Defeated for reelection in 1828, President John Quincy Adams was dismayed at the thought of going home to Massachusetts and turning into a replica of his embittered father, John Adams, whose defeat by Thomas Jefferson had stripped New England of its original dream of leading the American nation. In 1831 John Quincy decided to run for Congress and was easily elected. He soon found himself embroiled in the quarrel over slavery, an issue that he had done his best to avoid during his previous political career.
In the aftermath of Nat Turner’s 1831 uprising, Southerners became determined to intercept antislavery newspapers, pamphlets, and books that abolitionists sent to free blacks and sympathetic whites in the South. Antislavery societies also began sending petitions to Congress urging the lawmakers to demonstrate a federal disapproval of black bondage. These appeals were equally unpopular below the Mason-Dixon line.
The petitioners wanted to amend or even ban the 1790s law that gave federal marshals the power to seize runaway slaves and return them to their owners. The law was being abused by professional slave catchers who were much more diligent than the average marshal. In the 1830s, a man could earn two hundred dollars by catching a runaway slave; that was several times the yearly salary of a common laborer. For that kind of money, these professionals soon became ready to seize free blacks as runaways and smuggle them South aboard ships or trains.1
New England poet John Greenleaf Whittier summed up the abolitionists’ growing anger in a poem that proclaimed:
No slave-hunt in our borders—no pirate on our strand!
No fetters in the Bay State—no slave upon our land!2
Another abolitionist cause was a ban on slavery in Washington, DC, which was governed by Congress. The abolitionists argued that if slavery was as great an evil as even many Southerners admitted, it was a disgrace to have blacks bought and sold and shackled virtually in the shadow of the capitol, with Old Glory rippling in the breeze above their heads.
Other petitions called for a ban on the interstate slave trade, which enabled Virginia, Maryland, and other states in the upper South to sell surplus blacks to the plantations in the deep South, where the cotton crop was becoming an ever-more-lucrative product. Numerous petitioners adopted William Lloyd Garrison’s extremism and called on Congress to give every slave his or her freedom immediately. All heaped scorn on the nation’s tolerance of this terrible institution. Southern legislators reacted to these requests with outrage, and John Quincy Adams’s life as a congressman became very complicated.3
• • •
Adams’s thinking about slavery was complex. Early in his political career he had abandoned the Federalist Party and become a Jeffersonian Republican. That virtually guaranteed he would say nothing against slavery publicly. Privately, however, he loathed the institution. During the Missouri Compromise crisis in 1819 and 1820, when he was President James Monroe’s secretary of state, he had taken no part in the controversy but confided some revealing thoughts to his diary:
If slavery be the destined sword in the hand of the destroying angel which is to sever the ties of this Union, the same sword will cut in sunder the bonds of slavery itself. A dissolution of the Union . . . for the cause of slavery would be followed by a servile war in the slave holding states, combined with a war between the two severed portions of the Union. It seems to me that its result must be the extirpation of slavery from this whole continent; and, calamitous and desolating as this course of events . . . must be, so glorious would be its final issue, that, as God shall judge me, I dare not say it is not to be desired.4
A few days before Adams returned to Washington, DC, as a congressman, he had a talk with a young French writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, who was researching a book about the United States that would make him famous—Democracy in America. De Tocqueville asked Adams if he thought slavery was a great evil for the nation. “Yes, unquestionably,” Adams replied. “It’s in slavery that are to be found all the embarrassments of the present and fears of the future.” But Adams also made it clear that his view of blacks made him dubious about freeing them immediately, as his fellow New Englander William Lloyd Garrison was demanding.
Speaking from his experience as a resident of Washington, DC, for almost two decades, Adams said: “I know nothing more insolent than a black when he is not speaking to his master and is not afraid of being beaten.” Black women slaves were even worse. He had seen them “make frequent abuse of the kindness of their mistresses. They know that it isn’t customary to inflict bodily punishment on them.”5
• • •
Slowly, reluctantly, Congressman Adams was stirred to action by the measures that Southerners demanded as their anger at abolitionism increased. They wanted changes in the postal laws that would enable southern postmasters to weed out antislavery literature. They called for better enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. They wrathfully refused to consider abolitionist petitions to Congress. No one said a word about their underlying fear of a slave insurrection. More and more, they declaimed that they had a right to own slaves, thanks to the compromises in the Constitutional Convention that had won Southern support for the national charter.
As Adams sat at his desk in the House of Representatives listening to these tirades, he wrote a plaintive letter to his son Charles: “The voice of freedom has not yet been heard, and I am earnestly urged to speak in her name. She will be trampled under foot if I do not, and I shall be trampled under foot if I do. . . . What can I do?”
Those words suggest that Adams felt impelled to oppose the southern readiness to stifle freedom of speech—one of the fundamental rights that James Otis and John Adams and the other men of their Revolutionary generation had vowed to defend. But Adams the politician, who still hungered for another term in the White House, said little as Congress authorized postmasters to search the mail for antislavery pamphlets or books and dismissed proposals to ban slavery in the District of Columbia.
Senator John C. Calhoun summed up the South’s view on the latter point in a stentorian declaration: meddling with slavery in the nation’s capital would be “a foul slander on nearly one half the states of the Union.” Calhoun’s stance underscored another significant shift in the Southern attitude toward slavery. Instead of apologizing for it as an evil necessity, the South Carolina senator and many others began claiming there was nothing morally wrong with it.6
• • •
In spite of his inner hesitations, Congressman Adams became one of the most inveterate introducers of antislavery petitions, even though few of the dozens he presented in each session of Congress came from the voters who had elected him. His fame as an ex-president made him a favorite recipient for many petitioners. By 1836 he was on his feet almost daily, urging Congress to at least give these citizens the courtesy of considering some of their requests. “Over head and ears in debate,” he wrote to Charles. “I have taken up the glove . . . I had no alternative left.”
Although he was tormented by sciatica and lumbago, which deprived him of badly needed sleep, the aging ex-president found the combat strangely invigorating. “A skirmishing day,” Adams told Charles in another letter. He had made a point of reading aloud each of three petitions to the last line, while Southerners, trapped by the House rules, impotently growled and grumbled.
After his reading, Adams sat down and listened almost cheerfully to the ferocious rebuttals and denunciations of his defiance of the majority’s wishes. He knew that “one hundred members of the House represent slaves.” An additional forty members from nonslave states sided with their fellow Democrats. The other hundred and twenty representatives ranged from cold to lukewarm on antislavery and “are ready to desert me at the very first scintillation of indiscretion on my part.”7
Only a handful of congressmen from New England and their Midwest diaspora supported Adams. This huge imbalance emboldened the Southerners to make a serious blunder. In May 1836, a committee headed by Henry Laurens Pinckney of South Carolina introduced three resolutions. The first declared Congress could never interfere with slavery in any state. The second was a resolution to bar future Congresses from interfering with slavery in the District of Columbia. Adams surprised everyone by voting for both proposals.
Then came the resolution that brought the ex-president to his feet, ablaze with protest. “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 either being printed or referred, be laid on the table, and that no further action shall be taken thereon.” Soon called “the gag rule,” the idea had the tacit approval of Speaker of the House James K. Polk of Tennessee, who cut off attempts to debate it.
Congressman Adams repeatedly broke into discussions of other matters to denounce the idea of violating free speech in this brutal way. On May 26, 1836, the House voted on the gag rule. When the clerk of the House called: “Congressman Adams?” the ex-president roared: “I hold the resolution to be a direct violation of the Constitution of the United States, of the Rules of this House, and of the rights of my Constituents!” The House voted in favor of the proposal, 117 to 69.
The gag-rulers’ victory only made Adams resolve to resist it as long as he had breath and voice. He convinced himself that he would be fighting for the preservation of the Union. “This is the cause upon which I am entering the last stage of my life,” he told a friend.8
• • •
Usually, the Senate was not influenced by the agitations of the House of Representatives. Pennsylvania’s James Buchanan did not foresee any fuss when he introduced a petition from Quakers calling for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. Buchanan quickly added that he did not share the opinion, but felt it was his duty to present it. Everyone understood what the freshman senator meant. Quakers were a significant portion of the electorate in Pennsylvania. Buchanan, who had spent a decade in the House, knew his state’s political geography.
“Buck” Buchanan was a tall, heavy-set man with a strangely lopsided face, due to an eye problem that caused him to tilt his head to the left. His close friendship with Alabama’s Senator William Rufus Devane King was already prompting covert smiles. President Andrew Jackson, among others, had called the fastidious King a “Miss Nancy.” Some historians have suggested—or wondered if—Buchanan was gay. Others have cited a tragic youthful romance with an attractive woman who died suddenly, prompting him to vow never to marry.
As a bachelor, Buchanan had gravitated to southern politicians who often left their wives on their plantations and lived in Washington hotels and boarding houses. He roomed with Senator King until he died after a long struggle with tuberculosis in 1853. Other southern senators also became close friends.
Buchanan had made a fortune as a lawyer and investor and supported a remarkable number of orphaned nieces, nephews, and cousins, all of whom swirled through and around his mansion, “Wheatland,” outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He had made his opinion of slavery clear in a speech in the House of Representatives. He saw it as a political and moral evil that could not be remedied without the introduction of “evils infinitely greater.” For him, abolition was virtually synonymous with a race war against “high-minded . . . southern men.”
Senator Buchanan was more than a little shaken when Senator John C. Calhoun responded to his antislavery petition by angrily urging the Senate to institute its own gag rule. The debate raged for two months without reaching anything close to a majority backing the South Carolina senator. Buchanan was appalled by the rancor on both sides. Slavery was obviously a topic that virtually annihilated the Senate’s tradition of courtesy and mutual respect. It is easy to see why Senator Buchanan became convinced that abolitionism was a disease in the public mind. Alas, his southern sympathies made it impossible for him to see that other diseases spawned by slavery were distorting the public mind of the South.9
• • •
John Quincy Adams rapidly became the most powerful Washington, DC, voice opposing Senator Calhoun and his fellow defenders of slavery. Daniel Webster, distracted by his desire to become president, struggled to find some middle ground between proslavery and antislavery and fell far behind him. People began calling the former president “Old Man Eloquent”—a title lifted from a poem by John Milton. The nickname must have galled Webster, who saw himself as Congress’s great orator.
Adams was soon galling the Southerners in the House of Representatives far more with his relentless opposition to the gag rule. The abolitionists gleefully cooperated with him. In the years 1837 and 1838, they deluged Congress with petitions—130,200 for banning slavery from the District of Columbia, 32,000 for the repeal of the gag rule. Each petition had hundreds and often thousands of signatures on it. Other antislavery causes also drew large numbers of petitions. By violating the right to free speech with their gag rule, Southerners had added tens of thousands of people to the antislavery cause.
The abolitionists devised other ways to exacerbate the damage. They persuaded thousands of women to petition for their civil rights. Would the Southern Democrats and their Northern allies dare to gag them too? Adams promptly put the Democrats to the test. When a Georgia congressman protested against Adams’s presentation of a rights petition from the women of Dorchester, Massachusetts, the ex-president claimed to be shocked. Would southern gentlemen dare to extend the ban already inflicted on another group of “pure and virtuous citizens”—abolitionists—to women? It was almost tantamount to insulting their own presumably virtuous mothers!
Speaker of the House Polk ruled that Adams had a right to describe the contents of the petition. When the ex-president proceeded to read almost every word of the lengthy document, he was ordered to sit down. He did so, still reading in a defiant, declamatory voice.10
On another day, Adams asked the speaker if he could present a petition from nine ladies of Fredericksburg, Virginia, who seemed to be protesting the slave trade in the District of Columbia. The congressman said he was not sure whether the petitioners were slaves or free mulattoes. The petition was not clearly worded. But it was encouraging to see women engaging in such a worthy cause. This move sent Southern tempers soaring to volcanic proportions.
A South Carolina congressman called for indicting Adams for encouraging slaves to revolt. An Alabamian demanded a vote of censure. A Virginian reproached Adams for consorting with mulattoes, who by virtual definition were not respectable women. A New York Democrat tried sarcasm, urging his fellow members to be gentle with this old gentleman, who obviously did not have full command of his faculties. Otherwise how could he disturb the decorum of the House with such a ridiculous petition?
Adams finally got a chance to reply. He pointed out that he had only asked the speaker for permission to submit the petition. He had been as polite and respectful as possible. Why couldn’t these critical gentlemen reply in the same decorous fashion? Moreover, he was not at all sure what these female slaves—or free mulattoes—were saying. After further discussion it became apparent that the petition was against the abolition of the slave trade. Someone had sent it to Adams as a hoax, hoping to embarrass him. But he had turned the joke against the jokers, with devastating results.
Adams proceeded to make a speech that lashed the Southerners like an overseer’s whip. He said he was amazed that they would object to the mere idea of a petition from slaves. The most odious tyrants in the history of the human race had felt obligated to hear petitions from “the poorest of the meanest of human creatures.”
He went on to say that even if the petitioners were mulattoes, and supposedly not respectable, did that mean they had no right to petition? Since when had petitioners been required to meet a character test? Moreover, who was responsible for their reputations? Wasn’t it well known in the South that that there were often “great resemblances” between the progeny of colored people and the white men who claimed possession of them?
The House of Representatives Register of Debates now recorded the words: “Great agitation in the house!” Even this was an understatement. Dixon Lewis of Alabama, who weighed more than four hundred pounds, rose to roar that the House should “punish severely such an infraction of its decorum and its rules.” If the House refused, he recommended that “every member from the slave states should immediately, in a body, quit this House, and go home to their constituents. We no longer have any business here.”
“I will second the motion for punishment,” shouted a congressman from Georgia, “And go all lengths for it.”
Others bellowed, “Expel him!”
“No, no!” shouted others.
Julius Alford of Georgia seized the floor and declared: “As an act of justice to the South, the petition should be taken from the House and burnt!”
Waddy Thompson of South Carolina made a formal motion to censure Adams for “gross disrespect for the House” and called for him to be “brought to the bar to receive the severe censure of the Speaker.”11
Here was political obtuseness wafted by outrage and anxiety to the ultimate extreme. The Southerners were talking to each other, with little or no awareness that the rest of the nation was watching and listening. They were abusing and threatening a former president of the United States who was the son of a former president. They were endowing Old Man Eloquent with a popularity in the northern states that he had never come close to achieving before.
It was only human for Adams to relish this burst of fame. But the satisfaction had its dark side. Most of his new admirers were abolitionists, and Adams’s comments on mulattoes resembling their owners was a lurch in their vindictive, Southerner-slandering direction that carried him a long way from his original intent to protest the gag rule as a violation of the right of free speech.
Adams had personal reasons to dislike Southerners. They had elected Jefferson and ended his father’s political career on a note of repudiation. John Quincy had hoped his reelection for a second term would compensate for the stain and pain of his father’s defeat. Instead, he had been ousted from the White House by Tennessee’s Andrew Jackson with the help of southern votes. Old Hickory’s role as a slave owner was mostly a coincidence. But in the atmosphere of rancor and hatred created by the abolitionists and the South’s reaction to them, it was difficult if not impossible for Adams to avoid thinking and feeling with an abolitionist vocabulary.
• • •
Beyond heated and abusive oratory on both sides, nothing came of the first southern attempt to censure John Quincy Adams. He continued to agitate Congress with petitions and declamations against the gag rule. In 1839, fate handed Adams an opportunity to strike a blow against slavery that won him even more national attention. A Spanish slave ship, the Amistad, was transporting fifty-three blacks to a Cuban port when the unwilling passengers revolted, killed the captain and most of the crew, and ordered a surviving white officer to sail back to Africa. Instead he sailed to America, where a U.S. warship captured the Amistad and guided it into New Haven, Connecticut’s harbor.
Spain demanded that the slaves be returned to Cuba, where they would be tried for piracy. President Van Buren was inclined to give them up, and more than a few southern members of Congress supported him. But abolitionists rushed to defend them; their newspapers portrayed the slaves’ leader, Cinque, as a hero. A violent legal tangle exploded in the Connecticut courts. The case soon reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where John Quincy Adams volunteered to represent the slaves. Although the court had a majority of Southerners on its bench, they listened respectfully to Adams’s argument that the slaves should be released because both Spain and the United States had outlawed the slave trade. The Supreme Court freed the slaves and they returned to Africa accompanied by five Christian missionaries.12
• • •
Back in Boston, William Lloyd Garrison was drifting toward a new variation of his extremist views—a dissolution of the Union. He began denouncing the Constitution for the bargain the founders had made with slave owners. He called on people of the North “to demand the repeal of the Union or the abolition of slavery.”
Garrison claimed the North would be forever sinful if they ignored this moral ultimatum. Some forty-five citizens of Haverhill, Massachusetts, decided to send Congressman Adams a petition asking Congress to begin working out “measures peaceably to dissolve the union of these states.” They did not mention slavery; they claimed to be writing as taxpayers. In their opinion they were not getting their money’s worth from the federal arrangement.
When Adams introduced this petition, southern congressman by the dozens lost their tempers. One man declared his intention to get rid of a certain member,
Who in the course of one revolving moon
Was poet, fiddler, statesman and buffoon.13
A motion for censure was swiftly voted and approved by a majority of Adams’s own Whig Party. The Southern Democrats were equally ferocious, of course. But the Whigs had decided that getting rid of Adams was a good way to bolster the link between the northern and southern sections of their unstable political enterprise. The man whom the Whigs selected to submit the resolution was Thomas F. Marshall of Kentucky, the nephew of the late Chief Justice John Marshall, a man whose reputation as an interpreter of the Constitution had no equal.
Adams welcomed the opportunity to defend himself. For the next two weeks, he held the floor, day after day, flinging abuse and argument with a vehemence and persistence that stunned his opponents. He told Thomas Marshall to resign from Congress and enroll in some law school that might teach him about “the rights of the citizens of these states and the members of this House.” He also hoped that Marshall would learn to control his fondness for alcohol. Again and again Adams ridiculed Southerners for having a double standard—crying disloyalty to the Union at Northern citizens for their petitions against slavery while holding the nation hostage to tolerating slavery with similar threats of secession.
His assaults regularly contained the sort of personal barb that left Thomas Marshall red-faced with chagrin. Adams asked Congressman Henry A. Wise, the future governor of Virginia, how he could have the nerve to attack him. Everyone knew Wise had encouraged a Kentucky congressman to challenge a new Maine member to a duel for supposedly insulting him. The Kentuckian had killed the New Englander, and some members had wanted to censure Wise, but Adams had defended him because a censure trial would have violated his constitutional rights. “Is it possible I saved this blood-stained man,” Adams roared, “although his hands were reeking with the blood of murder?”14
All this and much more appeared in the daily papers. People in every state in the North read Adams’s words with growing fascination. In Boston, a huge meeting convened in storied Faneuil Hall with William Lloyd Garrison presiding. It was jammed with Boston’s so-called “best people,” who a few short years before would cross the street rather than pass Garrison on the sidewalk. It was electrifying evidence of the impact Old Man Eloquent was having in New England.
At the end of Adams’s two weeks of oratory against his censure, the battered southern Whigs said nothing while their anxious northern brethren proposed a motion to table the measure. An ecstatic Garrison gloated in The Liberator that Adams had “frightened the boastful South almost out of her wits.” Theodore Weld had worked behind the scenes to supply Adams with material for his daily harangues. In a burst of optimism he would repudiate a few years later, Weld told his wife Angelina that from this “first victory over the slaveowners in a body. . . their downfall takes its date.”15
• • •
Adams sensed he was close to an even bigger victory—the defeat of the gag rule. One of his Midwest supporters, Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio, submitted a resolution opposing the southern argument for regaining some Virginia slaves who had revolted aboard the ship Creole while en route to New Orleans. The slaves had sailed the ship to the Bahamas, where the British freed them. Without permitting any of the apparatus of debate that Adams had exploited, the southern Whigs censured Giddings. He resigned from Congress and immediately ran for reelection, winning in a landslide.
Sensing a shift in public opinion, Adams’s son Charles, having won a seat in the Massachusetts legislature, drafted a resolution that called on Congress to draw up a constitutional amendment that would eliminate the provision entitling Southerners to count five slaves as three men in apportioning representatives to Congress.
On the defensive now, the House’s majority created a select committee to consider the proposal and made John Quincy Adams the chairman. It was a sign that they had learned a hard lesson from the censure debacle. The rulers of the House made sure the rest of the committee was chosen with a view to making rejection a certainty. When they submitted their negative report, the House adopted it by a huge majority.
Undaunted, Massachusetts submitted the resolution three more times in the next year (1844). It went nowhere, of course. Some Southerners called it “the Hartford Convention Amendment,” implying that they had not forgotten New England’s flirtation with secession in 1814. The House refused even to print copies of the later submissions to circulate among the members. But the onslaught made some southern members wish they had never made an enemy of Old Man Eloquent.16
Adams waited until the first session of the next Congress in 1845 to introduce a resolution to abandon the gag rule. Congress approved it 105 to 80 with virtually no debate. A startling number of northern Democrats supported Adams—evidence of the growing strength of antislavery sentiment in that section of the country. In his diary, John Quincy Adams wrote: “Blessed, ever blessed be the name of God.” There was little doubt that he now saw himself exclusively as a warrior for righteousness, in the style of William Lloyd Garrison—the opposite of the judicious politician he had once been.17