by James Traub
It’s not clear whether Adams really had pushed the slaveholders beyond all endurance or whether he had given them a provocation they had been seeking. George Washington Hopkins of Virginia suggested that the only treatment such a petition merited was incineration. Henry Wise asked if it would be in order to propose a resolution of censure—to which Adams replied, “Good!” And then Gilmer presented such a resolution. Adams then ridiculed Gilmer as Wise’s “second fiddle,” prompting a return blast from his accuser. The House finally adjourned, although, according to Giddings, the members were now so agitated that most continued milling around the floor, the Southerners clenching their fists and uttering oaths against abolitionists.
That night, Southerners convened among themselves. They had learned something from the censure effort of 1837, which, in the absence of coordination, had been conducted largely by ungovernable hotheads like Waddy Thompson. Now the slave-state caucus agreed that Adams’ prosecution would be led by Thomas Marshall, who as a Whig could not be accused of party feeling against Adams and who was believed to have inherited something of the genius of his uncle, John Marshall, the former chief justice. Northern members declined to form a defense team, but the abolitionist core gathered at Giddings’ apartment in Mrs. Spriggs’ boarding house. Late that night, they walked to Adams’ home on F Street and told him that they were prepared to stand with him, come what may. “The aged statesman listened attentively,” Giddings wrote, “but for a time was unable to reply, laboring under great apparent feeling. At length he stated that the voice of friendship was so unusual to his ears, that he could not express his gratitude.” Only under the pressure of intense emotion could Adams admit to the price he paid for his rigid principles. Then he composed himself and gave them a list of books he would need to consult for his defense.
The following morning, crowds filled the galleries of the House long before the noon opening of the session. Giddings noted that “foreign ministers, attachés and privileged persons filled the lobbies and the outer space within the hall and outside the bar.” The Speaker called on Marshall, who read a resolution he proposed as substitute for Gilmer’s straightforward motion for censure. Marshall had raised the stakes considerably: whereas, he asserted, “a dissolution of the Union necessarily implies the destruction” of the Constitution, the “overthrow of the Republic” and the violation of the legislators’ own oath, the petition Adams had presented compelled the members to perjure themselves and involved “the crime of high treason.” Adams deserved expulsion; censure was “an act of grace and mercy.” This would prove to be a catastrophic overreach on Marshall’s part.
Marshall delivered an indictment he prefaced by long expressions of regard for Adams himself and for his family and their place in history. He therefore professed himself astounded when such a revered figure presented to the House so “monstrous” a document—and not only presented that document but sought to have it referred to committee, “thus leading to the conclusion that the dissolution of the Union was a fair subject to be considered by the House.” This was a piece of sophistry on Marshall’s part, since Adams had long made it a practice to present petitions whose objects he explicitly disavowed. But Marshall’s professions of neutrality and his rhetorical command had cheered his colleagues and left Adams’ supporters “depressed in a corresponding degree,” Giddings wrote. Both sides waited with excruciating anticipation for the old man’s response.
Adams had been here before, and not only in another censure debate five years earlier. This was also the man who had Jonathan-Russell’d Jonathan Russell and fought the veterans of the Hartford Convention to a standstill. Adams relished nothing so much as a solitary stand against a massed enemy—thus his emphatic “Good!” at the prospect of censure—and he was perhaps better equipped than any man alive to conduct one. With all eyes on him, Adams rose slowly, looking about him at friend and foe, and at last said to the Speaker, “It is no part of my intention to reply to the gentleman from Kentucky at this time.” That was a startling remark. What, then, was his intention? “I call, “Adams went on, “for the reading of the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.” The clerk began to read, “When in the course of human events . . .” When he slowed, uncertain where to stop, Adams cried, “Proceed! Proceed!” The clerk continued: “ . . . whenever any form of government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it,” and then, at Adams’ order, came to a stop at “ . . . it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government.”
John Quincy Adams’ father had played a central role in writing the Declaration of Independence. John Quincy himself had been very much alive at the time. His adversary, Thomas Marshall, was a young pup of forty. Adams was reminding his audience, which had come to see him as a “fanatic” and a “monomaniac,” of his own connection to the nation’s founding documents and principles—and, more than that, of just what those principles were. He had done the same in his peroration before the Supreme Court. Adams had become, more and more, the living incarnation of the founders from whom he was descended—a second-generation prophet.
Was it high treason, he now went on, to advocate the dissolution of the government (never mind that the Declaration had been written to justify the dissolution of colonial dominion)? The real danger to the Republic, Adams continued, came not from petitioners but from slaveholders: “There is a concerted system and purpose to destroy all the principles of civil liberty in the free states.” The right of habeas corpus and the right of trial by jury were at risk. So, of course, was the right of petition. Nevertheless, he did not share the petitioners’ view. “It is not yet time to do this, till other means have been tried.” Adams’ tone was measured. Weld, admittedly the most biased of spectators, wrote that Old Nestor had demonstrated “a calm fearlessness and majesty that furnished the highest illustration of the moral sublime that I ever witnessed in a popular secular assembly.”
The intemperate Henry Wise now rose in rebuttal—and did further damage to his own case. Even the sympathetic court reporter was struck by Wise’s combination of “vehemence” and inaudibility, at least “beyond a brief space around his seat.” Wise unfolded, at least to those who could hear him, a generations-long Northern conspiracy, headed by “the house of Braintree,” to surrender the nation to British control. The current chief of that house was, he declared, a British “agent.” He had surrendered Texas in order to weaken the South. He had advocated protective tariffs in order to drive the South away from the Union and set the stage for a British invasion. Today Great Britain was determined to destroy the institution of slavery, and the representative from Massachusetts resolutely opposed going to war to prevent that design. His whole career stood as a refutation of George Washington’s prophetic warning against foreign entanglements. Wise’s indictment had almost nothing to do with the petition in question; as Adams himself said on the floor, Wise had poured out “the whole volume which he has been measuring and accumulating for two or three years.”
After a weekend break, Adams regained the floor on January 27 and lit into the hapless Wise. He reminded the House that the gentleman who had just accused him of dreadful crimes was the very same man who a few years earlier had entered the chamber “with his hands and face dripping with the blood of murder, the blotches of which were yet hanging upon him.” This vivid imagery, which seemed to come straight from Macbeth, referred to Wise’s role a year earlier as a second in a notorious duel between congressmen. Wise angrily objected to this irrelevant character attack, but Adams had finished with him and turned to attack his chief target, Thomas Marshall. Adams had now exchanged his dignified tone for brutal mockery. “The Constitution of the United States,” he observed, “says what high treason is, and it is not for him, or his puny mind, to define what high treason is, and to confound it with what I have done.” Adams suggested that Marshall attend “some law school” in order to “learn a little of the rights of the citizens of these states and the memb
ers of this House.” Did he not understand that treason and the subornation of perjury were crimes, rather than simply censurable offenses, and that any man accused of them had the right to trial before an impartial jury? Was a jury of slaveholders impartial?
A number of Southerners had been troubled from the outset by the idea of censuring Adams—yet again—for the sin of presenting a petition. Now, after Adams had begun to train his artillery on their ranks, some of the doubters bolted. Joseph Underwood of Kentucky said that if Adams really were guilty of treason he should be hanged, not expelled; but he plainly wasn’t. John Botts of Virginia denied that Adams was an abolitionist. Thomas Arnold of Tennessee expressed his regret that the venerable Adams had been vexed by “boys who were yet of swaddling clothes when that gentleman was serving his country in the highest station.” Slaveholders, he continued, “might as well attempt to dam up the waters of the Niagara as attempt to stay this right of petition,” a metaphor until now used only by the abolitionists themselves.
Adams was beating the South yet again—and with the whole world watching. He was gleeful. That night, Weld came to visit Adams at home and found him “as fresh and elastic as a boy,” though he had scarcely slept for days. “I am all ready for another heat,” he declared, and with that, Adams began reciting his planned speech for the following day, accompanied by all the gestures and facial expressions he would be using before his auditors. The flabbergasted abolitionist tried to warn Adams against wasting his energy, but the old man was unstoppable. “He went on for an hour, or nearly that,” Weld wrote to Angelina, “in a voice loud enough to be heard by a large audience. Wonderful man!”
Marshall was now on the defensive. Taking the floor on January 28, he insisted that he had never intended to charge Adams with treason or subornation of perjury, since that language was only in the preamble of his resolution; he acknowledged that the members seemed to feel otherwise. Wise now interjected to say that, in fact, he had never supported Marshall’s resolution but rather had been speaking on behalf of a motion to have Gilmer’s resolution printed. This was abandonment and surrender. “God preserve me from my friends,” cried Marshall, who now turned on Wise, charging him with seeking to revive “the bitter and envenomed animosities of 1801”—when Thomas Jefferson had ended Federalist rule with his victory over John Adams. He sought to reestablish his nonpartisan bona fides. But Marshall’s own wrath betrayed him. He accused Adams once again of seeking to destroy slavery and assured him that in such a case, “the Cavalier sword will, as it was wont to do, drink blood.” He ridiculed the idea that Adams should be granted license on account of his years and past glories: “Are we to treat him as some old imbecile, whom it is not worth while to notice?” This was not a tactic calculated to win over the fence-sitters.
The House had transacted virtually no business for the last week. Adams knew very well how impatient many members had become. On February 2, he explained that he had not yet actually begun his defense and would need a mass of documents and several weeks of preparation. This had the desired effect. On the third, Thomas Gilmer offered to drop the resolution if Adams would withdraw the petition. Either Gilmer wasn’t being serious or he didn’t know Adams, for the latter of course refused. Gilmer now launched into a fresh attack on Adams, and the former president responded in kind. He brandished one of the many letters he received threatening assassination. The letter showed a rifle ball about to penetrate a skull. The author had written, “Stop the music of John Quincy Adams,” who “In one revolving moon, / Is statesman, poet, babbler, and buffoon.” A week earlier, Gilmer himself had used the same expression and had quoted the same lines (a paraphrase from Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel”), only substituting “fiddler” for “babbler.” Adams pointed out the coincidence without seeking to explain it. He left the impression that, at the very least, the slaveholders’ murderous rhetoric was inspiring some men to convert words to deeds.
Adams had smote his adversaries hip and thigh, but he still wasn’t done with them. On February 5, he complained about the postmasters in the South who refused to distribute abolitionist literature. Marshall objected that Adams had shifted the ground of debate from the censure motion to slavery—though the truth was that Wise and others had done so themselves. He also pointed out that Adams had had six days to defend himself—as long as it took God to create the Earth. He pleaded with his colleagues to shut the old man down. Adams said blandly that he would need at least two more weeks. Adams was sustained, 97–25. Now he knew that he had won. “I came home barely able to crawl into my chamber,” he wrote in his journal, “but with the sound of IO TRIOMPHE ringing in my ear.” On February 7, two weeks after the drama had begun, Marshall waved the white flag. He moved to lay the censure resolution on the table. The motion passed, 106–93. Adams still had the floor. He commenced introducing two hundred anti-slavery petitions.
Adams had shattered the overweening confidence of the South. Giddings overheard Marshall tell a colleague, “I would rather die a thousand deaths than again to encounter that old man.” Nor did he have to, for Marshall retired after that session of Congress. Wise later called Adams the “acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed.” It was not, of course, a merely individual defeat. Weld called the censure vote “the first victory over the slaveholders in a body ever yet achieved since the foundation of the government,” and that was not pure hyperbole. The South had fought a pitched battle over petitions and lost. Two more years would have to pass before the House defeated the gag rule, but as of that moment Southern resistance was spent. The mistake of the abolitionists, however, was to believe that slavery could not survive a crushing defeat in the court of public opinion. Weld boldly predicted that “from this time” slavery’s downfall “takes its date.” Adams knew better. He knew that slave owners would never voluntarily surrender their most precious property and the foundation of their way of life. The Cavalier sword would drink blood and be drowned in blood.
THE “SLAVE POWER,” AS ADAMS CALLED IT, HAD BEEN STAGGERED, but it remained the dominant force in Congress. The slaveholders were prepared to attack when provoked by a foe less dreadful than Adams. Their moment came on March 21, when Joshua Giddings, who unlike Adams was a true abolitionist, presented a clutch of resolutions whose effect would have been to free slaves the moment they left slave territory, whether by passing through free states or traveling by sea.
John Botts, the Virginia Whig who had come to Adams’ defense, now eagerly seized the opportunity to censure a more easily censurable man. He was quickly joined not only by other members of the slave power but also by Northern Whigs who feared that they might come to be seen as the party of abolition. This time they would not make the mistake of conducting a public trial: shockingly, Giddings was not given the chance to speak in his own behalf. The following day, the censure motion carried, 125–69, forcing Giddings to relinquish his seat. Adams, who understood that Giddings was being punished for Adams’ own alleged transgressions, was devastated. “I can find no language to express my feelings at the consummation of this act,” he wrote in his journal. Giddings, tall, lean, gentlemanly, came to Adams’ desk to shake his hand on the way out of the chamber, and Adams whispered, “I hope we shall soon have you back again.”
And he did. On May 5, Joshua Leavitt came to Adams’ seat to inform him that Giddings was back: a martyr to the cause of conscience, he had been reelected by the people of the Western Reserve. Adams would serve the remainder of his time in the House alongside the one colleague he truly loved. Toward the end of the 1844 congressional session, thinking that he might never see him again, Adams would send Giddings a letter with a short poem: “We seek, with searching ken to find / A soul congenial to our own / I sought, and found at last—in thee.” Giddings would remain in office until 1859, taking over from the elderly Adams the leadership of the anti-slavery movement in Congress.
IN JULY 1842, ADAMS TURNED SEVENTY-FIVE. ALREADY HE HAD outlived the biblical spa
n of threescore and ten, which Adams viewed as the age beyond which no one could reasonably expect to live. Life, he understood, was a “pilgrimage” from which he could at any moment be recalled. He had been admonishing himself for years, often on the occasion of his birthday, to prepare his soul for death. Two years earlier, on his seventy-third birthday, he had written in his diary, “I am deeply sensible of the duty of beginning in earnest to wean myself from the interests and afflictions of this world, and of preparing myself for the departure to that which is to come.” Then, almost in the next sentence, Adams made a stark admission to himself: “The truth is, I adhere to the world and all its vanities, from an impulse not altogether voluntary, and cannot, by any exercise of my will, realize that I can have but very few days left to live.”
So it was still. The time had come, he wrote in September 1842, “to set my house in order.” The next session of Congress would be “in all probability the last I shall ever attend.” And yet he admitted that his mind was “in the condition of a ship at sea in a hurricane, suspended by an instantaneous calm.” Ahead of him he saw nothing but turbulence. He listed the men with whom he was at daggers drawn: Wise, Marshall, Cost Johnson of Maryland, Joseph Ingersoll. Dutee Pearce, a former House member from Rhode Island, had begged Adams to defend him at a trial for treason; his crime was seeking to organize a universal suffrage party. “I could not hesitate for an instant to take it,” Adams wrote, “though it comes upon me like a thunderclap.” Nor could he decline an invitation to deliver an address at the Congregational church in Braintree and another at the annual dinner of the county temperance society—jugs of cold water, “ludicrous invectives” on the drinking of alcohol, long debate about whether the delivery of toasts was appropriate. (It was not.) Adams was locked in a struggle between soul and self, between pious resignation and zeal. It was a one-sided contest. Adams would fight to the very end.
