Though born in a free state, Henry Adams grew up in a republic conspicuous for its unfree. The first U.S. census taken after his birth showed some 2.5 million slaves in the United States, the vast majority, but by no means all, in the South. While a ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Court effectively abolished chattel servitude in 1783, gradual emancipation laws in neighboring New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut allowed New England slavery to survive into the 1850s. Abolitionists were quick to point out, however, that even Massachusetts, with its fleet of textile factories reliant upon southern cotton, remained linked to the slave system. This passive partnership between the “Lords of the Lash” and the “Lords of the Loom” produced a deep and ultimately irreparable rift within the Bay State’s Whig Party, the chief opponent in national politics of the older Democratic coalition founded under Thomas Jefferson and later refurbished by Andrew Jackson. Conscience Whigs, those morally opposed to slavery’s expansion, resided on one side of the divide, while a larger number of Cotton Whigs, eager to keep the profitable manufacturing mills of nearby Lowell churning out cloth and carpets, hosiery and other woven fabrics, occupied the other. Both Henry’s father and Grandfather Adams were Conscience Whigs.
Charles Francis’s interest in the slave question arose largely from circumstances surrounding the Mexican War (1846–48). Like many northerners, he worried that the conflict, which resulted in an American victory and the third-largest acquisition of territory in the nation’s history following the Louisiana and Alaska purchases, might conclude in a vast new empire of unfree labor. Accordingly, in 1846, he purchased two-fifths of the Boston Daily Whig, took over its editorial pages, and turned it into a bulwark of Conscience Whig sentiment. This incensed more orthodox Whigs, who attacked both his paper and his judgment. Edward Everett, a prominent Boston pastor and politician, later to offer a two-hour oration at the same 1863 dedication ceremony of the Gettysburg National Cemetery made historic by Lincoln’s two-minute address, thought the paper imprudent. Married to Charlotte Gray Brooks, an elder sister of Abigail Brown Brooks and thus Charles Francis’s brother-in-law, Everett worried that the Daily Whig sought to poison Massachusetts politics by “plac[ing] the Whig party under abolition influences.” Adams had no such designs. Like his father, now sitting in the House of Representatives, he believed that the federal Constitution provided certain and inviolable guarantees to slaveholders in slave states, though not in the nation’s shared territories. “The [sectional] compromise of the Constitution does not require us to go thus far,” he wrote at that time. “It does not bind us to approve of slavery… nor to look with composure upon a system of dishonesty practised to extend its limits to another and a new country, not infected by that blast.”1 As the country moved toward war with Mexico, Adams grew increasingly concerned that northern rights were being trampled. His resistance to slavery, in other words, had less to do with the peculiar institution’s inherent inhumanity than with his belief that the interests of free men were under assault. His sons adopted this view as well, as did a good many in the North.
If not an abolitionist paper, the Daily Whig did propose a number of items designed to check the progress of the southern planter class. These included calls to end slavery in the District of Columbia, to terminate the interstate slave trade, and to make the exclusion of slavery a condition for future states entering the union. This last demand took on a particular urgency when the Mexican War promised through conquest to dramatically enlarge the United States—as indeed the subsequent cession by the defeated Mexicans of all or part of present-day Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California proved. John Quincy Adams, representing Massachusetts’s 12th Congressional District (Plymouth), was one of only fourteen House members to vote against the war bill, and he remained an uncompromising critic of the conflict. He died in February 1848 from a massive cerebral hemorrhage shortly after collapsing during a war-related debate in Congress. Years later, Henry described how the old man’s outlook had influenced his own, imparting an “education… warped beyond recovery in the direction of puritan politics.”2
In June 1848, a few months after Henry turned ten, a Whig convention meeting in Philadelphia awarded Maj. Gen. Zachary Taylor the party’s presidential nomination. Having commanded American forces in Mexico to victories at the battles of Palo Alto, Monterrey, and Buena Vista, Taylor, a career soldier with no prior political experience, received a hero’s welcome on his return home. A Virginian by birth, he was raised in Kentucky and owned Cypress Grove, a nearly two-thousand-acre Mississippi plantation that produced cotton, corn, and tobacco; because he held slaves, Taylor proved an unpalatable candidate to antislavery Whigs. In early August some twenty thousand of the disaffected, including representatives from eighteen states, met under a massive tent in Buffalo, New York’s city park to form a new coalition, the Free Soil Party. Walt Whitman served as one of Brooklyn’s fifteen delegates, and Frederick Douglass, among others, addressed the gathering. Charles Francis presided over the convention and, in an opening speech, denounced the Whig-Democrat concert as archaic, stuck in past politics, and unable to contend with the brewing battle shaping up over slavery’s future. These two parties, he argued, were “fighting only for expediency, and… expecting nothing but [patronage].”3
In reply, the Free Soilers nominated former president Martin Van Buren, a controversial maneuver that alienated many of the delegates. A longtime Democrat, he had captured the White House in 1836, failed to win reelection in 1840, and then watched with dismay as his party’s presidential nominations went to other candidates in both 1844 and 1848. Now open to the idea of heading a third faction, Van Buren, so his enemies insisted, was nothing more than an opportunistic “Doughface”—a northern man with southern principles. As Andrew Jackson’s vice president he had supported the first in a series of controversial “gag rules” that for several years accepted but forbade discussion on abolitionist petitions sent to Congress. Seeking regional balance on the ticket, the Buffalo convention gave western Free Soilers the second slot, but, instead of choosing one of their own, they surprised the assemblage by proposing Charles Francis. After the requisite hemming and hawing, he accepted. The party’s plank recognized the legality of slavery where it stood—“We… propose no interference by Congress with slavery within the limits of any state”—but opposed its extension into the country’s territories: “[The] history [of the Founding era] clearly show that it was the settled policy of the nation not to extend, nationalize, or encourage, but to limit, to localize, and discourage slavery; and to this policy, which should never have been departed from the government ought to return.” Threatening to upend the tenuous sectional status quo, Boston’s Free Soilers became pariahs on polite Beacon Street. Henry later argued that his father “could not help it. With the record of J. Q. Adams fresh in the popular memory, his son and his only representative could not make terms with the slave-power, and the slave-power overshadowed all the great Boston interests.”4
In a tightly contested fall campaign, Taylor narrowly defeated his Democratic opponent, former Michigan senator Lewis Cass, by a count of 163 electoral votes to 127; both candidates carried fifteen states. The Free Soil ticket captured no electors, though it took 10 percent of the popular tally—at that time the highest percentage ever for a third party in a presidential race. Additionally, Free Soilers sent fourteen representatives and two senators to Congress. “This political party,” Henry later explained, “became a chief influence in [my] education… in the six years 1848 to 1854, and violently affected [my] character at the moment when character is plastic.” He further described this critical period in the country’s history as a “renewed war,” meaning a resumption of the seemingly eternal Adams–New England Puritan fight against anything compromised, wicked, or wrong.5 His subsequent efforts during the Gilded Age to combat various forms of political, financial, and corporate corruption can be tied directly to these heroic days of youth in which he observed his father and grandfather challenge the mighty Slave Power. Their defiance struck him as nothing less than an irrepressible family calling—and one that called him, too.