by James Traub
The South rose as one to meet the enemy on the frontier. Dixon Lewis of Alabama demanded that the House “punish severely such an infraction of its decorum and its rules”—though it wasn’t at all clear what rule Adams had broken—and suggested that, should the chamber fail to act, the representatives from the slave states should “go home at once.” Julius Alford of Georgia asked the House to punish not just Adams but the petition itself, which ought to be “committed to the flames.” Adams had endangered something much more serious than the decorum of the House, for, once granted the right to petition the Congress, how could slaves accept their subhuman status? Lewis offered a resolution stating that “by extending to slaves a privilege only belonging to freemen,” Adams “directly invited the slave population to insurrection” and thus should be “forthwith called to the bar of the House, and be censured by the Speaker.”
Only now, after so much spleen had been vented, did Adams reveal that the object of the petition was the exact opposite of what his accusers had imagined. It had also become clear by now that the nine ladies of Fredericksburg were free women of color, and perhaps not even reputable ones—yet another outrage from the Massachusetts incendiary. But that served his purpose very well, for Adams wished to defend the principle that the right to petition could under no circumstances be abridged. He was what we would call today a First Amendment absolutist. He would, he said, present a petition from slaves—or from “a horse or a dog” if it had “the power of speech and of writing.”
For four days, from February 6 to 9, Southern congressmen outdid one another in denouncing Adams, writing and rewriting the proposed resolution of censure. The ever-combative Waddy Thompson of South Carolina, who had grown apoplectic when he had learned that Adams had perpetrated a “hoax” on the House by disguising the true nature of the slave petition, reminded his friends that the “fanatics” of abolitionism “understand their game.” By insisting on the right of petition, they were cleverly attacking slaveholders “at our weakest point.” The abolitionists would stop at nothing: If slaves have the right to petition, Thompson observed, must it not be conceded that they have as well the right to vote? It was hardly an absurd question.
Only two legislators, Levi Lincoln, the ex-governor of Massachusetts and an Adams friend of many years, and Caleb Cushing, also from the Bay State, offered a full-throated defense of their colleague. Adams, meanwhile, sat quietly, letting one wave of invective after another crash over his head. Finally, on the ninth, he rose in his own defense. At first he resumed his single-minded defense of the universal right of petition. Then he made a brief swerve to the matter of the “nine ladies of Fredericksburg,” allegedly of low character—“prostitutes, I think the gentleman said,” alluding to John Patton, a Virginia congressman whose district included that city.
Patton jumped to his feet to explain that he had not called them “prostitutes,” which in fact he hadn’t, but rather had emphasized their low character in order to protect the honor of the true ladies of Fredericksburg. Adams now inserted the needle.
He was glad to hear the honourable gentleman disclaim any knowledge of them, for he was going to ask if they were infamous women, then who had made them infamous? Not, he believed, their own colour, but their masters, and he had heard it said, in proof of this fact, and he was inclined to believe it was the case, that there existed great resemblances in the South between the progeny of the coloured people and the white men who claimed the possession of them.
The fact that this assertion was true did not make it any less of a calumny, one lodged against slaveholders prepared to kill a man who called their honor into a question. It was also completely irrelevant to the question at hand. Adams, however, had the floor, and he would goad and torment his adversaries while he could. Adams now rounded directly on his accusers, all of whom had fallen into the trap he had set by brandishing the alleged petition from slaves without explaining that those petitioners sought the end of abolitionism, not of slavery. He read back to the House a passage in which Waddy Thompson had called for Adams to be subject to criminal prosecution. Is that, he asked, the opinion of the slave-state representatives? Do they believe that a member should be criminally liable for seeking to present a petition? If, as Thompson had claimed, the law of South Carolina prohibited such an act, Adams proclaimed, “I thank God I am not a citizen of South Carolina!” The court reporter tersely summarized the reaction to this last provocation by writing, “Great agitation.”
Adams pressed home the point, as if the question at issue were not his censure but his criminal prosecution. One of Adams’ many rhetorical gifts was seizing on the most extreme version of his opponents’ case and making it stand for the case itself. The more cool-headed among Adams’ opponents saw the debate getting away from them. Henry Wise of Virginia volunteered that he would never permit a grand jury to sit in judgment upon words spoken in Congress. The tide had begun to turn. Adams pocketed the concession and then turned back to Waddy Thompson, his preferred foil. “If he thought to frighten me from my purpose,” Adams thundered, “if that, sir, was his object, he mistook his man! I am not to be intimidated by the gentleman from South Carolina, nor by all the grand juries in the universe.” It is unlikely that by that point any member thought otherwise.
The question was called, the vote taken. From the ranks of Southern slaveholders and Northern Democrats, a grand total of twenty-two men voted for the resolution to censure Adams. Given the overwhelming numerical dominance of these two groups, who together could carry any issues they wished, it was an astonishing outcome. The editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser, who had been present in the House, wrote that “the effect of the speech has been rarely if ever exceeded by the influence of any speech on any assembly.”
The effect was felt far beyond Washington, and above all among abolitionists who had despaired of a slave-dominated Congress. The American Anti-Slavery Society reproduced the congressional debate in pamphlet form. Newspapers across the country carried accounts of Adams’ fearless defense of the right of petition. As Joshua Giddings, a Western abolitionist who was later to became Adams’ protégé in Congress, wrote many years later, “This defiance of the slave power was unexpected. The oldest member of the body had never witnessed such boldness, such heroism, on the part of any northern member.”
Adams himself recounted the drama for his hometown paper, the Quincy Patriot, in a series of letters to constituents. Since Adams was so overwhelmed with work during this period that he stopped keeping his journal, the letters serve as one of the few sources for his state of mind in the midst of this fight for his political life. What is striking is how persistently he returns to the theme that the slaveholders expected to enjoy in Congress the same mastery they exercised over their slaves, and thus treated Adams himself as an “inferior” impertinently demanding the rights of an equal. Polk, he notes, ought to have defended the right of free speech; “but the Speaker was a master.” In 1820 he had reflected that the need to defend slavery had warped as fine a mind as Calhoun’s. Now, in his letters, he recalled Jefferson’s observation that slavery degraded the master by accustoming him to dominion over his fellow man. Adams’ own fury must have been stoked by the condescension he felt from these pampered young sons of slave-borne privilege.
Adams had won the battle but not the war. The gag remained in force. And, more important, he had seen how very little support he enjoyed in Congress. Two days after his exoneration, the House voted on a resolution stating that presenting petitions from slaves violates the House’s “dignity” as well as that of “a large class of citizens of the South and West, and the Constitution of the United States.” The vote was 160 to 35 in favor. Next, in order to clear up any remaining ambiguity, the House considered a resolution stating that “slaves do not possess the right of petition secured to the people of the United States by the constitution.” Only 18 members voted against. Both Levi Lincoln and Caleb Cushing voted in favor.
The storm Adams had brought down on
his head had simultaneously made him more intransigent on petitions and more cautious on slavery. He would never give an inch on petitions, where he enjoyed fairly widespread support, but he understood that if he called for an immediate end to slavery, even in Washington, as the abolitionists implored him to do, he would marginalize himself in Congress and in national public opinion. Adams continued to maintain a wary distance from the abolitionists. When the poet-activist John Greenleaf Whittier invited him to attend the opening of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, Adams declined, reflecting in his journal that he must learn to be “more circumspect in my conduct than belongs to my nature.” Both parties were now prepared to pounce on any indiscretion he committed. He had already placed himself dangerously far afield from his own constituents. “Even in the North,” he wrote in his diary, “the people favor the whites and fear the blacks.” The abolitionists seemed incapable of recognizing the consequences of their own passionate polemics. He warned Lewis Tappan that by “taking untenable ground,” by which he meant immediatism, the anti-slavery movement had “turned the great mass of the community in the free states against them.”
Adams unburdened himself on this terrible question to Charles Hammond, the Ohio publisher, admitting that he had long thought that slavery would “slowly and peacefully pass away” thanks to the British prohibition, the growing emancipation of individual slaves, and the ban on the slave trade. Now he saw that it was not so. Slaveholders had responded to the “great moral force” of abolitionism by formulating a theology of their own, in which the Creator had formed black people to perpetually serve white ones. They would never agree to legislate their peculiar institution out of existence, as the abolitionists vainly imagined they would. Adams still could not accept the violence that he saw more clearly than ever would be needed to extirpate slavery. He would, he wrote Hammond, continue to abstain “in all measures leading to that conflict for life and death between Freedom and Slavery through which I have not been able to see how this Union can be preserved from passing.” The syntax was tortured, and so, perhaps, were Adams’ own feelings.
CHAPTER 33
Among the Most Illustrious of the World’s Benefactors
(1837–1838)
ADAMS HAD VERY LITTLE TIME TO REST IN QUINCY AFTER HIS ordeal by trial. He had been unable to leave Washington until he had paid down debts that had accumulated over the years, as his household expenses rose far above his meager income from rental properties and his $9 congressional per diem. Only after Charles, who managed his funds, sent him $1,500 was Adams able to leave, in the first days of May. Then he had to return in September, for President Van Buren had called for an emergency session of Congress in order to deal with the spreading economic crisis.
The abolitionists implored Adams to use the session to dramatize the dangers of the annexation of Texas, which they feared was imminent. On his last day in office Jackson had received ambassadors from Texas and had nominated an America chargé d’affaires. The Texan people had voted overwhelmingly for annexation. Lundy was now circulating petitions against annexation and reprinting his letters on Texas as a pamphlet titled “War in Texas” and suitable for mass circulation. He implored Adams to stop in Philadelphia on his way to Congress in order to plot strategy for the coming session. William Ellery Channing wrote with questions about Adams’ role as secretary of state in negotiations with Spain; Adams had spurred his interest on Texas, and now he was preparing a pamphlet on annexation and slavery. Adams did, in fact, stop in Philadelphia to meet with Lundy, Tappan, and other members of the Anti-Slavery Society.
Soon after he reached Washington, President Van Buren asked him over for a social call. Adams had not set foot inside the White House from March 4, 1829, until the previous May, when Van Buren had extended an invitation. This time the two made idle conversation about England’s new monarch, Queen Victoria. The president seemed entirely at his ease despite the crisis besetting the nation. He had, Adams reflected, much of Madison’s gentleness of manner but also a capacity for duplicity that reminded him of Jefferson—“though without his genius.” And, he added, a “fawning servility, which belongs to neither.” Adams would remain on comfortable terms with Van Buren but would always view him as a crass political operator and the linchpin of a coalition that ensured the dominance of the slavocracy. Van Buren had vindicated Adams’ expectation by announcing in his Inaugural Address that he would veto any legislation seeking to restrict slavery.
When Adams had reached his home in Washington, he found that he had already received stacks of petitions. He was no longer the only member prepared to present these documents, but he still got far more than anyone else. He received four hundred in September alone, and they came from all over the North and the West. At times he wished that this cup could pass from him. “If there was one man in the House capable of taking the lead on emancipation,” he wrote in his journal, “I would withdraw. There is no such man.”
By the fall of 1837 abolitionism had spread across the country with astonishing speed. An estimated one thousand anti-slavery societies claimed about a hundred thousand members. Virtually every city of any importance outside the South had an abolitionist newspaper. Thurlow Weed, who a few years earlier had become a leading Anti-Masonry publisher, now took up the anti-slavery cause and became an abolitionist publisher. In May the American Anti-Slavery Society had decided to focus almost all its efforts on the petition campaign. A great national machinery clanged into motion. The abolitionist leaders John Greenleaf Whittier and Theodore Weld spearheaded the operation, researching the horrors of slavery, writing up sample petitions, and sorting them into “libraries” to be purchased by local societies. A typical form would begin, “The undersigned women of”—for an increasing fraction of the petitions came from women—and then came a blank to be filled in with the name of the town in question, “deeply convinced by the sinfulness of slavery, and keenly aggrieved by its existence in a part of the country over which Congress possesses exclusive jurisdiction in all cases whatsoever, do most earnestly petition your honourable body to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and also to put an end to the slave trade in the United States.” There followed blank lines to be filled by signatures.
Petitions began to arrive in Washington by the wagonload. Over the course of the 1837–1838 congressional session legislators would receive 412,000 slave-related petitions, including 130,000 seeking the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in Washington, 32,000 calling for an end to the gag rule, and 180,000 protesting the annexation of Texas. One abolitionist estimated that the memorials bore half a million signatures (this in a country of 16 million). The petitions, like the letters, phone calls, and emails citizens and special-interest groups now send to Congress and the White House, served as an inescapable reminder of public opinion, though hardly a proof of majority preference.
At the very outset of the special session, Adams rose to demand that the administration turn over all correspondence with Mexico over the possible acquisition or annexation of Texas. The territory had declared itself sovereign, and Adams insisted that the Constitution made no provision for the executive to annex a nation; such a decision could be made only by the people, presumably through a constitutional amendment authorizing such an act. Adams had maintained this position since the Louisiana Purchase thirty-three years earlier. He added, with an obvious nod to the mighty river of petitions that would soon sluice through the halls of Congress, “There is a large portion of the people of the United States who would prefer a dissolution of the Union to the annexation of Texas.” Adams reiterated his demand that the correspondence with Mexico be made public. Several days later he introduced a resolution stating that the power of annexing a foreign nation could be exercised only by the people. The chair ruled it out of order.
Jackson had not called for annexation in his last message to Congress, as Adams had been sure he would. Van Buren had no intention of taking up the Texans’ clamor for annexation, which he understood could
damage him politically. In fact, the plan had been stopped dead in its tracks, in part owing to the furor Adams and his demiurge Lundy had whipped up. Nevertheless, Lundy continued working the bellows, printing twenty-three thousand copies of his pamphlet and making sure that every member of Congress and everyone in the abolitionist movement received a copy. Anti-annexationism became, briefly, the leading edge of the abolitionist movement.
Adams had by now become perhaps the most active member of the House, speaking on a wide range of subjects. President Van Buren had convened the special session in the hopes of passing the so-called Sub-Treasury bill, which would have established an independent body to handle federal deposits then being sent to state banks; the reckless lending behavior of those banks had helped spark the panic. Adams considered the Sub-Treasury an unnecessary substitute for the Bank of the United States, which Jackson and Van Buren had eliminated. He spent much of the special session denouncing the proposed measure. On this, as on many other subjects not involving slavery, legislators listened to Adams with the respectful attention due a former president and a venerable colleague.
On October 23, a week after the session had ended, Adams saw a shocking ad in the National Intelligencer. A slave woman, Dorcas Allen, and her two children, ages approximately seven and nine, were to be sold that day. Adams then heard that Dorcas had earlier murdered her two younger children in a fit of insanity; the slave trader who had bought her earlier that year had now returned her as unfit. Adams asked his brother-in-law Nathaniel Frye, a businessman who handled Adams’ investments in Washington, if the story was true, and Frye very reluctantly confirmed that it was. Dorcas’ terrible deed struck Adams less as an act of madness than as a judgment on the unspeakable practice of slavery. In his journal, he wrote, “It is a case of conscience with me whether my duty requires or forbids me to pursue the inquiry of the case to ascertain all the facts and to expose them in all their turpitude to the world.”
