John Quincy Adams

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by James Traub


  Adams’ speech against war on April 27 attracted the attention of Benjamin Lundy, an abolitionist who had traveled extensively in Texas. He sent Adams a letter praising his stand, and included a series of letters on Texas that he had just published in Robert Walsh’s National Gazette. Lundy claimed that Texan leaders and Southern slave owners had hatched a secret plan to win independence and divide Texas into as many as fifteen states, all committed to slavery. (Mexico had banned slavery.) According to the scheme, he wrote, “every facility is to be given to the introduction of slaves” from the South as well from Cuba and Africa. The slave trade “will be perpetuated perhaps for centuries.” As an added fillip, Lundy argued that Northern land speculators had been secretly buying up vast tracts of land, so that an independent Texas would constitute an unholy coalition between Northern capitalists and Southern slaveholders. Adams wrote back to Lundy immediately asking for more documents, including an English translation of the Mexican law emancipating the slaves. Lundy swiftly complied.

  Lundy was the kind of man Adams could not resist—morally driven, theologically inspired, fully prepared to sacrifice everything in the name of principle. For a brief period, he and Adams were to play indispensable roles in one another’s life. Lundy was the John the Baptist of abolitionism—a lone figure, crying in the wilderness. Born into a Quaker family in New Jersey in 1789, Lundy moved out West, where he was shocked to see slaves driven through the streets. In 1816 Lundy persuaded several of his friends to form an anti-slavery society. Five years later he started up the Genius of Universal Emancipation, the first anti-slavery newspaper in the country. At the time, according to his biographer, Lundy had no money, no printing press, no knowledge of publishing, and no more than six subscribers. Undaunted—undauntable—he moved to Tennessee, a slave state, where he loudly denounced slavery, putting his life in sufficient jeopardy that he moved again, to Baltimore—also in slave territory.

  Barely educated, Lundy preferred action to advocacy. He traveled to Haiti in the hopes of persuading free American blacks to emigrate there. In 1827 he sent one of the very first petitions to Congress demanding an end to slavery in Washington. “Let petitions and memorials flow into the halls of Congress, from all quarters,” he wrote in Genius—prematurely, it turned out. Lundy’s writings inspired the next generation of abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, who took over the editorship of Genius in 1829. Lundy and Garrison ultimately fell out over the latter’s radicalism and hostility to orthodox religion.

  Though slight of stature and frail, Lundy was extraordinarily brave. He walked across much of Canada in the dead of winter and then trekked across Texas, in disguise, in the height of summer. In the town of San Felipe he was threatened with tar and feather. In a journal he then kept he wrote, “I gave them all to understand, however, that I was not to be so easily intimidated.” Lundy was almost always broke, and unlike most abolitionists he frequently lived with and among black people. They often helped him survive. He had a wild scheme to buy a tract of land in Mexico, settle free blacks there, and then sell their produce in the United States, thus proving that blacks could be more productive as free men than as slaves—a precursor of the “Free Soil” movement. When the plan fell through, he returned to the United States, his health failing, and wrote his articles for Robert Walsh, since he no longer had a paper of his own.

  Lundy could neither write nor speak as convincingly as the well-born and well-educated New Englanders who had begun to fill the ranks of the abolitionist movement. They were bound to supplant him. But he knew more about Texas, and more about the real conditions of slavery, than any of them. At the time he was far more useful to Adams than were sedentary men of the cloth like William Ellery Channing, whose tracts he read with minimal appreciation. Lundy provided Adams with information he needed as well as with a point of view he shared—that the Texas “revolution” was actually the slavocracy’s next frontier. Adams provided Lundy, the prophet in the wilderness, with something yet more precious—the voice to whom all men listened. The letter Lundy wrote to Adams in early May 1836 was one of the most inspired acts of his career. He now had an opportunity to shape the national debate.

  On May 16, word reached Washington that Texan troops under Sam Houston had defeated Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto, avenging the defeat at the Alamo and gaining independence for Texas. The hosannas to Anglo-Saxon superiority unleashed by the victory only increased Adams’ disgust. Armed with Lundy’s mass of documents, Adams was looking for a chance to expose what he deemed a monstrous plot. The issue, alas, was no longer under debate in the House. Instead, on the afternoon of May 25, Adams seized on the pretext of a vote to offer relief to victims of Indian raids in Alabama and Georgia. At first he spoke directly to the issue at hand, which he mocked as one of a new class of “scalping-knife and tomahawk laws” designed to loose a flood of tears and thus of federal funds. Yet since “mere commiseration” was no grounds for draining the Treasury, Adams said, one needed to look elsewhere for a rationale for such relief bills. Perhaps it lay in the expansive war powers the Constitution conferred on the executive.

  Adams now recalled that he had begged five minutes of the chair to explain why the first of the Pinckney resolutions had been invalid on its face. He had been denied that opportunity. Now he could explain himself, for his views of the present question—the relief bill—stemmed from the same line of reasoning he had hoped to disclose before he had been gagged. Under those same war powers, Adams explained, the government had every right to regulate slavery, including by banning the slave trade, as it had done in 1808. “Suppose,” Adams said, “the case of a servile war”—a slave uprising. Suppose the slave emancipates himself. Would the president be powerless “to recognize his emancipation by a treaty of peace,” even if only by doing so he could bring that war to an end? Adams appears to have been the first to publicly raise this shocking prospect, which formed the constitutional foundation of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Or suppose a war with Mexico—and now Adams, having already found a way to make his case on Congress’ powers over slavery, elaborated his argument on Texas, though opponents might have felt that it had little to do with the question at hand. It’s not hard to see why the members were crying “Order!”

  “The war now raging in Texas,” Adams said, “is a Mexican civil war, and a war for the re-establishment of slavery where it was abolished. It is not a servile war, but a war between slavery and emancipation, and every possible effort has been made to drive us into this war, on the side of slavery.” This was Lundy, pure and simple. In fact, since Mexico had barely bothered to enforce its ban on slavery, Texans did not have to fight a war in order to preserve the institution. Now Adams digressed from his digression, ridiculing the pretensions of those who saw San Jacinto as racial vindication. Why, he asked, kindle “the fires of hereditary national hatred?” Isn’t the South already consumed enough by such hatred? Adams twisted the elastic band of his oratory tighter and tighter, and then let it fly: “Do not you, an Anglo-Saxon, slave-holding exterminator of Indians, from the bottom of your soul, hate the Mexican-Spaniard-Indian, emancipator of slaves, and abolisher of slavery? And do you think that your hatred is not with equal cordiality returned?”

  Adams now spoke of the prospect of a race war with Mexico, one in which the United States would fight on the side of slavery against freedom. Could the United States even be confident of winning such a war? What if a new Mexican leader called for the Indian and the Negro slave to join him under the banner of freedom? Might he not take the war to the American South? And Mexico might not fight alone; Great Britain, the global champion of abolitionism, might take up the Mexican cause against the United States—an ironic reversal, to say the least. It’s impossible to know if Adams actually took these terrifying hypotheticals seriously, or if he were gleefully tormenting his adversaries so long as he had the floor. None of them, remarkably, rose to the bait, though when Adams finally resumed his seat, Charles Haynes of Georgia di
d say that “however fashionable it might be in this House to discuss everything but the subject under consideration, he would not follow the example of the honorable gentleman from Massachusetts.”

  The first session of the Twenty-Fourth Congress dragged on until July 4. Two territories, Michigan and Arkansas, sought admission to the Union. No new states had been admitted since the Missouri Compromise, and now the same rule of balance had to apply. If Michigan was to join as a free state, Arkansas must join as a slave state. The Arkansas state legislature used the opportunity to fire a shot at Adams and his ilk, inserting into the state constitution a provision stating that the federal government had no power to interfere with slavery. Henry Wise of Virginia, one of Adams’ inveterate antagonists, said that if Northerners tried to prohibit slavery in Arkansas, he would introduce a bill to permit slavery in Michigan. Several Northerners promised that they would do no such thing—at which point Adams rose to say, “When the Arkansas bill comes to the House, if no one else raises the subject of slavery, I will.” The debate continued all night June 8 and well into the next morning—twenty-five hours without a break. Adams did not leave the House, though most of his colleagues did. In his journal he noted that one member was “drunk with whiskey” while another was “drunk with slavery.” Arkansas was finally admitted to the Union as a slave state, and Michigan as a free state. Adams voted against the admission of Arkansas.

  IF NO ONE RAISED SLAVERY, HE WOULD—ADAMS HAD TAKEN A definitive and irrevocable stand as a strident and even solitary voice of conscience. He had declared war on his fellow Whigs as much as he had on the slaveholders and the annexationists. He would willingly pay the cost; his family would do so unwillingly. In early 1836 Charles wrote to his mother to say that Boston was in a tumult over Adams’ fierce attacks on Daniel Webster, as it once had been over his rhodomontade against the Hartford conspirators. Charles wrote that he would go abroad to escape the clamor, save that he had so many small children to care for. Louisa wrote back to say that her husband’s recent speeches had “completely cut us off from all society.” Louisa’s brothers-in-law, as well as many of her friends, owned slaves, and her husband had, or so it felt, damned them to perdition. In her diary, which she had resumed after a decade, she wrote, “Every friend is turned into an enemy; and now the prospect terminates with the fear of losing the love, the friendship and the society of my own nearest and dearest connections.” Why, Louisa asked herself in an agony of spirit, “am I foerever thrust into situations which it is known I cannot endure rationally?” She was helpless; her husband never discussed politics with her.

  Adams left Washington as soon as the session ended, taking the train to Baltimore and then to Philadelphia. In his hotel he received a delegation from the American Anti-Slavery Society, which wished to thank him in person for the stout role he had played in Congress. Adams turned them down. He did not, he said, share their views either on ending slavery in Washington or on the imperative of immediate abolition, which he feared would lead to insurrection and race war. But he could not escape so easily. He had continued corresponding with Lundy, and asked him to send a hundred copies of the letters on Texas he had published in the National Gazette. Lundy then came by as well, asking Adams to help fund a new abolitionist paper he was starting up. Adams declined, but he did agree to go to a meeting of Quakers at the home of the abolitionists James and Lucretia Mott.

  Adams and Lundy wrote one another incessantly through the spring and summer of 1836. The former president would not help the abolitionist pay for his newspaper, but he urged him to publish in it all the documents he had supplied. He fastidiously sent Lundy a $10 check for the hundred copies of the articles that Lundy had sent him. Lundy, in turn, urged Adams on. “Let this Texas schism be carried into effect,” he wrote, “and our great Republic is riven to atoms.” That was just the way Adams himself thought. Over the course of two years the rambling abolitionist prophet and the fearsomely respectable New England Puritan would join together to stop the annexationist movement in its tracks.

  CHAPTER 32

  I Am Not to Be Intimidated by All the Grand Juries in the Universe

  (1837)

  IN HIS SEVENTIETH YEAR, JOHN QUINCY ADAMS FELT HIS EYESIGHT fading and his voice failing; his rheumatism became so severe that for weeks on end he could barely stir from his couch; he remained deeply in debt from John’s mismanagement of family affairs. He spoke of retiring to Quincy. But he didn’t mean it for a moment. Adams lived to fight, and he had now discovered the fight of his lifetime. In early 1837, on a day when Adams had lugged 160 petitions to Congress, Louisa informed Charles that “your father stands the wear and tear of Congress better than ever.”

  There was no evidence that the petition crusade was turning public opinion against slavery, but the abolitionists believed it was so and unleashed a cataract of petitions on Congress. Many of them were directed to Adams, one of the few men in Congress prepared to provoke the wrath of the slaveholders and their free-state allies. Martin Van Buren had succeeded to the presidency by assembling a North-South coalition that could be counted on to hold together so long as slavery was kept out of the national debate. Adams and his tiny band of allies would thus be facing a solid phalanx of resistance if they tried once again to force the House to hear anti-slavery petitions.

  Of course they did try, for the Pinckney gag had lapsed, as all temporary House rules did, at the end of the last session. On January 18, a member from Georgia, Albert Hawes, reintroduced the Pinckney gag, which promptly passed. Adams once again began probing the gag for weak spots. On January 23 he insisted that petitions he had presented before the gag had passed should be referred to committee. Speaker Polk denied the motion, and the House sustained him on appeal. Adams commenced his pantomime of martyrdom. “The old gentleman,” according to a contemporary account, “surveyed his file of petitions;—he turned an eye upon the House; he gave a dreary look up to the Speaker’s chair . . . ‘Give me back my old petitions then,’ he said.” Adams began to read from a new sheaf of petitions. The House shouted him down each time it became clear that the new petition he sought to present demanded an end to slavery or the slave trade. Adams tried to present thirteen or fourteen petitions in this manner, “dodging points of order, creeping through this rule and skipping over that . . . all the while flourishing away in tit-bit speeches, which were so short and so quickly said that, though they were out of order, nobody could call him to order; and when they did, he would say, ‘My speech is done.’” Though utterly outnumbered, Adams dodged every brickbat with the nimbleness of an acrobat.

  The petition drama was a public spectacle, reported in both abolitionist and mainstream newspapers all over the country. Adams increasingly became the hero and standard-bearer of the abolitionist movement—even though he opposed immediatism and the prohibition of slavery in the District. The leading abolitionists, all of them great letter writers, began sending Adams encouragement and advice. Adams heard from Lundy, and the Reverend William Ellery Channing, and some of the blazing spirits of the west like Arthur Lovejoy, a lone abolitionist in Alton, Illinois. The combustible William Lloyd Garrison offered fighting words: “Let these petitions be piled upon the table until it break.” Lewis Tappan, head of the American Anti-Slavery Society, gently rebuked Adams for opposing immediatism, for “if slavery be a sin, its immediate abolition is a duty.” Adams refused to delude himself on this score: immediate abolition meant civil war, and that was a price he would not pay. None of these men—and women—changed Adams’ mind, but they fired him with a sense of the urgency of the moment. He, too, believed that the battle against sin was man’s supreme calling. The abolitionists helped keep Adams’ blood at a steady boil.

  Adams was trying to goad the slave forces into a fight. In early February the perfect instrument for his theater of confrontation came to hand. He received in the mail the most unlikely of all petitions, one purporting to come from slaves complaining of attempts to end their condition, and insisting that they
wished to serve their masters “as long as life and health will permit.” Whoever wrote the petition had both excellent penmanship and an educated command of English. The signatures, on the other hand, were clumsy and scrawled. The petition was plainly a fraud designed to make Adams look ridiculous. Adams treated it as a godsend.

  On February 6, John C. Calhoun, the South’s intellectual and political leader, rose in the Senate to declare that the South’s entire way of life was under attack. “We must meet the enemy on the frontier,” Calhoun said, “with a fixed determination of maintaining our position at every hazard.” With the abolitionist movement gaining strength in the free states, even remote threats to slavery could no longer be countenanced. On that very same day, Adams turned his batteries on the House. First he presented a petition from “nine ladies of Fredericksburg” seeking an end to the slave trade in Washington. This was laid on the table. Adams continued. He also had, he said, a petition from twenty-two persons “declaring themselves to be slaves.” He did not say what these petitioners sought, leaving the obvious impression that they, too, wished an end to slavery. Nor did he actually present the petition. Since, he continued with the mock gentility he assumed at his most sardonic moments, “he wished to do nothing except in submission to the rules of the House,” Adams asked the chair to decide whether such a prayer could be received—especially since, he noted, it was “one of those petitions which had occurred to his mind as not being what it purported to be.”

 

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