SAM HOUSTON COULD have become the next Andrew Jackson—Young Hickory to Old Hickory—if not for a marriage gone badly wrong. As a soldier in Jackson’s army, Houston had won the general’s esteem for conspicuous bravery; as a congressman from Tennessee, he helped direct Jackson’s campaign for president; as governor of Tennessee at the time of Jackson’s inauguration, he showed a political flair that endeared him to the same people who had voted for Jackson. But his recent marriage to a woman half his age blew up just weeks after the wedding, and the humiliated Houston spun out of control. He resigned his governorship and vanished into the West. Periodic reports from Arkansas Territory, where he lived among the Indians, indicated that he spent much of the next two years on an epic bender, drowning his heartbreak. The Indians called him Big Drunk, and people who had known him in better times, including Jackson, wondered if he would ever recover. Finally he resurfaced, with a plan for regaining his honor and the respect of Jackson, whom he considered a second father. He would travel quietly to Texas, which Jackson had been trying to purchase from Mexico, and rouse American expatriates there to rebellion. Once freed from Mexico’s grip, Texas would apply for admission to the United States. Jackson would get the territory he wanted and would welcome back his prodigal son. Houston would be a hero and either the first governor of American Texas or one of its first senators.
Houston’s project commenced according to plan. Mexico’s president and commanding general, Antonio López de Santa Anna, alarmed at the unruliness of the Americans who poured into Texas in defiance of Mexican immigration laws, launched a crackdown that enabled the Americans to wrap themselves in the mantle of 1776 and claim spiritual kinship to the Americans who rose in rebellion against George III. A Texas declaration of independence echoed Thomas Jefferson’s version, and after a bloody setback at the Alamo, the Texans won a decisive victory at San Jacinto, where Sam Houston accepted the surrender of Santa Anna.
But the second phase of the project—the annexation of Texas to the United States—got stuck. Texans practiced slavery, and American opponents of slavery, including John Quincy Adams, objected to the addition of its vast territory, large enough for multiple states, to slavery’s existing realm in the South. Adams’s Massachusetts constituents mostly agreed with him that slavery was a blight on America’s honor and republican conscience. They sent him petition after petition imploring Congress to keep Texas out of the Union. Adams duly presented the petitions to the House, adding his own opposition.
Adams thought the entire Texas affair dubious in the extreme. He knew of the close relationship between Houston and Andrew Jackson, and he suspected Jackson of abetting the Texas rebellion. When Jackson’s 1836 annual message congratulated the Texans on achieving independence, Adams excoriated the president’s “very lame account of the wanton disregard of the rights of nations in the invasion of the Mexican territories.” Adams proposed resolutions calling on the president to hand over documents bearing on the Texas matter. The resolutions failed to gain a majority, but Adams commenced his own investigation. A defector from the Jackson side shared intelligence the defector said demonstrated the chicanery of Jackson toward Mexico and Texas. “It is so,” Adams agreed in his diary, “and proves that Jackson’s bold and dashing character was nevertheless capable of double-dealing worthy of Ferdinand the Catholic or of Tiberius Caesar. All the proceedings relating to Texas and Mexico have been in the same style.”
Adams’s protests got little attention. “Wind and tide are against me on this subject,” he remarked. But he had never required public approbation to do what he deemed right, and he pressed on. He tested the patience of the leadership in the House, which allowed him to speak on Texas but only intermittently. The result was a disjointed series of one-hour addresses that spanned three weeks during the summer of 1838. Adams adduced various reasons why Texas should not be annexed, starting with the lies and warmongering of the president and his aides. “The conduct of the executive administration of this government toward Mexico was marked by duplicity and hostility—by hostility to the extent of a deliberate design of plunging us into a war with that power, for the purpose of dismembering her territories and annexing a large portion of them to this Union,” he said. Adams challenged the power of Congress to authorize annexation of a foreign republic. Nothing like this had ever been attempted, he noted, and nothing in the Constitution authorized it.
But the most compelling reason Texas should be kept out of the Union was that annexation would spread the evil empire of bondage. After Adams had cited instance after instance of the barbarity of slavery, Francis Pickens of South Carolina complained that Adams, a Yankee, had no knowledge of slavery in practice. Adams retorted that Pickens, a slaveholder, was the one who lacked knowledge. “He knows nothing of the real operation of the system,” Adams said. “I do not in the least doubt that he is, himself, a kind and indulgent master; so, I doubt not, are all the gentlemen who represent his state on this floor. They know not the horrors that belong to the system.” Pickens didn’t associate with the worst of the slaveholding class. “He does not know the cruel, the tyrannical, the hard-hearted master. He does not know the profligate villain who procreates children from his slaves and then sells his own children as slaves. He does not know the crushing and destruction of all the tenderest and holiest ties of nature which that system produces, but which I have seen, with my own eyes, in this city of Washington.”
Adams gave an example: “Twelve months have not passed since a woman in this District was taken with her four infant children and separated from her husband, who was a free man, to be sent away, I know not where. That woman, in a dungeon in Alexandria, killed with her own hand two of her children, and attempted to kill the others.” This was what slavery did to human beings, Adams said, and this was why its expansion must be halted.
ADAMS AND OTHER critics of slavery became such a thorn in the side of the Democratic majority, and the petitions, memorials and remonstrances they brought from antislavery groups such an obstruction to legislation on other topics, that the House adopted a gag rule regarding antislavery petitions. Such petitions would be tabled without discussion or consideration.
Adams protested the gag rule as unconstitutional and immoral. The First Amendment guaranteed the right of petition, he pointed out. And by silencing antislavery petitioners, the gag rule kept the House from confronting the overriding moral issue of the age. Adams refused to obey the rule, finding one means and then another to introduce the petitions.
A group of Southern congressmen proposed to censure Adams. One of the first of several measures drafted for the purpose resolved: “That John Quincy Adams, a member from the State of Massachusetts, by his attempts to introduce into this House a petition from slaves, for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, committed an outrage on the rights and feelings of a large portion of the people of this Union; a flagrant contempt of the dignity of this House; and, by extending to slaves a privilege only belonging to freemen, directly invites the slave population to insurrection; and that the said member be forthwith called to the bar of the House, to be censured by the Speaker.”
Adams deflected this thrust by pointing out that he had not in fact introduced a petition from slaves for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, worthy though that end was. He had merely inquired whether a petition from slaves, as opposed to petitions from voters, fell under the gag rule.
The Southerners answered the question with another censure resolution: “That the right of petition does not belong to the slaves of this Union, and that no petition from them can be presented to this House, without derogating from the rights of the slaveholding states and endangering the integrity of the Union.” The resolution added: “That any member who shall hereafter present any such petition to the House ought to be considered as regardless of the feelings of the House, the rights of the South, and an enemy to the Union.”
Adams couldn’t contain his disgust. “Regardless of the feelings of the House!” he sneered. “What have the feelings of the House to do with the free agency of a member in the discharge of his duty? One of the most sacred duties of a member is to present the petitions committed to his charge, a duty which he cannot refuse or neglect to perform, without violating his oath to support the Constitution of the United States.
“Regardless of the rights of the South!” he continued, his temper rising. “What are the rights of the South? What is the South?” The South consisted of masters, nearly all white; of slaves, entirely black; and of other persons of both races. But it was only the rights of the first group that were being considered by the authors of the gag rule. “The rights of the South, then, here mean the rights of the masters of slaves, which, to describe them by an inoffensive word, I will call the rights of mastery.” Adams acknowledged that these rights were recognized implicitly by the Constitution. “But they are rights incompatible with the inalienable rights of all mankind, as set forth in the Declaration of Independence; incompatible with the fundamental principles of the constitutions of all the free states of the Union.
“An enemy to the Union!” he went on. “For presenting a petition! An enemy to the Union!” Adams shook his head in wonder that the South was reaching so far, trampling the Constitution and invoking the specter of treason as employed by tyrants. The gag rule was wholly unprecedented. “Since the existence of the Constitution of the United States, there has never before been an example of an attempt in the House of Representatives to punish one of its members for words spoken by him in the performance of his duty.” And it was another sign that slavery had corrupted the essence of republicanism. “Slavery has already had too deep and too baleful an influence upon the affairs and upon the history of this Union. It can never operate but as a slow poison to the morals of any community infected with it. Ours is infected with it to the vitals.”
A member from Virginia had objected to Adams’s effort to introduce a petition from some colored women of Fredericksburg. “The gentleman went further,” Adams said, “and made the objection that I had presented a petition from women of infamous character—prostitutes, I think he called them.”
The member interrupted: “It was not so. When the gentleman presented that petition, which I knew came from mulattoes in a slave state, I meant to confine my objection to petitions of mulattoes or free negroes in the Southern states. I meant to rescue the ladies of Fredericksburg from the stigma of having signed such a petition. Sir, no lady in Fredericksburg would sign such a petition.”
Adams almost snarled: “With respect to the question what female is entitled to the character of a lady, I should be sorry to enter into a discussion here.” Yet he denied having used the word in question. “When I have presented these petitions, I have usually said they were from women, and that, to my heart, is a dearer appellation than ladies.” Adams was mistaken in this case; he had in fact written the phrase “ladies of Fredericksburg” on the petition. But he wasn’t going to let his opponent off the hook. “The gentleman from Virginia says he knows these women, and that they are infamous. How does the gentleman know it?”
Laughter rippled through the House.
The member defended himself. “I did not say that I knew the women personally,” he explained. “I knew from others that the character of one of them was notoriously bad.”
“I am glad the gentleman now says he does not know these women, for if he had not disclaimed that knowledge, I might have asked who it was that made these women infamous, whether it was those of their own color or their masters,” Adams rejoined. “I have understood that there are those among the colored population of slaveholding states who bear the image of their masters.”
The House erupted again, but this time in Southern anger. Adams was unfazed. A member from South Carolina had observed that a lawmaker in his state who proposed abolition was subject to grand jury indictment. Adams sneered again. “Did the gentleman think he could frighten me from my purpose by his threat of a grand jury? If that was his object, let me tell him, he mistook his man. I am not to be frightened from the discharge of a duty by the indignation of the gentleman from South Carolina, nor by all the grand juries in the universe.”