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“The First and Holiest Rights of Humanity”
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS WOULD BECOME A LUMINARY IN CONGRESS during the middle and late 1830s. As the first former president to join the nation’s lawmakers, he automatically received more attention that the average representative. But his rise to prominence in the House coincided with the advent of a fierce slavery-related politics. Since the ratification of the Constitution, the country had previously experienced such a contest only once, the crisis over the admission of Missouri as a state. That wrath passed, however, with the passage of the Missouri Compromise in 1820, a quick and seemingly final solution. But the 1830s did not witness such a quick end to its furor. Although the particulars, actors and issues, might and did change, sectional rancor remained a potent force—a force that never really dissipated. Adams consciously took a leading part in maintaining, and even invigorating, the tension.
From middecade national politicians attempted to utilize political parties as a barrier against sectional battles. Both the Democratic party and the Whig party, which by 1835 had become the chief rival of the Democrats, operated nationally. Thus political success required finding ways to preclude sectional disharmony. This goal provided a cement for the barrier that could at times hold back the sectional tide. But it never ebbed for very long.
With just a tenuous partisan allegiance and in a secure congressional district, Adams had considerable freedom of action. During these years his animosity toward those like Jackson and Calhoun who he judged had unfairly driven him from the presidency meshed with his growing concern about southern influence in the nation. He saw southerners prevailing in his nemesis the Democratic party, which dominated the national government. This especially distressed him because it permitted the southerners to protect the evil of slavery.
He would stand, and fight, for what he defined as the moral purpose and grandeur of his beloved country. Embroiled in that struggle, he became more and more convinced that the nation created by the Founders could not survive without wrenching change. Thus the nationalism of the Founders that he had so cherished and for decades had propounded would perhaps have to be redefined. And he as their lineal disciple would have to lead the way. Congressman Adams was present when the first session of the Twenty-Third Congress convened in early December 1833. The partisanship of pro- and anti-Jackson adherents continued to dominate politics, though with shifting boundaries. Adams still held on to some Antimason affiliations, but that party no longer flourished, for following the election of 1832, Antimasonic leaders in critical states like New York and Pennsylvania realized that their party by itself could no longer seriously contend for statewide office, much less compete nationally.1
The demise of Antimasonry signaled the coalescing of partisans into two parties, the Democratic and the National Republican. Yet that lineup lacked stability. Because Jackson’s personality and policies generated such vigorous opposition as well as staunch loyalty, major anti-Jackson chieftains, led by Henry Clay, worked to create a political organization that could attract the diverse cast of Jackson opponents, from ardent nationalists who backed the Bank of the United States and a protective tariff to stalwart southern states’ righters who opposed both. This hope for inclusion stretched to Antimasons and even all the way to nullifiers. To succeed, Clay and his allies believed they had to jettison the National Republican brand. The presidential elections of 1828 and 1832 had led to resounding defeats. Moreover, the southern states’ righters alarmed by Jackson’s claim for executive, thus national, power would never subscribe to its identification with strong nationalist measures like the bank and a protective tariff. To reach this political goal, Clay met in private dinners in the winter of 1833–34 with a wide range of anti-Jackson men, including both Calhoun and Adams. He and his partners were determined to find a different way.
They found it with the creation of the Whig party. This new entity was taking shape across the country in 1834 and 1835. The name Whig came from the English tradition of those opposed to royal power and from the Revolutionary forebears, who embraced it in their struggle against the British crown. Whigs proclaimed their allegiance to the heritage of the American Revolution: liberty versus tyranny. Whigs designated Andrew Jackson the new tyrant, characterizing his executive actions as assaults on the liberty of Americans. Whigs broadcast that only by driving Jackson and his minions from office could Americans secure their precious political heritage. This identification with the glorious legacy of the Revolution gave Whigs legitimacy while permitting the gathering of disparate groups beneath their banner.2
In the midst of this evolving scene Adams faced his own decision. Understanding that the Antimasonic party was disappearing, he had consulted with Daniel Webster, with whom he had an often antagonistic relationship, and others to accomplish a merger in Massachusetts of the Antimasons and National Republicans. By then, however, the latter had but a short life span. Although Adams continually commented on his prized political independence, he had often associated himself with a party. In Congress he derided “the bugle-horn of party,” which in his view rallied the often unthinking faithful. Yet he almost always voted with the anti-Jacksonians; with the arrival of the Whig party, he usually sided with it as well. But he always insisted he did so on his own terms. Asserting that cherished independence, he indicated he would even back the hated Jackson, when the president stood on the right side of an issue, as with the Nullification Proclamation.3
The flux in political alignment offered an opportunity for Adams’s political advancement. In November 1834, with both Antimasonic and National Republican endorsement, he won reelection with a staggering 86 percent of the vote. In December the resignation of a sitting U.S. senator opened the possibility of his moving into that seat, which he surely wanted.
Massachusetts law required both chambers of the legislature to vote separately for senator. The choice of Adams seemed likely, for the Antimasons pushed him while the National Republicans moving rapidly into the Whig party agreed. It would be a repeat of the congressional election. Adams had a substantial lead in the Senate and in the House trailed his opponent, the incumbent governor, by only a few votes. It appeared that in his second try for statewide office he would succeed.
Yet what initially looked like an almost certain triumph ended in defeat and disappointment. The reason came from Congress. There Adams found himself allied with President Jackson on a foreign policy issue, the French claims. This matter originated in the French navy’s spoliation of American ships during the years leading to the War of 1812. Although France had agreed to pay American claims, the case had languished for a generation. The American government pressed, but not too hard; various French governments resisted, but never repudiated.
Not one to let proverbial bygones be bygones, President Jackson decided the time for resolution had finally arrived. He sent a special envoy to Paris, who obtained an agreement that France would pay. But once more no payment was forthcoming. Thereupon, in his annual message to Congress in December 1834, Jackson asked for legislation permitting reprisals on French property until payment was received. Partisanship governed the congressional response. In the new Whig-controlled Senate, the Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Clay, refused Jackson’s request, asserting the president’s posture could lead to war. Clay and his colleagues would give Jackson nothing. In the House, the Foreign Relations Committee made no response. Thus Congress apparently intended no action.
This inaction disturbed Adams. He did not think, perhaps as a former president, that on an important foreign policy question the chief executive should be left standing alone. The honor of the country was at stake, and in that situation politics had to stop at the water’s edge. Thereupon he proposed a resolution requiring the House to take a position, not remain silent. According to him, action by the House was more important than precisely what it decided. Ultimately, the House did take a position affirming the country’s right to demand payment.
The key outcome for Adams, however, took place in Boston, not in Washington. In the House he had moved toward Jackson. For Clay, Webster, and the newly formed Whig leadership, Adams had gone too far beyond the party’s unequivocal anti-Jackson stance. He had disregarded the tightening requirements of this new partisanship. To Clay and his comrades no valid reason existed for them to make other than a political decision—trying to tar Jackson with a warlike policy. Adams had proved himself undependable. Webster sent word up to Massachusetts to block his elevation to the Senate.
Webster’s message had the desired result. National Republican–Whigs heeded his call, and Adams was duly set aside. His lead in the Senate evaporated; his strength in the House dissolved. His opponent was elected. Adams’s son Charles Francis had no doubt that the French claims dispute had doomed his father, who agreed. For the second time his quest for statewide office had failed. He would not try again. To his diary he confided, “Cautious perseverance, support me!”4
That backing Jackson on the French issue cost Adams the Senate seat entailed a certain irony, for he had not altered his opinion on the president. Its harshness remained unabated. Back in the summer of 1833 Jackson had toured New England. During his passage through the Boston area, the authorities at Harvard University decided to award Jackson an honorary doctor of laws degree.
That decision made, Harvard’s president, Josiah Quincy, journeyed to nearby Quincy to issue that institution’s most notable living alumnus a personal invitation to attend the ceremony. An appalled Adams declined the offer, telling Quincy that the personal relations Jackson had ordained between them made impossible on his part any kind of friendly interaction. Even though he identified himself as “an affectionate child of our Alma Mater,” he declared he 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.” Replying, Josiah Quincy said he understood Adams’s position, but because the people of the United States had chosen Jackson as their chief executive, he and other university officials thought Harvard should honor him as it had his predecessor James Monroe.5
While Adams was disgusted with his alma mater’s decision and disappointed about his political defeat, neither feeling was his chief distress. In the fall of 1834 his second son, thirty-one-year-old John Adams II, became desperately ill. Like his older brother, George, this young man had never really found himself, though alcohol had not become central for him. Married to a first cousin, his mother’s niece, and father of two young children, he had failed to find financial security. After serving as his father’s private secretary during the latter’s presidency, he took over management of the Columbian Mills, a flour and grits mill on Rock Creek in the District of Columbia that Adams owned. The mill had been a financial burden ever since its purchase in the early 1820s from an uncle of Louisa’s. John II’s supervision did not improve its fortunes.
Then illness struck. Chills and fever assaulted the young man. The same also sent his wife to bed. Still in Quincy when he received word, Adams departed promptly for Washington. But by the time he reached the city, his son was literally on his deathbed. He died the day after his father’s arrival. When he asked the attending physician the precise nature of the fatal disease, the doctor responded honestly that he did not know.
The early death of a second son dealt Adams a heavy blow. In his diary he employed the phrase “the unutterable anguish of my own soul.” At the same time he cautioned himself, “Let me not murmur at the will of God.” He expressed comfort in his conviction that for all human suffering heaven provided relief, with no sorrow and permanent joy.
Yet the pain abided. A week later he called his daily walking “a melancholy pilgrimmage.” Coping with “the bitterness of my misfortune,” he found himself compelled to seek safe haven in “earnest triflings.” In his diary he turned to bleak images like “dark and gloomy terror,” which he said now governed him. He confided that only “divine mercy” provided any relief. That mercy he discerned in his having sufficient health to sustain him in the anguish and shock his son’s death had visited upon him.6
While struggling to cope with that sad event, he also had to deal with his wife’s poor health. Her own illness had prevented her from accompanying him to Washington. Various maladies racked her body—coughing, fever, fainting, and a protracted siege of erysipelas. Whether these afflictions had organic or emotional causes cannot be known. Yet her anxiety and distress were palpable.
Speaking of her pain in both body and mind, Louisa Adams constantly asked God to give her strength to navigate “the labrynth [sic]” in which she felt “doomed to stray.” Although she did not detail all the particulars of that labyrinth, she lamented her husband’s continuing political career. Aware of the strife, the toil, the “mortified vanity,” and the grievous disappointments that marked his life in politics, she longed for his retirement, convinced that it would bring a calmness to him. She was sure that outcome would benefit not only him but also herself. She left no doubt that all the turmoil roiling within him spilled over into their relationship, thus affecting her as well.
Even with that somber diagnosis, she never felt she could push her prescription. Understanding her husband’s heart and mind, she feared that taking him out of politics would risk “a total extinction of his life.” Or she contemplated what she termed “those powers” even more important than life itself—“a suitable sphere of action.” She had observed a man floundering during the period between his leaving the presidency and becoming a congressman. She realized, just as he did, that politics in a fundamental sense gave meaning to his life. Thus she could foresee no future for herself but to accept the situation where life as Mrs. John Quincy Adams had placed her.7
The results of the Massachusetts congressional nomination and senatorial election reflected an increasing obstinacy or inability to compromise on political matters, but left the political man John Quincy Adams safely ensconced in his House seat. Moreover, with his failed Senate try behind him, he no longer had any reasonable expectation of any higher office, either statewide or national. That realization plus the security of his House district gave him enormous freedom. He had an open political world with few constraints, other than those self-imposed. The overwhelming support of his local constituents both cheered and moved him. Now, he told himself, only failure to control his temper could hobble his usefulness to causes he embraced.
Jockeying for the presidential election of 1836 dominated the immediate political scene, however. The hated Jacksonians offered little surprise. Jackson himself anointed Martin Van Buren, whom in 1832 he had selected as his vice-president, for the succession. The first Democratic national convention, held in Baltimore in May 1835, dutifully named the New Yorker the party’s nominee. In contrast, the disparate groups coming into the new Whig party had not yet sufficiently coalesced to agree upon a single candidate. Whigs did not even hold a national convention, relying instead chiefly on state leaders to promote favorite possibilities.
Eventually the Whigs settled upon three candidates, each with particular regional appeal. The South along with the Mid-Atlantic and the West as well as New England had their choices. The most astute Whig chieftains did not contemplate a replica of 1824. They evinced little interest in a reprise of forcing the choice of a president upon the House of Representatives. The reek of the alleged corrupt bargain remained too powerful. Instead, they hoped running favorite sons would help build strength in the states.
Most important for Adams, of course, was New England. In his native region the nod went to Daniel Webster, initially put forward by the Massachusetts legislature. Adams would never back Webster, the man who had blocked his Senate hopes. In addition, he distrusted Webster. He did not have to worry, for Webster’s candidacy never blossomed. That had little impact on Adams, who following his practice in 1832 took no active role in the campaign. Van Buren’s ultimate victory over the Whig troika did not surprise him. From it he had no positive anticipation. Instead, he expected more of the same, just another Jackson term. In fact, he had disparaged all contenders as “demagogues,” who had no serious program for governing the Union.8
Confident that the Jacksonians were marching the country down the wrong road, Adams did have a clear vision of the correct direction. He provided an excellent map to the signposts along that way in extended eulogies he prepared for two men he greatly respected, James Monroe and James Madison, the last standing titans of the Founding Fathers generation. He honored each in orations he gave in Boston, the former in 1831, the latter five years later. An extensive biography was a feature in both, which were really long essays more than simply speeches. Praising both former presidents for their commitment to the entire country, the Union, he awarded them accolades for their pure patriotism. They placed duty to country and devotion to principle above the desire for office, above personal benefit.
In these discourses Adams made a special effort to insist that the people, not the states, formed the foundation of the Constitution, of the nation. And the nation, one of great energy, would become a magnificent empire if only those following Madison and Monroe would embrace their virtues. Placing Madison within this framework required Adams to treat deftly Madison’s opposition to Alexander Hamilton’s nationalistic policies and his authorship of the Virginia Resolutions, which underscored the validity of states’ rights. He did so by pointing to Madison’s difference with Jefferson, whose original Kentucky Resolutions pushed the states’ rights doctrine further, even to nullification. He then highlighted Madison’s rejection of Calhoun’s creed of nullification.
For Adams the ultimate goal of those two notable men corresponded with his sense of the thrust of both the American Revolution and the Constitution—“the improvement of the condition of the human race.” The bold and new Revolution took a giant stride to accomplish that goal. The equally bold and new Constitution pressed onward on that heading. Madison and Monroe continued that tradition. For Adams, he and his generation had an indisputable duty—“to preserve, to cherish, to improve the inheritance which they have left us—won by their toils—watered by their tears—saddened but fertilized by their blood.” He and they must become “worthy sons of worthy sires.” To do so their voice must proclaim the incalculable value of harmony and Union.
Strikingly, nowhere in the almost two hundred published pages of the two documents did he bring up the topic of slavery. And as he had made clear in his diary, he depicted that institution as undergirding the political parties and the policies that were turning the country away from the virtues he praised in the lives of Madison and Monroe. Yet both men owned slaves, and neither had taken steps to do away with slavery. Adams was not ready to take up public cudgels against the source that he judged the major threat to his vision of the Union.9
Although Adams barely mentioned slavery in his two eulogies, a new, potentially powerful antislavery force surged onto the American scene during the time he wrote and delivered them. Known as abolitionists, these men and women drove to the forefront the future of slavery in the United States. Adams soon became caught up in the political dimension of a crusade determined to destroy the institution in the country.
This manifestation of antislavery heralded the advent of a more ardent generation dedicated to annihilating slavery. That goal was, of course, not original, for an antislavery impulse dated back to the American Revolution. The language of the Declaration of Independence, particularly the assertion concerning the equality of all men, plus the widespread rhetoric calling for resistance to tyranny and oppression led to an attack on slavery, which was legal in all thirteen colonies because the British Empire sanctioned it. This antislavery activity led to the ending of slavery in the states north of Maryland, though a number enacted a program of gradual emancipation. In the southern states, however, from Delaware and Maryland south to Georgia, the home of the vast majority of slaves, antislavery had little impact. In fact, in those states slavery emerged stronger, for the institution had successfully withstood all attempts to terminate it, even gradually.
The abolitionists taking charge of antislavery by 1830 had no interest in gradualism. They cried for immediate emancipation, with no compensation for slave owners. This insurgence in the United States is usually dated from 1831 with the publication of the Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper in Boston edited by a young native of Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison. Yet, in the late 1820s, Garrison had been influenced by African American opponents of slavery, chiefly Daniel Walker, whose lengthy pamphlet of 1829, Daniel Walker’s Appeal . . . , had a significant effect on northern blacks and antislavery whites like Garrison. The creation in Philadelphia in 1833 of the American Antislavery Society provided organization and focus for the burgeoning campaign.
The American abolitionists acknowledged their debt to those in Great Britain who for decades had striven to end all connection between the British Empire and slavery. In 1807 they succeeded in halting British involvement in the slave trade, and finally, in 1833, Parliament abolished the institution in the empire, though owners received compensation and four years were allowed for actual termination.
American abolitionists faced a much more daunting challenge than their British forebears and contemporaries. The latter only had to persuade a powerful Parliament that had unquestioned authority to legislate for the entire empire. Moreover, slavery existed on the periphery, chiefly in the West Indies, not in Britain itself. In the United States, Congress did not have comparable power. Furthermore, provisions in the Constitution like the three-fifths clause provided legitimacy for the institution. Additionally, even if so inclined, the federal government could not dictate to the states, which shared sovereignty and constitutional rights. Finally, the political power of the slave states within the federal government made action by it against slavery practically impossible.
Even so, events in the early 1830s gave both impetus and hope to the abolitionists. The Nullification Crisis of 1831 and 1832 posed a potential threat to the Union. And abolitionists along with many others, including Adams of course, saw slavery at its root. Then, in 1831, the largest slave revolt in American history occurred in Virginia. Nat Turner’s Revolt, named for its slave leader, caused the deaths of more than sixty whites along with numerous slaves. That sent shivers that extended well beyond Virginia. The next year a massive uprising took place in the British colony of Jamaica. It appeared that race war could engulf slave areas. For abolitionists these events made clear the desperate need to end slavery in order to avoid bloodshed and the dismemberment of the Union.
These abolitionists preached a radical doctrine, far more radical than that which Adams espoused. They rejected any thought of colonization. Proclaiming slavery the great evil besetting the country, they demanded immediate action. An evil so profound permitted no temporizing. Going further, abolitionists also condemned all slave owners as evil. Thus they called not only for instant motion against slavery but also for no compensation for owners. In their judgment no one should profit from involvement with such wickedness. The abolitionists insisted on immediate freedom for over two million slaves, with their owners receiving nothing for their value, which in 1830 reached $577 million (today approximately $15 billion).
This unprecedented assault on both slavery and slave owners had its genesis in two key areas. First, the religious crusade beginning in the 1820s known as the Second Great Awakening caused an evangelical tide to rush over much of New England and spread along the migration track New Englanders followed westward through New York State and even beyond. The ministers trumpeted a message that taught individuals they could perfect themselves by renouncing their sins, but these purified Christians could not rest on their personal perfection. They must drive to rid the nation of all sins, such as alcohol consumption and desecration of the Sabbath. Quickly, however, one sin became the most heinous, that of slavery. No Christian nation could permit it, and no Christian could participate in it. Evangelical abolitionists sermonized that the monstrous scourge must be removed lest God turn his wrath on the United States. Hesitation could not be countenanced.
A second moral incentive had economic origins. Once again Britain led the way. There a free-labor ideology had come to dominate. For its adherents free labor characterized a modernizing economy; it meant progress. It demanded at least the appearance of voluntary choice for workers, a condition symbolized by a contract and the payment of a wage. The symbolism was critical, for often the contract and wage mocked free choice and resulted in “nearly absolute subordination.” Free-labor apostles damned slavery as qualitatively different from any other kind of discrimination or domination. The slave by definition had no choice and was certainly not party to any contract. Thus a slave-based economy was backward and nonprogressive.
With the merger of Christian morality and economic modernism fueling their endeavor, abolitionists marched confidently forward. They intended to storm the ramparts of slavery. Garrison spoke for this dedicated band as well as for himself when he wrote in the first issue of the Liberator, “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate . . . I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.”10
Adams’s first direct involvement with abolitionists came with petitions. The First Amendment to the Constitution enshrined the right of the people “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” From the beginning of the national government, citizens had utilized that provision to send petitions to their representatives in Congress. Because the House was considered closer to the people, the great majority went to it. In the House every session dealt with scores of petitions submitted by ordinary people. In that chamber on specified days a routine call for petitions occurred, starting with Maine and heading south. Individual congressmen followed a standard brief procedure: note the subject of their petitions, then identify where they originated and the number of signatures, and finally move that the petitions be assigned to the appropriate committee.11
Antislavery petitions were not new. Since George Washington’s presidency, Congress had received them. But because of the weakness of the antislavery movement, few members got excited. Nobody wanted to discuss the vexing slavery issue if at all avoidable. Usually no one remarked on the petitions before they went to committee, never to be heard from again.
Shortly after taking his oath as a congressman in early December 1831, Adams presented his first petition. Because all were short and similar, he requested that one be read. After his request was granted, he took up no more than five minutes to make a few remarks, explicitly saying that he did not support the position that asked for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. Speaking for the first time before the House, Adams recorded that the sound of his voice unnerved him more than a little. That his colleagues listened attentively he counted as a real achievement. In the next few years, however, this nervousness would be replaced by an assurance that had eluded him in recent years.12
The presentation of petitions he considered a moving experience. Though a tedious procedure, he described the exercise as exemplifying the “magnificent grandeur” and “sublime principles” of the nation. When members rose to transmit the “prayers,” the word formally used for petitions, they faced “the colossal emblem of the Union over the Speaker’s chair.” The ritual of the documents being carried from the members to the chair, the calling for the ayes and nays, marked by different accents and tones from the multitude of voices, the Speaker announcing the results, and finally the smiles and frowns the outcome produced on the faces of the members impressed him. For him this tangible illustration of the people asserting their rights in a ceremony binding them with their representatives demonstrated the meaning of America’s liberty.13
Adams’s initial presentation of an antislavery petition was certainly not his last. Abolitionists kept sending them, and he kept presenting them. He did not even require that they come from his own constituents, asserting that his duty as a congressman required him to do so, no matter their origins. Many came to him because of his fame. After all, no other former president sat in Congress. His willingness to transmit their wishes to the House brought publicity to the abolitionist cause. Yet he continued to make clear that he opposed what most petitions requested, abolishing both the slave trade and slavery itself in the District of Columbia. The petitions focused on the District because the Constitution gave Congress direct power over it, whereas few thought the national legislature had any authority over slavery in the states. Even though most abolitionists cheered his willingness to present their petitions, his public declarations opposing specific contents caused criticism among certain abolitionists, including Garrison himself.14
Garrison along with others of the faithful wondered about that opposition. Adams provided an answer in an 1833 letter spelling out the reasons for his stance. There were three. In his judgment petitioners had no right to demand changes affecting citizens in other states and territories. Then he argued that the measures the petitioners kept pressing would surely cause resentment in the South and might even lead to harsher laws governing slavery. Finally, combining the personal and political, he stated that the majority of his constituents did not advocate agitating the issue of slavery. He had no intention of alienating those voters whose broad support gave him such a positive sense of his own worth.15
By 1835, however, the abolitionist movement had become substantially different. An infusion of money from a few wealthy adherents plus the advent of mass-production technology permitting cheap printing that vastly increased the activity and scope of abolitionists. They intended to bombard the slave states with pamphlets, with a first run of 175,000, advocating the end of slavery. Reaction to this much broader campaign was immediate and vehement. The pamphlets, dubbed “incendiary publications,” sparked outrage in the South. Southerners charged that they aimed at inciting slave insurrection. That June in Charleston, South Carolina, a mob went into the post office, removed the sheets before delivery, and used them to start a bonfire. During the summer similar burnings occurred in other locations.
Not surprisingly, President Andrew Jackson agreed with his fellow southerners. Damning abolitionists attempting destruction of “the dictates of humanity and religion,” the president accused them of trying to ignite a race war. According to him they should forfeit their lives for their wickedness. In his message to Congress in December, he called for legislation allowing federal censorship of the mails to halt these inflammatory publications. This effort failed in no small part because southerners led by Calhoun wanted no such power granted to the federal government, recognizing that at some future date it could be used against them. Instead, the administration adopted an informal and surely illegal policy of permitting postmasters in the North to refuse dispatching abolitionist materials to the South. This policy remained in effect until the Civil War.16
With the distribution of their pamphlets basically blocked, petitions became more and more central to the abolitionists’ effort to arouse Americans to eradicate what they believed the fundamental evil affecting the country. In 1836 some 30,000 petitions arrived in Congress; two years later the number swelled to 400,000.
This explosion of abolitionist activity would not go unmatched. Not only did southerners take direct action against their foes; northerners also landed direct attacks on a movement that both threatened the Union and promoted social equality between the races. In July 1835 an angry band in Boston almost killed William Lloyd Garrison; it took the mayor’s jailing him to save his life. Two years later Elijah Lovejoy, a prominent abolitionist and newspaper editor in Illinois, lost his life defending his press from an assaulting pack.17
Adams strove to remain apart from the turmoil, informing a correspondent, “With the slave and Abolition whirligig I hope to have no concern.” At the same time, unlike many northerners, he did not, it must be emphasized, denounce the abolitionists. He stayed away from meetings like the one in Boston where leading citizens denounced abolitionists and their activities. After all, he could not mind assaults on slave owners, because he had only disdain for them and for what he regarded as their political agent, the Democratic party. Furthermore, he had considered slavery for a long time the great evil in the country and the chief danger to its future, and those views did not escape notice in his diary or in private letters. While he was no card-carrying abolitionist, he could legitimately be described as a fellow traveler. In the mid-1830s no other major political figure even came close to that position.18
Race made for a crucial element in anti-abolitionist feelings and actions. An overwhelming majority of white Americans, northern as well as southern, believed in the absolute supremacy of the white race. Suggestions of any kind of racial equality brought forth a heated reaction. In the free states African Americans were hardly strangers to vigorous discrimination. None of the newer western states permitted them to vote, and they lost that right in several older eastern ones. Moreover, job discrimination was rife, and northern mobs often terrorized African Americans. Abolitionists found themselves under assault not only for supporting racial equality but also for favoring miscegenation or “amalgamation,” to use the term most common at that time. Not all abolitionists embraced amalgamation, and some even shied away from racial equality, but opponents leveled those charges against all.
Adams shared neither the animus nor the intensity of the ardent racists. Additionally, he deplored the violence directed against blacks. Moreover, he never accepted the contention that African American slaves, as property, had no access to the fundamental rights of man as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. He thought that basing what he termed “the first and holiest rights of humanity” upon skin color was immoral and unchristian. He dismissed the assertion that the principles hallowed by the Declaration applied only to whites. In a letter to the historian George Bancroft, his fellow citizen of Massachusetts and an avid Jacksonian, he wanted to know what Jacksonians meant when they cried, “Government of the People.” Did they include free blacks, even slaves? According to him there could be no such government without their inclusion. Relating to Bancroft an incident when as cabinet colleagues he heard Calhoun praise universal education, he contemplated adding “skin deep,” but resisted the temptation. He still wondered about the impact universal education for whites and blacks alike would have on the South. While he did not provide an answer, no doubt can exist that in his mind a much improved South would emerge.19
Yet he clearly shared the conviction that Anglo-Saxons were superior to all others. In his time an upper-class white in Massachusetts could hardly hold any other opinion. Descendants of Pilgrims and Puritans, they believed, as did their ancestors, that they stood at the forefront of Christian civilization, which was white and Anglo-Saxon. For Adams that was settled truth. And in a fundamental sense amalgamation disgusted him. His discussion of Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello revealed his opinion on that topic. He found the physical intimacy between Desdemona and Othello appalling. The great moral lesson of the play, he argued, affirmed “that black and white blood cannot be intermingled in marriage without a gross outrage upon the laws of nature, and that in such violation nature will vindicate her laws.”20
His ultimate stance on amalgamation, however, was more complicated. He noted in his diary that many of his fellow House members felt that even a taint of African American blood should disqualify the swarthy delegate from the Territory of Florida. For Adams this man had a more serious problem, his Jewishness. Whenever referring to David Levy, he employed negatives about his Jewishness and gave no attention to the alleged stain of African blood.21
Furthermore, and more important, he envisioned amalgamation as the probable solution to his country’s most vexing problem, racial slavery. He perceived slavery itself and the possibility of race war as massively worse than race mixing. Colonization schemes provided no solution; he had long believed them fanciful. With his undoubted preference for a racially homogenous society impossible, amalgamation became for him the least disastrous outcome for the United States. He forecast that eventual consequence because whites so outnumbered blacks that over time blackness would be etiolated, with the white population retaining merely “a dash of African blood,” just as he thought he spotted in several southern congressmen.22
About slavery itself he was certain. The wicked institution would not survive, though its end would probably come only in the distant future. Before that happened, he surmised, slave owners would leave the Union, fearing emancipation. He predicted that when emancipation ultimately occurred, it would be won by the slaves themselves in a massive slave uprising. For the time being, however, he could only lament the power of the slaveholders.23
Yet change marked his own political world, remarkable for a man now in his late sixties. By the middle of the decade abolitionists had become a force in the Twelfth District of Massachusetts, especially among those who had welcomed Antimasonry and in villages, critical sources of his political strength. Some twenty-five antislavery societies had been formed in the district. No longer did his constituents tolerate violence against those advocating abolition. In Plymouth a grand jury brought charges against the sheriff for failing to control the mob that attacked an abolitionist minister at a church. On a national level that shift was matched by Adams’s increasing antipathy toward slave owners, chiefly because of their power in the Democratic party, which seemed poised to hold on to the presidency in 1836. He saw himself as watching helplessly while Jackson and his northern abettors, all the handmaidens of slavery, drove the country farther along the road to ruin.24
In the midst of this commotion, Adams surveyed what he deemed the devolution of his country. Simultaneously he mused about his own decline and the unfair impediments that he had faced in his public life and that he still confronted. He believed that despite the efforts of those who had tried to ruin him he had overcome all to reach the presidency. Since then, however, he felt his fortunes had declined, leaving him dubious whether he could ever recover public favor beyond his congressional district.
For his past struggle and contemporary predicament, he blamed what he depicted as “sorry pictures of the heart of man.” In his diary he made clear to whom he referred. From his old Federalist foes to his current nemeses, including Calhoun, Jackson, and Webster, he listed thirteen names. All of them had employed “base and dirty tricks” to impede his cause and malign his character. This situation he judged especially unfair, for he had only “returned good for evil,” never wronging any of them. In fact, he had “even neglected too much of my self-defence against them.”25
Yet he did not always hold back. While listening in the House to a speech praising Jackson by Representative James K. Polk of Tennessee, Adams noted that the remarks included “some coarse and equally dull invective against me.” When Polk finished, Adams indicated he would make no reply, only saying he would not respond when a member’s extolling of Jackson contained an attack on him. But he did utter a brief riposte:
No! let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee, . . .
According to him, those words had the desired effect, for in his diary he noted that Polk quietly “shrunk back abashed into his shell.”26
That sense of triumph was short-lived, however. On policy the southerners with their western and northern accomplices still got their way. What Adams perceived as the giving away of the public lands particularly distressed him. Their sale at properly appraised prices would fund his dream of internal improvements, which would mark the growing greatness of the American empire. Yet he could only mourn, for he could envision no way to halt the cheap-land juggernaut.27
Despite his lamentations about himself and policy, Adams stood once more on the verge of national attention, on the way to becoming at once a beloved and a hated figure. His resurgence had a most unexpected source—the unglamorous practice of presenting petitions to the House.
As did its predecessor, the first session of the Twenty-Fourth Congress began in December 1835 with the presentation of antislavery petitions. Initially it seemed that the past practice of accepting and immediately turning aside those petitions would be followed. But a young, ambitious nullifier from South Carolina quickly broke that pattern. Congressman James H. Hammond proposed rejecting peremptorily all petitions for action against slavery in the District of Columbia without hearing or receiving them. He also declared that Congress had no power to abolish slavery in the District.28
Hammond’s propositions addressed two constitutional questions. Could Congress abolish slavery in the District of Columbia? And could petitioners be denied their right to be heard? While most southerners answered the first negatively, most northerners, even those like Adams who opposed any such act, thought otherwise. They pointed out correctly that the Constitution gave Congress authority over all matters in the District. On the second, northerners overwhelmingly believed that the Constitution required that Congress at least accept all petitions. In the House debate raged.
The goings-on appalled the Massachusetts sexagenarian. He considered proslavery rhetoric dominant, with the voice of freedom muted. He wrote to his one surviving son that he had been urged to stand up and become that voice. He expressed two fears—that if he did not rise, freedom would be “trampled under foot,” but that if he did, he would suffer the same fate. On December 21 he did speak briefly against Hammond’s tactic, suggesting instead that the petitions be referred to the Committee on the District of Columbia, where they would surely “sleep the sleep of death.”29
Although the evidence indicates that Hammond acted on his own, he spoke for many southerners outraged by the abolitionists’ assaults not only on slavery but on the character and morality of all slaveholders. Slave owners who identified themselves as moral, Christian, and American took great offense at what they termed scurrilous attacks on them as individuals. While all white southerners detested abolitionists, the most ardent urged a direct strike against them. In Congress the great southern spokesman Senator Calhoun wanted to unite the South in an effort to squelch in direct fashion the abolitionists’ goal of bringing their crusade before the national legislature. Although a nullifier and a young follower of Calhoun, Hammond took up the cudgels in the House on his own.
Hammond’s initiative had an impact on congressional southerners and the Democratic party. No southern politician could afford to be found wanting in defense of his section’s major social and economic institution. Outright opposition to Hammond’s move was therefore unthinkable. Democratic partisans had a different perspective. They wanted to prevent a vicious battle over the right of petition that would threaten party unity.
United behind their presidential candidate, Vice-President Van Buren, Democrats wanted to retain that union to ensure that Van Buren would follow Jackson as president. With the Whigs fielding a southern candidate aimed at curbing Van Buren’s strength in that section, Van Buren and his adherents wanted to stave off inroads on their southern flank. The Democrats thus wanted a plan that would replace Hammond’s radical proposal with a solution that would at the same time maintain the allegiance of southern Democrats and not alienate the northerners.
The quandary that Hammond’s foray caused among southerners and Democrats did not at the moment affect Adams’s course. The Whig party, which had his tentative allegiance, experienced no similar stress. Still putting together disparate parts and with three sectionally oriented candidates, the former president could act as he saw with ease. Accordingly, he continued to bring antislavery petitions before the House in the new year.30
The political jeremiads stirred up the by now usual railing among congressmen. As rancor built, the reality of national Democratic politics asserted itself. Searching for a way around their Hammond problem, a number of northern Democrats pressed Van Buren to intervene. At this point another South Carolina congressman stepped forward, Henry L. Pinckney, son of a signer of the Constitution, who hailed from the same radical wing of Carolina politics as did his colleague. Moreover, he, too, had followed Calhoun. Yet he now headed in a different direction. Pinckney had become convinced that hard-line southerners like Hammond were damaging the southern, proslavery cause by dividing southerners while uniting northerners. The evidence does not reveal whether Van Buren directly influenced Pinckney, but his adherents in the House flocked to the Carolinian’s side.
Fending off furious intransigent southern members, who castigated him as a traitor to their section, Pinckney in early February 1836 proposed sending all petitions regarding slavery to a select committee instructed to report to the House that Congress had no authority over slavery in the states and should refrain from interfering with the institution in the District of Columbia because doing so would endanger the Union. Pinckney’s motion bypassed both contentious constitutional points. Congress would accept the petitions, but would automatically bury them and would take no position on the issue of slavery in the District.
Within a week the House accepted Pinckney’s proposition. It sharply split the southerners, with half for it and half, the hotspurs, against it. All northerners but one voted aye. And that lone man was not Adams; he was willing to see what Pinckney would produce. James K. Polk, now Speaker of the House, quickly named a committee of eight pro–Van Buren Democrats and one Whig, a Kentuckian, with Pinckney as chair.31
Pinckney’s committee deliberated for three months before bringing forth its report, which included three resolutions. The first stipulated what almost all politicians, North and South, had long backed—Congress had no constitutional authority over slavery in the states. The second repeated Pinckney’s earlier argument about slavery in the District—Congress would not interfere with slavery in the nation’s capital, because doing so would generate divisiveness and endanger the Union. The third broke new ground—Congress would lay upon the table all petitions regarding slavery without printing or referring them and would take no further action whatever on them. This last immediately became known as the gag rule. According to Pinckney, it had a straightforward purpose, to eliminate the discussion of slavery within the House chamber.32
A short debate ensued, and with the Jackson administration fully behind the report, Speaker Polk exercised tight control over who spoke. Then the resolutions came up for a vote, each separately. An outraged Adams struggled to gain the floor, exclaiming he had a right to speak before any ballot. Announcing the debate had ended, the Speaker declared Adams out of order. The senior statesman cried out, “Am I gagged or am I not?” Having been ruled out of order, he appealed to the full House. The members upheld the Speaker, with a majority of twenty. When the first resolution came up, Adams responded to the call of his name by asking for five minutes to demonstrate its falsehood. Shouts of order reverberated through the chamber. Once more he was unable to gain the floor.
The voting thus went on. The first resolution passed overwhelmingly, with only nine nay ballots. Adams’s, however, was among them. Even though the Speaker had prevented his giving his reasons for objecting to the thrust of that resolution, he lined up with the small minority who rejected the notion that the Constitution forbade congressional action on slavery in the states. This status placed him with the most extreme antislavery men in the House.
The next resolutions also passed with comfortable margins, though the opposition was more significant. Forty-five congressmen voted against the second, and 68 against the third, the gag. Yet, on the last, 117 said aye. Adams was recorded on neither, but hearing the vote called on the gag, he shouted that the resolution violated the Constitution and the rights of his constituents.33
The breakdown of the vote on Pinckney’s resolutions revealed both a sharp partisan divide and that John Quincy, except in the first instance, had numerous allies in his opposition. Only in the initial one did he belong to a lonely coterie. On all three almost every negative vote came from northern Whigs, those who belonged to the party with which Adams loosely identified himself. Not even 10 percent of the northern Whigs voted with the South on the second and third resolutions, while 80 percent of northern Democrats did so. The outcome was a victory for the coalition that had placed Jackson in the presidency and would soon win that office for Van Buren. The partisan divide also presaged the future—until 1860 northern Democrats remained firmer allies with the South than their political opposition.34
Although Adams could not defeat the Pinckney resolutions—he could not even get the floor to speak against them—he had no intention of keeping his objections to himself. Later that same day an occasion arose that permitted him to say openly what no one of his stature had ever done. His opportunity came when the House took up a bill providing relief for residents of Alabama and Georgia who had suffered from Indian depredations. He did not intend to oppose that measure, yet in a long speech, fourteen pages in the Register of Debates, he spent much time addressing Congress and the war power. Calls for order often interrupted him, but he did not yield or sit down.
A state of war, he insisted, gave Congress vastly more power, power that it did not possess in peacetime. While he agreed that during times of peace, slavery in the states was off-limits to congressional interference, he argued the onset of war in the slave states heralded dramatic change. Then Congress and the executive, the federal government, could surely intervene. He pointed to examples, such as the U.S. military involved in conflict with Indians or a foreign power like neighboring Mexico or the use of armed force to suppress a slave rebellion, which could lead to civil war. With that assertion he took a stand no major national leader since Alexander Hamilton had taken. And no one had heretofore done so in such a public arena as the House of Representatives. In the instances he had posited, he declared, the federal government could and probably would interfere with slavery in any and every way. A quarter century later Abraham Lincoln invoked the war power for just such an interference. Calling on southern members to recognize this truth, Adams warned them about the dangers for slavery inherent in any future armed contest. As for the southerners themselves, he blistered them as a people who had exterminated Indians (as if New Englanders had not), and as warmongers lusting for even more territory, particularly Texas, which was just emerging victorious from its fight for independence from Mexico.35
With this speech Adams took public his harsh view of the South, slavery, and southern political power. Recognizing its importance, he identified it a year and a half later as “by far the most noted speech I ever made.” No longer would he confine this outlook to his diary and private correspondence. Confident in his assessment of those who had thwarted him and certain in the moral righteousness of his cause, he would now assail those who in his judgment mocked the holy truths of the Declaration of Independence while they hindered the noble influences of his cherished Puritan values emanating from his own New England. Moreover, his being nominated in 1834 for a third term in the House assured him that he had a secure political base. To his diary he confessed that approval provided a “cheering consolation” in the face of “the calamities which oppress me.” He would never permit, however, such calamities to deter him from his sacred duty to defend his sense of liberty and justice.36
Even though Adams relished his participation in political combat on a question he held dear, his ardor did not extend into his home. Louisa Adams, who had opposed her husband’s reentry into politics, had not changed her mind. “How bitterly sick I am of the nefarious details of political life,” she wrote. When the politics-become-personal entangled her, she doubted her ability to “endure rationally,” fearing that her “reason should give way under the severity of these inflictions.” The onetime bipartisan hostess witnessed friends turn into enemies. She spoke of “my desolation” and worried that “despair will rise upon my soul.” She prayed that God would “hear the cry of my desolation” and take pity upon her. She revealed her disgust in her social withdrawal. Moreover, the emotional and psychological strain surely compounded the travails of her health.37
Not only did Louisa Adams find the political world painful; its impact on her husband concerned her. She believed the anxiety inherent in his political life negatively affected his health. In her diary she cataloged the scourges she defined as the “ill requited troubles”—“of bitter strife, of endless trial, of mortified vanity, of disappointed ambition.” If he would only give up politics, the resulting calm would not only benefit him but also rescue his family from the turmoil that enveloped him. Yet she continued to worry that retirement might risk “a total extinction of his life; or perhaps of those powers even more valuable than life,” for where else could he find “a suitable sphere of action”? She could only beseech heaven to grant the strength so that she and he might meet their situation “as becomes Christians.”38
In addition to her general displeasure with politics and her husband’s participation, the issue that had become central for him, slavery and its future in the country, caused Louisa great anguish. While she thought slavery evil, she considered agitating it also iniquitous. Although she was against slavery, her Johnson kin still counted as slave owners. Cherishing them, she did not think of them as immoral. Moreover, the prospect of “losing the love, the friendship and the society of my own nearest and dearest connections” particularly distressed her. At the same time she found it “utterly impossible” not to empathize with Adams, whose motives she knew “to be pure and patriotic.” She felt trapped between conflicting loyalties, though she would never turn from her husband. She yearned for him to leave “a fame to posterity.”39
Not surprisingly for her, discussion of slavery brought with it the perplexity of race. Like her husband, she assumed the superiority of her own race. Her conviction appeared more powerful than his, however, for she envisioned no way to bridge the massive racial chasm. No evidence suggests that she shared his ultimate solution to the race question in the country.40
Just as he did, she dreaded what she saw as the final outcome of the conflict over slavery. Because she identified the contest as a “great struggle for power and dominion,” between North and South, the result would be civil war. In both sections she perceived passion replacing reason. For that state of affairs she held abolitionists equally accountable with southern hotspurs. In her judgment only God could avert the disaster that she foresaw. And she prayed that “he who rules the hearts of men will now dispense them” to adopt “some wise and temperate course that would lead to peaceful resolution.” Thus to Louisa Catherine the horror of civil war exceeded the hideousness of slavery. She discerned nothing sublime in the potential bloodletting.41
Even with congressional tumult and domestic stress, Adams had two old companions that provided at least temporary repose. His almost daily walks remained central for him. Yet, even when walking, his analytical bent came through. He liked to measure the distance he had traversed by time and the number of his paces. On one occasion he counted 1,000 paces to a mile and a second for every pace at seventeen minutes to a mile. On another and in cool weather with a good road, it took him 1,070 paces to the mile. He calculated he was striding at three and a half miles per hour. He had previously covered the distances in sixteen minutes.42
While his walks provided mental as well as physical exercise, his garden was a salve. He filled pages in his diary with details on plants and their care, from nursery to adult trees. Nothing escaped his attention, from insect infestation to the difficulty of raising trees from seeds or nuts, to the success of his fruit trees. The grounds around the house in Quincy had literally become his botanical playground, though, as with all else, he also took this play seriously.43
Although he maintained an active life, he was cognizant now, in his late sixties, of his age. And he knew he could not arrest what he termed “an erosion upon Time.” He found concrete evidence in the maladies that struck his body. Rheumatism affected his hands, at times making it difficult for him to write. Periodically a painful inflammation of the eyes afflicted him, though not so severely as he had previously experienced. But with old age upon him, he knew he would have to cope with whatever impairment it brought.44
The older Adams appears in a pair of portraits painted by Asher Brown Durand in the spring of 1835. In both he faces to his left in a three-quarter profile, and in both he wears dark clothing, including a large tie that obscures his shirt and some of his chin. These two paintings depict a more elderly and dour man than do those of Stuart and Harding done a decade earlier. But these two later paintings also differ dramatically from each other. The March portrait is darker, in every sense. From the sharply painted eyebrows to the deep, downward creases by nose and mouth, the artist has depicted a man who appears older and more troubled than the man quietly gazing into the near distance of the bland June rendering.45
Still, he would not permit either emotional or physical concern to deter him from his political mission to thwart what he designated as an attempt by southerners and their allies to deny, even abolish, fundamental rights enshrined in the Declaration and guaranteed by the Constitution. He might even overcome what he damned as his lack of accomplishment. When the second session of the Twenty-Fourth Congress convened in December 1836, he would be in his seat for what he would help make a tumultuous and memorable session. This time he would press his cause.46
Adams began the session on the offensive. Determined to continue his charge against slavery, he would not attack the hated institution and its political phalanx head-on, however. Such an effort would receive practically no support in the House and little more in the North. Moreover, he did not think immediate abolition either possible or practical. He wanted, instead, to maintain his assault, emphasizing the free-speech right of petition, always hoping to embarrass, even ridicule, slave owners. He expected to prod the more hard-line and excitable southerners to follow Hammond’s lead with extreme reaction. And he had in hand scores of petitions for the abolition of either the slave trade or slavery or both in the District of Columbia.47
Acting promptly, he could make some headway in spite of the gag rule passed back in the spring. Because the gag originated as a resolution, not a formal House rule, it would have to be imposed anew in the current session. Before that occurred, Adams stood to offer his first petition, from 150 women living in his district, and moved that it be read. Immediately members rose in opposition. Responding, he noted that all have or have had a mother and no human emotion surpassed that which every man felt toward his mother. Then he urged the members to listen to their mothers. These mothers only wanted to abolish slavery on earth, surely a magnificent improvement for mankind.48
After having this first petition promptly tabled, Adams presented a second. In spite of vociferous objections, he began to read it, which occasioned interruptions with shouts for order. But he did not stop. Speaker Polk scolded him to be silent and take his seat. Complying slowly, he continued to read as he sat. Finally after extended debate, this one was also tabled. And then on January 18, 1837, the House reinstated the gag rule as Adams expected. Even so, he had made his presence felt.49
And he was not finished. He had no intention of allowing the gag to silence him. Less than a month after its reinstatement, he tried to present a petition from nine ladies of Fredericksburg, Virginia, saying they wanted only to end the slave trade in the District, not slavery itself. Speaker Polk refused, announcing it came under the gag. Undeterred, Adams next requested a ruling on another in his possession that supposedly came from slaves. He wanted to know whether it would be in order for him to present it.
This question produced bedlam. Infuriated, southerners tried to outdo each other with screams of outrage at what they deemed Adams’s intentionally insulting attempt to bring forth a petition from slaves. Proclaiming that slaves had no right to petition, they called for severe punishment, possibly censure or even expulsion for the man they saw as a malicious troublemaker. Adams had understood how to spark an outburst of raw emotion from his southern opponents. He had them now foaming.
Defending his surprise, Adams asserted that he had indicated the petition purportedly carried the signatures, or scribbles, of slaves, and he had not attempted to introduce it, only asking whether its introduction would be in order. Now he specified slaves as signers, though he thought owners might have required the act from their bondspeople. Then he revealed his second shock. The petition opposed abolition; it wanted Congress to keep its hands off slavery. This revelation caused even greater upset among the southerners. They correctly perceived their nemesis playing with them, manipulating them and the House for his own ends.
In the midst of the uproar a Virginia congressman, a native of Fredericksburg, got a look at the petition, still in Adams’s possession, from women of that town. Appalled, he discovered the names of free blacks and mulattoes, one of whom he identified as a prostitute. They were in no way ladies, he thundered. Accusing Adams of misrepresentation, this consternated representative only underscored John Quincy’s triumph in offending the slave-state men while he claimed solely to uphold the sacred right of petition. Once again he had succeeded in branding southerners as opponents of free speech and the rights of Americans. All the while, however, he kept saying he intended no disrespect to the House or to any member, much less any interest in disrupting normal proceedings.
It took three days to expend the emotional energy generated by the gentleman from Massachusetts. At that point more level-headed members, northern as well as southern, presented three resolutions to the House. They hoped their proposals would halt the commotion while putting the House on record regarding slaves and petitions. They also wanted to provide finality to the contretemps between Adams and his detractors. The first stigmatized anyone who brought forth a petition from slaves as an enemy of the South and the Union. The second made clear that slaves had no right of petition. The third asserted that because Adams had disclaimed any intention to disrupt the House and had stated he would not present a petition against House rules, there was no need for any proceedings against him. The third could best be described as hopeful, for he had made no such pledge about presentation, nor was he likely to abide by any rule he disapproved. His definition of disrespect and that of the majority of his colleagues differed massively.50
Because the third resolution specifically named him, he would have the opportunity to defend himself. The House could deny him that privilege, but in doing so would set a dangerous precedent. In the future that tactic could be used against any congressman when the majority decided to do so. The vast majority of representatives did not want to put in place such a possibility.
On February 9, 1837, Adams got up to make the case for himself. Beginning disingenuously, he moved that he had but a single goal—to get a ruling on whether the House would accept petitions from slaves. Of course, he well knew beforehand the answer to his question. Then he went into a lengthy defense of petitions, calling the right to petition a right of humanity, not just of Americans. The denial of that right for unpopular opinions or political partisanship or any other reason would annihilate the Declaration and the Constitution.
He did not neglect slave owners as a group, excoriating what he judged to be their degradation. Referring to the Virginian who spoke of the Fredericksburg women as infamous, he asked whether men of their own color or slave masters made them that way. Scourging the slave owners for having sexual relations with their female slaves, he reported his understanding that many among the colored population in the slave states bore a resemblance to their masters. Thus the charge of infamy should be leveled against masters, not any men or women of color. The reporter noted this intimation caused a “Great sensation” in the House.
Adams closed by standing his ground. He would not be intimidated. He disdained “the gentlemen from the South [who] pounced upon me like so many eagles upon a dove.” No matter their attacks, he would stay his course. Yet he presented himself as a champion and guardian of the House, which he revered as the temple of the people. It must never, however, transgress the principles of the holy writ set forth in the Declaration and the Constitution. Thus he requested exoneration.
Despite his refusal to temper either his charges against the South or his insinuation about the morality of slave owners, his plea for exoneration was heard. Too many of his colleagues feared that censuring him would make it much easier for one of them at some point in the future to suffer an identical fate. Thus a resolution exonerating him passed by a lopsided margin of 137 to 21, with Adams excused from voting. He had successfully defended himself without at all backing away from his stance on petitions or slavery.51
Wanting to make sure that his constituents were aware of his cause in the House and comprehended why he acted as he did, Adams prepared four lengthy, public letters for them. Eventually grouped together in a pamphlet, they totaled forty printed pages. He provided a detailed account of his battle with southerners over petitions. He also spelled out his conviction about the pernicious impact of slavery. In the letters he presented himself as a man imbued with the higher duty of defending fundamental rights. He identified with his voters, all “Sons of Plymouth Pilgrims” immersed in the struggle to maintain the ideals of the Declaration and the Constitution.52
For him the petitions served to highlight the danger slavery and its political power posed to the nation. He knew his pushing that sacred right would cause an explosion among the representatives of slavery, “master members” he called them. Because he did so, “the torrid zone was in commotion.” In his description their emotions outstripped their reason, with “blind precipitancy and fury” governing the southern response to his initiative.
At the same time he spoke positively about the handful of southerners who realized their comrades had gone too far in attempting to censure him. These men had nothing but contempt for Adams’s petitions, but they recognized that such punishment threatened the independence of all members, including themselves. Their stance broke southern unanimity and led to the withdrawal of the most offensive resolution and eventually to Adams’s vindication.
His admitting the decency of these few did not, however, cause him to temper his assault on slavery. He castigated slave owners for classifying one group of native-born Americans as outcasts of human nature, even as brutes, because of their African ancestry. For him slavery already had “too deep and too baleful an influence” upon the history of the country. He asserted that the institution could only operate as “a slow poison to the morals of any community infected with it.” And, in his opinion, the United States was “infected with it to the vitals.”
In slavery’s demand for its rights, he discovered a great paradox. The masters in Congress claimed that the national government had no right to interfere with slavery in the states “in any manner.” If that is the case, he asked, what right does slavery have to interfere with the free states, with, for example, “the sacred privacy of correspondence by the mail?” How can slavery call on the national government for defense, for “vindication of her pretended and polluted rights?” He answered, of course, that slavery had no such right. Vigilance was essential, and he would be vigilant.
While Adams assailed the South and slave owners, southerners struck back. In the House undaunted congressmen from the slave states accused him of endangering the Union and fomenting slave insurrection. Mail from individuals, overwhelmingly from southerners, brought more dire threats. By the end of the decade, he had received scores. Warnings about bodily harm, even death, were commonplace. One man seemed especially determined. In a second letter affirming his intentions already expressed in a previous one, he said his journey to Washington had been slowed initially by ice in the Ohio River and now by rheumatism, which had struck him in a town in western Maryland. Still, he assured Adams he would reach the capital in a week and would shoot him whether in the House or in the street. Even though Adams did not dismiss these warnings out of hand as false alarms, he refused to be intimidated. He would stand his ground against the potential dangers, just as he did against the imprecations hurled against him in the House.53
The slave-state congressmen who attempted to silence him elicited his utter scorn. Not only did he return oratorical fire in the House chamber, but in his diary he displayed his contempt for them individually. He had previously belittled Speaker Polk, whom he battled over the introduction of petitions, as unqualified to be anything more than a county court lawyer. A Virginian he dubbed “a beef headed blunderhead.” He lacerated a North Carolinian: “There is not a more cankered or venomous reptile in the country.” Of a South Carolinian he wrote that the man’s “speeches sound like a tin canister, half filled with stones, rolling down an entry staircase.” Another South Carolinian he seared with commonplace epithets, branding him “as cunning as four Yankees, sly as four Quakers.” Upon a corpulent Alabamian’s election to the Senate, Adams lampooned both his size and energy—his “twenty score of flesh have been transferred from slumber in the House to sleep in the Senate.”54
At the same time he made an exception for a few southerners, all anti-Jackson and anti–Van Buren men and almost all of them Whigs. Adams’s wrath had a distinctly partisan hue. A South Carolina senator, not a follower of Calhoun, he praised for the eloquence, beauty, and wit of his speeches. Four years later he described the solon as “the most accomplished orator” in that chamber. “Oh for his elocution,” an envious Adams cried. A second South Carolinian, also not a Calhoun apostle, he considered a polished, educated man and a brilliant scholar. Even so, he found both men morally deficient because they lacked fundamental moral principles in their views of slavery. Adams refused to realize that almost every southerner accepted the necessity of slavery, though it is impossible to know how many truly embraced the institution. He also failed to understand that any southerner overtly opposing slavery faced ostracism, or even expulsion.55
Clearly his partial caveat did not apply to every southerner he respected, especially those who openly identified with the Whig party. Although these men regularly joined their Democratic brethren in defending slavery, in Adams’s view they had the virtue of steadily siding, as did he, with Whig economic policy, for example, the tariff and a national bank. He applauded a slave-owning senator from Louisiana for his talent, taste, good heart, and classical learning. Adams mourned his death, which he termed a serious loss for the country, for it meant the replacement would be “a stinkard,” undoubtedly a Democrat. A young congressman from Georgia received this generous compliment: “a man of talents, of good principles, and gentlemanly manners.” After the death of Lewis Williams of North Carolina, the longest-serving member of the House, Adams made brief remarks praising him in the chamber. He spoke of Williams as “the father of the House” and one of the best men, not only in the House but in the world. He even walked arm in arm with a North Carolina colleague, also a Whig, at the head of Williams’s funeral procession.56
For all his sharply different opinions about southerners in Congress, he did acknowledge that in the House southerners, even Democrats, treated him civilly. He said in a conversation with a Massachusetts friend that all dealt with him as gentlemen, and “most of them with kindness and courtesy.” He surmised that the southerners respected him because he did not truckle to them. According to Adams, southerners generally scorned those who did. These trucklers he termed “dough-faces,” the sobriquet John Randolph of Roanoke had given northern politicians who did the southerners’ bidding. But Adams went on to say that “so marked a difference [existed] between the manners of the South and of the North” that intimacy between members should be quite rare.57
An example of the respect Adams referred to concerned Congressmen Francis Pickens of South Carolina, an especially vociferous friend of slavery and foe of Adams on the floor of Congress. In his diary he recorded an occasion when Pickens came to his desk in the House to ask his opinion of a school in the District for young ladies, which his granddaughters had attended.58
Adams himself had not the slightest respect for the doughfaces whom he had long reviled. The most notable among them was now president. Even though the New Yorker had reached the presidency, Martin Van Buren in Adams’s view had not shed his basic character flaws. Admitting that Van Buren did possess certain good qualities, Adams listed a cordial and calm manner along with discretion. They paled, however, beside “his obsequiousness, his sycophancy, his profound dissimulation and duplicity.” Even worse, in Adams’s catalog of defects, the president’s “fawning servility” formed “the most disgusting part of his character.” Adams characteristically besmirched a personality that differed from his own.
Yet, in public, Adams managed a most civil relationship with the man of a diametrically opposite temperament. For Van Buren that kind of relationship was second nature, but for Adams it took effort. Attending a large social gathering, he noticed Van Buren. And he commented on the chief executive’s courteousness toward him. Van Buren even gave him a ride home in his carriage, telling his companion he would be glad to see him. Adams replied that he would call very soon. And this he did, dining with the president, along with cabinet officers.59
Adams’s dealings with certain southerners as well as with Van Buren revealed that he could divorce the personal from the political at least in public, provided those he condemned acted mannerly toward him. With one critical relationship, however, that demonstration of social courtesies never occurred.
Adams’s hatred of Andrew Jackson only grew over time, to which the Tennessean responded in kind. Because Jackson never separated the political from the personal, he would never seriously extend public civility toward anyone who in his judgment had wronged him. And in his estimation Adams surely had. Sharing that aggrieved feeling, Adams rained epithets upon the man he had at an earlier time vigorously championed. Jackson was “ravenous of notoriety,” for Adams a despicable trait. Jackson was enslaved by his passions, meaning he had no self-control, an equally contemptible attribute in the New Englander’s eyes. According to Adams, “insolence and insult” marked President Jackson’s relations with Congress. For Adams, Jackson’s passions were fueled by a rampaging lust to disparage those like himself whom Jackson without cause had labeled as enemies. Jackson “glutted his revenge” by creating fictitious affronts, which led to “bold, dashing, base, and utterly baseless lies.”60
Jackson matched Adams’s vituperation. No man could outhate Jackson. He battered Adams for supposed vindictiveness in efforts to defame him. Lying had become central in Adams’s makeup, Jackson wrote, asserting he “delights more in falsehood than truth.” He summarized this judgment with a dismissive phrase, “that lying old scamp.” The former president even suggested that his antagonist was demented, for after all “reckless depravity” marked his conduct. Late in life Jackson concluded that Adams’s “wickedness has never been surpassed by any thing in recorded history.”61
Fierceness of language could not match the ferocity of another practice that reinforced Adams’s animus toward the slaveholding South. Dueling was widely condoned in the South as necessary to protect honor. In contrast, Adams had long believed the potentially lethal clash between two men to be a barbaric practice. In the 1830s he connected it to the South’s major institution, terming it “an appendage to slavery.”62
The duel had come to America from class-conscious European officers who crossed the Atlantic to fight in the Revolutionary War. They upheld the tradition of private warfare to vindicate the honor of gentlemen. Their code obviously impressed certain Americans, both North and South. Undoubtedly the most famous duel in American history took place in 1804 in New Jersey when Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton. The Burr-Hamilton clash notwithstanding, the duel more and more became associated with the South. Northerners condemned dueling, and it practically disappeared in the free states. Southern states also outlawed that mode of conduct, mandating various penalties for participants. Although state after state banned dueling, the idea of the duel had penetrated the essence of white southern society. Laws could not eradicate it, and the duel flourished until 1860.
Southerners who counted themselves in the upper order of society fought duels to defend their honor, their reputation, their good name. These qualities became extensions of the southern absorption with liberty and independence. They became two parts of one whole—an independent man was by definition an honorable man; a man who cherished his liberty could not allow anyone to besmirch his reputation. This concept gripped southerners intensely because in the South dependence and dishonor meant slavery. Only slaves had to accept assaults on their reputation, their integrity, their honor. White southerners thus embraced the duel to underscore their distance from slavelike characteristics. That southern legislatures exempted individual duelists from the provisions of antidueling laws just as readily as they passed the laws beautifully illustrates that the duel involved fundamental values. That southern society accepted, even demanded, the practice of personal warfare bolsters that conclusion.63
Almost all of Adams’s major southern contemporaries adopted the culture of dueling. Even men of the stature of Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson fought duels. Clay, in fact, went to the dueling grounds while serving as Adams’s secretary of state. On that occasion he faced John Randolph of Roanoke, at the time one of Virginia’s U.S. senators. That engagement ended in the manner most proponents of dueling hoped for. Neither was hurt, but both had affirmed his honor.
The duel leapt into national attention because of one event in February 1838. A dispute arose between two young congressmen—William Graves, a Whig from Kentucky, and Jonathan Cilley, a Democrat from Maine. This quarrel originated in notes passed between the two after Cilley on the floor of the House had vigorously criticized a Whig editor, who was Graves’s friend. The exchange quickly became nasty, and Graves challenged Cilley to a duel. Even though he was certainly no southerner, Cilley felt compelled to accept.64
The men met at the dueling grounds with rifles as weapons in Bladensburg, Maryland, just beyond the boundary of the District of Columbia. This duel seemed especially uncivilized because Virginian Congressman Henry Wise, one of Graves’s seconds, insisted that firing continue even after each combatant had discharged his firearm, not only once but twice. On the third shot Graves killed Cilley.
News of the occurrence caused a national outcry because of what many saw as the barbarity of the event. Even the veteran duelist Andrew Jackson condemned it as murder and called on Congress to act. The blame was placed on Graves, and especially on Wise. According to the code seconds were supposed to assure after the initial exchange of gunfire left both contestants unhurt that each had satisfied the requirements of honor, and that the affair should end. Wise failed to do so, instead insisting the firing continue. The uproar even had a partisan dimension, with northern Democrats charging that Graves had murdered Cilley.65
The vigorous reaction soon ensnared Adams. He had been unwilling to push an antidueling measure because he thought it hopeless. The southerners and their allies had too much strength. Zeal alone, he wrote, could not accomplish the task. Yet in the aftermath of the Graves-Cilley duel, the House resolved to have a special committee look into duels and inform the full House of its findings. The speaker named Adams as one of seven on the committee. In late April the committee provided a lengthy, comprehensive report. After considerable debate, the House tabled it.66
In the meantime, an antidueling bill was making headway in the Senate. Introduced shortly after the duel took place, this measure did not gain approval before the second session of the Twenty-Fifth Congress adjourned in July. But upon the convening of the third session in December, the Senate once again took it up, and passed it on January 23, 1839. Its penalty section included possible imprisonment for members of Congress who dueled.
In the House, Adams eagerly supported it. According to him no subject before the House had more importance. Yet he thought its enactment would be difficult. In his diary he posited that his efforts for it would require “above all things, the perfect mastery of my own temper—for which I pray for aid from above.”
Tumult reigned when the House considered the bill. Attempts to thwart it, to delay its passage, abounded. Amendments were proposed. Motions for adjournment one after another followed. None succeeded. Some members absented themselves, a number of them remaining just outside the doors. The Speaker then directed the sergeant-at-arms to corral the absentees and bring them back into the chamber, forcibly if necessary. Finally, on February 13, 1837, the House gave its approval to the antidueling bill by the wide margin of 118–18. The southern partisans for the duel had failed to block it. Adams had succeeded. On this occasion the mores of New England had bested those of the southerners.67
Despite Adams’s new obsession with fighting slavery, he did not spend all of his congressional time on these issues. An unexpected bequest from a wealthy Englishman especially excited him. James Smithson’s complicated will left half a million dollars to the U.S. government to found an establishment in Washington that would advance knowledge and be named the Smithsonian Institution. Adjusted for inflation, that sum today would come to approximately thirteen million dollars. Informed of this bounty, President Jackson in a message to Congress in December 1835 stated that the executive had no authority to accept the award. Congress, if it so chose, must enact the measures necessary to obtain it and also decide upon its use.68
Both houses of Congress reacted positively, and with scant evidence of partisanship. In the House, Adams was named chair of a special committee to draft a bill that would accomplish that goal. In addition his committee prepared a thorough report that would result in the creation of an institution devoted to research. The House approved his handiwork. The Senate also passed an enabling resolution. In reconciling the two, Adams’s blueprint won the endorsement of both chambers. The money arrived in the United States in the form of gold coins.
Adams exulted in the possibilities offered by this bountiful gift. He wanted the fund kept whole and used solely for “the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” He did not want it connected with any other entity, nor did he desire the new organization in any way to be dependent upon the appropriations of public money. His objective was absolute independence to achieve a noble end. Moreover, he insisted that the endowment itself remain untouched; only the interest should be expended. The consequence for him would be the creation of a major research institution. He opposed the granting of any money to any particular college or school, for what he termed “common education.” In his judgment spending the money in that fashion would fritter it away piecemeal and invite political favoritism and jobbery.69
He envisioned the Smithsonian Institution as a hallmark of his nation’s commitment to expanding man’s understanding of his world and the universe, which would surely include his long-held dream of an astronomical observatory. When president, he could never get Congress to join him in this endeavor. But now, with this windfall, the country could place itself in the vanguard of the quest for knowledge. The Smithsonian could become the American counterpart of major European research institutions. To ensure that his inspiration had a chance for success, he strove energetically to bring national leaders to his side. Even though he opposed the Van Buren administration politically, he lobbied the president and several cabinet members, always pressing upon them what he saw as their godsend, and his efforts did not cease after Van Buren left office.70
He worried this incredible opportunity would end up like the shattered goals of his own presidency. And the perpetrators of this new travesty would be the same breed of shortsighted and selfish politicians who had wrecked his earlier hopes. He employed vivid language, fearing “the noble and most munificent donation” would be “wasted upon hungry and worthless political jackals.” No matter his pessimism, he was determined to do all in his power to thwart all those who aimed to torpedo his design.71
He knew that reaching that objective would be neither easy nor quick, but he never flagged. For a decade he remained the House committee chair, always vigilant against all attempts to poach on the Smithsonian preserve. A final decision on the shape of the Smithsonian Institution did not take place until 1846, only two years before his death. The outcome was not exactly what Adams had been advocating. Instead of a thoughtfully organized research body, the congressionally created institution included a museum, laboratory, library, and art gallery. The bequest did remain intact, however, and the institution would be controlled by a nonpolitical board of regents. And an aged Adams did vote for the final bill.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the twenty-first, the Smithsonian Institution developed into a depository for national treasures and a variety of educational and research activities. No one was more responsible than Adams himself for guaranteeing that the Smithsonian endowment did not become a piggy bank for self-interested politicians. Moreover, no one else had more impact on placing the institution on the path that led to its current distinction.
Whether grappling with southerners or bugling for the Smithsonian, Adams had to retain his seat in Congress to continue his crusade. In 1836 he won his fourth term by the massive margin of more than 80 percent of the vote, an even larger triumph than his two earlier blowouts, both exceeding 70 percent. In the middle of the following year he commented on his overwhelming strength in his district. “No other voice is heard,” he noted in his diary. At the same time he realized that almost miraculous situation could change. After all, he operated in a roily political world.72
A slight shift, however, did occur in the next contest. Even though all the state legislators from his congressional district congratulated him for his service in the second session of the Twenty-Fourth Congress, his Democratic opponents did not intend to permit his reelection to pass without a fight. By 1838 united Democratic and Whig parties had developed into national competitors for electoral victory. Though generally a minority in Massachusetts and certainly so in the Twelfth District, Democrats did not want to hand over to Adams an unobstructed path to yet another term.
As a result, Democrats in the district put up an avowed abolitionist, hoping that their loyalists allied with voters of that bent would make the Democratic presence felt. Adams realized that “the whole Van Buren phalanx” now backed his abolitionist opponent. The tactic of the Democrats worked, to a degree. Nevertheless, they remained far behind. Adams’s majority slipped to 59 percent, still a landslide by any political calculation.73
Before Election Day friends urged him to make a speaking tour of towns in the district. Agreeing to such canvassing, however, was impossible for him. He dismissed it as “the stump eloquence of the Southern and Western States,” with which he would have no part. He had never campaigned in this manner and had no intention of starting. Moreover, he felt the practice was beneath the standards of proper New England politics. Although he regretted that the South and the West at the moment might be dominating national affairs, he did not want his beloved New England adopting what he considered their inferior mores, political included.74
Reelected in 1838 with more than a comfortable margin for his fifth term, yet not having yielded in his convictions about politicking, Adams could feel confident that his constituency stood solidly behind him. His political independence secure, he could continue to follow his own course in the House as the nation began throttling into an increasingly vicious and raucous political way that would define the mid-nineteenth century.