In September, 1830, Mr. Adams notes
in his Diary a suggestion made to him that he might
if he wished be elected to the national House of Representatives
from the Plymouth district. The gentleman who
threw out this tentative proposition remarked that
in his opinion the acceptance of this position by
an ex-President “instead of degrading the individual
would elevate the representative character.”
Mr. Adams replied, that he “had in that respect
no scruple whatever. No person could be degraded
by serving the people as a Representative in Congress.
Nor in my opinion would an ex-President of the United
States be degraded by serving as a selectman of his
town, if elected thereto by the people.”
A few weeks later his election was accomplished by
a flattering vote, the poll showing for him 1817 votes
out of 2565, with only 373 for the next candidate.
He continued thenceforth to represent this district
until his death, a period of about sixteen years.
During this time he was occasionally suggested as
a candidate for the governorship of the
State, but was always reluctant to stand. The
feeling between the Freemasons and the anti-Masons
ran very high for several years, and once he was prevailed
upon to allow his name to be used by the latter party.
The result was that there was no election by the people;
and as he had been very loath to enter the contest
in the beginning, he insisted upon withdrawing from
before the legislature. We have now therefore
only to pursue his career in the lower house of Congress.
Unfortunately, but of obvious necessity,
it is possible to touch only upon the more salient
points of this which was really by far the most striking
and distinguished portion of his life. To do more
than this would involve an explanation of the politics
of the country and the measures before Congress much
more elaborate than would be possible in this volume.
It will be necessary, therefore, to confine ourselves
to drawing a picture of him in his character as the
great combatant of Southern slavery. In the waging
of this mighty conflict we shall see both his mind
and his character developing in strength even in these
years of his old age, and his traits standing forth
in bolder relief than ever before. In his place
on the floor of the House of Representatives he was
destined to appear a more impressive figure than in
any of the higher positions which he had previously
filled. There he was to do his
greatest work and to win a peculiar and distinctive
glory which takes him out of the general throng even
of famous statesmen, and entitles his name to be remembered
with an especial reverence. Adequately to sketch
his achievements, and so to do his memory the honor
which it deserves, would require a pen as eloquent
as has been wielded by any writer of our language.
I can only attempt a brief and insufficient narrative.
In his conscientious way he was faithful
and industrious to a rare degree. He was never
absent and seldom late; he bore unflinchingly the
burden of severe committee work, and shirked no toil
on the plea of age or infirmity. He attended
closely to all the business of the House; carefully
formed his opinions on every question; never failed
to vote except for cause; and always had a sufficient
reason independent of party allegiance to sustain
his vote. Living in the age of oratory, he earned
the name of “the old man eloquent.”
Yet he was not an orator in the sense in which Webster,
Clay, and Calhoun were orators. He was not a
rhetorician; he had neither grace of manner nor a
fine presence, neither an imposing delivery, nor even
pleasing tones. On the contrary, he was exceptionally
lacking in all these qualities. He
was short, rotund, and bald; about the time when he
entered Congress, complaints become frequent in his
Diary of weak and inflamed eyes, and soon these organs
became so rheumy that the water would trickle down
his cheeks; a shaking of the hand grew upon him to
such an extent that in time he had to use artificial
assistance to steady it for writing; his voice was
high, shrill, liable to break, piercing enough to
make itself heard, but not agreeable. This hardly
seems the picture of an orator; nor was it to any charm
of elocution that he owed his influence, but rather
to the fact that men soon learned that what he said
was always well worth hearing. When he entered
Congress he had been for much more than a third of
a century zealously gathering knowledge in public
affairs, and during his career in that body every
year swelled the already vast accumulation. Moreover,
listeners were always sure to get a bold and an honest
utterance and often pretty keen words from him, and
he never spoke to an inattentive audience or to a
thin house. Whether pleased or incensed by what
he said, the Representatives at least always listened
to it. He was by nature a hard fighter, and by
the circumstances of his course in Congress this quality
was stimulated to such a degree that parliamentary
history does not show his equal as a gladiator. His power of invective was extraordinary, and
he was untiring and merciless in his use of it.
Theoretically he disapproved of sarcasm, but practically
he could not refrain from it. Men winced and cowered
before his milder attacks, became sometimes dumb, sometimes
furious with mad rage before his fiercer assaults.
Such struggles evidently gave him pleasure, and there
was scarce a back in Congress that did not at one
time or another feel the score of his cutting lash;
though it was the Southerners and the Northern allies
of Southerners whom chiefly he singled out for torture.
He was irritable and quick to wrath; he himself constantly
speaks of the infirmity of his temper, and in his
many conflicts his principal concern was to keep it
in control. His enemies often referred to it
and twitted him with it. Of alliances he was
careless, and friendships he had almost none.
But in the creation of enmities he was terribly successful.
Not so much at first, but increasingly as years went
on, a state of ceaseless, vigilant hostility became
his normal condition. From the time when he fairly
entered upon the long struggle against slavery, he
enjoyed few peaceful days in the House. But he
seemed to thrive upon the warfare, and to be never
so well pleased as when he was bandying hot words with
slave-holders and the Northern supporters of slave-holders.
When the air of the House was thick with
crimination and abuse he seemed to suck in fresh vigor
and spirit from the hate-laden atmosphere. When
invective fell around him in showers, he screamed back
his retaliation with untiring rapidity and marvellous
dexterity of aim. No odds could appall him.
With his back set firm against a solid moral principle,
it was his joy to strike out at a multitude of foes.
They lost their heads as well as their tempers, but
in the extremest moments of excitement and anger Mr.
Adams’s brain seemed to work with machine-like
coolness and accuracy. With flushed face, streaming
eyes, animated gesticulation, and cracking voice,
he always retained perfect mastery of all his intellectual
faculties. He thus became a terrible antagonist,
whom all feared, yet fearing could not refrain from
attacking, so bitterly and incessantly did he choose
to exert his wonderful power of exasperation.
Few men could throw an opponent into wild blind fury
with such speed and certainty as he could; and he does
not conceal the malicious gratification which such
feats brought to him. A leader of such fighting
capacity, so courageous, with such a magazine of experience
and information, and with a character so irreproachable,
could have won brilliant victories in public life at
the head of even a small band of devoted
followers. But Mr. Adams never had and apparently
never wanted followers. Other prominent public
men were brought not only into collision but into
comparison with their contemporaries. But Mr.
Adams’s individuality was so strong that he
can be compared with no one. It was not an individuality
of genius nor to any remarkable extent of mental qualities;
but rather an individuality of character. To
this fact is probably to be attributed his peculiar
solitariness. Men touch each other for purposes
of attachment through their characters much more than
through their minds. But few men, even in agreeing
with Mr. Adams, felt themselves in sympathy with him.
Occasionally conscience, or invincible logic, or even
policy and self-interest, might compel one or another
politician to stand beside him in debate or in voting;
but no current of fellow feeling ever passed between
such temporary comrades and him. It was the cold
connection of duty or of business. The first instinct
of nearly every one was opposition towards him; coalition
might be forced by circumstances but never came by
volition. For the purpose of winning immediate
successes this was of course a most unfortunate condition
of relationships. Yet it had some compensations:
it left such influence as Mr. Adams could exert by
steadfastness and argument entirely
unweakened by suspicion of hidden motives or personal
ends. He had the weight and enjoyed the respect
which a sincerity beyond distrust must always command
in the long run. Of this we shall see some striking
instances.
One important limitation, however,
belongs to this statement of solitariness. It
was confined to his position in Congress. Outside
of the city of Washington great numbers of the people,
especially in New England, lent him a hearty support
and regarded him with friendship and admiration.
These men had strong convictions and deep feelings,
and their adherence counted for much. Moreover,
their numbers steadily increased, and Mr. Adams saw
that he was the leader in a cause which engaged the
sound sense and the best feeling of the intelligent
people of the country, and which was steadily gaining
ground. Without such encouragement it is doubtful
whether even his persistence would have held out through
so long and extreme a trial. The sense of human
fellowship was needful to him; he could go without
it in Congress, but he could not have gone without
it altogether.
Mr. Adams took his seat in the House
as a member of the twenty-second Congress in December,
1831. He had been elected by the National Republican,
afterward better known as the Whig party, but one of
his first acts was to declare that he would
be bound by no partisan connection, but would in every
matter act independently. This course he regarded
as a “duty imposed upon him by his peculiar position,”
in that he “had spent the greatest portion of
his life in the service of the whole nation and had
been honored with their highest trust.”
Many persons had predicted that he would find himself
subjected to embarrassments and perhaps to humiliations
by reason of his apparent descent in the scale of
political dignities. He notes, however, that
he encountered no annoyance on this score, but on the
contrary he was rather treated with an especial respect.
He was made chairman of the Committee on Manufactures,
a laborious as well as an important and honorable
position at all times, and especially so at this juncture
when the rebellious mutterings of South Carolina against
the protective tariff were already to be heard rolling
and swelling like portentous thunder from the fiery
Southern regions. He would have preferred to
exchange this post for a place upon the Committee on
Foreign Affairs, for whose business he felt more fitted.
But he was told that in the impending crisis his ability,
authority, and prestige were all likely to be needed
in the place allotted to him to aid in the salvation
of the country.
The nullification chapter of our history
cannot here be entered upon at length,
and Mr. Adams’s connection with it must be very
shortly stated. At the first meeting of his committee
he remarks: “A reduction of the duties
upon many of the articles in the tariff was understood
by all to be the object to be effected;” and
a little later he said that he should be disposed
to give such aid as he could to any plan for this
reduction which the Treasury Department should devise.
“He should certainly not consent to sacrifice
the manufacturing interest,” he said, “but
something of concession would be due from that interest
to appease the discontents of the South.”
He was in a reasonable frame of mind; but unfortunately
other people were rapidly ceasing to be reasonable.
When Jackson’s message of December 4, 1832,
was promulgated, showing a disposition to do for South
Carolina pretty much all that she demanded, Mr. Adams
was bitterly indignant. The message, he said,
“recommends a total change in the policy of the
Union with reference to the Bank, manufactures, internal
improvement, and the public lands. It goes to
dissolve the Union into its original elements, and
is in substance a complete surrender to the nullifiers
of South Carolina.” When, somewhat later
on, the President lost his temper and flamed out in
his famous proclamation to meet the
nullification ordinance, he spoke in tones more pleasing
to Mr. Adams. But the ultimate compromise which
disposed of the temporary dissension without permanently
settling the fundamental question of the constitutional
right of nullification was extremely distasteful to
him. He was utterly opposed to the concessions
which were made while South Carolina still remained
contumacious. He was for compelling her to retire
altogether from her rebellious position and to repeal
her unconstitutional enactments wholly and unconditionally,
before one jot should be abated from the obnoxious
duties. When the bill for the modification of
the tariff was under debate, he moved to strike out
all but the enacting clause, and supported his motion
in a long speech, insisting that no tariff ought to
pass until it was known “whether there was any
measure by which a State could defeat the laws of
the Union.” In a minority report from his
own committee he strongly censured the policy of the
Administration. He was for meeting, fighting
out, and determining at this crisis the whole doctrine
of state rights and secession. “One particle
of compromise,” he said, with what truth events
have since shown clearly enough, would “directly
lead to the final and irretrievable dissolution of
the Union.” In his usual strong and thorough-going
fashion he was for persisting in the vigorous
and spirited measures, the mere brief declaration
of which, though so quickly receded from, won for Jackson
a measure of credit greater than he deserved.
Jackson was thrown into a great rage by the threats
of South Carolina, and replied to them with the same
prompt wrath with which he had sometimes resented
insults from individuals. But in his cool inner
mind he was in sympathy with the demands which that
State preferred, and though undoubtedly he would have
fought her, had the dispute been forced to that pass,
yet he was quite willing to make concessions, which
were in fact in consonance with his own views as well
as with hers, in order to avoid that sad conclusion.
He was satisfied to have the instant emergency pass
over in a manner rendered superficially creditable
to himself by his outburst of temper, under cover
of which he sacrificed the substantial matter of principle
without a qualm. He shook his fist and shouted
defiance in the face of the nullifiers, while Mr. Clay
smuggled a comfortable concession into their pockets.
Jackson, notwithstanding his belligerent attitude,
did all he could to help Clay and was well pleased
with the result. Mr. Adams was not. He watched
the disingenuous game with disgust. It is certain
that if he had still been in the White House, the
matter would have had a very different
ending, bloodier, it may be, and more painful, but
much more conclusive.
For the most part Mr. Adams found
himself in opposition to President Jackson’s
Administration. This was not attributable to any
sense of personal hostility towards a successful rival,
but to an inevitable antipathy towards the measures,
methods, and ways adopted by the General so unfortunately
transferred to civil life. Few intelligent persons,
and none having the statesman habit of mind, befriended
the reckless, violent, eminently unstatesmanlike President.
His ultimate weakness in the nullification matter,
his opposition to internal improvements, his policy
of sacrificing the public lands to individual speculators,
his warfare against the Bank of the United States
conducted by methods the most unjustifiable, the transaction
of the removal of the deposits so disreputable and
injurious in all its details, the importation of Mrs.
Eaton’s visiting-list into the politics and
government of the country, the dismissal of the oldest
and best public servants as a part of the nefarious
system of using public offices as rewards for political
aid and personal adherence, the formation from base
ingredients of the ignoble “Kitchen Cabinet,” all
these doings, together with much more of the like
sort, constituted a career which could only
seem blundering, undignified, and dishonorable in
the eyes of a man like Mr. Adams, who regarded statesmanship
with the reverence due to the noblest of human callings.
Right as Mr. Adams was generally in his opposition to
Jackson, yet once he deserves credit for the contrary course. This was in
the matter of our relations with France. The treaty of 1831 secured to
this country an indemnity of $5,000,000, which, however, it had never been
possible to collect. This procrastination raised Jacksons ever ready ire,
and casting to the winds any further dunning, he resolved either to have the
money or to fight for it. He sent a message to Congress, recommending that
if France should not promptly settle the account, letters of marque and reprisal
against her commerce should be issued. He ordered Edward Livingston,
minister at Paris, to demand his passports and cross over to London. These
eminently proper and ultimately effectual measures alarmed the large party of
the timid; and the General found himself in danger of extensive desertions even
on the part of his usual supporters. But as once before in a season of his
dire extremity his courage and vigor had brought the potent aid of Mr. Adams to
his side, so now again he came under a heavy debt of gratitude to the
same champion. Mr. Adams stood by him with generous gallantry, and by a
telling speech in the House probably saved him from serious humiliation and even
disaster. The Presidents style of dealing had roused Mr. Adamss spirit,
and he spoke with a fire and vehemence which accomplished the unusual feat of
changing the predisposed minds of men too familiar with speech-making to be
often much influenced by it in the practical matter of voting. He thought
at the time that the success of this speech, brilliant as it appeared, was not
unlikely to result in his political ruin. Jackson would befriend and
reward his thorough-going partisans at any cost to his own conscience or the
public welfare; but the exceptional aid, tendered not from a sense of personal
fealty to himself, but simply from the motive of aiding the right cause
happening in the especial instance to have been espoused by him, never won from
him any token of regard. In November, 1837, Mr. Adams, speaking of his
personal relations with the President, said:
“Though I had served him more
than any other living man ever did, and though
I supported his Administration at the hazard of my
own political destruction, and effected for him
at a moment when his own friends were deserting
him what no other member of Congress ever accomplished
for him an unanimous vote of the House of
Representatives to support him in his
quarrel with France; though I supported him in
other very critical periods of his Administration,
my return from him was insult, indignity, and
slander.”
Antipathy had at last become the definitive
condition of these two men antipathy both
political and personal. At one time a singular
effort to reconcile them probably though
not certainly undertaken with the knowledge of Jackson was
made by Richard M. Johnson. This occurred shortly
before the inauguration of the war conducted by the
President against the Bank of the United States; and
judging by the rest of Jackson’s behavior at
this period, there was probably at least as much of
calculation in his motives, if in fact he was cognizant
of Johnson’s approaches, as there was of any
real desire to reestablish the bygone relation of
honorable friendship. To the advances thus made
Mr. Adams replied a little coldly, not quite repellently,
that Jackson, having been responsible for the suspension
of personal intercourse, must now be undisguisedly
the active party in renewing it. At the same
time he professed himself “willing to receive
in a spirit of conciliation any advance which in that
spirit General Jackson might make.” But
nothing came of this intrinsically hopeless attempt.
On the contrary the two drew rapidly and more widely
apart, and entertained concerning each
other opinions which grew steadily more unfavorable,
and upon Adams’s part more contemptuous, as time
went on.
Fifteen months later General Jackson made his visit to
Boston, and it was proposed that Harvard College should confer upon him the
degree of Doctor of Laws. The absurdity of the act, considered simply in
itself, was admitted by all. But the argument in its favor was based upon
the established usage of the College as towards all other Presidents, so that
its omission in this case might seem a personal slight. Mr. Adams, being
at the time a member of the Board of Overseers, strongly opposed the
proposition, but of course in vain. All that he could do was, for his own
individual part, to refuse to be present at the conferring of the degree, giving
as the minor reason for his absence, that he could hold no friendly intercourse
with the President, but for the major reason that independent of that, as
myself an affectionate child of our Alma Mater, I would not be present to
witness her disgrace in conferring her highest literary honors upon a barbarian
who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.
A Doctorate of Laws, he said, for which an apology was necessary, was a cheap
honor and ... a sycophantic compliment. After the deed was done,
he used to amuse himself by speaking of Doctor Andrew Jackson. This same
eastern tour of Jacksons called forth many other expressions of bitter sarcasm
from Adams. The President was ill and unable to carry out the programme of
entertainment and exhibition prepared for him: whereupon Mr. Adams
remarks:
“I believe much of his debility
is politic.... He is one of our tribe of
great men who turn disease to commodity, like John
Randolph, who for forty years was always dying.
Jackson, ever since he became a mark of public
attention, has been doing the same thing....
He is now alternately giving out his chronic diarrhoea
and making Warren bleed him for a pleurisy, and posting
to Cambridge for a doctorate of laws; mounting the
monument of Bunker’s Hill to hear a fulsome
address and receive two cannon balls from Edward
Everett,” etc. “Four fifths of
his sickness is trickery, and the other fifth
mere fatigue.”
This sounds, it must be confessed,
a trifle rancorous; but Adams had great excuse for
nourishing rancor towards Jackson.
It is time, however, to return to
the House of Representatives. It was not by bearing
his share in the ordinary work of that body, important
or exciting as that might at one time or another happen
to be, that Mr. Adams was to win in Congress that
reputation which has been already described
as far overshadowing all his previous career.
A special task and a peculiar mission were before
him. It was a part of his destiny to become the
champion of the anti-slavery cause in the national
legislature. Almost the first thing which he did
after he had taken his seat in Congress was to present
“fifteen petitions signed numerously by citizens
of Pennsylvania, praying for the abolition of slavery
and the slave-trade in the District of Columbia.”
He simply moved their reference to the Committee on
the District of Columbia, declaring that he should
not support that part of the petition which prayed
for abolition in the District. The time had not
yet come when the South felt much anxiety at such
manifestations, and these first stones were dropped
into the pool without stirring a ripple on the surface.
For about four years more we hear little in the Diary
concerning slavery. It was not until 1835, when
the annexation of Texas began to be mooted, that the
North fairly took the alarm, and the irrepressible
conflict began to develop. Then at once we find
Mr. Adams at the front. That he had always cherished
an abhorrence of slavery and a bitter antipathy to
slave-holders as a class is sufficiently indicated
by many chance remarks scattered through his Diary
from early years. Now that a great question, vitally
affecting the slave power, divided
the country into parties and inaugurated the struggle
which never again slept until it was settled forever
by the result of the civil war, Mr. Adams at once assumed
the function of leader. His position should be
clearly understood; for in the vast labor which lay
before the abolition party different tasks fell to
different men. Mr. Adams assumed to be neither
an agitator nor a reformer; by necessity of character,
training, fitness, and official position, he was a
legislator and statesman. The task which accident
or destiny allotted to him was neither to preach among
the people a crusade against slavery, nor to devise
and keep in action the thousand resources which busy
men throughout the country were constantly multiplying
for the purpose of spreading and increasing a popular
hostility towards the great “institution.”
Every great cause has need of its fanatics, its vanguard
to keep far in advance of what is for the time reasonable
and possible; it has not less need of the wiser and
cooler heads to discipline and control the great mass
which is set in motion by the reckless forerunners,
to see to the accomplishment of that which the present
circumstances and development of the movement allow
to be accomplished. It fell to Mr. Adams to direct
the assault against the outworks which
were then vulnerable, and to see that the force then
possessed by the movement was put to such uses as
would insure definite results instead of being wasted
in endeavors which as yet were impossible of achievement.
Drawing his duty from his situation and surroundings,
he left to others, to younger men and more rhetorical
natures, outside the walls of Congress, the business
of firing the people and stirring popular opinion
and sympathy. He was set to do that portion of
the work of abolition which was to be done in Congress,
to encounter the mighty efforts which were made to
stifle the great humanitarian cry in the halls of
the national legislature. This was quite as much
as one man was equal to; in fact, it is certain that
no one then in public life except Mr. Adams could have
done it effectually. So obvious is this that
one cannot help wondering what would have befallen
the cause, had he not been just where he was to forward
it in just the way that he did. It is only another
among the many instances of the need surely finding
the man. His qualifications were unique; his
ability, his knowledge, his prestige and authority,
his high personal character, his persistence and courage,
his combativeness stimulated by an acrimonious temper
but checked by a sound judgment, his merciless power
of invective, his independence and carelessness
of applause or vilification, friendship or enmity,
constituted him an opponent fully equal to the enormous
odds which the slave-holding interest arrayed against
him. A like moral and mental fitness was to be
found in no one else. Numbers could not overawe
him, nor loneliness dispirit him. He was probably
the most formidable fighter in debate of whom parliamentary
records preserve the memory. The hostility which
he encountered beggars description; the English language
was deficient in adequate words of virulence and contempt
to express the feelings which were entertained towards
him. At home he had not the countenance of that
class in society to which he naturally belonged.
A second time he found the chief part of the gentlemen
of Boston and its vicinity, the leading lawyers, the
rich merchants, the successful manufacturers, not
only opposed to him, but entertaining towards him
sentiments of personal dislike and even vindictiveness.
This stratum of the community, having a natural distaste
for disquieting agitation and influenced by class
feeling, the gentlemen of the North sympathizing
with the “aristocracy” of the South, could
not make common cause with anti-slavery people.
Fortunately, however, Mr. Adams was returned by a
country district where the old Puritan instincts were still strong. The intelligence and
free spirit of New England were at his back, and were
fairly represented by him; in spite of high-bred disfavor
they carried him gallantly through the long struggle.
The people of the Plymouth district sent him back to
the House every two years from the time of his first
election to the year of his death, and the disgust
of the gentlemen of Boston was after all of trifling
consequence to him and of no serious influence upon
the course of history. The old New England instinct
was in him as it was in the mass of the people; that
instinct made him the real exponent of New England
thought, belief, and feeling, and that same instinct
made the great body of voters stand by him with unswerving
constancy. When his fellow Representatives, almost
to a man, deserted him, he was sustained by many a
token of sympathy and admiration coming from among
the people at large. Time and the history of the
United States have been his potent vindicators.
The conservative, conscienceless respectability of
wealth was, as is usually the case with it in the
annals of the Anglo-Saxon race, quite in the wrong
and predestined to well-merited defeat. It adds
to the honor due to Mr. Adams that his sense of right
was true enough, and that his vision was clear enough,
to lead him out of that strong thraldom which class
feelings, traditions, and comradeship
are wont to exercise.
But it is time to resume the narrative
and to let Mr. Adams’s acts of which
after all it is possible to give only the briefest
sketch, selecting a few of the more striking incidents tell
the tale of his Congressional life.
On February 14, 1835, Mr. Adams again
presented two petitions for the abolition of slavery
in the District of Columbia, but without giving rise
to much excitement. The fusillade was, however,
getting too thick and fast to be endured longer with
indifference by the impatient Southerners. At
the next session of Congress they concluded to try
to stop it, and their ingenious scheme was to make
Congress shot-proof, so to speak, against such missiles.
On January 4, 1836, Mr. Adams presented an abolition
petition couched in the usual form, and moved that
it be laid on the table, as others like it had lately
been. But in a moment Mr. Glascock, of Georgia,
moved that the petition be not received. Debate
sprang up on a point of order, and two days later,
before the question of reception was determined, a
resolution was offered by Mr. Jarvis, of Maine, declaring
that the House would not entertain any petitions for
the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.
This resolution was supported on the ground that
Congress had no constitutional power in
the premises. Some days later, January 18, 1836,
before any final action had been reached upon this
proposition, Mr. Adams presented some more abolition
petitions, one of them signed by “one hundred
and forty-eight ladies, citizens of the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts; for, I said, I had not yet brought
myself to doubt whether females were citizens.”
The usual motion not to receive was made, and then
a new device was resorted to in the shape of a motion
that the motion not to receive be laid on the table.
On February 8, 1836, this novel scheme
for shutting off petitions against slavery immediately
upon their presentation was referred to a select committee
of which Mr. Pinckney was chairman. On May 18
this committee reported in substance: 1.
That Congress had no power to interfere with slavery
in any State; 2. That Congress ought not to interfere
with slavery in the District of Columbia; 3. That
whereas the agitation of the subject was disquieting
and objectionable, “all petitions, memorials,
resolutions or papers, relating in any way or to any
extent whatsoever to the subject of slavery or the
abolition of slavery, shall, without being either
printed or referred, be laid upon the table, and that
no further action whatever shall be had thereon.” When it came to taking a
vote upon this report a division of the question was
called for, and the yeas and nays were ordered.
The first resolution was then read, whereupon Mr.
Adams at once rose and pledged himself, if the House
would allow him five minutes’ time, to prove
it to be false. But cries of “order”
resounded; he was compelled to take his seat and the
resolution was adopted by 182 to 9. Upon the
second resolution he asked to be excused from voting,
and his name was passed in the call. The third
resolution with its preamble was then read, and Mr.
Adams, so soon as his name was called, rose and said:
“I hold the resolution to be a direct violation
of the Constitution of the United States, the rules
of this House, and the rights of my constituents.”
He was interrupted by shrieks of “order”
resounding on every side; but he only spoke the louder
and obstinately finished his sentence before resuming
his seat. The resolution was of course agreed
to, the vote standing 117 to 68. Such was the
beginning of the famous “gag” which became
and long remained afterward in a worse shape a
standing rule of the House. Regularly in each
new Congress when the adoption of rules came up, Mr.
Adams moved to rescind the “gag;” but
for many years his motions continued to be voted down,
as a matter of course. Its imposition
was clearly a mistake on the part of the slave-holding
party; free debate would almost surely have hurt them
less than this interference with the freedom of petition.
They had assumed an untenable position. Henceforth,
as the persistent advocate of the right of petition,
Mr. Adams had a support among the people at large
vastly greater than he could have enjoyed as the opponent
of slavery. As his adversaries had shaped the
issue he was predestined to victory in a free country.
A similar scene was enacted on December
21 and 22, 1837. A “gag” or “speech-smothering”
resolution being then again before the House, Mr.
Adams, when his name was called in the taking of the
vote, cried out “amidst a perfect war-whoop
of ‘order:’ ’I hold the resolution
to be a violation of the Constitution, of the right
of petition of my constituents and of the people of
the United States, and of my right to freedom of speech
as a member of this House.’” Afterward,
in reading over the names of members who had voted,
the clerk omitted that of Mr. Adams, this utterance
of his not having constituted a vote. Mr. Adams
called attention to the omission. The clerk, by
direction of the Speaker, thereupon called his name.
His only reply was by a motion that his answer as
already made should be entered on the Journal.
The Speaker said that this motion was not in order.
Mr. Adams, resolute to get upon the record, requested
that his motion with the Speaker’s decision
that it was not in order might be entered on the Journal.
The next day, finding that this entry had not been
made in proper shape, he brought up the matter again.
One of his opponents made a false step, and Mr. Adams
“bantered him” upon it until the other
was provoked into saying that, “if the question
ever came to the issue of war, the Southern people
would march into New England and conquer it.”
Mr. Adams replied that no doubt they would if they
could; that he entered his resolution upon the Journal
because he was resolved that his opponent’s
“name should go down to posterity damned to
everlasting fame.” No one ever gained much
in a war of words with this ever-ready and merciless
tongue.
Mr. Adams, having soon become known
to all the nation as the indomitable presenter of
anti-slavery petitions, quickly found that great numbers
of people were ready to keep him busy in this trying
task. For a long while it was almost as much as
he could accomplish to receive, sort, schedule, and
present the infinite number of petitions and memorials
which came to him praying for the abolition of slavery
and of the slave-trade in the District of Columbia,
and opposing the annexation of Texas.
It was an occupation not altogether devoid even of
physical danger, and calling for an amount of moral
courage greater than it is now easy to appreciate.
It is the incipient stage of such a conflict that
tests the mettle of the little band of innovators.
When it grows into a great party question much less
courage is demanded. The mere presentation of
an odious petition may seem in itself to be a simple
task; but to find himself in a constant state of antagonism
to a powerful, active, and vindictive majority in
a debating body, constituted of such material as then
made up the House of Representatives, wore hardly
even upon the iron temper and inflexible disposition
of Mr. Adams. “The most insignificant error
of conduct in me at this time,” he writes in
April, 1837, “would be my irredeemable ruin
in this world; and both the ruling political parties
are watching with intense anxiety for some overt act
by me to set the whole pack of their hireling presses
upon me.” But amid the host of foes, and
aware that he could count upon the aid of scarcely
a single hearty and daring friend, he labored only
the more earnestly. The severe pressure against
him begat only the more severe counter pressure upon
his part.
Besides these natural and legitimate difficulties, Mr. Adams
was further in the embarrassing position of one who has to fear as much
from the imprudence of allies as from open hostility of antagonists, and he was
often compelled to guard against a peculiar risk coming from his very coadjutors
in the great cause. The extremists who had cast aside all regard for what
was practicable, and who utterly scorned to consider the feasibility or the
consequences of measures which seemed to them to be correct as abstract
propositions of morality, were constantly urging him to action which would only
have destroyed him forever in political life, would have stripped him of his
influence, exiled him from that position in Congress where he could render the
most efficient service that was in him, and left him naked of all usefulness and
utterly helpless to continue that essential portion of the labor which could be
conducted by no one else. The abolitionists generally, he said, are
constantly urging me to indiscreet movements, which would ruin me, and weaken
and not strengthen their cause. His family, on the other hand, sought to
restrain him from all connection with these dangerous partisans. Between
these adverse impulses, he writes, my mind is agitated almost to
distraction.... I walk on the edge of a precipice almost every step that I
take. In the midst of all this anxiety, however, he was
fortunately supported by the strong commendation of his constituents which they
once loyally declared by formal and unanimous votes in a convention summoned for
the express purpose of manifesting their support. His feelings appear by
an entry in his Diary in October, 1837:
“I have gone [he said] as far
upon this article, the abolition of slavery,
as the public opinion of the free portion of the Union
will bear, and so far that scarcely a slave-holding
member of the House dares to vote with me upon
any question. I have as yet been thoroughly
sustained by my own State, but one step further and
I hazard my own standing and influence there,
my own final overthrow, and the cause of liberty
itself for an indefinite time, certainly for
more than my remnant of life. Were there in the
House one member capable of taking the lead in this
cause of universal emancipation, which is moving
onward in the world and in this country, I would
withdraw from the contest which will rage with
increasing fury as it draws to its crisis, but for
the management of which my age, infirmities,
and approaching end totally disqualify me.
There is no such man in the House.”
September 15, 1837, he says:
“I have been for some time occupied day and
night, when at home, in assorting and recording the
petitions and remonstrances against the annexation
of Texas, and other anti-slavery
petitions, which flow upon me in torrents.”
The next day he presented the singular petition of
one Sherlock S. Gregory, who had conceived the eccentric
notion of asking Congress to declare him “an
alien or stranger in the land so long as slavery exists
and the wrongs of the Indians are unrequited and unrepented
of.” September 28 he presented a batch
of his usual petitions, and also asked leave to offer
a resolution calling for a report concerning the coasting
trade in slaves. “There was what Napoleon
would have called a superb NO! returned to my request
from the servile side of the House.” The
next day he presented fifty-one more like documents,
and notes having previously presented one hundred
and fifty more.
In December, 1837, still at this same
work, he made a hard but fruitless effort to have
the Texan remonstrances and petitions sent to a select
committee instead of to that on foreign affairs which
was constituted in the Southern interest. On
December 29 he “presented several bundles of
abolition and anti-slavery petitions,” and said
that, having declared his opinion that the gag-rule
was unconstitutional, null, and void, he should “submit
to it only as to physical force.” January
3, 1838, he presented “about a hundred petitions,
memorials, and remonstrances, all
laid on the table.” January 15 he presented
fifty more. January 28 he received thirty-one
petitions, and spent that day and the next in assorting
and filing these and others which he previously had,
amounting in all to one hundred and twenty. February
14, in the same year, was a field-day in the petition
campaign: he presented then no less than three
hundred and fifty petitions, all but three or four
of which bore more or less directly upon the slavery
question. Among these petitions was one
“praying that Congress would
take measures to protect citizens from the North
going to the South from danger to their lives.
When the motion to lay that on the table was made,
I said that, ’In another part of the Capitol
it had been threatened that if a Northern abolitionist
should go to North Carolina, and utter a principle
of the Declaration of Independence’ Here
a loud cry of ‘order! order!’ burst
forth, in which the Speaker yelled the loudest.
I waited till it subsided, and then resumed, ’that
if they could catch him they would hang him!’
I said this so as to be distinctly heard throughout
the hall, the renewed deafening shout of ‘order!
order!’ notwithstanding. The Speaker then
said, ‘The gentleman from Massachusetts
will take his seat;’ which I did and immediately
rose again and presented another petition. He
did not dare tell me that I could not proceed
without permission of the House,
and I proceeded. The threat to hang Northern
abolitionists was uttered by Preston of the Senate
within the last fortnight.”
On March 12, of the same year, he
presented ninety-six petitions, nearly all of an anti-slavery
character, one of them for “expunging the Declaration
of Independence from the Journals.”
On December 14, 1838, Mr. Wise, of Virginia, objected to the
reception of certain anti-slavery petitions. The Speaker ruled his
objection out of order, and from this ruling Wise appealed. The question
on the appeal was taken by yeas and nays. When Mr. Adamss name was
called, he relates:
“I rose and said, ’Mr.
Speaker, considering all the resolutions introduced
by the gentleman from New Hampshire as’ The
Speaker roared out, ’The gentleman from
Massachusetts must answer Aye or No, and nothing
else. Order!’ With a reinforced voice ’I
refuse to answer, because I consider all the
proceedings of the House as unconstitutional’ While
in a firm and swelling voice I pronounced distinctly
these words, the Speaker and about two thirds of the
House cried, ‘order! order! order!’
till it became a perfect yell. I paused
a moment for it to cease and then said, ’a direct
violation of the Constitution of the United States.’
While speaking these words with loud, distinct,
and slow articulation, the
bawl of ‘order! order!’ resounded again
from two thirds of the House. The Speaker,
with agonizing lungs, screamed, ’I call
upon the House to support me in the execution of
my duty!’ I then coolly resumed my seat.
Waddy Thompson, of South Carolina, advancing
into one of the aisles with a sarcastic smile
and silvery tone of voice, said, ’What aid from
the House would the Speaker desire?’ The
Speaker snarled back, ’The gentleman from
South Carolina is out of order!’ and a peal of
laughter burst forth from all sides of the House.”
So that little skirmish ended, much
more cheerfully than was often the case.
December 20, 1838, he presented fifty
anti-slavery petitions, among which were three praying
for the recognition of the Republic of Hayti.
Petitions of this latter kind he strenuously insisted
should be referred to a select committee, or else
to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, accompanied in
the latter case with explicit instructions that a
report thereon should be brought in. He audaciously
stated that he asked for these instructions because
so many petitions of a like tenor had been sent to
the Foreign Affairs Committee, and had found it a
limbo from which they never again emerged, and the
chairman had said that this would continue to be the
case. The chairman, sitting two rows behind Mr.
Adams, said, “that insinuation should not be
made against a gentleman!” “I
shall make,” retorted Mr. Adams, “what
insinuation I please. This is not an insinuation,
but a direct, positive assertion.”
January 7, 1839, he cheerfully records
that he presented ninety-five petitions, bearing “directly
or indirectly upon the slavery topics,” and
some of them very exasperating in their language.
March 30, 1840, he handed in no less than five hundred
and eleven petitions, many of which were not receivable
under the “gag” rule adopted on January
28 of that year, which had actually gone the length
of refusing so much as a reception to abolition petitions.
April 13, 1840, he presented a petition for the repeal
of the laws in the District of Columbia, which authorized
the whipping of women. Besides this he had a multitude
of others, and he only got through the presentation
of them “just as the morning hour expired.”
On January 21, 1841, he found much amusement in puzzling
his Southern adversaries by presenting some petitions
in which, besides the usual anti-slavery prayers,
there was a prayer to refuse to admit to the Union
any new State whose constitution should tolerate slavery.
The Speaker said that only the latter prayer could
be received under the “gag” rule.
Connor, of North Carolina, moved to lay
on the table so much of the petition as could be received.
Mr. Adams tauntingly suggested that in order to do
this it would be necessary to mutilate the document
by cutting it into two pieces; whereat there was great
wrath and confusion, “the House got into a snarl,
the Speaker knew not what to do.” The Southerners
raved and fumed for a while, and finally resorted
to their usual expedient, and dropped altogether a
matter which so sorely burned their fingers.
A fact, very striking in view of the subsequent course of
events, concerning Mr. Adamss relation with the slavery question, seems
hitherto to have escaped the attention of those who have dealt with his career.
It may as well find a place here as elsewhere in a narrative which it is
difficult to make strictly chronological. Apparently he was the first to
declare the doctrine, that the abolition of slavery could be lawfully
accomplished by the exercise of the war powers of the Government. The
earliest expression of this principle is found in a speech made by him in May,
1836, concerning the distribution of rations to fugitives from Indian
hostilities in Alabama and Georgia. He then said:
“From the instant that your slave-holding
States become the theatre of war, civil, servile,
or foreign, from that instant the war
powers of the Constitution extend to interference with
the institution of slavery in every way in which
it can be interfered with, from a claim of indemnity
for slaves taken or destroyed, to a cession of
the State burdened with slavery to a foreign
power.”
In June, 1841, he made a speech of
which no report exists, but the contents of which
may be in part learned from the replies and references
to it which are on record. Therein he appears
to have declared that slavery could be abolished in
the exercise of the treaty-making power, having reference
doubtless to a treaty concluding a war.
These views were of course mere abstract
expressions of opinion as to the constitutionality
of measures the real occurrence of which was anticipated
by nobody. But, as the first suggestions of a
doctrine in itself most obnoxious to the Southern
theory and fundamentally destructive of the great
Southern “institution” under perfectly
possible circumstances, this enunciation by Mr. Adams
gave rise to much indignation. Instead of allowing
the imperfectly formulated principle to lose its danger
in oblivion, the Southerners assailed it with vehemence.
They taunted Mr. Adams with the opinion, as if merely
to say that he held it was to damn him to everlasting
infamy. The only result was that they induced
him to consider the matter more fully,
and to express his belief more deliberately. In
January, 1842, Mr. Wise attacked him upon this ground,
and a month later Marshall followed in the same strain.
These assaults were perhaps the direct incentive to
what was said soon after by Mr. Adams, on April 14,
1842, in a speech concerning war with England and
with Mexico, of which there was then some talk.
Giddings, among other resolutions, had introduced
one to the effect that the slave States had the exclusive
right to be consulted on the subject of slavery.
Mr. Adams said that he could not give his assent to
this. One of the laws of war, he said, is
“that when a country
is invaded, and two hostile armies are set
in martial array, the
commanders of both armies have power to
emancipate all the slaves
in the invaded territory.”
He cited some precedents from South American history, and
continued:
“Whether the war be servile,
civil, or foreign, I lay this down as the law
of nations. I say that the military authority
takes for the time the place of all municipal
institutions, slavery among the rest. Under
that state of things, so far from its being true
that the States where slavery exists have the exclusive
management of the subject, not only the President
of the United States but the commander of the
army has power to order the universal
emancipation of the slaves.”
This declaration of constitutional doctrine was made with
much positiveness and emphasis. There for many years the matter rested.
The principle had been clearly asserted by Mr. Adams, angrily repudiated by the
South, and in the absence of the occasion of war there was nothing more to be
done in the matter. But when the exigency at last came, and the government
of the United States was brought face to face with by far the gravest
constitutional problem presented by the great rebellion, then no other solution
presented itself save that which had been suggested twenty years earlier in the
days of peace by Mr. Adams. It was in pursuance of the doctrine to which
he thus gave the first utterance that slavery was forever abolished in the
United States. Extracts from the last-quoted speech long stood as the
motto of the Liberator; and at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation Mr.
Adams was regarded as the chief and sufficient authority for an act so momentous
in its effect, so infinitely useful in a matter of national extremity. But
it was evidently a theory which had taken strong hold upon him. Besides
the foregoing speeches there is an explicit statement of it in a letter which he
wrote from Washington April 4, 1836, to Hon. Solomon Lincoln, of Hingham, a
friend and constituent. After touching upon other topics he says:
“The new pretensions of the slave
representation in Congress of a right to refuse
to receive petitions, and that Congress have no constitutional
power to abolish slavery or the slave-trade in the
District of Columbia, forced upon me so much of
the discussion as I did take upon me, but in
which you are well aware I did not and could
not speak a tenth part of my mind. I did not,
for example, start the question whether by the
law of God and of nature man can hold property,
HEREDITARY property, in man. I did not start
the question whether in the event of a servile
insurrection and war, Congress would not have
complete unlimited control over the whole subject
of slavery, even to the emancipation of all the slaves
in the State where such insurrection should break out,
and for the suppression of which the freemen
of Plymouth and Norfolk counties, Massachusetts,
should be called by Acts of Congress to pour
out their treasures and to shed their blood. Had
I spoken my mind on these two points, the sturdiest
of the abolitionists would have disavowed the
sentiments of their champion.”
The projected annexation of Texas,
which became a battle-ground whereon the tide of conflict
swayed so long and so fiercely to and fro, profoundly
stirred Mr. Adams’s indignation. It is,
he said, “a question of far deeper root and
more overshadowing branches than any or
all others that now agitate this country.... I
had opened it by my speech ... on the 25th May, 1836 by
far the most noted speech that I ever made.”
He based his opposition to the annexation upon constitutional
objections, and on September 18, 1837, offered a resolution
that “the power of annexing the people of any
independent State to this Union is a power not delegated
by the Constitution of the United States to their
Congress or to any department of their government,
but reserved to the people.” The Speaker
refused to receive the motion, or even allow it to
be read, on the ground that it was not in order.
Mr. Adams repeated substantially the same motion in
June, 1838, then adding “that any attempt by
act of Congress or by treaty to annex the Republic
of Texas to this Union would be an usurpation of power
which it would be the right and the duty of the free
people of the Union to resist and annul.”
The story of his opposition to this measure is, however,
so interwoven with his general antagonism to slavery,
that there is little occasion for treating them separately.
People sometimes took advantage of
his avowed principles concerning
freedom of petition to put him in positions which they
thought would embarrass him or render him ridiculous.
Not much success, however, attended these foolish
efforts of shallow wits. It was not easy to disconcert
him or to take him at disadvantage. July 28,
1841, he presented a paper of this character coming
from sundry Virginians and praying that all the free
colored population should be sold or expelled from
the country. He simply stated as he handed in
the sheet that nothing could be more abhorrent to him
than this prayer, and that his respect
for the right of petition was his only motive for
presenting this. It was suspended under the “gag”
rule, and its promoters, unless very easily amused,
must have been sadly disappointed with the fate and
effect of their joke. On March 5, 1838, he received
from Rocky Mount in Virginia a letter and petition
praying that the House would arraign at its bar and
forever expel John Quincy Adams. He presented
both documents, with a resolution asking that they
be referred to a committee for investigation and report.
His enemies in the House saw that he was sure to have
the best of the sport if the matter should be pursued,
and succeeded in laying it on the table. Waddy
Thompson thoughtfully improved the opportunity to
mention to Mr. Adams that he also had received a petition,
“numerously signed,” praying for Mr. Adams’s
expulsion, but had never presented it. In the
following May Mr. Adams presented another petition
of like tenor. Dromgoole said that he supposed
it was a “quiz,” and that he would move
to lay it on the table, “unless the gentleman
from Massachusetts wished to give it another direction.”
Mr. Adams said that “the gentleman from Massachusetts
cared very little about it,” and it found the
limbo of the “table.”
To this same period belongs the memorable tale of Mr. Adamss
attempt to present a petition from slaves. On February 6, 1837,
he brought in some two hundred abolition petitions. He closed with one
against the slave-trade in the District of Columbia purporting to be signed by
nine ladies of Fredericksburg, Virginia, whom he declined to name because, as
he said, in the present disposition of the country, he did not know what might
happen to them if he did name them. Indeed, he added, he was not sure
that the petition was genuine; he had said, when he began to present his
petitions, that some among them were so peculiar that he was in doubt as to
their genuineness, and this fell within the description. Apparently he had
concluded and was about to take his seat, when he quickly caught up another
sheet, and said that he held in his hand a paper concerning which he should wish
to have the decision of the Speaker before presenting it. It purported to
be a petition from twenty-two slaves, and he would like to know whether it came
within the rule of the House concerning petitions relating to slavery. The
Speaker, in manifest confusion, said that he could not answer the question until
he knew the contents of the document. Mr. Adams, remarking that it was
one of those petitions which had occurred to his mind as not being what
it purported to be, proposed to send it up to the Chair for inspection.
Objection was made to this, and the Speaker said that the circumstances were so
extraordinary that he would take the sense of the House. That body, at
first inattentive, now became interested, and no sooner did a knowledge of what
was going on spread among those present than great excitement prevailed.
Members were hastily brought in from the lobbies; many tried to speak, and from
parts of the hall cries of Expel him! Expel him! were heard. For a
brief interval no one of the enraged Southerners was equal to the unforeseen
emergency. Mr. Haynes moved the rejection of the petition. Mr. Lewis
deprecated this motion, being of opinion that the House must inflict punishment
on the gentleman from Massachusetts. Mr. Haynes thereupon withdrew a
motion which was so obviously inadequate to the vindictive gravity of the
occasion. Mr. Grantland stood ready to second a motion to punish Mr.
Adams, and Mr. Lewis said that if punishment should not be meted out it would
be better for the representatives from the slave-holding States to go home at
once. Mr. Alford said that so soon as the petition should be presented he
would move that it should be taken from the House and burned. At last
Mr. Thompson got a resolution into shape as follows:
“That the Hon. John Quincy Adams,
by the attempt just made by him to introduce
a petition purporting on its face to be from slaves,
has been guilty of a gross disrespect to this
House, and that he be instantly brought to the
bar to receive the severe censure of the Speaker.”
In supporting this resolution he said
that Mr. Adams’s action was in gross and wilful
violation of the rules of the House and an insult to
its members. He even threatened criminal proceedings
before the grand jury of the District of Columbia,
saying that if that body had the “proper intelligence
and spirit” people might “yet see an incendiary
brought to condign punishment.” Mr. Haynes,
not satisfied with Mr. Thompson’s resolution,
proposed a substitute to the effect that Mr. Adams
had “rendered himself justly liable to the severest
censure of this House and is censured accordingly.”
Then there ensued a little more excited speech-making
and another resolution, that Mr. Adams,
“by his attempt to introduce
into this House a petition from slaves for the
abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia,
has committed an outrage on the feelings of the
people of a large portion of this Union; a flagrant
contempt on the dignity of this
House; and, by extending to slaves a privilege only
belonging to freemen, directly incites the slave
population to insurrection; and that the said
member be forthwith called to the bar of the
House and be censured by the Speaker.”
Mr. Lewis remained of opinion that
it might be best for the Southern members to go home, a
proposition which afterwards drew forth a flaming
speech from Mr. Alford, who, far from inclining to
go home, was ready to stay “until this fair
city is a field of Waterloo and this beautiful Potomac
a river of blood.” Mr. Patton, of Virginia,
was the first to speak a few words to bring members
to their senses, pertinently asking whether Mr. Adams
had “attempted to offer” this petition,
and whether it did indeed pray for the abolition of
slavery. It might be well, he suggested, for
his friends to be sure of their facts before going
further. Then at last Mr. Adams, who had not at
all lost his head in the general hurly-burly, rose
and said, that amid these numerous resolutions charging
him with “high crimes and misdemeanors”
and calling him to the bar of the House to answer for
the same, he had thought it proper to remain silent
until the House should take some action; that he did
not suppose that, if he should be brought to the bar
of the House, he should be “struck mute by the
previous question” before he should
have been given an opportunity to “say a word
or two” in his own defence. As to the facts:
“I did not present the petition,” he said,
“and I appeal to the Speaker to say that I did
not.... I intended to take the decision of the
Speaker before I went one step towards presenting
or offering to present that petition.”
The contents of the petition, should the House ever
choose to read it, he continued, would render necessary
some amendments at least in the last resolution, since
the prayer was that slavery should not be abolished!”
The gentleman from Alabama may perchance find, that
the object of this petition is precisely what he desires
to accomplish; and that these slaves who have sent
this paper to me are his auxiliaries instead of being
his opponents.”
These remarks caused some discomfiture among the Southern
members, who were glad to have time for deliberation given them by a maundering
speech from Mr. Mann, of New York, who talked about the deplorable spectacle
shown off every petition day by the honorable member from Massachusetts in
presenting the abolition petitions of his infatuated friends and constituents,
charged Mr. Adams with running counter to the sense of the whole country with a
violence paralleled only by the revolutionary madness of desperation,
and twitted him with his political friendlessness, with his age, and with the
insinuation of waning faculties and judgment. This little phial having
been emptied, Mr. Thompson arose and angrily assailed Mr. Adams for
contemptuously trifling with the House, which charge he based upon the entirely
unproved assumption that the petition was not a genuine document. He
concluded by presenting new resolutions better adapted to the recent development
of the case:
“1. That
the Hon. John Quincy Adams, by an effort to present
a
petition from slaves,
has committed a gross contempt of this
House.
“2. That the member from
Massachusetts above-named, by creating the impression
and leaving the House under such impression, that
the said petition was for the abolition of slavery,
when he knew that it was not, has trifled with
the House.
“3. That
the Hon. John Quincy Adams receive the censure of the
House for his conduct
referred to in the preceding resolutions.”
Mr. Pinckney said that the avowal
by Mr. Adams that he had in his possession the petition
of slaves was an admission of communication with slaves,
and so was evidence of collusion with them; and that
Mr. Adams had thus rendered himself indictable for
aiding and abetting insurrection. A
fortiori, then, was he not amenable to the censure
of the House? Mr. Haynes, of Georgia, forgetting
that the petition had not been presented, announced
his intention of moving that it should be rejected
subject only to a permission for its withdrawal; another
member suggested that, if the petition should be disposed
of by burning, it would be well to commit to the same
combustion the gentleman who presented it.
On the next day some more resolutions
were ready, prepared by Dromgoole, who in his sober
hours was regarded as the best parliamentarian in
the Southern party. These were, that Mr. Adams
“by stating in his place that
he had in his possession a paper purporting to
be a petition from slaves, and inquiring if it came
within the meaning of a resolution heretofore
adopted (as preliminary to its presentation),
has given color to the idea that slaves have
the right of petition and of his readiness to be their
organ; and that for the same he deserves the censure
of the House.
“That the aforesaid
John Quincy Adams receive a censure from the
Speaker in the presence
of the House of Representatives.”
Mr. Alford, in advocating these resolutions,
talked about “this awful crisis of our beloved
country.” Mr. Robertson, though opposing
the resolutions, took pains “strongly
to condemn ... the conduct of the gentleman from Massachusetts.”
Mr. Adams’s colleague, Mr. Lincoln, spoke in
his behalf, so also did Mr. Evans, of Maine; and Caleb
Cushing made a powerful speech upon his side.
Otherwise than this Mr. Adams was left to carry on
the contest single-handed against the numerous array
of assailants, all incensed and many fairly savage.
Yet it is a striking proof of the dread in which even
the united body of hot-blooded Southerners stood of
this hard fighter from the North, that as the debate
was drawing to a close, after they had all said their
say and just before his opportunity came for making
his elaborate speech of defence, they suddenly and
opportunely became ready to content themselves with
a mild resolution, which condemned generally the presentation
of petitions from slaves, and, for the disposal of
this particular case, recited that Mr. Adams had “solemnly
disclaimed all design of doing anything disrespectful
to the House,” and had “avowed his intention
not to offer to present” to the House the petition
of this kind held by him; that “therefore all
further proceedings in regard to his conduct do now
cease.” A sneaking effort by Mr. Vanderpoel
to close Mr. Adams’s mouth by moving the
previous question involved too much cowardice
to be carried; and so on February 9 the sorely bated
man was at last able to begin his final speech.
He conducted his defence with singular spirit and ability,
but at too great length to admit of even a sketch
of what he said. He claimed the right of petition
for slaves, and established it so far as argument
can establish anything. He alleged that all he
had done was to ask a question of the Speaker, and
if he was to be censured for so doing, then how much
more, he asked, was the Speaker deserving of censure
who had even put the same question to the House, and
given as his reason for so doing that it was not only
of novel but of difficult import! He repudiated
the idea that any member of the House could be held
by a grand jury to respond for words spoken in debate,
and recommended the gentlemen who had indulged in
such preposterous threats “to study a little
the first principles of civil liberty,” excoriating
them until they actually arose and tried to explain
away their own language. He cast infinite ridicule
upon the unhappy expression of Dromgoole, “giving
color to an idea.” Referring to the difficulty
which he encountered by reason of the variety and disorder
of the resolutions and charges against him with which
“gentlemen from the South had pounced down upon
him like so many eagles upon a dove,” there
was an exquisite sarcasm in the simile! he
said: “When I take up one idea, before
I can give color to the idea, it has already changed
its form and presents itself for consideration under
other colors.... What defence can be made against
this new crime of giving color to ideas?” As
for trifling with the House by presenting a petition
which in the course of debate had become pretty well
known and acknowledged to be a hoax designed to lead
Mr. Adams into a position of embarrassment and danger,
he disclaimed any such motive, reminding members that
he had given warning, when beginning to present his
petitions, that he was suspicious that some among them
might not be genuine. But while denying all intention
of trifling with the House, he rejected the mercy
extended to him in the last of the long
series of resolutions before that body. “I
disclaim not,” he said, “any particle
of what I have done, not a single word of what I have
said do I unsay; nay, I am ready to do and to say the
same to-morrow.” He had no notion of aiding
in making a loophole through which his blundering
enemies might escape, even though he himself should
be accorded the privilege of crawling through it with
them. At times during his speech “there
was great agitation in the House,” but when
he closed no one seemed ambitious to reply. His
enemies had learned anew a lesson, often taught to
them before and often to be impressed upon them again,
that it was perilous to come to close quarters with
Mr. Adams. They gave up all idea of censuring
him, and were content to apply a very mild emollient
to their own smarting wounds in the shape of a resolution,
to the effect that slaves did not possess the right
of petition secured by the Constitution to the people
of the United States.
In the winter of 1842-43 the questions
arising out of the affair of the Creole rendered the
position then held by Mr. Adams at the head of the
House Committee on Foreign Affairs exceedingly distasteful
to the slave-holders. On January 21, 1842, a
somewhat singular manifestation
of this feeling was made when Mr. Adams himself presented
a petition from Georgia praying for his removal from
this Chairmanship. Upon this he requested to
be heard in his own behalf. The Southern party,
not sanguine of any advantage from debating the matter,
tried to lay it on the table. The petition was
alleged by Habersham, of Georgia, to be undoubtedly
another hoax. But Mr. Adams, loath to lose a
good opportunity, still claimed to be heard on the
charges made against him by the “infamous slave-holders.”
Mr. Smith, of Virginia, said that the House had lately
given Mr. Adams leave to defend himself against the
charge of monomania, and asked whether he was doing
so. Some members cried “Yes! Yes!”;
others shouted “No! he is establishing the fact.”
The wrangling was at last brought to an end by the
Speaker’s declaration, that the petition must
lie over for the present. But the scene had been
only the prelude to one much longer, fiercer, and
more exciting. No sooner was the document thus
temporarily disposed of than Mr. Adams rose and presented
the petition of forty-five citizens of Haverhill,
Massachusetts, praying the House “immediately
to adopt measures peaceably to dissolve the union of
these States,” for the alleged cause of the incompatibility
between free and slave-holding communities.
He moved “its reference to a select committee,
with instructions to report an answer to the petitioners
showing the reasons why the prayer of it ought not
to be granted.”
In a moment the House was aflame with
excitement. The numerous members who hated Mr.
Adams thought that at last he was experiencing the
divinely sent madness which foreruns destruction.
Those who sought his political annihilation felt that
the appointed and glorious hour of extinction had
come; those who had writhed beneath the castigation
of his invective exulted in the near revenge.
While one said that the petition should never have
been brought within the walls of the House, and another
wished to burn it in the presence of the members, Mr.
Gilmer, of Virginia, offered a resolution, that in
presenting the petition Mr. Adams “had justly
incurred the censure of the House.” Some
objection was made to this resolution as not being
in order; but Mr. Adams said that he hoped that it
would be received and debated and that an opportunity
would be given him to speak in his own defence; “especially
as the gentleman from Virginia had thought proper to
play second fiddle to his colleague from Accomac.”
Mr. Gilmer retorted that he “played second fiddle
to no man. He was no fiddler, but
was endeavoring to prevent the music of him who,
’In the space of one revolving moon,
Was statesman, poet, fiddler, and buffoon.’”
The resolution was then laid on the
table. The House rose, and Mr. Adams went home
and noted in his Diary, “evening in meditation,”
for which indeed he had abundant cause. On the
following day Thomas F. Marshall, of Kentucky, offered
a substitute for Gilmer’s resolution. This
new fulmination had been prepared in a caucus of forty
members of the slave-holding party, and was long and
carefully framed. Its preamble recited, in substance,
that a petition to dissolve the Union, proposing to
Congress to destroy that which the several members
had solemnly and officially sworn to support, was
a “high breach of privilege, a contempt offered
to this House, a direct proposition to the Legislature
and each member of it to commit perjury, and involving
necessarily in its execution and its consequences the
destruction of our country and the crime of high treason:”
wherefore it was to be resolved that Mr. Adams, in
presenting a petition for dissolution, had “offered
the deepest indignity to the House” and “an
insult to the people;” that if “this outrage”
should be “permitted to pass unrebuked and unpunished”
he would have “disgraced his country ... in the
eyes of the whole world;” that for
this insult and this “wound at the Constitution
and existence of his country, the peace, the security
and liberty of the people of these States” he
“might well be held to merit expulsion from
the national councils;” and that “the House
deem it an act of grace and mercy when they only inflict
upon him their severest censure;” that so much
they must do “for the maintenance of their own
purity and dignity; for the rest they turned him over
to his own conscience and the indignation of all true
American citizens.”
These resolutions were then advocated
by Mr. Marshall at great length and with extreme bitterness.
Mr. Adams replied shortly, stating that he should
wish to make his full defence at a later stage of the
debate. Mr. Wise followed in a personal and acrimonious
harangue; Mr. Everett gave some little assistance
to Mr. Adams, and the House again adjourned.
The following day Wise continued his speech, very
elaborately. When he closed, Mr. Adams, who had
“determined not to interrupt him till he had
discharged his full cargo of filthy invective,”
rose to “make a preliminary point.”
He questioned the right of the House to entertain
Marshall’s resolutions since the preamble assumed
him to be guilty of the crimes of subornation of perjury
and treason, and the resolutions themselves
censured him as if he had been found guilty; whereas
in fact he had not been tried upon these charges and
of course had not been convicted. If he was to
be brought to trial upon them he asserted his right
to have the proceedings conducted before a jury of
his peers, and that the House was not a tribunal having
this authority. But if he was to be tried for
contempt, for which alone he could lawfully be tried
by the House, still there were an hundred members
sitting on its benches who were morally disqualified
to judge him, who could not give him an impartial trial,
because they were prejudiced and the question was one
“on which their personal, pecuniary, and most
sordid interests were at stake.” Such considerations,
he said, ought to prevent many gentlemen from voting,
as Mr. Wise had avowed that they would prevent him.
Here Wise interrupted to disavow that he was influenced
by any such reasons, but rather, he said, by the “personal
loathing, dread, and contempt I feel for the man.”
Mr. Adams, continuing after this pleasant interjection,
admitted that he was in the power of the majority,
who might try him against law and condemn him against
right if they would.
“If they say they will try me,
they must try me. If they say
they will punish me, they must punish me. But
if they say that in peace and mercy they will
spare me expulsion, I disdain and cast away their
mercy; and I ask them if they will come to such
a trial and expel me. I defy them. I have
constituents to go to who will have something
to say if this House expels me. Nor will
it be long before the gentlemen will see me here again.”
Such was the fierce temper and indomitable
courage of this inflexible old man! He flung
contempt in the face of those who had him wholly in
their power, and in the same breath in which he acknowledged
that power he dared them to use it. He charged
Wise with the guilt of innocent blood, in connection
with certain transactions in a duel, and exasperated
that gentleman into crying out that the “charge
made by the gentleman from Massachusetts was as base
and black a lie as the traitor was base and black
who uttered it.” When he was asked by the
Speaker to put his point of order in writing, his
own request to the like effect in another case having
been refused shortly before, he tauntingly
congratulated that gentleman “upon his discovery
of the expediency of having points of order reduced
to writing a favor which he had repeatedly
denied to me.” When Mr. Wise was speaking,
“I interrupted him occasionally,” says
Mr. Adams, “sometimes to provoke
him into absurdity.” As usual he was left
to fight out his desperate battle substantially single-handed.
Only Mr. Everett occasionally helped him a very little;
while one or two others who spoke against the resolutions
were careful to explain that they felt no personal
good will towards Mr. Adams. But he faced the
odds courageously. It was no new thing for him
to be pitted alone against a “solid South.”
Outside the walls of the House he had some sympathy
and some assistance tendered him by individuals, among
others by Rufus Choate then in the Senate, and by
his own colleagues from Massachusetts. This support
aided and cheered him somewhat, but could not prevent
substantially the whole burden of the labor and brunt
of the contest from bearing upon him alone. Among
the external manifestations of feeling, those of hostility
were naturally largely in the ascendant. The
newspapers of Washington the “Globe”
and the “National Intelligencer” which
reported the debates, daily filled their columns with
all the abuse and invective which was poured forth
against him, while they gave the most meagre statements,
or none at all, of what he said in his own defence.
Among other amenities he received from North Carolina
an anonymous letter threatening him with assassination,
having also an engraved portrait of him with the
mark of a rifle-ball in the forehead, and
the motto “to stop the music of John Quincy
Adams,” etc., etc. This missive
he read and displayed in the House, but it was received
with profound indifference by men who would not have
greatly objected to the execution of the barbarous
threat.
The prolonged struggle cost him deep
anxiety and sleepless nights, which in the declining
years of a laborious life told hardly upon his aged
frame. But against all odds of numbers and under
all disadvantages of circumstances the past repeated
itself, and Mr. Adams alone won a victory over all
the cohorts of the South. Several attempts had
been made during the debate to lay the whole subject
on the table. Mr. Adams said that he would consent
to this simply because his defence would be a very
long affair, and he did not wish to have the time
of the House consumed and the business of the nation
brought to a stand solely for the consideration of
his personal affairs. These propositions failing,
he began his speech and soon was making such headway
that even his adversaries were constrained to see that
the opportunity which they had conceived to be within
their grasp was eluding them, as had so often happened
before. Accordingly on February 7 the motion
to “lay the whole subject on the table forever”
was renewed and carried by one hundred
and six votes to ninety-three. The House then
took up the original petition and refused to receive
it by one hundred and sixty-six to forty. No
sooner was this consummation reached than the irrepressible
champion rose to his feet and proceeded with his budget
of anti-slavery petitions, of which he “presented
nearly two hundred, till the House adjourned.”
Within a very short time there came
further and convincing proof that Mr. Adams was victor.
On February 26 he writes: “D. D. Barnard
told me he had received a petition from his District,
signed by a small number of very respectable persons,
praying for a dissolution of the Union. He said
he did not know what to do with it. I dined with
him.” By March 14 this dinner bore fruit.
Mr. Barnard had made up his mind “what to do
with it.” He presented it, with a motion
that it be referred to a select committee with instructions
to report adversely to its prayer. The well-schooled
House now took the presentation without a ripple of
excitement, and was content with simply voting not
to receive the petition.
In the midst of the toil and anxiety
imposed upon Mr. Adams by this effort to censure and
disgrace him, the scheme, already referred to, for
displacing him from the chairmanship of the Committee
on Foreign Affairs had been actively
prosecuted. He was notified that the Southern
members had formed a cabal for removing him and putting
Caleb Cushing in his place. The plan was, however,
temporarily checked, and so soon as Mr. Adams had
triumphed in the House the four Southern members of
the committee sent to the House a paper begging to
be excused from further services on the committee,
“because from recent occurrences it was doubtful
whether the House would remove the chairman, and they
were unwilling to serve with one in whom they had
no confidence.” The fugitives were granted,
“by a shout of acclamation,” the excuse
which they sought for so welcome a reason, and the
same was also done for a fifth member. Three more
of the same party, nominated to fill these vacancies,
likewise asked to be excused, and were so. Their
letters preferring this request were “so insulting
personally” to Mr. Adams as to constitute “gross
breaches of privilege.” “The Speaker
would have refused to receive or present them had
they referred to any other man in the House.”
They were published, but Mr. Adams, after some hesitation,
determined not to give them the importance which would
result from any public notice in the House upon his
part. He could afford to keep silence, and judged
wisely in doing so.
Amid all the animosity and rancor
entertained towards Mr. Adams, there yet
lurked a degree of respect for his courage, honesty,
and ability which showed itself upon occasion, doubtless
not a little to the surprise of the members themselves
who were hardly conscious that they entertained such
sentiments until startled into a manifestation of
them. An eminent instance of this is to be found
in the story of the troubled days preceding the organization
of the twenty-sixth Congress. On December 2,
1839, the members elect of that body came together
in Washington, with the knowledge that the seats of
five gentlemen from New Jersey, who brought with them
the regular gubernatorial certificate of their election,
would be contested by five other claimants. According
to custom Garland, clerk of the last House, called
the assemblage to order and began the roll-call.
When he came to New Jersey he called the name of one
member from that State, and then said that there were
five other seats which were contested, and that not
feeling authorized to decide the dispute he would pass
over the names of the New Jersey members and proceed
with the roll till the House should be formed, when
the question could be decided. Plausible as appeared
this abstention from an exercise of authority in so
grave a dispute, it was nevertheless really an assumption
and not a deprecation of power, and as
such was altogether unjustifiable. The clerk’s
sole business was to call the names of those persons
who presented the usual formal credentials; he had
no right to take cognizance that the seats of any
such persons might be the subject of a contest, which
could properly be instituted, conducted, and determined
only before and by the House itself when organized.
But his course was not innocent of a purpose.
So evenly was the House divided that the admission
or exclusion of these five members in the first instance
would determine the political complexion of the body.
The members holding the certificates were Whigs; if
the clerk could keep them out until the organization
of the House should be completed, then the Democrats
would control that organization, would elect their
Speaker, and through him would make up the committees.
Naturally enough this arrogation of
power by the clerk, the motives and consequences of
which were abundantly obvious, raised a terrible storm.
The debate continued till four o’clock in the
afternoon, when a motion was made to adjourn.
The clerk said that he could put no question, not
even of adjournment, till the House should be formed.
But there was a general cry to adjourn, and the clerk
declared the House adjourned. Mr. Adams went
home and wrote in his Diary that the clerk’s
“two decisions form together an insurmountable
objection to the transaction of any business, and
an impossibility of organizing the House....
The most curious part of the case is, that his own
election as clerk depends upon the exclusion of the
New Jersey members.” The next day was consumed
in a fierce debate as to whether the clerk should
be allowed to read an explanatory statement. Again
the clerk refused to put the question of adjournment,
but, “upon inspection,” declared an adjournment.
Some called out “a count! a count!” while
most rushed out of the hall, and Wise cried loudly,
“Now we are a mob!” The next day there
was more violent debating, but no progress towards
a decision. Various party leaders offered resolutions,
none of which accomplished anything. The condition
was ridiculous, disgraceful, and not without serious
possibilities of danger. Neither did any light
of encouragement break in any quarter. In the
crisis there seemed, by sudden consent of all, to be
a turning towards Mr. Adams. Prominent men of
both parties came to him and begged him to interfere.
He was reluctant to plunge into the embroilment; but
the great urgency and the abundant assurances of support
placed little less than actual compulsion upon him.
Accordingly on December 5 he rose to address the House.
He was greeted as a Deus ex machina.
Not speaking to the clerk, but turning directly to
the assembled members, he began: “Fellow
citizens! Members elect of the twenty-sixth Congress!”
He could not resist the temptation of administering
a brief but severe and righteous castigation to Garland;
and then, ignoring that functionary altogether, proceeded
to beg the House to organize itself. To
this end he said that he would offer a resolution
“ordering the clerk to call the members from
New Jersey possessing the credentials from the Governor
of that State.” There had been already
no lack of resolutions, but the difficulty lay in
the clerk’s obstinate refusal to put the question
upon them. So now the puzzled cry went up:
“How shall the question be put?” “I
intend to put the question myself,” said the
dauntless old man, wholly equal to the emergency.
A tumult of applause resounded upon all sides.
Rhett, of South Carolina, sprang up and offered a
resolution, that Williams, of North Carolina, the
oldest member of the House, be appointed chairman
of the meeting; but upon objection by Williams, he
substituted the name of Mr. Adams, and put the question.
He was “answered by an almost universal shout
in the affirmative.” Whereupon Rhett and
Williams conducted the old man to the chair. It
was a proud moment. Wise, of Virginia,
afterward said, addressing a complimentary speech
to Mr. Adams, “and if, when you shall be gathered
to your fathers, I were asked to select the words which
in my judgment are calculated to give at once the
best character of the man, I would inscribe upon your
tomb this sentence, ’I will put the question
myself!’” Doubtless Wise and a good many
more would have been glad enough to put almost any
epitaph on a tombstone for Mr. Adams. It must,
however, be acknowledged that the impetuous Southerners
behaved very handsomely by their arch foe on this
occasion, and were for once as chivalrous in fact
as they always were in profession.
Smooth water had by no means been
reached when Mr. Adams was placed at the helm; on
the contrary, the buffeting became only the more severe
when the members were no longer restrained by a lurking
dread of grave disaster if not of utter shipwreck.
Between two bitterly incensed and evenly divided parties
engaged in a struggle for an important prize, Mr.
Adams, having no strictly lawful authority pertaining
to his singular and anomalous position,
was hard taxed to perform his functions. It is
impossible to follow the intricate and acrimonious
quarrels of the eleven days which succeeded until on
December 16, upon the eleventh ballot, R. M. T. Hunter,
of Virginia, was elected Speaker, and Mr. Adams was
relieved from the most arduous duty imposed upon him
during his life. In the course of the debates
there had been “much vituperation and much equally
unacceptable compliment” lavished upon him.
After the organization of the House, there was some
talk of moving a vote of thanks, but he entreated
that it should not be done. “In the rancorous
and bitter temper of the Administration party, exasperated
by their disappointment in losing their Speaker, the
resolution of thanks,” he said, “would
have been lost if it had been offered.”
However this might have been, history has determined
this occurrence to have been one of the most brilliant
episodes in a life which had many distinctions.
A few incidents indicative of respect must have been welcome
enough in the solitary fight-laden career of Mr. Adams. He needed some
occasional encouragement to keep him from sinking into despondency; for though
he was of so unyielding and belligerent a disposition, of such ungracious
demeanor, so uncompromising with friend and foe, yet he was a man of
deep and strong feelings, and in a way even very sensitive though a proud
reserve kept the secret of this quality so close that few suspected it.
His Diary during his Congressional life shows a man doing his duty sternly
rather than cheerfully, treading resolutely a painful path, having the reward
which attends upon a clear conscience, but neither light-hearted nor often even
happy. Especially he was frequently disappointed at the returns which he
received from others, and considered himself ill-treated by every public man
whom circumstances had brought into competition with him; they had returned his
acts of kindness and services with gross injustice. The reflection did
not induce him to deflect his course in the least, but it was made with much
bitterness of spirit. Toward the close of 1835 he writes:
“Among the dark spots in human
nature which in the course of my life I have
observed, the devices of rivals to ruin me have been
sorry pictures of the heart of man.... H.
G. Otis, Theophilus Parsons, Timothy Pickering,
James A. Bayard, Henry Clay, Jonathan Russell,
William H. Crawford, John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson,
Daniel Webster, and John Davis, W. B. Giles, and
John Randolph, have used up their faculties in
base and dirty tricks to thwart my progress in
life and destroy my character.”
Truly a long and exhaustive list of
enmities! One can but suspect that
a man of so many quarrels must have been quarrelsome.
Certain it is, however, that in nearly every difference
which Mr. Adams had in his life a question of right
and wrong, of moral or political principle, had presented
itself to him. His intention was always good,
though his manner was so habitually irritating.
He himself says that to nearly all these men Russell
alone specifically excepted he had “returned
good for evil,” that he had “never wronged
any one of them,” and had even “neglected
too much his self-defence against them.”
In October, 1833, he said: “I subject myself
to so much toil and so much enmity, with so very little
apparent fruit, that I sometimes ask myself whether
I do not mistake my own motives. The best actions
of my life make me nothing but enemies.”
In February, 1841, he made a powerful speech in castigation
of Henry A. Wise, who had been upholding in Southern
fashion slavery, duelling, and nullification.
He received afterward some messages of praise and
sympathy, but noted with pain that his colleagues
thought it one of his “eccentric, wild, extravagant
freaks of passion;” and with a pathetic sense
of loneliness he adds: “All around me is
cold and discouraging and my own feelings are wound
up to a pitch that my reason can scarcely endure.” A few days later he had the
pleasure of hearing one of the members say, in a speech,
that there was an opinion among many that Mr. Adams
was insane and did not know what he said. While
a fight was going on such incidents only fired his
blood, but afterwards the reminiscence affected his
spirits cruelly.
In August, 1840, he writes that he
has been twelve years submitting in silence to the
“foulest and basest aspersions,” to which
it would have been waste of time to make reply, since
the public ear had not been open to him. “Is
the time arriving,” he asks, “for me to
speak? or must I go down to the grave and leave posterity
to do justice to my father and to me?”
He has had at least the advantage
of saying his say to posterity in a very effective
and convincing shape in that Diary, which so discomfited
and enraged General Jackson. There is plain enough
speaking in its pages, which were a safety valve whereby
much wrath escaped. Mr. Adams had the faculty
of forcible expression when he chose to employ it,
as may be seen from a few specimen sentences.
On March 28, 1840, he remarks that Atherton “this
day emitted half an hour of his rotten breath against”
a pending bill. Atherton was infamous as the mover
of the “gag” resolution, and Mr. Adams
abhorred him accordingly. Duncan, of
Cincinnati, mentioned as “delivering a dose of
balderdash,” is described as “the prime
bully of the Kinderhook Democracy,” without
“perception of any moral distinction between
truth and falsehood, ... a thorough-going hack-demagogue,
coarse, vulgar, and impudent, with a vein of low humor
exactly suited to the rabble of a popular city and
equally so to the taste of the present House of Representatives.”
Other similar bits of that pessimism and belief in
the deterioration of the times, so common in old men,
occasionally appear. In August, 1835, he thinks
that “the signs of the times are portentous.
All the tendencies of legislation are to the removal
of restrictions from the vicious and the guilty, and
to the exercise of all the powers of government, legislative,
judicial, and executive, by lawless assemblages of
individuals.” December 27, 1838, he looks
upon the Senate and the House, “the cream of
the land, the culled darlings of fifteen millions,”
and observes that “the remarkable phenomenon
that they present is the level of intellect and of
morals upon which they stand; and this universal mediocrity
is the basis upon which the liberties of this nation
repose.” In July, 1840, he thinks that
parties are falling into profligate factions. I have
seen this before; but the worst symptom now is the change in the
manners of the people. The continuance of
the present Administration ... will open wide
all the flood-gates of corruption. Will a change
produce reform? Pause and ponder! Slavery,
the Indians, the public lands, the collection
and disbursement of public money, the tariff, and
foreign affairs: what is to become of them?”
On January 29, 1841, Henry A. Wise
uttered “a motley compound of eloquence and
folly, of braggart impudence and childish vanity, of
self-laudation and Virginian narrow-mindedness.”
After him Hubbard, of Alabama, “began grunting
against the tariff.” Three days later Black,
of Georgia, “poured forth his black bile”
for an hour and a half. The next week we find
Clifford, of Maine, “muddily bothering his trickster
invention” to get over a rule of the House, and
“snapping like a mackerel at a red rag”
at the suggestion of a way to do so. In July,
1841, we again hear of Atherton as a “cross-grained
numskull ... snarling against the loan bill.”
With such peppery passages in great abundance the
Diary is thickly and piquantly besprinkled. They
are not always pleasant, perhaps not even always amusing,
but they display the marked element of censoriousness
in Mr. Adams’s character, which it is necessary
to appreciate in order to understand some parts of
his career.
If Mr. Adams never had the cheerful support of popularity, so
neither did he often have the encouragement of success. He said that he was
paying in his declining years for the good luck which had attended the earlier
portion of his life. On December 14, 1833, he calculates that he has three
fourths of the people of Massachusetts against him, and by estranging the
anti-Masons he is about to become obnoxious to the whole. My public life will
terminate by the alienation from me of all mankind.... It is the experience of
all ages that the people grow weary of old men. I cannot flatter myself that I
shall escape the common law of our nature. Yet he acknowledges that he is
unable to abstract himself from the great questions which agitate the country.
Soon after he again writes in the same vein: To be forsaken by all mankind
seems to be the destiny that awaits my last days. August 6, 1835, he gives as
his reason for not accepting an invitation to deliver a discourse, that instead
of having any beneficial influence upon the public mind, it would be turned as
an instrument of obloquy against myself. So it had been, as he enumerates, with
his exertions against Freemasonry, his labors for internal improvement, for the
manufacturing interest, for domestic industry, for free labor, for the
disinterested aid then lately brought by him to Jackson
in the dispute with France; “so it will be to
the end of my political life.”
When to unpopularity and reiterated
disappointment we add the physical ills of old age,
it no longer surprises us to find Mr. Adams at times
harsh and bitter beyond the excuse of the occasion.
That he was a man of strong physique and of extraordinary
powers of endurance, often surpassing those of young
and vigorous men, is evident. For example, one
day in March, 1840, he notes incidentally: “I
walked home and found my family at dinner. From
my breakfast yesterday morning until one this afternoon,
twenty-eight hours, I had fasted.” Many
a time he showed like, if not quite equal vigor.
But he had been a hard worker all his life, and testing
the powers of one’s constitution does not tend
to their preservation; he was by no means free from
the woes of the flesh or from the depression which
comes with years and the dread of decrepitude.
Already as early as October 7, 1833, he fears that
his health is “irretrievable;” he gets
but five hours a night of “disturbed unquiet
sleep full of tossings.” February
17, 1834, his “voice was so hoarse and feeble
that it broke repeatedly, and he could scarcely articulate.
It is gone forever,” he very mistakenly but
despondingly adds, “and it is in vain for me
to contend against the decay of time and
nature.” His enemies found little truth
in this foreboding for many sessions thereafter.
Only a year after he had performed his feat of fasting
for twenty-eight hours of business, he received a
letter from a stranger advising him to retire.
He admits that perhaps he ought to do so, but says
that more than sixty years of public life have made
activity necessary to him; it is the “weakness
of his nature” which he has “intellect
enough left to perceive but not energy to control,”
so that “the world will retire from me before
I shall retire from the world.”
The brief sketch which can be given
in a volume of this size of so long and so busy a
life does not suffice even to indicate all its many
industries. The anti-slavery labors of Mr. Adams
during his Congressional career were alone an abundant
occupation for a man in the prime of life; but to
these he added a wonderful list of other toils and
interests. He was not only an incessant student
in history, politics, and literature, but he also
constantly invaded the domain of science. He
was Chairman of the Congressional Committee on the
Smithsonian bequest, and for several years he gave
much time and attention to it, striving to give the
fund a direction in favor of science; he hoped to make it subservient to a plan which he had
long cherished for the building of a noble national
observatory. He had much committee work; he received
many visitors; he secured hours of leisure for his
favorite pursuit of composing poetry; he delivered
an enormous number of addresses and speeches upon
all sorts of occasions; he conducted an extensive
correspondence; he was a very devout man, regularly
going to church and reading three chapters in his
Bible every day; and he kept up faithfully his colossal
Diary. For several months in the midst of Congressional
duties he devoted great labor, thought, and anxiety
to the famous cause of the slaves of the Amistad,
in which he was induced to act as counsel before the
Supreme Court. Such were the labors of his declining
age. To men of ordinary calibre the multiplicity
of his acquirements and achievements is confounding
and incredible. He worked his brain and his body
as unsparingly as if they had been machines insensible
to the pleasure or necessity of rest. Surprisingly
did they submit to his exacting treatment, lasting
in good order and condition far beyond what was then
the average of life and vigorous faculties among his
contemporaries engaged in public affairs.
In August, 1842, while he was still tarrying in the
unwholesome heats of Washington,
he had some symptoms which he thought premonitory,
and he speaks of the next session of Congress as probably
the last which he should ever attend. March 25,
1844, he gives a painful sketch of himself. Physical
disability, he says, must soon put a stop to his Diary.
That morning he had risen “at four, and with
smarting, bloodshot eyes and shivering hand, still
sat down and wrote to fill up the chasm of the closing
days of last week.” If his remaining days
were to be few he was at least resolved to make them
long for purposes of unremitted labor.
But he had one great joy and distinguished
triumph still in store for him. From the time
when the “gag” rule had been first established,
Mr. Adams had kept up an unbroken series of attacks
upon it at all times and by all means. At the
beginning of the several sessions, when the rules
were established by the House, he always moved to strike
out this one. Year after year his motion was
voted down, but year after year he renewed it with
invincible perseverance. The majorities against
him began to dwindle till they became almost imperceptible;
in 1842 it was a majority of four; in 1843, of three;
in 1844 the struggle was protracted for weeks, and
Mr. Adams all but carried the day. It was evident
that victory was not far off, and a kind fate had destined him to live not only to see but
himself to win it. On December 3, 1844, he made
his usual motion and called for the yeas and nays;
a motion was made to lay his motion on the table, and
upon that also the question was taken by yeas and
nays eighty-one yeas, one hundred and four
nays, and his motion was not laid on the table.
The question was then put upon it, and it was carried
by the handsome vote of one hundred and eight to eighty.
In that moment the “gag” rule became a
thing of the past, and Mr. Adams had conquered in his
last fight. “Blessed, forever blessed,
be the name of God!” he writes in recording
the event. A week afterwards some anti-slavery
petitions were received and actually referred to the
Committee on the District of Columbia. This glorious
consummation having been achieved, this advanced stage
in the long conflict having been reached, Mr. Adams
could not hope for life to see another goal passed.
His work was nearly done; he had grown aged, and had
worn himself out faithfully toiling in the struggle
which must hereafter be fought through its coming
phases and to its final success by others, younger
men than he, though none of them certainly having
over him any other militant advantage save only the
accident of youth.
His mental powers were not less than
at any time in the past when, on November
19, 1846, he was struck by paralysis in the street
in Boston. He recovered from the attack, however,
sufficiently to resume his duties in Washington some
three months later. His reappearance in the House
was marked by a pleasing incident: all the members
rose together; business was for the moment suspended;
his old accustomed seat was at once surrendered to
him by the gentleman to whom it had fallen in the
allotment, and he was formally conducted to it by
two members. After this, though punctual in attendance,
he only once took part in debate. On February
21, 1848, he appeared in his seat as usual. At
half past one in the afternoon the Speaker was rising
to put a question, when he was suddenly interrupted
by cries of “Stop! Stop! Mr.
Adams!” Some gentlemen near Mr. Adams had thought
that he was striving to rise to address the Speaker,
when in an instant he fell over insensible. The
members thronged around him in great confusion.
The House hastily adjourned. He was placed on
a sofa and removed first to the hall of the rotunda
and then to the Speaker’s room. Medical
men were in attendance but could be of no service in
the presence of death. The stern old fighter
lay dying almost on the very field of so many battles
and in the very tracks in which he had so often stood erect and unconquerable, taking and
dealing so many mighty blows. Late in the afternoon
some inarticulate mutterings were construed into the
words, “Thank the officers of the House.”
Soon again he said intelligibly, “This is the
last of earth! I am content!” It was his
extreme utterance. He lay thereafter unconscious
till the evening of the 23d, when he passed quietly
away.
He lies buried “under the portal
of the church at Quincy” beside his wife, who
survived him four years, his father and his mother.
The memorial tablet inside the church bears upon it
the words “Alteri Saeculo,” surely
never more justly or appropriately applied to any man
than to John Quincy Adams, hardly abused and cruelly
misappreciated in his own day but whom subsequent
generations already begin to honor as one of the greatest
of American statesmen, not only preeminent in ability
and acquirements, but even more to be honored for profound,
immutable honesty of purpose and broad, noble humanity
of aims.