitman, only thirteen or so at the time, secured a seat and later recalled, “Fanny Kemble! … Nothing finer did ever stage exhibit.” At subsequent stops in Philadelphia and Washington, DC, she met with prominent writers and politicians, including President Andrew Jackson (and let slide his complaints about “scribbling ladies” who fomented political controversy).

Her arrival in Boston in April 1833 was keenly awaited. Securing the Kembles as dinner guests during their brief stay could not have been easy, but George Parkman, a wealthy physician, managed to do so. Because it was true, or because he knew that he had to flatter the former president to get him to travel the nine miles from Quincy for the dinner, Parkman told him that Fanny Kemble had requested his presence. Either way, it worked. Adams wrote in his journal that “the young lady was desirous of being introduced to me. And I could but say that it would be very pleasing to me. … As a sort of personage myself, of the last century, I was flattered by the wish of this blossom of the next age, to bestow some of her fresh fragrance upon the antiquities of the past.” While acknowledging here the great gap in their ages—he was now 66, she 23—Adams doesn’t admit to other gulfs separating them. Kemble represented a British perspective on the morality and politics of the...