by James Traub
Adams might have chosen prudence, as he had on the broad question of the prohibition of slavery, but five days later he saw another ad for Dorcas’ sale. Until now, Adams had had no direct experience of the horrors of slavery, and had known few if any black people who were not servants. Now he went directly to the slave auction house in Alexandria, where he met the children and Dorcas, “weeping and wailing most piteously.” The auctioneer, a Mr. Dyer, explained that several days earlier he had sold Dorcas to her own husband, a free black named Nathaniel Allen, for $475. Allen worked as a waiter at Gadsby’s, a prominent hotel and tavern where many congressmen stayed during the term. Now Nathaniel was trying to scrape up the funds. Dyer doubted he could, so he had placed another ad.
Dyer told Adams that on her deathbed the woman who had owned Dorcas many years earlier had made her husband, Mr. Davis, promise to free her. Dorcas had married Nathaniel, and the two had lived as free blacks for a dozen or so years. In the meanwhile, Davis had died, his second wife had remarried, and that woman’s husband had sold Dorcas to a slave trader as if he owned her. That very day, Dorcas and her children had been seized and thrown into Alexandria’s dismal slave prison, within sight of the Capitol building. That night, Dorcas had murdered her four-year-old son and infant daughter; the screams of the older children prevented her from killing them too. A jury had acquitted her by reason of insanity, though it heard no prior evidence of mental instability. When asked why she had killed her children, Dorcas had said “that they were in Heaven, that if they had lived she did not know what would become of them.”
Dorcas was no longer a cause to be publicized but a woman to be rescued. This probably made it easier for Adams to act on her behalf. His heart always responded to individuals—especially strangers—in peril. He returned to the slave house and told Dyer that he had no right to sell a free woman into slavery. Dyer, of course, disagreed. By now Nathaniel Allen had learned that Adams had taken an interest in his case, and came to him for help. He worried that Davis’ creditors would claim Dorcas even if he bought her. Adams promised to track down the Washington district attorney, Francis Scott Key, better known today as the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A slave owner and aggressive defender of slavery, Key was unsympathetic but did tell Adams that Allen’s title to his wife could not be contested.
On November 13, Nathaniel came to Adams’ home with Dorcas, temporarily released from bondage. Nathaniel explained that another supporter, General Walter Smith of Georgetown, said that he could raise up to $330. What Nathaniel needed was money—the one commodity Adams did not have. Nevertheless, he pledged $50. Nathaniel and Dorcas left, returning later in the day with a promise from General Smith to raise the funds if the ex-president would, in fact, help as well. Adams immediately wrote the $50 check he had promised. Nathaniel and Dorcas exited from Adams’ home and from his life, presumably to freedom. Adams appears to have been the only man in Congress or in official Washington to have come to this helpless woman’s aid.
THE REGULAR SESSION OF CONGRESS RESUMED IN MID-DECEMBER, and Adams immediately rose to present a sheaf of petitions on slavery and Texas. On December 20, before the majority had formulated a new version of the gag, William Slade of Vermont, one of Adams’ very few reliable allies, introduced a resolution proposing the creation of a special committee to draw up a bill abolishing slavery and the slave trade in Washington. This was much further than Adams, who of course opposed abolition in the District, had ever gone. Adams wrote that Slade’s speech “shook the hall into convulsions.” The reliably pro-administration Globe, which had taken over from the Intelligencer the job of recording and printing congressional debates, did not report the speech. Contemporary accounts, however, show that Slade was barely able to get through a sentence without being interrupted by shouts and calls for order; Polk was far more abrupt than he dared to be with Adams.
Rather than avail themselves once again of the failed weapon of censure, representatives from Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia called on their colleagues to leave the hall, an unprecedented form of protest. Slave-state members caucused in a committee room; their Northern allies were not permitted to enter, though Southerners from the Senate were. This constituted, as one historian of the period notes, an act of proto-secession. They agreed to present a new version of the gag order the following day, delegating John Patton of Virginia to do so. Patton introduced the resolution and then, in order to preclude debate, called the previous question—that is, called for an immediate vote. An outraged Adams rose to protest and was shouted down and ruled out of order. When the roll was called, Adams, rather than voting, declared, “I hold the resolution to be in violation of the United States constitution.” The measure nevertheless passed 122 to 74.
Many free-state Democrats, long accustomed to taking dictation from the South, voted for the gag despite having been prohibited from the meeting in which the plans had been made. Still, the majority was smaller than it ever had been before. New members from the North and the West refused to fall in step with Southern forces; others had shifted to Adams’ side. It was only a matter of time before the dam broke. Millard Fillmore of New Hampshire and three New Yorkers asked Adams to write a manifesto for members opposed to the gag but unwilling to take Slade’s abolitionist position.
Adams now treated the gag as illegitimate. When his turn came to submit petitions on December 28, he offered memorials on various subjects and then presented one on slavery. Since, he said, he did not recognize the gag, “I should submit to it only as to physical force.” A few weeks later he submitted fifty more. Then another three hundred fifty. The language of these documents shows that the implacable bitterness with which Southern planters regarded Northern activists had become mutual. One prayed for the construction of a “great wall of China between North and South,” another to offer protection to Northerners venturing into the South—because “in another part of the Capitol it had been threatened that if a Northern abolitionist should go to South Carolina . . . if they catch him they should hang him.” This sidelong reference to a statement by Senator Preston of South Carolina brought the wrath of the House and the Speaker down on Adams, who jumped up and offered another petition. In March, Adams presented a petition from Virginia praying for “the arraignment at the bar of the House, and expulsion, of John Quincy Adams.” Since this was of course not covered by the gag, Adams asked the clerk to read the entire, quite lengthy resolution. It, too, was tabled.
Adams still had very little company. He tried to draw up a plan to overturn the gag rule with his fellow Massachusetts legislators, but many feared being tarred with abolitionism. Adams’ fears that abolitionist zeal would provoke a backlash that would damage the cause more than advance it were increasingly being vindicated. The previous summer, a mob in Cincinnati had destroyed the office of the Philanthropist, an abolitionist newspaper published by James Birney, who had just published an open letter to slaveholders in which he warned that “the discussion of slavery can now, no more be stopped, than the rising of the sun.” The assault was presumably designed to say, “Oh yes it can.” After smashing Birney’s printer and throwing the pieces in a river, the mob had come for Birney but hadn’t found him. Elijah P. Lovejoy, another abolitionist publisher, in Alton, Illinois, was less fortunate. In November 1837, Lovejoy was murdered in a virtually identical attack. He had corresponded with Adams, who had cautioned him to cool his fervor. Adams feared, rightly as it turned out, that Lovejoy had the makings of a martyr. Adams delivered a furious address in Congress denouncing the arson and murder.
Abolitionists needed protection not in the South, where few ventured, but in the cities of the North and the West, where most people viewed them as radicals seeking to tear the country in half. For every abolitionist newspaper there were two or three inciting readers to fury against the anti-slavery activists. No place was safe from the lynch mob—not even Philadelphia, the home of the abolitionist movement. The city’s leading progressives had built a fine structure, Pe
nnsylvania Hall, to host public lectures, above all on the question of slavery. Benjamin Lundy and others had invited Adams to address the opening session, and he of course had declined. The hall opened on May 14, 1838, with speeches by William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimké, Theodore Weld, and other leading figures. The abolitionists had insisted on letting black and white spectators sit together. This bold decision, as well as wild rumors of what was being said inside, drove anti-abolitionists to a fever pitch. On May 17, as the police stood idly by, a crowd forced the doors of the building and set it aflame. Pennsylvania Hall burned to the ground three days after opening.
No one died, but Lundy suffered a serious loss. The itinerant abolitionist had been working furiously to rouse public indignation on Texas, among other things, by sending a steady stream of documents to Adams. But after years of rugged solitary travel across the continent, his health was broken. He had passed the baton of leadership to a generation far more worldly and polished than himself—men like Weld and Channing and the perpetually furious Garrison. In January 1838, Lundy had handed over the editorship of his current paper, the National Enquirer. He had decided to return to the West and to live a settled life that would not test his waning resources, physical or material. He had moved out of his rooms and stored all his belongings in Pennsylvania Hall. He had little that mattered to him save his papers. They were all consumed by the fire. Yet that very morning this faithful Quaker was able to write to a friend, “I am not disheartened, though everything of earthly value (in the shape of property) is lost. Let us persevere in the good cause. We shall assuredly triumph yet.”
This humble, hopeful, zealous man had entered deeply into Adams’ life. They wrote to one another often, and at times Adams, perhaps accidentally, fell into Lundy’s Quaker diction, writing “thou knowest” and the like. Lundy never stopped trying to enlist Adams in causes that Adams knew better than to join; his indefatigable friend was a nuisance, but the kind of nuisance Adams viewed as the very salt of the earth. Lundy, in turn, viewed Adams in salvific terms, as Adams perhaps viewed himself in the core of his being. “The eyes of millions, my dear and honoured friend, are now turned to thee,” he wrote a few weeks before the fire. “No mortal ever held a part of greater usefulness—more enviable distinction—or higher moral responsibility, than is thine at the present moment.” Lundy did not wait a day to write to Adams with news of his calamity, which he recounted without self-pity. He apologized for being unable to supply documents Adams had requested. Then he set off for the West, where his health continued to decline. Benjamin Lundy died August 21, 1839, in Lowell, LaSalle County, Illinois. He was only fifty, but he had worn himself out in the abolitionist cause.
THE PATTON GAG HAD LARGELY STOPPED UP THE FLOW OF PETITIONS on slavery in the District of Columbia. Texas, however, was a more complicated question. From the first days of 1838, the House began receiving resolutions passed by state legislatures opposing—or favoring—the annexation of Texas. Were they, too, to be laid upon the table? No, they were instead referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, dominated by slaveholders and administration supporters. The committee reported back, in very short order, with a recommendation that, as the administration did not currently propose to annex Texas, no action should be taken on the petitions. Adams rose to ask George Dromgoole of Virginia, speaking for the committee, whether the thousands of petitions and resolutions “had ever received five minutes of consideration” from committee members. Rather than answer, Dromgoole irritably denied the right of any member “to catechise the committee as to its actions.” Adams, roused to fury, shouted, “That is enough, Sir! That, Sir, is enough for this house and this country. The committee refuses to answer.” Now there were shouts, cries, bedlam. The House adjourned.
The following day, Benjamin Howard, the committee chairman, sought to bring the discussion to a close. When Adams rose to ask Howard whether he believed a member had the right to ask whether a committee had read petitions referred to it, Howard simply repeated Dromgoole’s formulation. Now Adams had a club to beat the opposition with. He asked whether members were prepared to state their views of his question. Hugh Legaré of South Carolina gave Adams the direct answer he was looking for: “For myself, I have no hesitation in admitting that I have not read the papers, or looked into them, nor was I bound to do so.” Adams now delightedly read, and then slowly reread, the seventy-sixth rule of the House, which stipulated that the Committee on Foreign Affairs must “take into consideration all matters concerning the relations of the United States with foreign nations.” Legaré said that he had considered the subject of the petitions rather than the documents themselves, a distinction Adams promptly ridiculed.
Waddy Thompson now proposed that the committee’s resolution be amended to call for the president to annex Texas. Adams, in turn, called for an amendment stating that neither Congress nor the president had the authority to do so. Then, as now, House rules permit amendments to amendments, but nothing further. The chamber could not proceed further until it had voted on Adams’ proposed amendment to the amendment. Adams took the floor to speak on behalf of his proposal on the morning of June 16. In this era before cloture calls, Adams could continue speaking as long as he wished. He knew that he could not win; what he could do, however, was rivet the nation’s attention to the issue of Texas and, collaterally, slavery by holding the floor. The “morning hour” was by tradition set aside for committee business. The seventy-one-year-old Adams now filled that hour for fifteen sessions, until virtually dropping from exhaustion on July 7. The speech, published in book form by Gales and Seaton and endlessly reprinted, ran to 112 pages, not including the 18-page introduction Adams added.
Adams found many ingenious means to reintroduce through a back door what had been blocked by Congress at the front. He traced the evolution of the doctrine of “suppression” from petitions on slavery to those on Texas. He could hardly discuss this matter without adverting to the question of the rights of slaves, and the movement to censure him. He was wandering far afield—intentionally, of course—and the chair ordered him to stick to the question at hand. He would not and did not. Earlier in the debate, Benjamin Howard had taken note of the fact that many of the petitions on Texas had come from women, and he had expressed the wish that women restrict their sphere of influence to “their duties to their fathers, their husbands, and their children . . . instead of rushing into the fierce struggle of political life.” Adams read the passage, sorrowfully. “Sir,” he asked, “was it from a son—was it from a father—was it from a husband, that I heard these words? . . . Are women to have no opinions or actions on subjects relating to the general welfare?”
The man who had never shown the slightest interest in his own wife’s political opinions—or, really, in those of any other woman save his mother—tolled off a mighty list of women who had thrust themselves into great affairs, from Old Testament figures like Esther to Isabelle of Castile. By the third day of this sub-oration he had arrived at the women of the American Revolution. Is the right to petition, he asked, to be denied to such women simply because they lack the right to vote? And then, startlingly: “Is it so clear that they have no such right as this last?” There is no evidence that Adams had ever before considered the possibility that woman should have the right to vote.
Adams was looking for an opening to talk about slavery. On June 30, he found it. Representative Francis Pickens rose to complain that the petitions from women he so admired—Adams happened to be talking about the celebrated Grimké sisters of Charleston—were in fact a “tissue of prejudice and misrepresentation.” Not so, said Adams. No doubt the gentleman from South Carolina, like his brethren in the chamber, was a “kind and indulgent master” and thus could not be expected to know “the cruel, the tyrannical, the hard-hearted master” who “procreates children from his slaves, and then sells the children as slaves.” He told his colleagues the story of Dorcas Allen, who had killed two of her children rather than see them bound into slavery. No j
ury, even in Virginia, could be found to convict her of murder.
Adams kept baiting his opponents and then exploiting their response. Returning to the subject of his amendment, he observed that if Texas were annexed as a slave state, both slavery and the slave trade would be revitalized across the South. John Campbell of South Carolina rejoined that it was abolitionism which had “tended to rivet the system,” hardening attitudes across the South and leading to the widespread view that slavery “was neither a moral nor a political evil.” Adams wheeled on him:
I am well aware of the change that is taking place in the political philosophy of the South. I know well that the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal,” is there held as an incendiary doctrine, and deserves Lynching; that the Declaration itself is a farrago of abstractions. I know all this perfectly; and that is the very reason why I want to put my foot upon such doctrine; that I want to drive it back to its fountain—its corrupt fountain—and pursue it until it is made to disappear from this land, and from the world.
Adams conceded that he had been “drawn into observations which are here much out of place,” but added that if the gentleman so wished he would happy to “enter into a full and strict scrutiny of slavery . . . and so long as God shall give me life, and breath, and the faculty of speech, he shall have it, to his heart’s content.” In fact, he had already broached the subject more directly than he had before. There was much else to come over the ensuing week, much raillery and invective, much constitutional exegesis and allegations of a secret policy to provoke Mexico into war and seize Texas, but in his furious response to Campbell, Adams had touched on what he and everyone else knew was the heart of the matter. He had inched yet closer to assuming the heroic mantle he had imagined for himself in 1820.