by James Traub
Three days later, John Quincy Adams, having listened in silence, rose to speak. From the time that he had joined the House, Adams recalled, he had introduced such petitions, knowing full well that they would be referred to the committee on the District of Columbia, where “they go to the family vault ‘of all the Capulets,’ and you will never hear of them again.” Since, Adams said, he did not believe that Congress should ban slavery in the nation’s capital, this had struck him as a judicious system for satisfying all parties. Why, he asked, open Pandora’s Box?
Here, however, Adams departed sharply from Hammond and his ilk. Should the Congress stop up the vent of petitions, he predicted, it would force a discussion on slavery itself to the floor. In that case, he said, “the speeches of my colleagues, probably of myself, will be incendiary”—Adams very consciously chose the word the slaveholders used to describe abolitionist literature—“because, if discussion is thrust upon us, I doubt not I might make a speech as incendiary as any pamphlet upon which such torrents of denunciation have been poured upon us.” Then what? Would the Congress impede not just the right of petition but the freedom of speech? And the freedom of the press? You will end, Adams said, by suppressing the freedom of religion, “for in the minds of many worthy, honest, and honourable men, fanatics, if you so please to call them, this is a religious question, in which they act under what they believe to be a sense of duty to their God.”
Adams appeared to be counseling the slave-state representatives on their self-interest. If he was defending anything, it was the “sacred” right of petition rather than the human rights of slaves. But that wasn’t quite so, for he was also plainly threatening a righteous assault on slavery from worthy, honest, and honorable men. Who were these men? Adams would have been hard-pressed to say. There were no abolitionists in Congress, and few men were prepared to defy the South on any issue so profound as this. Perhaps the force Adams was preparing to unleash was himself. Only a few weeks earlier, after reading a defense of slavery that enraged him, he had written in his journal, “My duty for the present is silence. Whether it may ever come to be my duty to speak, is in the darkness of futurity.” Adams had felt since the Missouri Compromise in 1820 that his own destiny might be intertwined with the abolition of slavery. Yet he had long accepted that he could do little to hasten the end of this abominable practice. He feared speaking his mind. He also, of course, yearned to speak his mind. He implied, though he did not say, that he counted himself among the “fanatics” driven by conscience to throw themselves at the great brick wall of slavery.
At that moment, Adams was feeling his way toward the issue that would define the remainder of his career. He knew what he believed, but he did not, for once, know how to reach the goal he sought. Slavery, for him, was a moral issue, not a legislative one. It was a practice sanctioned by state law. Petitions, however, were another matter entirely. The Constitution guaranteed the right of petition, and Adams had no doubt about the sanctity of that right. He would fight for the citizens’ right to petition even where he disagreed with the substance of the demand. Adams could not yet see how a fight over the gag rule could undermine and finally bring down that brick wall. He hoped it would be so, and he, more than any other man, would lead that fight. Confronting and defeating the slave power in Congress—the “slavocracy,” as he called it—would be the great achievement of his life.
THE ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT BEGAN IN EARNEST IN ENGLAND IN the late eighteenth century and spread thereafter to the United States. Most American adherents were gradualists who hoped to hasten the slow withering away of a practice plainly at variance with Christian teachings. Even many Southerners were prepared to contemplate this prospect and to join local anti-slavery societies. Many favored, and practiced, voluntary manumission. Few, however, could contemplate the prospect of a multiracial American society. Enlightened slaveholders, including Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, advocated transporting freed slaves to Africa. The American Colonization Society was founded with this object in 1816; Henry Clay, himself a slave owner, presided over its first meeting. Understood in this anodyne manner, the debate over slavery was a subject reasonable men could discuss.
But there was no realistic prospect that voluntary acts would bring about the end of slavery. As the evangelical movement known as the Second Great Awakening swept the nation starting in the 1820s, the elimination of slavery came increasingly to be seen as a matter of supreme moral urgency. Many members of the new generation of anti-slavery leaders, men like Lyman Beecher and Theodore Weld and Joshua Leavitt, were Christian ministers who had begun their career of activism in the temperance movement, or sabbatarianism, or Anti-Masonry. They preached a gospel of social change. To live with the fact of slavery, to allow so heinous a practice to simply wither away over time, was an intolerable compromise with evil. These men advocated “abolition,” by which they meant the use of public pressure and political power to force an end to slavery.
The activists differed over the tactics required to end slavery. So-called gradualists were prepared to work with enlightened slaveholders. Immediatists called for a campaign of public pressure to begin right away; most, however, expected a decades-long struggle. The differences among them had to do with their willingness to provoke violent opposition, even a civil war, in order to end slavery. The most fiery of the polemicists were unwilling to accept any compromise with Southern resistance. On New Year’s Day 1831, William Lloyd Garrison wrote in the initial issue of the Liberator, his abolitionist newspaper, that he had been wrong to endorse gradualism in a speech two years before. “On this subject,” he wrote, “I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No, no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm.” This was the rising mood of the anti-slavery activists.
In 1833, the British parliament voted to outlaw slavery in its West Indian colonies, a clarion call for the American abolitionists. In December 1833, literally days after news of the decision reached the United States, they formed the American Anti-Slavery Society. Activists started up abolitionist newspapers like the Liberator across New England and the West. Abolitionists brought their campaign to the South, where they faced death threats and organized violence. Like the civil rights activists of the late 1950s and early ’60s, the abolitionists of 1835 were a small band of idealists hoping to awaken the conscience of the nation by confronting racial injustice at its source.
At first, they were less successful in awakening citizens in the free states than they were in outraging, and terrifying, those in the South. These new sparks landed on dry tinder, for the slave rebellions led by Denmark Vesey in 1822 and Nat Turner in 1831, along with the mass distribution in 1829 of the abolitionist tract Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World, by a free black man named David Walker, had already persuaded Southerners that their way of life—indeed, their very lives—were under attack. Then came the Northern evangelists accusing the South of perpetuating evil, and then their newspapers and pamphlets by the hundreds of thousands. The middle ground once occupied by aristocratic Virginians who acknowledged that slavery was an unfortunate exception to American principles swiftly disappeared. Men like John Calhoun, who had been content to argue that, whatever its merits, slavery was no one’s business save the South, now embraced it as a good, for both master and slave.
In fact, the new abolitionist activism hardened opinion in the North as well as in the South, though hardly in the way the abolitionists had expected. To many Northerners, immediatism looked like a formula for disunion, or even civil war. Rioters routinely disrupted anti-slavery meetings throughout New England. In October 1835, a mob in Boston, seedbed of the American Revolution, chased down an English abolitionist who had hoped to speak in a local church. Northern representatives in Congress had no more appetite to raise the issue of slavery than Southerners did. In a speech in the House, Franklin Pierce, the future president, estimated that no more than one in five hundred citizens of his native New Hampshire favored immediate abolit
ion. No legislator had a political motive to raise the subject of slavery; many had a strong reason to let it slumber.
This, then, was the situation Adams faced in December 1835. His private views had been “incendiary” since the debate over the Missouri Compromise, when he had acknowledged to himself that the Union might have to be dissolved in order to uproot the evil of slavery. But while a few radicals were prepared to accept bloodshed, Adams was not. Neither, at the same time, could he put much stock by less drastic solutions. Some abolitionists believed that the South would be won over by persistent argument; Adams considered this absurd. He felt the same way about the campaign to send freed slaves back to Africa.
Adams saw no way out on slavery. He knew that his constituents did not share his passionate convictions. He did not seek to meet with abolitionists, and he did not look for opportunities to reveal his views in Congress, any more than he had sought to publicize his views in 1820. Adams had been quite sincere when he had told the House that he did not support abolishing slavery in the District. He viewed such a measure as undemocratic, though not unconstitutional. In a letter to a petitioner from Rhode Island in November 1835, he wrote, “As the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia would deeply affect the right of property of the inhabitants of that District without affecting yours, I do not think it just or generous that you should be the petitioner to impair their rights of property and not your own.” Adams also feared that banning slavery in the District would enrage the South while accomplishing something very modest in return. Many other Northern Whigs had remained silent on the subject, not out of complacency toward slavery but out of fear of dividing Congress—and the country.
The rise of anti-slavery petitions, on the other hand, presented Adams with an issue on which he had unambiguous feelings. A debate on the gag rule would afford him the high ground in a debate with the slavocracy. If it allowed him at the same time to disclose the horrors of slavery, so much the better. During the first month of each session, portions of each day were by tradition set aside for the presentation of petitions, and Adams periodically introduced petitions on noncontroversial topics, which would be received, and ones on slavery, which would provoke a new round of debate. (Hammond’s motion had never come to a vote, leaving the House to deal separately with each new anti-slavery petition.) The slaveholders’ Northern allies agreed that Congress had no power to regulate slavery, but they differed on whether petitions on the subject should be permitted. Many legislators were unwilling to sacrifice free speech on the altar of slavery. In late January Adams declared that he “believed it to be the true course to let error be tolerated, to grant freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, and apply reason to put it down.” This claim, anticipating John Stuart Mill’s defense of the “marketplace of ideas,” resonated with many free-state representatives. The endless wrangle over petitions brought the regular business of Congress almost to a halt.
On February 4, Henry Laurens Pinckney, another South Carolinian, sought to break the deadlock by proposing that all such petitions be referred to a select committee—which would agree in advance that Congress had no right to interfere with slavery in the states and ought not do so in the District. Just as Hammond was operating as a cat’s-paw for Calhoun, who planned to run for president as the candidate of states’ rights, so Pinckney was probably acting at the behest of Vice President Van Buren, who wanted to marginalize slavery as an issue in order to forge a coalition of “the planter of the South and the plain Republican of the North,” as he had said back in 1826. But by this time the Southern mossbacks had become so inflamed against the petition campaign that the Calhounites treated Pinckney’s proposed compromise as treachery. Nevertheless, the idea was referred to committee for further discussion.
By the time the Pinckney committee reported back on May 18, it had retreated before South Carolina’s harassing fire. Rather than referring all slavery petitions to a select committee, the report suggested that such petitions “shall, without being either printed or referred, be laid on the table and no further action whatever shall be had thereon.” This was similar to what Hammond had proposed and precisely what Adams had counseled against. Yet this was no longer enough for the most agitated Southerners; the report did not explicitly state that Congress had no right to legislate slavery anywhere, including in the District. The fire-breathing Waddy Thompson denounced the report as an “abandonment” of Southern rights unworthy of South Carolina, the state both he and Pinckney represented.
The debate between pragmatic slaveholders and ideologues, with Northerners largely looking on, dragged on until May 25. After Congressman John Robertson of Virginia spent hours denouncing the Pinckney compromise, George Owens of Georgia moved the previous question, the parliamentary means for ending debate and proceeding to a vote. Adams, who had something to say, asked Owens to withdraw the motion; the Georgian refused. Adams appealed to the chair—Speaker James K. Polk of Tennessee—who also refused. “I am aware that there is a slaveholder in the chair,” Adams said caustically. He continued to seek the floor, bickering with Polk and others. One of his chief adversaries, Henry Wise of Virginia, accused Adams of violating parliamentary order. Finally a furious Adams burst out, “Am I gagged or not?” Pinckney’s proposed gag rule had not yet been adopted; Adams was saying that the slaveholders had already begun to eliminate debate. He tried once again to speak, and now calls of “Order!” ricocheted around the hall.
The House then proceeded to vote on the resolution that Congress had no power to regulate slavery in the states. Adams shot to his feet once again; massed opposition had only whetted his appetite for battle. “If the House will give me five minutes,” he cried, “I will prove that resolution false and utterly untrue”—or so wrote the perhaps overwhelmed reporter for Gales and Seaton’s Register of Congressional Debate. The representative from Massachusetts was shouted down, and the vote was taken. Adams was one of only nine in the negative. He continued to badger Polk on fine points of procedure until one o’clock arrived, and the Speaker called for the dinner break.
Later in the day, the House voted on the remainder of the Pinckney compromise. Despite Southern opposition, the resolution stipulating that the House ought not take up slavery in the District of Columbia—but not declaring that the Constitution forbade the subject—passed 132 to 45. Then came the actual “gag,” which committed the House to neither print nor even formally receive slavery petitions. By now Adams was so exercised that he disputed the legitimacy of the vote itself. When his name was called, he rose and said, “I hold the resolution to be a direct violation of the Constitution of the United States, the rules of this House, and the rights of my constituents.” The reporter noted that “Mr. A resumed his seat amid loud cries of ‘Order!’, from all parts of the Hall.” The resolution passed 117 to 68. Though some Northern Whigs had balked at the idea of infringing the right of petition, many others had not.
Adams had reached, and crossed, a Rubicon. In December he had made an effort, whether in good faith or no, to appeal to slave interests in the calm language of collective self-interest. He had made no headway. And he had sat for long days and weeks as slaveholders and their free-state allies had painted lurid pictures of the fanaticism of the abolitionists and the dire threats to the Southern way of life. Adams could feign patience, but he was not a patient man. His blood must have been boiling. And now he had let it overflow. “Am I gagged?,” he had shouted. He had not been; he had, in fact, been out of order. But Adams was now prepared to use his own solitary resistance to the slavocracy to illustrate and publicize the grave threats to cherished constitutional liberties that accompanied the defense of slavery. Adams was staging a theater of martyrdom—a species of drama to which, thanks to his rhetorical gifts, his fearlessness, his towering sense of moral purpose, he was supremely well suited.
AS SECRETARY OF STATE, ADAMS HAD SOUGHT TO BUY FROM SPAIN the northeastern province known as Texas, but the fear that it could become a giant slave state, or the
source of several such states, was reason enough for both Adams and President Monroe to restrain the impulse for territorial self-aggrandizement. Since that time, however, tens of thousands of American settlers had established themselves in the region and become a potent force in American politics. President Jackson had sought to buy Texas from the new Mexican Republic, but Mexico had turned him down flat.
Left on their own, Texans had begun agitating for independence. When General Lopez de Santa Anna seized power and dissolved the legislature, in 1835, Texas as well as several other provinces rebelled. On March 2, 1836, Texas declared its independence. A week later, Santa Anna’s forces decimated the Texans at the battle of the Alamo. When the news reached Washington the following month, Congress voted to ask the president to send a volunteer militia to defend the settlers. Adams was one of the few to oppose the measure. He had seen Congress afflicted with war fever almost from the beginning of his tenure in national office, in 1804. Now he saw his colleagues preparing to fight a republican government and a former colony, rather than a European monarchy, and doing so, he believed, in order to advance the cause of slavery.
